There are some days in your life when you know everything has changed. Sometimes these events are unexpected, but sometimes they are engineered. My life changed the day I engineered an interview with Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. I had been going to hear him teach for a while, and I was intrigued. I wanted to look him in the eyes and see the truth of his statements there. I wanted his certainty that what he is teaching the crowds is true.
I have much in common with Rabbi Jesus, we both grew up in villages and began our formal studies with our village Rabbi. Unlike Rabbi Jesus, I have ended up in Jerusalem as a member of the Sanhedrin, while he is an itinerant preacher.
For all children, our education begins with our parents teaching us to pray, as it is written in the book of Deuteronomy
“Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead; inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and your gates” (Deut. 6:6-9).
From the moment I could hear, my father would pray for me and then with me. He would instruct me in how I should live my life, what my values as a ‘child of the book’ should be.
When I speak at home, I speak Aramaic, but Torah is written in Hebrew, so I began studying Hebrew with Rabbi Amos when I was about five years old. All boys in our land should study Torah. Torah is the five books of Moses; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. It has 304,805 letters in it, written on pages of parchment sewn together to make a scroll, and each page is exactly 42 lines long. The scribe who writes the scroll is very skilled, for even one mistake he makes will mean that the whole scroll will have to be destroyed and the scribe will have to begin again. It takes him about a year to complete a scroll, and they are very precious.
To begin with my friends and I learnt from Rabbi Amos how the letters sounded, then to write them. Some of my friends found it really difficult. There are no gaps between the words, and there are a series of marks under the letters which tell you how to pronounce each word. Sometimes scholars can’t even agree on the marks, so the pronunciations can vary, take the word for God ‘JHWH’. Depending on how the marks are made, this can be pronounced Yahweh or Jehovah. I could carry on, but this isn’t one of my lessons with my students. I started reading Torah as soon as I could, and began memorising it as well. I lived for my lessons, I lived to read Torah, I lived to learn more. As soon as I could, I moved up to study with the older boys. Usually boys would begin the study of the Mishnah, the oral laws of our people at the age of ten, but although I cannot remember at exactly what age I began to study Mishnah, it was younger than 10. No matter how precocious we were, Rabbi Amos would not let me, or anyone else fulfil Mitsvoth until at least the day of our 13th birthdays. On my 13th birthday, which was luckily Shabbat, I stood up in the synagogue and read from the beginning of the Torah scroll. I was finally a man and an adult in my community. Then Rabbi Amos allowed me to study the Talmud or rather the Gemara, the commentary and Rabbinical analysis of the Mishnah.
Although I can read and write Hebrew, a lot of our scholarship is passed on from a Rabbi to his pupils orally. We learn what past Rabbi’s have taught and debated, and we are encouraged to learn their responses to the questions Torah asks of us. As we learn we debate, and as we debate we learn. Then we go out and try to live what we have learnt through our debates. I am very good at debating, so good that when elections for the Sanhedrin came up in the nearest town sending a teacher to the Sanhedrin, I was elected to represent my town as one of the 71 members of the Sanhedrin.
The Sanhedrin is the ruling council of the Israelites, and even now, with Rome ruling over us, the council has a lot of power. In Torah, Moses and the Israelites were commanded by Yahweh to establish courts of judges, who were given authority over the people of Israel. They were commanded by Yahweh to obey every word the judges instructed and every law they established. As a member of the Sanhedrin I am a religious leader, a teacher and a Judge of the nation of Israel.
Since Herod rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin has had a room in which we meet daily to deliberate on the cases brought before us. It is called the Hall of the Hewn Stones. There is a great semicircular bench on which the majority of us sit facing the Nasi, or President, who is usually the High Priest. At the moment that is Joseph Ciaiphas, who is the son-in-law of the former High Priest, Ananus ben Seth, who likes to keep control over his sons and son-in-law still, and likes to keep interfering in the affairs of state. When Ananus retired, his son Eleazar ben Ananus became High Priest, then after him Caiaphas was elected. When he retires Ananus will probably engineer one or other of his other sons Jonathan, Theophilis, Matthias and Ananus to become High Priest. Its the same with all those Sadducees, they think just because they are of aristocratic lineage they are a cut above the rest of us. I have as much if not more scholarship than they, and at least I do try to live out what I preach and teach, which is more than I can say for them. But enough about the Sadducees.
As well as the Nasi, there is the Av Beit Din, the chief of the court, and 69 general members, of which I am one. There are two clerks to the court to make a record of our debates and our judgments, and there are benches for students to come and listen to our debates and to learn from us. We convene every day except Shabbat and major festivals, so there is little opportunity to return home to my village and my family.
When Rabbi Jesus began to preach in the villages around Jerusalem, I would go out to listen to him, when I could take time out from sessions of the Sanhedrin. There was something about him that I found very attractive. I think the first thing that really struck me was his joy, not in the law or the words of Torah, but in Yahweh. I try to keep to the letter of the law, I try to live Torah, but Jesus advocates that we should live our lives for Yahweh. He calls him Abba, Father, and teaches that he loves us like a father. I had never before understood what it meant to be loved by Yahweh until Jesus said those words. Now I want, I want so much to be loved by Yahweh.
The other thing that really struck me about being a Pharisee, is that I have studied Torah for as long as I can remember. I have tried to live it for as long as I can remember. I have dedicated my life to this, almost to the exclusion of all else. As a Pharisee I teach that this is what we must all do in order to be perfect followers of Yahweh. Yet I know that if I were working out in the fields every day sweating under the mid day sun, dragging crops from the ground and fruit from the trees, I could not live Torah as I have the leisure to do as a teacher. I have become more uncomfortable the older I have got, that in making all these laws and expecting people to keep them, and condemning them when they cannot keep them, we are making it far too hard, harder than Yahweh intended, for everyone to become close to him. Jesus does not make lots of laws. He reiterates two simple laws for his followers to keep that they should ‘love Yahweh, and their neighbours as themselves’ Not easy if done properly, but easier than I make it.
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