Winter and the Cold Mountain
Shabbat gratefuls: Parsha Beshalach: Exodus 13:17-17:16. Shabbat candle holders. Shabbat. Joanne. Alan. His BMW in Oxnard, Ca. Breakfast with Marilyn and Irv next week. Irv and his recovery. Jazz concert tomorrow at Alan and Cheri’s in Denver. Snow yesterday. 52 on Wednesday. Colorado. The Rocky Mountains. The Atlantic Ocean. The Pacific. The South China Sea. The Yellow Sea. Sailing.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: A day of joy
One brief shining: A millennia ago I lived in student housing at United Theological Seminary in New Brighton Minnesota and walked through the then still fierce Winter to the classroom building a block away where I would go through the cafeteria, down past the mailboxes collecting anything to me on the way and the bookstore to the small stainless steel elevator, get in, push 3, get out on the top floor of the library, head to my carrel, sit down and sink into both the expansive view and my intent to learn. Ah.
That was 1970. There were electric outlets at each of our outdoor parking places so we could plug in our engine block heaters. I recalled these memories because I added Parsha Beshalach to my gratefuls this morning. A through line between seminary and this Jewish life I’m now living is my excitement about study of scripture. I loved those “Old Testament” classes with Art Merrill and the New Testament classes with Henry Gustafson. A month or so ago I asked to have Torah study added to the adult education program at CBE. Of course, I ended up in charge of it. That’s the way of religious institutions. If you volunteer, you lead.
You might think the several classes I took at UTS would give me some expertise for Torah study, but you would be mostly wrong. Not sure if I wrote about this before, but here are the big differences. First, Jews focus on the Torah, the first five books of the Tanakh which also includes the Nevi’im, the prophets, and the Ketuvim, writings. T for Torah. N for Nevi’im. K for Ketuvim = TaNaKh. The Tanakh has most of the same material as what Christians insist on calling the “Old Testament.” My education at UTS covered the whole of both Testaments, “Old” and New. So much, much less attention to the Torah itself.
Second, the exegetical methods I learned, that is, the methods of getting at what the text meant and its interpretation (hermeneutics), differ significantly from the Jewish approach to exegesis. I learned redaction criticism, how the texts were edited; form criticism, whether the text had liturgical or other formal construction; textual criticism, how did the variant editions and translations differ; how to translate from the Greek and Hebrew for myself though mine was a limited introduction; historical criticism, what was happening at the time the text was written; and, reception criticism, how had the text been received and interpreted over church history.
We learned two steps. First, exegesis using the best tools we knew, the various critical methodologies and any other analysis we could bring to the text. Second, the hermeneutical task, taking our best understanding of the meaning of the text, exegetical work, and applying that meaning to a contemporary situation. This usually meant writing a sermon.
Third, a lot of what I learned about the “Old Testament” had a definite Christian inflection. That is, finding those parts of the Tanakh which prophesied the coming of Jesus, the Messiah.
The Jewish approach is much different and I’ll go into that in a later post. Tomorrow if I remember.
