Doing Righteousness

"Do the Right Thing" is a 1989 film by Spike Lee which explores simmering racial tension between blacks and the white operators of an Italian pizzeria in a Brooklyn neighborhood.  Whatever elements the plot elevates, it's the title we're grabbing here.  Because doing the right thing is precisely what is meant by TSEDAQAH (צְדָקָה).

 

TSEDAQAH  is the Hebrew noun commonly translated as “righteousness”.  It’s possible that you have already heard of the word.  Like SHALOM (שָׁלוֹם), CHESED (חֵסֵד), and other Hebrew words, it is one that Western Christians might toss into a conversation when they wish to sound educated.  In combination with its masculine form TSEDEQ (צֶדֶק), which also gets translated as “righteousness”, it appears nearly 300 times in the Hebrew Text.

Among its occurrences is its first and arguably most significant one in Genesis 15:6:

“Abram believed the Lord, and He credited it to him as RIGHTEOUSNESS.”

Another favorite Messianic prophetic reference is the word’s final use in the Hebrew Bible, in Malachi 4:2:

“But for you who revere my name, the sun of RIGHTEOUSNESS will rise with healing in its rays.  And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves.”

Like all Hebrew words, its meaning is more complicated than a simple one-for-one correlation with our English word “righteousness”.  For example, translators occasionally render it as “justice”, “just”, or “right”.  In Psalm 35:27, many translations have it as “vindication”:

“May those who delight in my VINDICATION shout for joy and gladness; may they always say, “The Lord be exalted, who delights in the well-being of his servant.”

By the time of Jesus in the Second Temple era – the so-called “intertestamental period” between the completion of the Jewish Canon and the beginning of the Christian one – the word had taken on an even more significant meaning.  Taking their cue from Daniel 4:27, Rabbinic sages began to use TSEDAQAH to mean “charity”.  Here’s the verse:

“Therefore, Your Majesty, be pleased to accept my advice: Renounce your sins by DOING WHAT IS RIGHT, and your wickedness by being kind to the oppressed.  It may be that then your prosperity will continue.”

 

The sages equated “being kind to the oppressed” (CHANAN) with “doing what is right” (TSEDAQAH).  This notion is expounded upon in Second Temple writings such as Ben Sira and Tobit.  And the concept is carried forward into the Talmud, which comprises the written record of Jewish oral teaching. 

For observant Jews, doing TSEDAQAH (charity) is the supreme command (MITSVAH).  The sages say:

“Tzedakah and acts of kindness are the equivalent of all the mitzvot of the Torah” – Jerusalem Talmud, Pe’ah 1:1.

“Greater is tzedakah than all the sacrifices” – Talmud, Sukkah 49b.

“If only the people who lived in the generation of the Flood and the people of Sodom had given tzedakah, they would not have perished” – Midrash Zutta, Song of Songs 1.

“Great is tzedakah, for since the day that the world was created until this day the world stands upon tzedakah” – Midrash Tanna d’Vei Eliyahu Zutta 1.

At the time of Jesus, then, TSEDAQAH did not simply mean “righteousness” in the sense of being morally correct and justified.  It also incorporated into that meaning the idea of doing charity toward the less fortunate, not just as a good idea, but rather as a supreme command from the LORD.  How would a Torah-observant Jew such as Jesus the Messiah regard this idea?  Well, we have hints if we read the New Testament with Hebraic eyes.

“Be careful not to PRACTICE YOUR RIGHTEOUSNESS in front of others to be seen by them.  If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.  So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others.  Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.  But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret.  Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

Matthew 6:1-4

Orthodox Jewish interpreters today say that Jews do not believe in charity.  In fact, there is not a Hebrew word that translates to our English charity.  Instead, they say that Jews believe in doing the right thing, which is TSEDAQAH.  The giving of TSEDAQAH is rooted in the organismic understanding that when there is a need expressed within the organization that we are part of, and we have the means to satisfy that need, it is our sacred duty to do so.  TSEDAQAH is the socio-spiritual mechanism whereby each part bears responsibility for the well-being of the whole.  (Does anyone else hear echoes of St. Paul’s discussion of the Church as an organismic body?)

TSEDAQAH means righteousness.  Doing TSEDAQAH is simply doing the right thing.  And when you have an abundance of something, the right thing is to share it with someone who does not have an abundance.  As Jesus teaches us in St. Luke’s gospel:

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

The Song Remains the Same…Literally - Following a Master

 

The Song Remains the Same…Literally

The Hebrew word for “disciple” is TALMID (plural is TALMIDIM).  It appears 0 times in the
Hebrew Bible because the concept did not emerge in Judaism until the Rabbinic Era.  TALMID is a cousin word to one everyone’s probably familiar with: TALMUD.  The TALMUD is a collection of writings of Jewish sages which expound on law and tradition, compiled between the third and sixth centuries AD.  TALMUD means “learning”.

Both words come from the Hebrew word for “learn”, which is also used occasionally for “teach” and “train” in our English Bibles: LAMAD (לָמַד).  The word occurs 86 times in the Hebrew Bible.  For example, in Deuteronomy 5:31:

“But you, stand here by me, and I will tell you all the commandment and the statutes and the ordinances which you SHALL TEACH them, that they may do them in the land which I give them to possess.” (RSV)

Its final use in the Hebrew Text is Micah 4:3:

“He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide for strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they LEARN war any more.”

TALMID and TALMIDIM do not appear in the Hebrew Bible because they are terms that derived more fully from so-called Rabbinic Judaism during the Second Temple era, with the Men of the Great Assembly.  With Judasim’s emphasis on teaching and interpreting TORAH, Teachers (called RABBI, which means “my great one”) gathered students in order to pass on this learning.

What is fascinating about a RABBI and his TALMIDM is the devotion of the latter to the former.  In Jesus’ day, TALMIDM desired to follow their RABBI so closely that they would be covered in his dust, literally and figuratively.  A TALMID does not just want to know what his RABBI knows.  He wants to do what his RABBI does.  A TALMID wants to imitate his RABBI so closely that it is hard to tell them apart in terms of character and behavior. 

Obviously, this has many deeply profound implications for followers of the RABBI known as YESHUA/JESUS.  For instance, you cannot become a true TALMID of YESHUA if you are not following in His steps.  Certainly, that would entail immersing yourself in His life every day by reading and studying the Gospels.  It probably also means reading and knowing the Bible He read and knew: the Hebrew Text.

The idea of imitation, and the obsession it requires from a TALMID, is brought vividly home by a new documentary film, Mr. Jimmy, about a Japanese guitarist who wants to be Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page.  A good summary of the film can be found here.

People call his consuming passion a particularly Japanese obsession.  But I think it is not.  I think it sounds very Jewish in a way.  How many followers of Jesus obsessively try to imitate their Great Master the way “Mr. Jimmy” tries to imitate his master?

Let it go, this too shall pass

 C.S. Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters:

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal…  As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.  This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.  Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks…  As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty.

Peaks and valleys are our lot in life, and our trouble begins when we forget the truth of this.

I often think of this undulation principle when observing a friend going through a difficult season.  It is much easier to notice it and remark on it when one is on the outside looking in, rather than the other way around.  When we are inside it -- in the valley or the trials -- we forget that “this too shall pass” (a well-known phrase that comes not from the Bible, but from a Persian fable).  The phrase is also at the center of the sublime song by the American rock band, OK Go (and shown in not one official music video, but two of them).  To be sure, the Scriptures give us this theme (“weeping endures for a night, but joy comes in the morning”), which is perhaps why we associate the phrase with the Bible, rather than with Medieval Sufi poets.

“This too shall pass” and CS Lewis’s “law of undulation” have been on our mind as we consider the Hebrew word for distress: TSARAH (צָרָה).  The Hebrew Bible gives us this word 73 times.

…then let us arise and go up to Bethel, that I may make there an altar to the God who answered me in the day of my DISTRESS and has been with me wherever I have gone.

Genesis 35:3

 

Go and cry to the gods whom you have chosen; let them deliver you in the time of your DISTRESS.

Judges 10:14

 

But you have this day rejected your God, who saves you from all your calamities and your DISTRESSES; and you have said, ‘No!  but set a king over us.’ Now therefore present yourselves before the Lord by your tribes and by your thousands.”

1 Samuel 10:19

 

The word TSARAH derives from TSARAR (צָרַר), a verb which means “to bind or tie up”.  It can also mean “to be restricted, narrow, or cramped”.  And the evocative power of Hebrew comes crashing through: to be in distress is to be in a tight spot.  Our hope in distress lies in the fact that it is only temporary; it may endure for a season, but “joy comes in the morning”.

Recently, however, we have come across a different reading of the word TSARAH which gives a fresh slant to its meaning. 

Since the Fall, suffering and distress have vexed humans – indeed, all creation.  Explaining why there is pain in the world is man’s philosophical and religious quest.  Indeed, the problem of pain (as the philosophers name it) is often the atheists’ argument against an all-knowing and all-loving G-d.  “If He is omnipotent and loving, why is there suffering in the world?”

The Jewish sages are no different in asking why there is pain.  But they are different in how they have answered the question.  In their view of the question, it is physically impossible for the human brain, with its limited abilities, to grasp an infinite G-d, or, for that matter, to understand His ways.  The medieval Jewish sage, Yosef Albo, wrote, “If I knew Him, I would be Him.”

This leads us to a new reading of TSARAH.  One of its meanings is “narrow”, which certainly can mean a “tight spot”.  But what if it has more to do with how we see the world?  We are given only a narrow, subjective view of the world and our place in it.  We experience our suffering as the totality of existence.  As the Dread Pirate Roberts tells Princess Buttercup in The Princess Bride, “Life is pain, Highness.”

But this is only so because our view is necessarily limited.  We do not see the whole picture, but only fragments.  We see the narrow window of our valley, unable to see the peak we have left or the peak which awaits.  All valley, all of the time.

The Jewish sages connect words that share letters.  So TSARAH is connected with other words which share its consonants, in their thinking.  One word with which TSARAH shares consonants is TSOHAR (צֹהַר), which means “midday or noon”, but practically means brightest light of day.  It occurs 24 times in the Hebrew Bible, but the oddest one is in the story of Noah building his ark:

You shall make a WINDOW for the ark, and you shall finish it to a cubit from above; and set the door of the ark in its side.  You shall make it with lower, second, and third decks.

Genesis 6:16 NKJV

While the NKJV translators are consistent with the KJV, NASB, and Wycliffe, other translators have struggled with the English meaning of the word.  Most render it “roof”, which is odd for a word that means “noonday” everywhere else.  What gives and what does this have to do with distress?

The sages connected “suffering, distress” with “window” or “noonday” because suffering opens a window into our deepest recesses, allowing us to become aware of, and gain access to, dormant potentials and deeper reservoirs of energy and insight that might have otherwise remained unrealized.

This is one of the hidden blessings of the valley seasons – the pain and distress in life: they allow us to pause, reflect, dig deep, and grow beyond what we ever thought was possible.  Pain pushes us out of our comfort zone and goads us to do the hard work of adaptation and evolution.  Without it, we might simply stay safe in our own status quo and never risk becoming who we were ultimately meant to be.

Moreover, pain can also create a window into other people’s experiences.  Therefore, another blessing of pain is that it can serve as an agent of empathy, enabling us to connect, relate, and understand suffering and situations other than our own, thus expanding our heart and worldview.

The Messiah teaches us to give thanks in all things.  Our Scriptures teach us that in all things – including suffering – G-d works for the GOOD of those who love Him.  TSARAH is a narrow view, but it might just give us a TSOHAR to the bigger picture if we hold fast and look for it.  This is not a “let go and let G-d” stock phrase.  But rather an orientation on the Truth of G-d working in all of our circumstances – even the hard ones which press us tightly.

 

A bit about Scandals

 In the modern Church, we have become quite familiar with the idea of “scandal”.  From fallen Evangelical titans to covered-up child abuse in the Catholic Church, our world seems rife with it.  We do not typically see scandal as anything but negative.  But the word’s origin story ought to offer us some different perspectives on “scandal".

The Greek word behind our English word is skandalon (σκάνδαλον), which ought to make everyone think of that outstanding song of the same name from Michael Card.

“He will be the Truth
That will offend them one and all
A stone that makes men stumble
And a rock that makes them fall.
And many will be broken
So that He can make them whole.
And many will be crushed
And lose their own soul.” 

Scandalon is used 15 times in the Greek New Testament.  However, it also appears in the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. 

“Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God.  I am the Lord.”

Lev 19:14

 

“He will be a holy place; for both Israel and Judah he will be a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.  And for the people of Jerusalem he will be a trap and a snare.”

Isaiah 8:14

The word means “trap, stumbling block, offense, snare”.  The Hebrew equivalent is MIKHSHOL (מִכְשׁוֹל).  It is used 14 times in the Hebrew text, including eight times in Ezekiel, three in chapter 14.

Whether we experience scandalon as a positive or a negative depends in large measure on our point of view.  In a typically excellent article, Father Stephen Freeman writes about the incarnation and the transfiguration:

“The scandal of the Incarnation, God-becoming-man, is the seeming contradiction of the utterly transcendent God and the particularity and limits of human existence. It is a scandal whose errors  run in two directions.  First, there is an assumption that God is so displeased with sin that He can have nothing to do with it, or that sin somehow nullifies the work of God. Second, there is an equally odious belief that human beings, in their observance of the commandments, are never righteous enough to actually be compatible with true holiness. The first is an error about God, the second an error about human beings.”

 You can read the rest of Father Stephen’s piece here at his blog.

 

Bible Geek Word Nerd: Love... is a Journey

 Love is a Journey

The Hebrew word for “love” is AHABAH (אַהֲבָה), from the verb AHEB (אָהַב).  For an observant Jew, such as Jesus the Messiah, this word might have been the most important one in the lexicon.  It formed the cornerstone of His daily identity mark in the recitation of the SHEMA:

“Hear, O Yisrael, the LORD is our G-d, the LORD alone.  AND YOU SHALL LOVE (וְאָ֣הַבְתָּ֔) the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.”

Deut 6:4-5

When Jesus was asked what the Greatest Commandment was, He replied with the SHEMA.  And He then added a passage from Leviticus 19:

“…AND YOU SHALL LOVE (וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥) your neighbor as yourself…”

 Jesus told His listeners that these two commands summed up all of the Law and the Prophets.

His linking of these two passages from the TORAH in this way is known among rabbinic teachers as “stringing pearls”.  They would strong together disparate passages that shared common key words.  The verse from Deuteronomy and the verse from Leviticus share the verb phrase, “and you shall love” (וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥), transliterated as “WA-AHAB-THA”.  These are the only two places in the Text where this verb phrase occurs, which is why the Sages connected them.  

 

These two pearls, given their prominence in the Sage of Galilee's thinking, might be considered "Pearls of great price".  The knowledge of them, the embrace of them, and the keeping of them are like a "treasure hidden in a field", in this case the the Scriptures of the Hebrew Bible.  They lie waiting there, not buried, but neither easily found, to be discovered by the seeker who looks diligently for them.

Two observations about Jesus’ words and this practice of “stringing pearls” are interesting to note. 

Jesus is neither the first nor the only rabbinic teacher to link these two passages in this way and to call them the “greatest commandments”.  Rabbi Akiva, a contemporary of Jesus, said, “This is a (perhaps 'the') major principle of the Torah” (parashah (Sifra, 2).  And Hillel the Elder, another contemporary of Jesus and the founder of the dominant rabbinic school in Judaism, citing the centrality of loving one’s neighbor, said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.  That is the entire Torah, and the rest is its commentary.  Now go and study.”  (And doesn't Hillel’s teaching have echoes of the Golden Rule?)

The second observation is about the word “love” itself.  We read about loving God, but I think we modern, Western readers are inclined to take from that word an interpretation that would be utterly foreign to Jesus and His rabbinic contemporaries.  We live in a culture saturated with ideas that love is a feeling (pace DC Talk).  So a modern, Western reader encounters a command to "love your neighbor" and may think it means they are supposed to feel loving emotions toward them.

This is an idea that would never occur to ancient Jewish reader.  To them -- and to Jesus who lived and read the Text with them -- love is not a feeling or emotion.  Love is an action.  It represents something we do for someone else (in this case, our neighbor).

The genesis of Hebraic thinking on the true meaning of “love” comes from its relationship to a related word in the language: HAB (הַב) or YAHAB (יָהַב), which means “to give”.  In the views of the rabbinic sages, among whom Jesus is preeminent, “to love” means “to give”.  In other words, love is other-centric.

Whereas in modern Western thinking about romantic love, it is focused on my feelings – how the other makes me feel, or what they can give to me – in Hebraic thinking, it is about what I can GIVE to the other, what I can DO for the other.  My feelings do not enter into the equation.

All of this Bible-Geek-Word-Nerding has been prompted by the ever-brilliant Orthodox Priest, Father Stephen Freeman, whose post here concludes with this about the treasure of the Kingdom:

“The treasure of the Kingdom of God is buried in the life of my brother, my sister.”

 https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2023/07/25/the-path-of-the-good-the-true-the-real/