Recently I’ve gone back to reading a lot of Abraham Joshua Heschel. He’s written a few books that have had a fairly profound impact on me (and quite a few others, I’m sure), including The Sabbath, The Prophets, and God in Search of Man : A Philosophy of Judaism (which I’m reading now).

One of the things that I’m continuously struck with when I actually take the time to study Judaism (and not just what I’m told about Judaism) is how much more faith-oriented and devotional it actually is.

I grew up Methodist, but I started getting involved in more “evangelical” expressions of Christianity in my 20s, and that’s when I began to regularly hear about how Jesus came to rescue us all from captivity to the “Law,” and how Judaism (usually represented by the poor pharisees; taking the brunt of our jabs for centuries) was a religion of “works” that failed to understand what God REALLY wanted Somehow they’d missed all the writings in the prophets where, um, JEWS had reminded each other of what God really wanted, like in Isaiah 1:

But somehow we made it all work out; Jesus came to set us free from “dead religion.”

But it’s funny, when you actually read what a lot of Jews say about their faith (that’s right, I used that word), the math begins to break down. (Even Paul’s view on the Law is not quite so monochromatic as what we might think, but that is perhaps for another post.)

For instance, read this from Heschel:

The world needs more than the secret holiness of individual inwardness. It needs more than sacred sentiments and good intentions. God asks for the heart because He needs the lives. It is by lives that the world will be redeemed, by lives that beat in concordance with God, by deeds that outbeat the finite charity of the human heart.

Does that sound like a “dead, works-based religion”?

Trust me: there’s lots more where that came from.

If I had to boil it down, I’d start perhaps with these statements:

1. Judaism has many different strands to it; some are more focused on the Law than others.
2. On the whole, Judaism is as Spirit-focused as Christianity; conversely, it’s possible to find some strands of Christianity that are as works/law-focused as our (incorrect) vision of Judaism.
3. In essence, this is what Paul is condemning: He doesn’t condemn the Law, per se, he condemns trusting the Law for salvation.
4. Jesus still came, lived, died and was raised to set us free from sin.
5. A huge (and still woefully overlooked) implication of this is that the Gentiles (that’s me) could be included in the people of God.
6. Which is the Church.

Should this shape the way we live? Absolutely. We should take the Law (which we really should understand as, “The Instruction“) seriously, not just as the prequel to Jesus.

Should this shape the way we understand Judaism? Yes. Though we still disagree in regards to who Jesus was/is (and this is no small thing), we are closer in our faith (there’s that word again) than perhaps we’d like to believe.

Should this shape the way we preach? Yes, yes, and yes. In my opinion, Christians—and Evangelicals in particular—are constantly inventing “enemies” to preach against. Whether it’s the law, the liberals, the conservatives, or the fundamentals, we seem to thrive on false enemies. We need to release the Law from our expectations, and try to understand it more from a wider perspective. Though we’d lose this “enemy” we may actually find ourselves free to pursue a more constructive agenda in the world (though one that requires much more work and creativity).