Dialogue focuses on Pharisees, Passover

— As Rabbi Eugene Levy sees it, Christians and Jews owe a debt to the Pharisees.

"If it weren't for the Pharisees, there wouldn't have been a Christianity," the rabbi of Temple B'nai Israel in Little Rock said. "My feeling is Paul's view that he needed to find a substitute for the law to lead to salvation came from his having been a Pharisee."

But Paul isn't the first person who comes to mind when most Christians hear the word "Pharisee." After all, throughout the Gospels, Jesus often lambastes them as "blind guides" who don't practice what they preach. Today, their name is synonymous with hypocrite.

Levy thinks they are getting a bum rap. As the rabbi points out, when Paul said he was a Pharisee according to the law, the evangelist wasn't identifying himself as a hypocrite. Paul was establishing his credentials as part of a rich Jewish intellectual tradition. Indeed, they were the forerunners of modern rabbis.

Levy hopes to help rehabilitate their image April 5 when he and the Rev. Debbie Freeman lead a discussion of "Passover, the Phariseesand Jesus" at Westover Hills Presbyterian Church in Little Rock.

"This is an opportunity for members of the community to listen to two people who are interested in these subjects talk a little bit," said Freeman, Westover Hills' pastor. "It's not just going to be a dialogue between the rabbi and myself. It's going to be a dialogue among all the participants who are there."

The event comes just days before Jews begin their celebration of Passover at sundown April 8 and western Christians commemorate Jesus' Last Supper on Holy Thursday - April 9. The pastor and rabbi agree the discussion comes at an ideal time to reflect on the relationship between the two faiths.

The Pharisees are part of Judaism and Christianity's shared heritage. They were educated lay people who focused on careful interpretation of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and in finding ways to make it applicable to everyday life.

The word "Pharisee" means separatist, Levy said, and the people they had separated from were the Sadducees, Judaism's priestly caste.

"They could see the priesthood was corrupted by first Greece and then Rome," Levy said.

They introduced two key concepts into Judaism. The first was an oral tradition to complement the Torah. This tradition would ultimately form the foundation of the Talmud, a multi-volume Jewish sacred text. The second idea was even more revolutionary - a belief in an afterlife.

"You can look through the Hebrew Scriptures," Levy said, "and get nothing more than just a hint of anything beyond this life."

The Sadducees, who included the temple elite that handed Jesus over for execution, did not share the Pharisees' belief in life after death. But clearly Jesus did, and perhaps not surprisingly, he often associated with them and shared their passion for the Torah.

Like most Christians, Freeman said she long viewed the Pharisees in a negative light. In the New Testament, Pharisees often come across as bumbling villains. They're always trying to outwit Jesus, but have about as much success as the nerdy cell phone salesmen trying to take on Chad in Alltel's TV commercials.

But, Freeman said, that is an incomplete picture of who the Pharisees were.

"The Gospel writers were writing a witness - they aren't writing a political document; they aren't writing a literary document," Freeman said. "For them this is how Jesus was treated by a group of people. We 2,000 years later read that and think the scribes and Pharisees didn't like Jesus. We tend to look atthat and think it refers to all scribes and Pharisees."

The truth, she said, is that some were likely hypocrites; others were not. Certainly, Scripture records that Jesus had some Pharisee fans, including Nicodemus.

New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, in her book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal ofthe Jewish Jesus, points out that Jesus often dined with Pharisees - an indication that they kept the lines of communication open even when they disagreed. In Luke 13:31, Pharisees even seem concerned for Jesus' safety, warning him, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you."

After Roman forces destroyed the Jewish Temple in A.D. 70, theSadducees didn't last long. But the Pharisees survived and they preserved the faith, and their intellectual descendants developed many of the traditions that Jews still observe today, including the Haggadah - the telling of the Exodus narrative - that became the basis of the modern Jewish Passover seder.

"Basically up until the Enlightenment and the beginning of Reform Judaism in the early 19th century, Judaism centered on pharisaic belief," Levy said. "The pharisaic belief basicallywas that you believed in a fathertype God to whom you prayed, you did the mitzvot - the commandments - and if you did them and believed in your Father God, then your reward was life after death." The Rev. Debbie Freeman and Rabbi Eugene Levy will hold a dialogue and discussion on "Passover, the Pharisees and Jesus" at 4 p.m. April 5 at Westover Hills Presbyterian Church, 6400 Richard B. Hardie Drive, Little Rock. Refreshments will follow. More information is available by calling the church at (501) 663-6383.

Religion, Pages 14, 15 on 03/28/2009

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