So the real dilemma arises when a people is thrust back into an earlier (some would say more primitive) incarnation of a religion under altered circumstances after an evolutionary leap of necessity has occcured. It’s boiling water hitting dry ice with a healthy shot of nitroglycerine for good measure. The Temple system was designed for a free and sovereign nation. The society under occupation no longer functions as it did as a sovereign nation. The law of the society must conform to the law of the occupiers and as such must contract to try to insulate itself from the incompatible elements such as idolatry, sexual license, different methods of conducting business (which I think a lot of people might not realize for Jews is a religious matter) etc. The old system of The Temple was rigid and designed only to resist and not to withstand the onslaught of Hellenistic culture.

There was a new system taking shape, as I have said, in the first exile: that portable notion of Judaism, the first time it could rightly be called Judaism because a term was for the first time needed to describe the practice of the people of Judah outside the borders of their own land. Such a Judaism could mix into foreign society and remain true to itself because it relied not on a rigid centralized system involving specific sacrifices of material assets and the changing of money which, to complicate matters suddenly was not the money of Israelites but money of pagans with pagan gods imprinted on the face of each coin. Rather it was based on personal and communal codes of conduct, communal memories and communalized ritual where leadership became largely meritocratic rather than dynastic. This developed into the rabbinical tradition which continues to this day.

The problem with Jesus and Christianity in relation to Judaism, as I see it, is not that it was a reformist movement. That was exactly what was needed and what was developing. Jesus and the early Christian movement were an element of the causally catalyzing process of inevitable breakdown which ended in the fall of Jerusalem and the second (current) exile. But the Christians threw away the notion of chosenness. Whether that was Jesus or Paul’s doing is unclear. In the end it tried to sweep away Judaism entirely, sweep away the law, the practice, the nation-of-priests ideal. “God is not an Israelite” says Jesus in Scorcese’s film. And its a great line, and absolutely true. But the fact that God is not an Israelite does not mean that everyone is an Israelite or that no one is. The idea was never supposed to be that only Israel has a right to or a place in The World To Come, in The Kingdom of Heaven, whatever your preferred terminology. The idea was that this nation, Israel, had the burden and the honor of carrying an idea and leading by example. The law of Israel was for Israelites and the rest of humanity, as far as Israel was concerned, got off easy: all they had to do was to be basically good, live according to a code if 7 principles and they were in. We were held to all 613.

In that regard, in a sense, Christianity was Judaism fulfilling its “light unto the nations” role. Christianity brought the basic elements of Jewish ethical law, the 10 commandments (which conveniently enough do encapsulate the 7 noahide laws) to the gentile world. But it also perpetuated the mistaken notion that Israel was therefore obsolete, that Christianity was the replacement, the new Israel. The light that Christianity supposedly brought unto the nations easily turned old pagan tyranny into new Christian self-righteous tyranny and Rome was created all over again.

to be continued…