Talmud Perspective

The word of the Lord is tried  Psalm 18:30

Tried – Christians have suffered for lack of knowledge.  Long ago, our faith was dislodged from its Hebraic roots and cut off from the history of interpretation that followed the Jewish path.  By the end of the third century, Christianity trod the road of Greek metaphysics, leaving behind it the insights of twenty centuries of exploration by believers in the one true God.  In these days, there seems to be a movement afoot to recapture some of those insights.  Christians are seeking the same experience that anchored the Jewish faith through millennia.  One place that they can go to uncover this treasure of the centuries is the Talmud, a collection of the thoughts of Jewish sages.

Step back a moment from the contemporary Christian preoccupation with an evangelical theology, a rather young participant in theological history, and remember that Yeshua was a Jew.  So were all of the disciples and nearly all of the authors of our New Testament canon.  These men did not think like we do.  We have twenty centuries of Greek logic at our backs.  They have thirty centuries of community experience of the Most High God.  Sometimes the two different approaches send us on such divergent paths that we get lost before we have traveled even a mile. 

Perhaps it is time to take just a peek at the way that a rabbi thinks.  After all, Yeshua was a rabbi.  So was Paul.  How can we expect to follow their arguments, illustrations and insights if we pull them out of their own contexts.  It is a tragedy of the greatest magnitude that Christians often treat the Scriptures as the only book in the world that comes to us without a cultural bias.  It is a tragedy because is removes us from the wonder of men who thought deeply about their history with God.  It is a tragedy because it ignores the fact that God comes to us clothed in human context.  Apparently, God preferred Hebrew.

If we look at just this one verse, we find something incredibly important about the perspective of the Talmud and the orientation of Jewish faith.  The rabbis taught that this verse implies that Torah was given for the refinement of human being.  In other words, man becomes human in the process of observing Torah.  Because we find our true humanity in the deepest possible relationship with God, and God has given us His instructions about living in this world in that deep relationship, we become the best human beings we can be as we align our lives with His eternal instructions.  We grow into our humanity in the process of obedience to Torah.

This thought has a powerful corollary.  Torah observance should be a joyful experience of discovering my humanity in the midst of my voluntary commitment.  Keeping Torah is never simply a matter of legislation.  Torah is not a collection of rules.  It is a way of life – in fact, it is the only way of real life because it makes me fully useful to my God and Creator.  From the rabbinic perspective, I am really only human in the joyful celebration of observing God’s instructions.  Therefore, Torah is the most valuable possession I can own.  Nothing else is able to make me what I find most fulfilling, most satisfying and most aligned with my design.  Torah is joy to keep because it is exactly right for who I am.

How do the rabbis draw this conclusion?  They focus on the Hebrew word tsaraph (in this verse translated “tried”).  It means “to test, to purify and to refine,” as a silversmith would refine his metal.  From this practical application, they conclude that God’s Word is the medium by which we are refined, and, of course, the way that His Word refines us is in the way that we are instructed to live by it.  Therefore, as we conform our lives to His Word, we ourselves are refined as human beings.  We emerge as pure silver.  That, my friends, is a joyful state of being.

Topical Index:  rabbinic perspective, Torah, becoming human, Psalm 18:30, tsaraph, Talmud