Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

QUARTERLY REVIEW, WINTER 1984
man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do
justice and to love kindness and to be humble in going with your God?" 9
After God had created man and woman in God's image as the
governors of all creatures, God attached the phrase "very good" to the
finished work. In this verse of Micah, good is doing justice, loving
kindness, and being humble in going with God. In a human community
where these requirements are fulfilled, God's image becomes visible.
That is what God tells humanity through the Word of God. When we
look at Jewish tradition this is in a nutshell what the Torah spells out in
great detail. The purpose of the Torah is to create such a community,
and its final goal is that the whole of humanity will live according to
these requirements of God, which in the Micah verse are addressed to
"Adam," humanity. Then it will be visible that "Adam," the whole of
humanity, has been created in the image of God.
Jesus was "Torah in the flesh/' a man who embodied
Torah, all of whose actions were Torah.
As a Christian I confess "the Word became flesh" (John 1:14). I
believe that in this confession the "Word" should be understood in
the sense of "Torah" and that thus "the Word became flesh" should
be understood as: "the Torah took on flesh and blood." This means:
Jesus was so to speak, "Torah in the flesh," a man who embodied
Torah, all of whose actions were Torah. In him became transparent
the purpose of the Torah to bring about a kind of human existence in
which the image of God is visible.
All this is confirmed and strengthened as we look at the picture
drawn of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. When we disregard for a
moment such polemical passages as those regarding the scribes and
Pharisees which reflect the tensions between the early Christian
community and the Pharisee movement about forty years after Jesus'
death, and look at what Jesus actually said and did, then a genuinely
Jewish picture emerges. The Sermon on the Mount strongly
resembles rabbinic teachings, and Jesus' parables and sayings find
remarkable parallels in rabbinic literature. He lived a Jewish life,
marked by the sign of the covenant, the circumcision, from the eighth
day of his life. He went to the synagogue and prayed Jewish prayers
that even today are prayed in the synagogues all over the world. His
life and behavior were articulated by the commandments given to
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