Could The Holy Ghost Be Jewish?

 Christian Belief Can Be Traced Back to the Hebrew Bible

Robert J. Foley of Wilmington, N.C., sends me a copy of an open letter written by author and rabbi Rami Shapiro to Pope Francis. In it, Rabbi Shapiro hopes that “ruach ha-kodesh, the Holy Spirit, has called a new pope from the new world to lead the Catholic Church,” and Mr. Foley writes:
“Rabbi Shapiro… is alluding to an expression often used by the conclave of cardinals [which chose the new pope], to the effect that the Holy Spirit will guide them in their deliberations. In my cursory look at the meanings and interpretations of the Hebrew words ruach ha-kodesh, I was indeed struck by some of the similarities between them and the concept of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity. In forming this concept, to what extent do you think the early Christian writers and Church Fathers might have been influenced by Judaism?”

They were influenced by it a great deal. Although neither biblical nor rabbinic Judaism has anything like the Christian Trinity in its thinking about God, there can be no doubt that the ru’aḥ ha-kodesh (literally, “spirit of holiness”) of the Bible and rabbinic literature was the direct antecedent of the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit — or, as it was more commonly known in the English-speaking Catholic Church until recent times, the Holy Ghost. (“Ghost” is an Old English word for “spirit,” just as “a spirit” is a now archaic way of denoting a ghost. A ghost is nothing but a disembodied spirit, and the expression “to give up the ghost,” which has survived from medieval times, refers to the body’s sundering from the spirit at the time of death.)

In Hebrew, starting with the Bible and continuing to this day, ru’aḥ has the two meanings of “spirit” and “wind.” Historically, wind is clearly the older of the two, spirit being derived from it by analogy: As the wind, that is, is invisible but has the power to move visible things, so the spirit is conceived of as that unseen force in human beings or the world — the breath of life, as it were — that activates all that can be seen.

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The Calendar as Solace

After our daughter’s car accident, her recovery paralleled the holidays, from Purim to Passover to Shavuot

We were in downtown Chicago on Feb. 17 when my wife Galit got the first call. Our niece Maya, 24, had been in a bad car accident near our house, some 28 miles outside the city. Her parents were away, so we needed to come to the hospital. We were told that in the person driving the car was also injured, but that person was unconscious and the paramedics and police officers on the scene hadn’t been able to ascertain her identity.

It wasn’t a mystery for long. Minutes later, Galit’s phone rang again: The driver of the car was our daughter Becky, 23. Forty minutes later—an eternity—we were led to Becky and Maya’s bedsides.

Later that day, sequestered in Becky’s hospital room, shades drawn against the winter gloom, we were alone in a frigid, fluorescent ecosystem of monitors, IVs, and white lab coats. We were overwhelmed and lost track of time. Before long, we had to consult our phones just to remember what day it was. Becky—asleep or semiconscious most of the time, the entire left side of her body battered and lacerated—appeared pallid and unchanging, like her environment. Maya, whose jaw had been shattered, was conscious, but her face was swollen both from that impact and the reconstructive surgery that followed. For the next three days, the girls’ families settled into neighboring bunkers of anxiety, exhaustion, and vigilance, meeting with teams of doctors, responding to calls from worried friends and relatives, taking turns dashing home to keep our households from being swallowed by the chaos.

It was on one of those trips home, on Feb. 19, that I saw the Jewish calendar hung by our back door and realized that it would soon be Purim. How ironic, I thought: We’re supposed to be happy, to down some drinks, and give tzedakah—and here we were, miserable, sober, self-absorbed. In that moment, the holiday seemed more of a cruel joke than an object lesson in mindfulness and gratitude.

Little did I know at the time how important that calendar would become.

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Shavuot 2013

Everything you need to know to celebrate the holiday.

 

Shavuot begins at sunset on May 14, 2013 and will end on the evening of May 15th for Reform Jews and the evening of May 16th for Conservative and Orthodox Jews. Check your synagogue's practices. 

What is Shavuot? Shavuot, the feast of weeks, is celebrated seven weeks after the second Passover seder.

Although Shavuot began as an ancient grain harvest festival, the holiday has been identified since biblical times with the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.

For more about the history of Shavuot click here.

What are some customs and practices for Shavuot?

- To commemorate the giving of the Torah at Sinai there is a tradition of staying up all night studying Jewish texts in what is called a tikun.
- On Shavuot the Book of Ruth is read.
- Traditionally dairy foods are eaten on Shavuot.
- In order to mark the agricultural history of Shavuot, some decorate their house and synagogues with a floral theme.

Shavuot, the end of the Transition

As we said in earlier articles, Passover is a time of transition, and the period of the Omer is a continuation of the transition. Shavuot is the final period of that transition.

There are two separate and distinct transitions that take place during the Passover to Shavuot period. Passover is the time of our liberation, our release from slavery and bondage. It is a celebration of the end of our physical slavery and our entering into being free men. But the release from forced labor was not an end to the miracle that G-d did for us; we were destined to greater glory than just being "free men." We were destined to receive the Torah which would transform us from merely being "free men" and elevate us to becoming noblemen, as the servants of G-d.

However in order to realize this lofty goal, we had to not just be free in body, but also free in mind. Passover was the freeing of the body, but Shavuot was the time of the freeing of the mind. The period between the two holidays, Passover and Shavuot, which we call the Omer period, was a time to transform ourselves from the lowly state of being slaves with its accompanying mentality and to prepare us for becoming noblemen and its totally different mentality.

Had we just been released from our slavery, we might have been free men, but it would be only in the physical. Mentally and spiritually we would remain the same. It would have taken many years to realize our potentials, since a slave, especially one who was born to parents who were slaves, has both a low opinion of his own potential to function and lacks the personal resources to achieve that potential.

As an example, when President Lincoln freed the Negro slaves and granted them equality under the law, it did not automatically make them equal to their former white masters. They lacked the educational background to function as an equal and they themselves knew in their hearts that they could not compete as equals, for they looked upon themselves as inferior.

So too, when the Jewish nation left the slavery of Egypt, they were unable to see themselves as capable functioning noblemen. Yet it was G-d's desires that this nation, the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were to become a holy nation. They were to be G-d's ministers. Like a great king who expects that his ministers be men of high character and education, G-d also required that we achieve our maximum. Hence it was necessary that we receive G-d's vital message to mankind of what was expected of us and how to act in a manner fitting G-d's ministers.

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Field Study

Why the holiday of Shavuot is all but ignored across America

By Marissa Brostoff

When it comes to theological significance, the late-spring festival of Shavuot is no slouch: The event it commemorates—God giving the Torah to the Jews at Mount Sinai—is arguably the most pivotal in the narrative of the Jewish people. But from the treatment it receives next to its more popular siblings—at least within non-Orthodox American communities—you wouldn’t know it. Passover gets celebrated at the White House and inspires novels, Yom Kippur turned Sandy Koufax into an American Jewish hero, and Hanukkah is so visible that conservative talk radio hosts think it threatens Christmas. Shavuot, meanwhile, can’t even satisfy Tom Lehrer, who “spent Shavuos, in East St. Louis/A charming spot but clearly not the spot for me.”

“When you ask people what’s their favorite holiday, I’ve heard people say Passover, Hanukkah, Sukkot, Purim,” says Jonathan Sarna, who teaches American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “I think it’s harder for people to find an emotional attachment to Shavuot than to almost any other Jewish holiday.” According to Sarna and other historians, Shavuot’s trouble catching on is nothing new—it goes back, they say, to the fall of the Second Temple in the year 70 C.E.

 In its earliest incarnation, Shavuot marked a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the sacrifice of the harvest’s first fruits and is one of a historical trio of harvest celebrations, along with Sukkot and Passover, known as the shalosh regalim. According to Paul Steinberg, a rabbi at the Conservative synagogue Valley Beth Shalom in Los Angeles and the author of a series of books on the Jewish holidays, rabbis in the Talmudic period needed to reinvent Shavuot after the Jews left Israel for the Diaspora and no longer traveled to Jerusalem with harvest offerings. So, through what Steinberg calls the use of “complicated mathematical formulas” that were debated for centuries, the sages associated Shavuot with the giving of the Torah. But that interpretive shift, says Steinberg, has not “captured the imagination of Jews in America or anywhere else.” (According to Reform rabbi Andy Bachman, who leads Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim, some early Zionist settlers went so far as to explicitly reject the rabbinic interpretation of the holiday in favor of the agricultural one and celebrated Shavuot by dancing in the fields and riding on tractors.)

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To talk about Lag B'Omer (the thirty third day after Passover) with out talking about Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai is ignoring the main point of the festivities of the day. Although all through-out Israel, the evening is marked by the lighting of large bonfires that are visible for miles, the real celebration in Israel of Lag B'Omer, is in the northern Galilee town of Meron. A small town by all measures, on Lag B'Omer, it becomes filled with celebration. An estimated 250,000 to 300.000 people congregate on this normally sleepy mountainside during the 24 hours of Lag B'Omer. What is the reason that in a country of five and a half million Jewish inhabitants, such a large percentage of people make their way, through traffic and police barricades to come to Meron?

The answer is Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (or Rashbi) as he is some times refereed to, died on this day 2287 years ago and was buried in Meron, together with his son Rabbi Eleazer. So what is the festivities? Why the carnival atmosphere? Why the enormous amounts of pilgrims, both religious and not?

To answer this question requires a brief explanation of one of the most unique personalities in Jewish history. Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai was one of the disciples of Rabbi Akiva. Although Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai is mentioned many times in the Talmud, his fame is known because of the Zohar (The Book of Splendor). This is a book which is the basis for most mystical thought in Judaism.

Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai lived during the time of the Romans. When one of his colleagues praised the Romans for building up the Land of Israel, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai slandered them by stating that they did it for themselves and not for the Jews. When word reached the Roman governor, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai was forced to flee for his life. He and his son, Rabbi Eleazer, took refuge in a cave. In the cave, he and his son began studying the Torah, a miracle occurred for them, that a Carob tree sprouted and a water spring opened up providing them with sustenance. Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai and his son lived in the cave for twelve years, studying by themselves with out interruption and with out going outside.


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What is Lag BaOmer?

Lag BaOmer, the 33rd day of the Omer count—this year, Sunday, April 28, 2013—is a festive day on the Jewish calendar. It is celebrated with outings (on which the children traditionally play with bows and arrows), bonfires, and other joyous events. Many visit the resting place (in Meron, northern Israel) of the great sage and mystic Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the anniversary of whose passing is on this day.

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, who lived in the second century of the common era, was the first to publicly teach the mystical dimension of the Torah known as the “Kabbalah,” and is the author of the basic work of Kabbalah, the Zohar. On the day of his passing, Rabbi Shimon instructed his disciples to mark the date as “the day of my joy.”

The chassidic masters explain that the final day of a righteous person’s earthly life marks the point at which “all his deeds, teachings and work” achieve their culminating perfection and the zenith of their impact upon our lives. So each Lag BaOmer, we celebrate Rabbi Shimon’s life and the revelation of the esoteric soul of Torah.

Lag BaOmer also commemorates another joyous event. The Talmud relates that in the weeks between the Jewish holidays of Passover and Shavuot, a plague raged amongst the disciples of the great sage Rabbi Akiva, “because they did not act respectfully towards each other.” These weeks are therefore observed as a period of mourning, with various joyous activities proscribed by law and custom. On Lag BaOmer the deaths ceased. Thus, Lag BaOmer also carries the theme of the imperative to love and respect one’s fellow (ahavat yisrael).