Strangers and Neighbors by Maria Poggi Johnson

Author:Maria Poggi Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

Not a Jot nor a Tittle

Fifty days after Pesach comes Shavuos, when Jews remember the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, the Torah that seals the covenant between them and the God who chose them. When God first made the covenant, he promised Abraham more descendants than there are stars in the sky, and now at Sinai Abraham’s descendants gather at the foot of the mountain. God promises them a land of their own, and then they are free and on their way to the Promised Land. God told Abraham that he would make of him a great nation. Thus, the greatness to which Israel is called is bound to the Torah; by obedience to the Law, they will make manifest to the world knowledge of the one true God.

The Torah remains the center of Jewish identity. Without the shape it gives to their lives, the Jews could not possibly have survived what history has thrust on them. When the Temple was destroyed and they were thrown out of Jerusalem, it became the anchor of Jewish life. Wherever the bereaved, scattered Jews went then and in the centuries to come—to Spain and Ethiopia and Poland and Iraq—the Torah went. It is a vital, active presence in the lives of our Orthodox neighbors: modern people with camera-phones and minivans and jobs as hairdressers, accountants, doctors, and caterers. They study it constantly; they obey it; they shape every day, every hour, almost every word and action, around it.

When God promised Abraham descendants, land, and greatness, he also said that through him all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Christians understand this to mean that while God, through the Torah, was shaping the sons of Abraham into a great and holy nation, he was preparing a place where he himself would come into the world, into time and space and history, into human birth and life and death, and draw humans with him into what lies beyond death.

Fifty days after Jesus’s shattered, shattering Seder, after he ordered his disciples to drink the blood of the new covenant and then went out to his death, Jerusalem was again full of pilgrims come from far and wide to celebrate Shavuos. The day must have had special resonances for the disciples. Like their ancestors, they had recently passed through the waters of terror and triumph and watched their God demolish the powers of death and darkness. Like their ancestors, they were facing a hostile and uncertain world. And, like their ancestors, they were the bearers of promises they did not fully understand. Jesus had told them that he had to leave them, that a helper would come, that they held the keys to the kingdom of heaven, that they must go to the end of the earth and baptize and make disciples, and that they would stand before emperors and he would give them the words to say. But as of yet no help had come, and they were as inadequate to the

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