As a Christian, I have been exposed to Judaism as Christianity had beginning roots in Judaism. Of course, the Old Testament in the Christian Bible is the sacred text of Judaism, and is known as the Tanakh. The Sabbath or Shabbat is the day that Jews consider as the day of rest that God had commanded to the people of Israel. The Shabbat begins once the sun sets on Friday and continues until the sun sets on Saturday. They consider the Shabbat as a way to return the keys of the world back to God, as Rabbi Marc Raphael Guedj states. I consider his statement about returning the keys of the world back to God as a profound and deep understanding. As humans, our lives move forward with the various activities of our days, and the Jewish people will take some time out of their lives to give the keys of their life to God. As we had the privilege to attend the Shabbat service on Saturday, I was given a glimpse of what life is like for a Jew who observes the Shabbat. The service clearly had deep symbolic meanings, and every expression was deeper than what I could perceive. Rabbi Guedj even mentioned that in Judaism, there are several series of rituals and meanings. In order to keep the meanings, they create dogmas, and the dogmas provide meaning and understanding to what is being conducted. Being in an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, I could see that there might be distinct traits that would separate them from a Reformed Jewish synagogue. First, I noticed that the men were sitting closest to the Torah, and the women were in the balcony. I also thought that the blessing at the end was very impacting. The people could not look at the priests, and the priests had the tallit covering their faces. That is such a deep way to connect the presence of God among the people, because in the Torah, God told Moses that seeing His full presence would kill him, so to be in the presence of God, one should not be looking straight at His face.
There is a prayer that was included in
the second Morning T’fillah that really moved me. The prayer was in the
beginning and discusses how the soul is pure and was shaped by God. He is the
Almighty. I felt that the prayer really gives God His authority and lordship
over the lives of the people. Personally, I do believe in the power of the
soul, because when a body is dead, his or her body has a sense of emptiness,
but when we are alive, the soul is what truly moves us forward.
Rabbi Guedj went into the deep realities
of the Pesach, Sukkot, and the Shavuot which are holy days for the Jewish
people. The Pesach is the passing over the angel of death which took the lives
of the firstborn of Egypt as the tenth and final plague before Moses and the
Israelites were able to depart from Egypt. The Sukkot also known as the Feast
of Booths. During the time of the Sukkot, there are two and a half walls, and
leaves are patched together for the roof. They spend a week inside, and that is
a time of remembrance. The Shavuot, also known as the Weeks, commemorates the
anniversary of the Torah being passed to the Israelites. During the time of the
Shavuot, the Jews do not sleep during the night, and they study. The Shavuot is
a remembrance that they should be alert, unlike the Israelites who began to
worship the golden calf and Moses found them asleep as he came down Mt. Sinai
with the Torah.
The Kabbalah is a certain mystical teaching
within Judaism that Rabbi Guedj shared with us.The Kabbalah is the work of reaching the harmony
between contradicting values. The Kabbalah has such a divine inspiration that
most of the Jewish texts are influenced by the Kabbalah, and in such a manner,
can be prompted to provide wisdom to the Jewish people. Of course, the Kabbalah
is not something that should be taken lightly. For the Jews, several people say
that the Kabbalah should not be taught to anyone under the age of forty.
As Rabbi Guedj came to a close in his
sessions, he shared with our group about the loss of universality. When the
people attempted to build the Tower of Babel, God split the languages of the
people. The Tower of Babel was a building enterprise for monolithic singularities.
We, as humanity are in exile of a lost universality. When he said that we as
humans are in exile without a sense of connection, I was so awestruck. I truly
agree with him, because in today’s day and age, we love to express our
individuality, and sometimes that becomes more of a priority for us. When our
individuality becomes more of a priority, we begin to strive to not have a
commonality, and when others do not share with our commonality, strife and
conflict become the object of our world today.
I
realize that I may not have learned the whole of Judaism, but as I continue to
move on in this course, I hope that what I have learned thus far will be able
to be connected to the future learnings of Christianity and Islam. With the
newfound knowledge that I have received, I hope to utilize for future
interfaith dialogue.
"By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating he had done."
-Genesis 2:2-3 (NIV)
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