John D. Brey
Well-Known Member
Someone came. Surely it was God, God . . . or was it the devil? Who can tell them apart? They exchange faces; God sometimes becomes all darkness, the devil all light, and the mind of man is left in the muddle.
Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, 15.
Samael is at one and the same time an angel, something holy, and also the source of death, evil. Keeping this in mind, we can understand the statements of Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmeini in Chulin 91a who says that Samael appeared to Jacob as a pagan, whereas Rav Shmuel bar Acha thought that Samael appeared to Jacob in the guise of a Torah scholar. These two views need not conflict with one another . . . Samael appeared like a pagan; considering the holiness that radiates from the angelic aspect of Samael, he appeared like a Torah scholar.
Shney Luchot HaBerit, Torah Shebikhtav, Vayishlach, Torah Ohr, 13-14.
In one of the most in-depth kabbalistic works ever compiled, the holy Shelah (Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz), confronts the confounding conundrum associated with deciphering the greatest theological question of all time: where Satan starts, and God ends. Anyone familiar with the Shelah's famous work ----Shney Luchot Haberit ----could, or should, come away from its study appreciating the degree to which, by peering too deeply into God's blinding light, the Shelah came face-to-face with the darkness that's the last temptation of Christ; the temptation to leave God behind for the love of Judaism.
My thesis is that Paul understands himself as outbidding Moses. . . The opening of the Jews, of God’s holy people, to the Gentiles. And this holy people of God is transfigured, that is, the old people winds up becoming unclear. This Moses would not have done, and Paul knows that very well, that he is taking on a task that is unprecedented and unique. I don’t read this rhetorically, what Paul is saying here, at the beginning of 9 ----that he is burdened with great sorrow and anguish at all of what he’s leaving behind: the sonship, the covenant, the fathers, the worship, the promises, the Messiah ---there is nothing, after all that does not rest on this people. So how can someone who thinks of Israel this way dare to venture a single step beyond?
Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, p. 39, 41.
Jesus and his disciples went their way, off the stage of Israel's enduring life, and I would have thought then, and I think now, that Israel was right to let them take their leave. For theirs--- at least in the spectacle of Matthew's picture--- was a message for the individuals, but the Torah spoke to us all. Leave home, follow me; give it all up, follow me; take up your (personal) cross, follow me --- but then what of home, what of family and community and the social order that the Torah had commanded Israel to bring into being?
Rabbi Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, p. 157.
John
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