I remembered the side-splitting spectacle of the Hassid on the back of his scooter and said, “Very true. The day before yesterday all of Haifa was laughing at you when you gave that Hassid a lift!” “What, did you see it?” Daniel asked in alarm.
“Of course,” I said, “and it wasn’t just me. The whole town was laughing itself silly!”
He seemed a bit disconcerted, and started giving explanations. “He was late for Kaddish, you see, and there wasn’t a bus or taxi to be had. I saw the rush he was in and stopped and offered him a lift. He got on. It was nothing special. I took him where he needed to go, he said ‘Thank you,’ and that was that. What’s so funny about it?”
Musa clutched his stomach laughing. Daniel was still puzzled. “I was going in that direction anyway!”
“It was because you are both Jews, but Jews will never be going in the same direction as Arabs. I’m telling you that as an Arab. We Arab Christians have no escape, both because of your victories and because of your defeats.”
We had a coffee and before leaving, Daniel said, “Hilda, don’t go telling everyone I gave a lift to a Hassid.”
“Daniel, I promise not to say a word to a soul, but the whole of Haifa saw it!”
“Well, perhaps it wasn’t me but some other priest.”
There isn’t another priest like him.
11. 1967, Jerusalem
H
ILDA’S NOTES FROM A PREEXAMINATION TUTORIAL WITH
P
ROFESSOR
N
EUHAUS
NOTE IN MARGIN: Discuss with Daniel!
1. The Second Temple Period ends in Year 70. The Temple was destroyed and Temple sacrifices ceased. The Period of Synagogal Worship began. Jews are believed to have come to the Temple while it existed three times a year, for Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot.
NOTE IN MARGIN: The latter correspond to the Christian Easter and Whitsun. Need to ask about Sukkot.
It is difficult to believe that peasants from Galilee undertook such pilgrimages three times a year. In those times the journey one way took a week and the festivals lasted a further week. Could a peasant leave his farm for three weeks? In the synoptic gospels, Christ is said to have visited Jerusalem for a festival only once during his boyhood.
A more convincing hypothesis is that every Judaean undertook such a pilgrimage once in several years. Shmuel Safrai, a modern scholar, considers that in the early first century, even before the destruction of the Second Temple, there existed synagogues, assemblies of Jews to read the Torah and pray together on the Sabbath. It was at such assemblies that Christ healed the sick.
Although Jewish researchers do not usually use Christian sources, it is interesting in this case to see what the New Testament says. There are numerous references to synagogues in the text of the New Testament. Possibly these were the private houses of rich people who made room available to their neighbors and fellow villagers for communal prayers and the reading of scripture.
I believe the ruins of the synagogue at Capernaum, a Christian holy place still extant, are wrongly dated, but we shall leave that on the conscience of modern archaeologists and the tourist business. It does however suggest that synagogue services were taking place before the Temple was destroyed.
Not all researchers share this point of view. Adherents of a more conservative school consider the synagogal era to have begun only several years after the destruction of the Temple. I incline to the viewpoint of Shmuel Safrai.
I remind you that a relentless struggle to ban all worship outside the Temple began centuries before this time! This gives grounds to surmise that even before the destruction of the Temple, clandestine activity was preparing the way for a new phase in the history of Judaism—post-Temple, synagogal—which took shape in all its diversity during the period of the Exile.
Why were synagogues being created so early? Was it a historical presentiment? An unshakeable faith in prophecies of the destruction of the Temple? Farsightedness on the part of religious leaders of the time who foresaw the catastrophe? There is something for you to reflect on.
How was the Temple viewed by different strata of the population? The charismatic and ecstatic Qumranites shunned the Temple as a sink of corruption. Intellectuals found the Temple’s ideology too inflexible. Pharisees stressed study of the Torah and not services at the Temple. As a result the Temple was the province of priests and the simple people. The former, as always and everywhere, had power and wealth, the latter can be blamed for nothing because of their ignorance.
In the first century of the new era, in a crucial period of transition which was to shape the destiny of the world, the Jews were not yet clearly differentiated from Christians. They were still together in liturgical communion and joint creativity. They were still Jewish Christians venerating the same Torah, the same Psalter, and with the same prayers of thanksgiving and supplication to the Lord. The texts of the Gospels had not even been compiled yet. The new shoot of the olive tree had yet to be severed from the trunk by the sword of St. Paul.
2. A further topic for consideration: at this time the status of the Temple was undermined. The Qumran community had begun creating prayers not associated with the Temple. These texts have now been found.
Around Year 50 of the first century, Philo of Alexandria died, the same Philo who had gone at the head of a delegation of Alexandrian Jews to Rome to petition the Emperor Caligula against erecting statues of the Emperor in the synagogues of Alexandria and the Temple in Jerusalem. His description of his less-than-successful journey has survived. Thanks to the Christians, many of Philo’s works have come down to us in their Greek original. He is an astoundingly bold and talented popularizer of the Torah. From an orthodox viewpoint he is infected with Platonism, Stoicism, and other newly fashionable Greek influences, but it is thanks to his treatise On the Contemplative Life that we know about the existence of the sect of the Theraputae.
NOTE IN MARGIN: Need to look this up!
Philo writes, “If you have not brought your sins to the altar of your heart, it is of no avail for you to go to the Temple. And if you have come to the Temple and are thinking in your mind of some other place, then that is where you are.” Philo readily transfers the material to the spiritual plane. “We do not eat pork because it is a figure of ingratitude as the pig knows not its masters,” he writes. Following the Prophets he spoke of “circumcision of the heart”. He was a contemporary of Jesus and in some matters a fellow-thinker. Under Philo of Alexandria several families in the community did not circumcise their sons, and he chided them mildly: “One should observe tradition in order not to lead others astray.” How agreeable that is! But it would be well for me to stop here. I have a personal weakness for Philo of Alexandria.
NOTE IN THE MARGIN: Must get this Philo out of the library!
Let us return to the religious service. The church service hours of the Christians derive from the Jewish times. In the Torah the Lord God prescribed that Jews should perform a morning and evening sacrifice. Before Solomon built the First Temple, sacrifices were made on altars in the open air. At the time of the Babylonian Captivity, Jews began praying in meetings in set locations. The service came to be a reading of the Torah at particular hours, of psalms and hymns. The blood sacrifice began to be replaced by the “sacrifice of praise.” This kind of religious service, devised during the Babylonian Captivity, served as a prototype for the later liturgy in Christian churches. Here is an excellent subject for independent research: comparison of the historical development of liturgical texts! It is impossible to imagine Christianity without the Torah. The New Testament was born of the Torah.