Letter or Spirit?

AS A JEWISH longtime Sojourners subscriber, I would like to comment on Wes Howard-Brook's article, "Undermining the Power of the Law," in your May 1993 issue.

One of the examples the writer uses of undermining the law is John 5:8. Jesus tells the man by the poolside to get up, pick up his mat, and walk. The specific Sabbath violation here is the picking up of the mat, this being a form of work presumably forbidden on the Sabbath. The accusation against Jesus is even more tendentious, as all he did was tell the man to do something regarded as a violation. The real offense, however, as Howard-Brook goes on to explain, is "What is more important -- the keeping of 'God's law' or the act of healing?"

Now let us assume, as Howard-Brook does, that this was an act of healing. Jewish law specifically provides that Sabbath laws are to be broken to save a person's life (even an animal's). A midrash in Mechilta Shabbatas 1 states: "We should disregard one Sabbath for the sake of saving the life of a person, so that he may observe many Sabbaths."

The difficulty most non-Jewish theologians have in interpreting passages like John 5:8 is that they think that Jewish law is either what the apostles say it is, or what they read in the Tanach (Old Testament). To understand Jewish law one must be familiar with the oral law, mishnah, as well as the written law in the Torah. This is to be found in the Talmud and is based on midrashim, exegeses of various kinds intended to clarify exact points of law (something like the way case law clarifies statutes); in the case at hand, for example, clarifying exactly what can and cannot be done on the Sabbath.

This being said, not all Jews at the time of Jesus agreed with the mishnah interpretations. The priestly party, the Sadducees, rejected anything that could not be found word for word in the Bible. So it is possible some Sadducees objected to Jesus' action; but this has to be understood in the context that the Pharisees, of whom there were a great many, and were those who employed the mishnah, would have agreed with him. So when Howard-Brook goes on to state that this poolside encounter "leads the Judeans to persecute" Jesus, what is essentially Jesus expressing the views of one group of Jews is made to appear that he is "persecuted" by all the Jews.

The article is replete with misunderstandings of Jewish law and the state of Jewish theology 1960 years ago (how could Jesus' references to God as his father offend those who constantly pray to our father, 'avenu'?); but rather than compose an exhaustive treatise, I should just like to remind your readers that, okay, Moses gave us 613 commandments, reduced to 11 principles by David (Psalm 15); to six by Isaiah; and to just three by Micah: "What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" (Micah 6:8).

James Munves

Frog Hollow, Prince Edward Island

Wes Howard-Brook replies:

James Munves' letter illustrates precisely the viewpoint of the Johannine Jesus: that among many competing interpretations of the Torah, those that perpetuate injustice should be rejected in favor of those supporting compassionate community and loving challenge. The interpretations he quotes are beautiful, but they did not reflect the practice of the Jerusalem temple-state in the first century.

In first century Palestine, Christians were not the only communities resisting the hypocrisy of institutional Judean religious practice. The Qumran Jewish community left Judea altogether rather than be tainted by the perversion of the Torah they found in Jerusalem. Similarly, though many official Christian bodies preach love and justice today, many of our religious institutions are often found in practice "with" the powers who perpetuate oppression based on class, race, and gender.

It is unfortunate that Munves reads my interpretation of the Judeans' practice as a criticism of "all the Jews." As a Jewish person myself, it is crucial to my own acceptance of John's gospel as God's Word to interpret, with many modern scholars, the Johannine Jesus' polemic as aimed not at members of a religious group, but at those persons identified with an oppressive state government that has distorted sacred tradition to suit its own economic and political needs.

Finally, I note that it is the gospel itself (John 5:16, 18), not me, that attributes Jesus' persecution and eventual death to the Judeans' response to the breaking of Sabbath and the identification of God as "Father." But as is usually the case in such disputes, the real concern of the Judeans was not the sanctity of Sabbath but power and authority.