How Much Torah?

My email friend sent back a couple of more questions, here is the answer to the first one...

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Hi M,

Your next question was how much of the Law are Jewish Yeshua-followers expected to keep and is there new covenant grace for Jews trying to keep Torah.

Let me answer the second part of the question first. It is important to understand first of all that the Torah was not given as a means of salvation. You did not infer that in your question but it is such a common misconception that I wanted to mention it. God, out of His grace, chose and redeemed Israel from Egypt. Once that was done, He gave them His teachings (Torah means teaching not law) on how to live as His holy people. So to use Christian theological terms, Torah is about Sanctification not Justification.

God knew that Israel, as imperfect humans, could not possibly keep the Torah. He therefore included in His Torah the means by which one could restore the relationship. This is the sacrificial system. It is by God's grace that He accepts the offering and forgives the person.

If you read the text carefully you will discover that there are only offerings for unintentional sins. There is no sacrifice for one who intentionally violates Torah. The assumption is that an Israelite is attempting to live in fidelity to Torah. This caused much concern on the part of the rabbis, for clearly people do at times deliberately sin. What to do? Their conclusion was that if a person sincerely repents of deliberate sin, God changes it to be as if it was an unintentional sin and therefore can be atoned for. A rather clever way to address the issue. Yeshua becomes the ultimate sin offering that brings forgiveness to Israel and all of humanity. So we as Messianic Jews and Christians can see that this is also covered by his atoning sacrifice.

So I guess this is a long winded answer to say that grace existed within the Torah, indeed it is one of its foundations! Grace also, of course, exists with the new covenant as well. Yeshua's offering of himself is merely an intensification and perfection of grace, as this is no longer the blood of animals, but the blood of the Son of God (see Hebrews 9). So there was grace for Jews who failed to follow Torah prior to the advent of Yeshua, and there is a more perfect grace with Yeshua.

Let me also point out, as this is another common misconception, that the sacrifices were for more than just sin. Only 2 of the 5 types of sacrifices have to do with sin. The others are voluntary offerings expression devotion and fellowship with God. And of the 2, they do not cover all sins, just ones that are considered particularly offensive to God such as vain oaths, misuse of Temple objects, etc. But this is a topic for another time.

Now to the first part of the question. This is a more complicated issue. Some folks reject the rabbis and attempt to harken back to what they call "Biblical Judaism". Their argument is that Rabbinical Judaism was largely a development after Yeshua by Jews who had "rejected" him, and therefore we should not follow their laws. There are two problems with this. First, the Torah as given assumed a society of Jews living as a theocracy. Since Israel does not exist as such a community any more how could we even do this? And are we going to start stoning people again and such? Second, as Jews we are part of all of Israel, not just the parts that we agree with. Therefore, we have to at least wrestle with and take seriously rabbinic tradition as it is an important part of our inheritance.

And the reality is that many of the laws cannot be followed even by Orthodox Jews as they have to deal with things like living in Israel and the Temple. I think that I read somewhere that the maximum number for Jews living outside of Israel is like 124 out of 613 commandments.

A group of rabbis within our movement have formed a rabbinical council and have started to define Messianic halacha (Jewish law). They have taken a sensible approach in accepting that many in our movement come from little or no Torah observance. So they have defined what they consider to be a minimum, expecting folks to start there and move their way upwards. (This is a very similar approach to Conservative Judaism). You can look at their site at www.ourrabbis.org.

So how much Torah should Messianic Jews keep? Well, certainly a starting point would be to focus on key identity markers such as keeping kosher, observing Shabbat, life cycle events, holy days, etc... Ultimately, it would be nice to have a movement that was very similar in its level of observance to that of the Modern Orthodox, but we are probably a few generations away from that developing fully.