Dear Kehillah Community,

Over the past week, we celebrated Chanukah. In last week’s nEWESpaper, Rabbi Dennis explained the idea associated with Chanukah of adding light, one candle at a time. What kind of light might we add to a world darkened by so much conflict and suffering? The last panoRAMa referenced interfaith dialogue work. Many of our students are involved in this work, especially the Interfaith Dialogue Club leaders, Beck Orion and Hannah Wolf, who indeed add light in this beautiful way. 

At a Jewish school for everybody, like ours, interfaith dialogue manifests in so many ways. Recently, in my JSH class, we encountered a Talmudic text that describes a halachic (Jewish Legal) dispute in which Rabbi Eliezer appealed to a voice from Heaven to support his position. The Rabbis rejected this on the basis that Jewish Law is not decided in Heaven. It is bound by majority rule, and the majority had ruled against Rabbi Eliezer. The text continues to describe God’s reaction, in Heaven, to these shocking events. God smiled and said: My children have defeated me … twice.

The students and I considered why the text had God repeat this line twice. Ben Domine, an Episcopalian student, who had learned the Hebrew alphabet over the Summer in order to prepare for the challenge of classical Jewish text study in the original language, noted that these two utterances – combined with the divine voice that agreed with Rabbi Eliezer – add up to three, like the Trinity, an important concept in his own religion. We also considered the idea that this was the text’s way of representing the principle of majority rule, even in Heaven. One divine voice said Rabbi Eliezer was right and two divine voices said that the law follows the majority. 

We discussed how this text is fundamental to the way that halacha (Jewish Law) functions. Could it also be fundamental to the development of Christianity? The possibility arose that the Father and the Holy Spirit made the two utterances, while the Son was the initial divine voice. If so, perhaps Jesus comes to earth to plant the seeds for Christianity in response to this concretization of the Earthly nature of halacha? For some of the students, this was merely an intellectual exercise. For others, it may have been the most personally relevant piece of learning of the entire semester. All of us supported each other’s learning and meaning-making.