Taken from Nakdimon’s page.  Nakdimon, who is a Dutch Messianic Jew is the original author of this article.

Here is the actual link:

http://www.geocities.com/nakdimonspage/questionablerts.html

Questionable rabbinic

interpretations of Scripture

In this section we will look at some amazing rabbinic interpretations. Let me demonstrate to you some classical examples of anti-missionary double standards. They are willing to swallow whatever sources such as the Talmud teaches, even if the Talmudic conclusion is totally contrary to the conclusion of the Tenach. Even then the words of the Talmud are seen as a display of the brilliance and incredible wisdom of the Sages by the anti-missionaries. Now bear in mind that these are only interpretations that I am aware of! Interpretations that I have learned from anti-missionary sources, that have really startled me. Yet for much less the authors of the New Testament are allotted every imaginable certificate of incompetence and ignorance one can think of. Here are the examples.

Daniel 7 vs Zacharya 9

There are 2 places in scripture that are both understood by Rabbinic Jews as well as Messianic Jews to be Messianic texts about how Messiah will appear to his people. One being Daniel 7:13 and the other being Zecharya 9:9. The former says that Messiah will come with the clouds of heaven and the latter says he will come lowly and riding upon a donkey. Well, this posed some difficulties for the sages, because how will Moshiach come? He can’t come in both ways. So the Talmud comes with one conclusive answer: it merges the two and changes it into a conditional prophecy!

Namely: If we are worthy (meaning if we are righteous) he will come on the clouds of heaven and if we’re not worthy (meaning if we are sinful) he will come lowly riding on a donkey.

So, problem solved, right? Not exactly! For starters, there is no indication whatsoever that these prophecies have any relation to one another let alone are dependent to one another for their fulfilment. In saying so, using the same standards with which the anti-missionaries judge the New Testament authors and Yeshua, one of these prophets, be it Daniel or Zechariah, will be a false prophet, since they both proclaimed their prophecies in the Name of Yahweh and one will not come true!

Also, since there were Messianic expectations during the second Temple times and the Messiah didn’t come (according to rabbinic Judaism) the excuse is been made that because of our sins he (Messiah) didn’t come. This, however, is not what we are told by the Talmud in relation to Daniel 7:13 and Zechariah 9:9! According to the Talmudic reading Messiah would come on the clouds of heaven if we were righteous, and lowly on a donkey if we were sinful. He would not “stay away because of our sins”. So, since we were wicked and therefore “not worthy”, he should have come riding on a donkey per their own view and not just stay away! Yet if we say that the Messiah came on a donkey (Zech 9:9), died and rose from the dead (Is 53:9-10, 12), ascended to the right hand of God (Ps 110:1), will remain there for many days (Hos 3:4-5) and come with the clouds of heaven (Dan 7:13), then this is said not to be in conformity with the Tenach but merely a “Christian fabrication”. But because the rabbis say this there are no questions asked and the anti-missionaries take their statements to be the absolute truth. You go figure!

David and Uriah (2 Samuel 11-12)

How about the Talmudic element rabbi Singer was referring to in his “Sin and Atonement” lecture? Now when reading the account of David and Uriah in 2 Samuel 11 and 12 we will see that:

 God thinks David had no right to kill Uriah

 God thinks David had no right to take Batsheva

 David committed murder and adultery

 According to Torah, David had to die (compare Deut 22:22 – 2 Sam 12:13)

 There is nothing in the text that indicates that Uriah and Batsheva were either illegally married or divorced at that time.

 Uriah was loyal to David. (see the list of David’s heroes in 1 Chron 11:41. In a discussion with an anti-missionary on the Messiah Truth forum one guy actually basically told me that maybe the author of Chronicles erred by putting Uriah in this list! No one corrected him! So the Tenach is wrong but the Sages are correct!)

Yet despite these clear testimonies that the Tenach gives us, the anti-missionaries, based on the Talmudic reading, come to the exact opposite conclusion! Their position is:

 David had every right to kill Uriah

 David had every right to take Batsheva

 David committed no murder and adultery

 David had done nothing wrong except give people the wrong impression in his actions concerning Batsheva

 Uriah and Batsheva were illegally married at best, divorced at worst

 Uriah committed high treason

Isn’t this amazing? Now this is either entirely the Talmudic reading or the anti-missionary position based on the Talmudic reading. Whatever the case, it is obvious to what length the anti-missionaries go to accept an interpretation diametrically opposed to that of the Tenach and fail to be the least bit critical. Now I have to be honest and mention that of all the anti-missionaries on that forum there was only one person (who apparently wasn’t aware of the Talmudic reading) that tried to correct the others and said that it was obvious that the Tenach said something else than they were saying and even went so far to say that they were all acting “like the Christians” by avoiding the obvious. That coming from an anti-missionary says a lot!

The Talmud manages to acquit the guilty and accuse the innocent! How does the Talmud come to this conclusion? This is what I’ve been told on the Messiah Truth website by the moderators: (1) The Talmud claims that since Uriah was a Hittite and since Torah prohibits intermarriage, the marriage was to be considered illegal. (2) In the time of war, the men of war would give his wife a “get”, which was a letter of divorce in case the man had gone missing, which permitted the woman to remarry. (3) When David had ordered Uriah to go home to sleep with his wife and Uriah didn’t do that, he committed high treason (!), since he failed to follow a direct order of the king in time of war and was disloyal to David by calling Joab his lord instead of acknowledging David as his lord. (4) He was considered a threat to the king since he swore by the kings life that he would not go home and for this reason David had the right to kill him. (5) The fact that Uriah didn’t go home to sleep with his wife is to be considered evidence that they weren’t married. (6) since David, being a man of great responsibility, gave people the occasion to misunderstand his actions, he had to be punished harshly. I have even been told that it was actually Batsheva who seduced David!

Now, who would believe this story? But let’s look at the claims one by one:

(1) The Bible obviously doesn’t share the view that the marriage was illegal. When God rebukes David, He asks why David took Uriah’s wife (ishto – his wife) to be his own in verse 9 and calls Batsheva “eshet Uriah” (the wife of Uriah) in verse 10. Especially notice 2 Sam 11:26 where it says that “she made lamentation for her husband” (Heb. watispod al-ba’alah), clearly showing the obvious husband-wife relationship between the two. (the anti-missionary mod Sophiee1 actually accused me of not knowing any Hebrew and then refused to admit that the word “ishah” here means “wife”, but instead claimed that it meant “woman”, no mattter how elaborate my explanation of the Hebrew text was! Although that word can mean woman, in this context it doesn’t matter if we talk about “the wife of Uriah” or “the woman of Uriah”. The point is that she belonged to him and he was her “ba’al” – husband – and was therefore off limits for David.)

(2) Again, based on point no. 1, there is no reason whatsoever to either think that Uriah and Batsheva were either illegally married or divorced.

(3) The charge of high treason is absolutely ridiculous. High treason is to collaborate with the enemy in times of war or disloyalty towards a nation (or the head of the nation) to the point of endangering that nation. Did Uriah do these things? Not at all! His loyalty towards Israel was very profound as shown in 2 Samuel 11, when it says:

11 And Uriah said unto David: ‘The ark, and Israel, and Judah, abide in booths; and my lord Joab, and the servants of my lord, are encamped in the open field; shall I then go into my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? as thou livest, and as thy soul liveth, I will not do this thing.’

Does this sound like a traitor to you? He showed great loyalty towards the God of Israel (by mentioning the ark), Israel’s king and Israel’s army! Not going home to “get busy” with your wife when the king tells you to is not what one would call (high) treason. Especially when you clarify to the king why you didn’t go: because of the ark, because of Israel and Judah, because of his commander Joab and the his fellow soldiers serving in the Israeli army (if that isn’t loyalty, then what is?). Not because he didn’t acknowledge David as his lord by calling Joab his lord (which he was, he was the highest ranked officer!), but because of the obvious reasons given above.

(4) It was common in that day to swear by something or someone higher than yourself. David also did this in 2 Sam 12:5: “…‘As the LORD lives, the man that hath done this deserves to die;”. Here he swears by God’s life. Using the line of reasoning of the anti-missionaries, David sought God’s life. How are we to believe that?

(5) On the contrary: the fact that David sent Uriah home to go sleep with his wife should be considered conclusive evidence that they were legally married! Why would David even consider to send him to Batsheva if they weren’t married, especially when she was already carrying David’s child! What logic is that based on?

(6) An anti-missionary moderator called Sophiee1 on the Messiah Truth website told me that the word “la’asot” in 12:9 indicates that David “appeared” to have sinned, but didn’t really sin. His only sin was that he rushed into things instead of waiting for God to get rid of Uriah and to make Batsheva his wife. It should be mentioned that no one rebuked her for it! This desperate attempt to try to acquit David was easy to refute by pointing her to Gen 2:23 where the same word “la’asot” is used, saying that God created heaven and earth. Yet no one would even think of claiming that God didn’t actually create heaven and earth but only “appeared” to create it. So I asked her to provide one example where the word “la’asot” is used to describe an “appearance” of something rather than an actual act or event. Of course, I am still waiting for her to come up with it. (btw, she is also a mod at the forum “Kosher Judaism” where she also portrays herself as a great scholar on Judaism, but when you actually challenge her claims, she can’t substantiate them and you will end up being banned because of disrespectful behaviour, as happened to me twice on the Messiah Truth forum and once on the Kosher Judaism forum.)

So all these arguments are clearly nothing but desperate attempts to try to acquit David and pin it on his victims. But after having read the account in the Bible, what unbiased reader on the face of this earth would even consider to believe the story of the Talmud? There is not a stitch of evidence whatsoever to support any point the Talmud raises. Yet this is considered a display of great scholarship and wisdom in the eyes of rabbinic Jews! Imagine if the New Testament would come up with such a story? All rabbi Singer would do is “leave skid marks”, wouldn’t he? Or ask questions like “how dare they play with my Bible”? But because the rabbis say this there are no questions asked and the anti-missionaries take their statements to be the absolute truth.

Counting of the Omer:

Traditional Judaism teaches that the counting of the Omer must start the day after the Sabbath of Pesach, i.e. on the 16^th of Nisan, irrespective of what day of the week this is. And this is how our people have been taught for many centuries. But let’s see what the bible says about the start of the counting of the Omer:

You shall count for yourselves — from the day after the Shabbat, from the day when you bring the Omer of the waving — seven Shabbats, they shall be complete. Until the day after the seventh sabbath you shall count, fifty days… -Leviticus 23:15-16

So the rabbinic Jewish position says to start to counting from the 16^th and after seven full weeks we have Shavu’ot, irrespective of what day the week it is, right? However, the text above clearly says seven full weeks “Until the day after the seventh sabbath”! Which means that Shavu’ot is always preceded by a Yom Shabbat (Sabbath day). Which in turn means that this can only be the case if that Yom Shabbat would be the weekly Shabbat and therefore starting on the 16^th of Nisan (on any given day) is erroneous. For example: If you would start on a Tuesday, 16^th Nisan, you will and up on a Tuesday after seven full weeks. The day before that day is a Monday or Yom Sheni, which is not a Yom Shabbat, as the Bible requires. Yet if you start counting on Yom Echad (Sunday), taking the phrase “from the day after the Shabbat” to be referring to the day after the ordinary Shabbat in the Pesach week, you will automatically end up on Sunday after seven full weeks and, exactly as required, the day after the seventh Shabbat, the 50^th day! So obviously the rabbinic reading of this text is erroneous, since it fails to meet the requirements of the Torah and the counting of the Omer is to start on the day after the weekly Shabbat of the Pesach week and not on the 16^th of Nisan, irrespective of what day of the week. So they will build Scripture around the statements of the rabbis, instead of building their statements around Scripture. But because the rabbis say differently there are no questions asked and the anti-missionaries take their statements to be the absolute truth.

Isaiah 9:5-6

For more on these verses, see my essay on the Trinity. But the question raises: who does this refer to? An immediate response, and logical one, would be Messiah, because what we learn about him is that he will be given the throne of David and rule on it forever and to his kingdom will be no end, have peace throughout his reign and his works will be marvellous. Yet, instead of this obvious conclusion, the Talmud says that this is not about Messiah, but about Chizki’yahu (Hezekiah). Read the story about Hezekiah in 2 Kings 18-20 and honestly tell me how this prophecy is fulfilled. With statements like “God wanted to make Hezekiah Messiah but Hezekiah wasn’t worthy” (My paraphrase) the rabbis win the hearts of the anti-missionaries. But looking at the prophecy, we can safely conclude that this was nowhere near fulfilled by Hezekiah, since Hezekiah’s reign was not what we would call (increasingly) peaceful and his reign did end (the words “ein kets” has the meaning “which can hardly be counted”). He only reigned for 29 years, much shorter than a lot of kings. For example, his son Menashe ruled for 55 years and is regarded to be the most wicked king in Judah’s history. Furthermore, he was called none of the names listed in the verse either contemporarily or after and a couple of generations later Judah was carried off to exile! So considering all this, Hezekiah does not fit the bill at all and this prophecy remains unfulfilled! So either Isaiah is a false prophet and this prophecy was never fulfilled, or this prophecy is Messianic, as is the Messianic Jewish position, and therefore is yet to be fulfilled. An in-depth response to the rabbinic position can be found at the “Trinity” section. But because the rabbis say differently there are no questions asked and the anti-missionaries take their statements to be the absolute truth.

Pronunciation of Gods Name

This might be the most sensitive subject of all of the points I have raised in this section. And therefore I have done my best to choose my words carefully. The rabbis claim that it is forbidden to pronounce The Name (haShem) of God, even with the most sincere intentions. Pronunciation of the Name is therefore unthinkable for the religious Jew. The Divine Name can only be pronounced by the High Priest, once a year during Yom Kippur. Of course there is an upside to this interpretation of the rabbis, namely, that this keeps the Name from being used in vein. But on the other hand, this view is built on the assumption that people will go on and use the Name in vein. However, what does the Bible say? If you read the Bible, especially the Torah, God actually says the exact opposite that the Tradition says. Namely, that His Name is the only name among any and all other gods that we are allowed to utter. It is actually the name of other gods that are not to be found in our mouths. With this, God thinks of the good in man, particularly of his people and trusts that we will not use His Name in vein, as He warns us subsequently. But the overall testimony of the Bible is very different from that of rabbinic Judaism. While Rabbinic Judaism has problems to pronounce the Divine Name of the God of Israel, it has no problem pronouncing the names of other gods, it is unthinkable that they would say the Name of the Almighty, thereby doing and teaching the exact opposite of the Torah, Prophets and Writings. Although there is absolutely nothing wrong with calling God “HaShem”, “Adonai” or “Lord”, there is also no scriptural basis for the prohibition of calling God by His Name; YaHWeH. But because the rabbis say differently… you finish the sentence.

Importance of the oral law: Exodus 34:27

27. The Lord said to Moses: “Inscribe these words for yourself, for according to these words I have formed a covenant with you and with Israel.”

In my rebuttal on rabbi Tovia Singer on the oral law I referred to this verse and said that this verse, although being a clear declaration to the fact that the Written Torah is the entire basis for the Covenant on Mt Sinai, the Talmud manages to use this very verse as proof that God made His Covenant based on the oral law. Now the entire basis for this is the words that I’ve made red in the Hebrew text and the translation. The words “al pi” literally mean “on the mouth” but make no sense whatsoever when translated as such in this verse. The link is also made with the “Torah Sheba’al Peh” (Torah that is owned by mouth; oral law), which looks like this:

If we read the text, however, and we use the interpretation of the Talmud, the verse would say

Inscribe these words for yourself, for on the mouth of these words

I have formed a covenant with you and with Israel

How absurd this reading is! God is saying nothing else than that, according to these words Moses is told to write down, He has made a Covenant with Israel. This is all about the words Moses was to write down and how on earth should this be seen as solid proof that the oral law is the basis of the Covenant at Sinai. And, since rabbi Singer is strongly opposed to the New Testament not quoting entire verses and accused it of being deceitful for doing so, only half of this verse was quoted here, namely the part “for according to these words I have formed a covenant with you“. And by doing so, the Talmud tries to PROVE it’s point and is used to do so to support major doctrinal issues. Can you immagine rabbi Singer stumbling upon something like this in the New Testament? The words “skid marks” come to mind. Yet we have nothing of that about the Talmud, do we? Remember: double standards! Now this is THE verse in all of scripture that proves that there not only is an oral law, but that the oral law is the foundation of the covenant God made with Israel. And we find another astonishing statement in the Talmud:

“the Holy One, Blessed be He, did not make His covenant with Israel except by virtue of the Oral Law” (Gittin 60b)

Notice that there is NOTHING in the entire Tenach that supports this claim. In fact, every time the people mention the covenant that was made on Sinai they always refer to the BOOK of Moses. So we have here a word in Hebrew, al-pi, that means “in accordance” which is totally distorted to make it say that it refers to the oral law just to be able to endorse it. But the rabbis say it, so no ifs ands or buts, that’s what you do because it’s the absolute truth!

Separation of milk and meat

This “commandment” is solely based on one commandment that is repeated three times in the Torah and applied in a way that it was never meant to be applied. Because of this verse, Orthodox Jewish rabbis have taught the people to completely separate all dairy from all meat products. This goes very far: separate dishes, separate kitchens, separate towels, you name it. Let’s analyse this verse and see what is actually being said.

The choicest of the first fruits of your soil you shall bring to the house of the Lord, your God.

You shall not cook a kid in its mother’s milk. (Ex 23:19)

The choicest of the first of your soil you shall bring to the house of the Lord, your God.

You shall not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” (Ex 34:26)

You shall not eat any carcass. You may give it to the stranger who is in your cities, that he may eat it,

or you may sell it to a foreigner; for you are a holy people to the Lord, your God.

You shall not cook a kid in its mother’s milk. (Deut 14:21)

That’s it! Based on these words the entire Jewish milk and meat issue has emerged. The words in Hebrew are

From this verse the rabbis have decided that this verse tells us that it is prohibited to draw any benefit whatsoever from the combination of milk and meat in any way shape or form! I often wonder how you can get all that from this verse. If you look at the texts, of the three instances this commandment occurs, two are related to sacrifices. Those are the instances in Exodus. As to say that if you are going to bring an offering to God, you should not bring an offering where you boil a kid in it’s mother’s milk. This may have had something to do with the pagans that did these things while living in the Land and were removed for that reason. Only the last one is in the context of consummation. However, the commandment remains the same. It is still “You will not cook…” and didn’t change into “You will not eat…” Let’s look at all the prohibitions in the text on Deuteronomy 14. After a long list of clean animals follows a list of unclean animals. Now the word for “to eat” in Hebrew is אכל (achal) and the word for “to cook” is בשּל (bashal). Now look at the wording:

See the distinction: don’t eat this, don’t eat that, don’t eat so, don’t boil the kid… All the things we cannot eat, the Torah says that we cannot eat. Why doesn’t the Torah also tell us not to eat milk and meat but only not to boil a kid in it’s mother’s milk? And why, if milk and meat are generally forbidden to consume together, does the Torah explicitly say that you can’t boil a kid in the milk of it’s mother? So, since we are into nitpicking, than it’s totally justified to eat a chicken sandwich with a milkshake, since we run no risk whatsoever that the chicken is mixed with the milk of it’s mother! Why isn’t there a general ban on eating milk and meat? Obviously, this had nothing to do with consuming milk and meat together, but this was one of the pagan rites of the Canaanites. It is perfectly okay for us to consume a cheeseburger or baloney sandwich with a hot cup of coco without waiting hours to drink a cup of coffee with cream after having eaten meat. The prohibition is totally baseless, since it is based on a verse that is repeated three times verbatim, that has nothing to do with dietary laws.

There is so much more that can be said about rabbinic interpretations and exegesis from Scriptures. I want to direct you to a lecture of Dr. Michael L Brown about the high standards of rabbinic authority, how rabbinic authority even surpasses prophetic authority. You can listen to the lecture here: http://www.realmessiah.com/Listen/Entries/2008/12/11_Are_the_Rabbis_right.html

Nakdimon

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Taken from Nakdimon’s page.  Nakdimon, who is a Dutch Messianic Jew is the original author of this article.

Here is the actual link:

http://www.geocities.com/nakdimonspage/rabbisingerquestionsrts.html

Tovia Singer Answers Questions

Question #1: What happened that the Temple got sacked and hasn’t been rebuilt 2000 years later? (Bethlehem lecture 34:40)

Someone asks this question and sounds very eager to get answers. “Something happened…”, he said, “…and I need to know what it is”. When you listen to what rabbi Tovia Singer tells him you will notice that he never answers this question! He says a lot of words but says nothing to answer the man’s question, because he knows that it only works against rabbinic Judaism. Let’s examine what he says and if that is correct:

A: Rabbi Tovia Singer claims that Israel has returned and that it didn’t take Jesus to get there, to demonstrate that there is no need for Jesus. But it didn’t take rabbinic Judaism and Torah observance to get there either. It was because of secular Zionists that the state of Israel exists today. What does this then say about rabbinic Judaism if we use rabbi Singer’s line of reasoning?

B: Rabbi Singer subsequently asks the question what was so terribly wrong that we have been exiled for almost 2000 years? He then comes with an amazing statement. He actually says: “It’s so obvious: As soon as Jews start believing in Jesus, we’re exiled”. Isn’t this the entire world upside down? In his lecture on Sin and Atonement he actually said that Jews en masse rejected Yeshua! And that is fact! How can he now claim that the Jewish people have been exiled because they accepted Yeshua?

Israel’s spiritual state is always measured by the righteousness of the majority of the people. This means that only when the majority of the people deals corruptly and sins grievously against God, that Israel is exiled. So if the vast majority of the Jewish people, according to rabbinic Judaism, dealt correctly by rejecting Jesus, then what the rabbi claims here is inaccurate and totally the opposite of the truth. It’s just a lie when he claims that we got exiled “because we accepted Jesus”. Why does rabbi Tovia Singer make claims like these? Almost an act of desperation!

Rabbi Tovia Singer goes on to say that the question isn’t against Judaism, but against Christianity, claiming that it was foretold by the prophets that Israel was exiled. Truth is that the rabbi is referring to only one prophet, namely, the prophet Hoshea. Now, Hoshea was a contemporary of Yeshayahu [Isaiah] and lived before the first exile. And the people had no indication to think that Hoshea was referring to a second exile. The reasons for the first exile were, amongst others, mass idolatry, hatred amongst the Jewish people and persecution of the prophets God sent to His people. Exile was almost a logical result due to the behaviour of the Jewish people. Now this exile lasted 70 years. Those are a lot of days! For all the people knew, Hoshea was referring to that exile.

But still, if we take rabbi Singer’s word for it, just for the sake of argument, Israel is not just exiled for no reason. This would be totally contrary to the Covenant God made with His people. Israel is not just exiled because the prophet “foretold it”. Israel is only exiled because of grievous sins committed against God and breaking His Covenant. So something of great significance must have happened, something that was so terrible that was as bad, if not worse, than what happened with the first exile, that made this prophecy to become reality. What happened that caused the Jewish people to be scattered among the nations, banned from the Land of Israel, the Temple to be destroyed and not being rebuilt for almost 2000 years? What was it, rabbi Singer? He doesn’t answer that question at all, but instead comes up with some diversion tactic and criticizes Christianity. He almost blames Yeshua’s delayed return for the length of the exile. Quoting Mark 9:1

And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.

Read on and see how these words are explained by the writers. We see the same account in Luke and in Matthew. Luke tells us in the very next verse that: Some eight days after these sayings, He took along Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. (Luke 9:28) What sayings is Luke referring to? The very promise made in the preceding verse. All the Gospels have these accounts back to back explaining what this means. But let’s not wander off. As for the eminence of the return of Yeshua, revering to Revelations 22 (I come quickly). Who says he is talking in human terms? How about the promise of the quick to appear Yom haDin (Day of Judgement) made up to more than 700 years before the books of the New Testament. Many promises were made:

6 Howl ye; for the day of the LORD is at hand; as destruction from the Almighty shall it come. [Isaiah 13]

15 Alas for the day! for the day of the LORD is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come. [Joel 1]

15 For the day of the LORD is near upon all the nations; as thou hast done, it shall be done unto thee; thy dealing shall return upon thine own head. [Obadiah 1]

7 Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord GOD; for the day of the LORD is at hand, for the LORD hath prepared a sacrifice, He hath consecrated His guests…

14 The great day of the LORD is near, it is near and hasteth greatly, even the voice of the day of the LORD, wherein the mighty man crieth bitterly. [Zephaniah 1]

3 For the day is near, even the day of the LORD is near, a day of clouds, it shall be the time of the nations.[Ezekiel 3]

Why aren’t these prophecies called false prophecies and promises of an eminent Day of Judgement? So when, 2700 years ago, the Tenach said something is near and it hasn’t happened yet, then it’s not a problem, but if, 2000 years ago, the New Testament said that the Kingdom is near then it’s untrustworthy? Based on what logic?

And then rabbi Singer goes on to say a whole lot of nothing, things that have nothing at all to do with the question that was raised. If Christianity is the true religion then why has God only preserved rabbinic Jews? That’s is a similar question to “if rabbinic Judaism is the true religion then why wasn’t the modern state of Israel established due to rabbinic Judaism?” Why did God choose the secular Zionists to make sure that Jews have their own autonomy in the Eretz Yisrael and to bring back Jews (including rabbinic Jews!) to the promised land. It’s actually quite simple: God uses whom He wants to use, how He wants to use them.

 He used Messianic Jews to bring the news of the Messiah of Israel to the Gentiles so that His testimony would be preserved.

 He used Rabbinic Jews to preserve the testimony of His people.

 He used Secular Jews to bring His people back to the land he promised to Abraham Isaac and Jacob, fulfilling His vow.

For the references to atonement, see the section “Sin and atonement”.

Bottom line is that rabbi Tovia Singer doesn’t answer that question and that’s truly understandable, because it only works against what he wants his audience to believe. Instead of giving the man the answer he requested, he starts criticizing Messianic Jewish beliefs and attacking Sadducees. Very subtle.

Paul not a Pharisee? (13:40)

(Tovia Singer answers questions pt 1)

According to rabbi Singer Paul is not to be taken seriously when he says that he is a Pharisee, because he gives away his cards for two reasons; 1 he was involved in killing a Christian and 2 he worked for the Sadducees when he went after the Christians. To answer the first allegation we need only to point out that Paul was never involved with the killing of a Christian. It is said in the story of Stephen that the people that killed Stephen threw their coats at Paul’s feet and he agreed with what they did. Does this mean that he is “involved” in the killing of Christians? Also he went from house to house persecuting followers of Yeshua only to throw them in jail! But does that condone the charge of murder? Of course not. The second is also very easy. He didn’t “work for the Sadducees” when he went to Damascus. He went to the high priest and asked for written permission to go to synagogues outside the Land with the authority of the Temple to imprison the followers of the Messiah. What is so bad about that? Do you really think that Paul would be able to go to synagogues outside Israel in his own authority? Who was he? The only way he could do that was on the authority of the high priest since Jews all over the world recognized the authority of the high priest and the Temple. And if Paul wanted to “present himself as someone significant”, as far as politics went, the Sadducees had more power than the Pharisees. So if Paul really wanted to be someone of importance, he would have presented himself as a Sadducee. Which he couldn’t be anyway, since he was jailed by the Sadducees for his teachings, that were, obviously, not according to theirs. And the Pharisees stood up for him, because of his teaching, which was according to theirs. (See Acts 23:1-10) So why would Pharisees jump to the defence of a “friend of the Sadducees”? So Paul didn’t “give away his cards” and there is no doubt that Paul wasn’t a Sadducee, but a Pharisee, just as he said! But, of course, it is convenient for rabbi Singer to deny this.

Jeremiah 31:31 raped? (22:15)

Rabbi Tovia Singer then accuses the writer of Hebrews of changing the text in chapter 8:9 to do away with Israel, claiming that this is the agenda of the writer of Hebrews. Rabbi Singer says that the writer of Hebrews “had to literally rape” the text of Jeremiah 31:31 to get rid of Israel. What an accusation! A lot of untrue accusations too, if I may. First of all, the writer of Hebrews didn’t have to “get rid of Israel”, because he himself, as a Jew, was part of that very same Israel. Second, and I hate to remind you again, the writer didn’t change a thing in the text, since he was quoting from the Greek text of the LXX (Septuagint), which was the dominant Greek text in Jewish circles in that time. You simply don’t accuse someone of changing the text when he quotes from a translation, in this case, the dominant Jewish translation of the day. And third, look at the preceding verse that doesn’t make any sense if he wanted to “get rid of Israel”: “For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah:”

Since the New Testament gets accused of changing texts to fit it’s agenda all the time, why didn’t the author of Hebrews come up with the idea of just chopping the verse in half and leaving out all the offending references? The authors could have easily done that, but he didn’t because there was no “offensive part”.

And of course I am aware of the stories that the LXX has been manipulated by the church. This is something rabbi Singer claims in a few lectures. But it would be hard to believe that the authors of the New Testament would have quoted from a LXX that didn’t say what they claimed it said. It doesn’t make sense to claim that the LXX says something that it doesn’t, especially when people could verify it. Most Jews spoke Greek so therefore it would be really silly to think that you would deceive those people you wanted to reach by manipulating a text they were familiar with. And the story that it was only the Torah that was translated by the 72 rabbis and not the Prophets and the Writings, so, therefore, only the translation of the Torah is to be considered valid. Again, we need to ask; why would people not only read from the Torah translation of the LXX in the synagogues, but also from the Prophets and Writings if those translations were considered inaccurate and misleading? Obviously people recognized the entire Tenach translation in those days as an accurate and authoritative Greek translation. This actually shows us the exact opposite of what the anti-missionaries claim.

Sins of the fathers… (29:15)

Then rabbi Singer goes on to Exodus 20 where verse 4 speaks of God visiting the iniquities of the fathers up to 3 and 4 generations of those that hate Him. Rabbi Singer uses this to prove that there is no such thing as vicarious atonement. Although I agree with the fact that this text doesn’t speak of vicarious atonement, I still wanted to address something that the rabbi said. He speaks of “three OR four generations of those that continue to sin” and continues his analysis based on this reading. Notice the rabbi emphasizes the words in bold? They are nowhere to be found in the text and since rabbi Singer argues about the smallest detail when it comes to Christian translations, allow me to return the favour. The text speaks of “al-sh’lishe’im w’al-ribe’im”, which means “third AND fourth”. Also the words “that continue to sin” are completely absent from the text. What we do see is the word “leson’ai” which means “to those that hate me”. So therefore, rabbi Singer’s whole analysis to disprove vicarious atonement is not only based on a wrong text but also on a wrong translation of the text, which makes this entire analysis completely baseless. What the text is simply saying is that God is slow in His anger and abundant in His mercy. (Hence the contrast “3 and 4 generations of haters” and “1000 generations of lovers”)

Luke written after the fact (58:40)

Then rabbi Singer has a ball with the prophecy in the New Testament that the Messiah made and was written by Luke. He first claims that Yeshua’s prophecy isn’t accurate, because he said that not one stone would be left on top of another, and points his audience to the fact that the Western Wall is still standing. But if we want to nitpick as far as the New Testament is concerned, then we can’t be liberal when it comes to the Tenach, because that would be judging by double standards. If we want to press rabbi Singer’s point that the prophecy is incorrect because of the Western Wall still stands (although the Temple itself is completely gone to the point that you can’t see where it used to be, which happens to be the whole point of Yeshua’s prophecy in the first place) then how many false prophets do we have in the Tenach, if we are to examine every minor detail of a prophecy? Even God Himself can’t prophesise when we apply rabbi Singer’s criteria! So let’s get nitpicky: In 1 Kings 19 God tells Elijah that he [i.e. Elijah] will go to Aram to anoint Haza’el as king of Aram then to Yehu to anoint him as king of Israel and then anoint Elisha as a prophet in his stead. But Elijah first gets to Elisha (1 Kings 19), then is taken away (2 Kings 2) and Yehu is anointed by neither Elijah nor Elisha, but by another prophet (2 Kings 9). Yet the initial prophecy is that this would all be done by Elijah. We can go on and point out that Jeremiah is also a false prophet by the standards of rabbi Singer. Obviously this is all about understanding the prophetic language. But rabbi Singer wants to cherry-pick when it comes to the New Testament, but when it comes to the Tenach, he uses other standards. If you have to use one standard for one source to disprove it, yet go out of your way to use another standard for another source you try to endorse, what does that say about the strength of your argument?

Then he goes on to ridicule the New Testament that the accounts of the destruction of the Temple were written after the fact. Well, if we use that strict criterion as a measuring rod for the New Testament, then we can throw out a good portion of the Tenach as well. A lot in the Tenach is written after the fact. How, then, is it possible that rabbi Singer makes these claims of invalidity in regard to the New Testament, but on the same note he ignores these same invalidities in the Tenach? And if Luke was written after the fact and wanted Yeshua to look good then he wouldn’t have made the claim that Yeshua said that not one stone would be upon another. He would have written the prophecy and adjusted it to fit the destruction to the tiniest detail, so that at some point in time, someone called, let’s say, rabbi Tovia Singer, wouldn’t be able to make the claim that Yeshua is a false prophet because the Western Wall still stands! But I know for a fact that if, of all the stones, only two would be on each other and all the others would have been scattered, rabbi Singer would still make the ridiculous claim that the prophecy wasn’t fulfilled. Obviously the message was that the destruction of the Temple would be enormous, a horrendous event and a devastating experience for the Jewish people. As someone once said:

“It seems a little petty to admit that Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple in the lifetime of his hearers, and for the temple to be destroyed forty years later, and then to claim Jesus was a false prophet because a few stones remained on top of each other. I can imagine a Jewish survivor standing amidst the rubble of the temple, having lost his whole family to the sword or the flame, witnessing one of the most horrific events that has ever happened to the Jewish people, and bellowing, “False prophet! Jesus was a false prophet! Part of one wall remains standing.” How petty is that? The point of the prophecy, not its technical accuracy to the letter, determines the validity of the prophet.”

And nothing more needs to be said.

Nakdimon

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Taken from Nakdimon’s page.  Nakdimon, who is a Dutch Messianic Jew is the original author of this article.

Here is the actual link:

http://www.geocities.com/nakdimonspage/whoisthemessiahrts.html

Who is the Messiah?

Jews of the Devil? (11:30)

This lecture actually
should have been called “slandering of Messianic Jews” or something like
that, because that’s exactly what rabbi Tovia Singer is doing for the vast
majority of this lecture. I am not even going to address the points about
the slander of rabbi Singer against Messianic Jews. I do want to address the
claim of rabbi Singer that “only Satan can” reject the truth when
knowing the truth. (We actually don’t believe that Jews “know”
that Yeshua is the Messiah, but we say that because they don’t believe he
is the Messiah they want to get rid of all possible allusions to him, be it
by removing Isaiah 53 from the haphtarah [which I’m not sure of] or making
another interpretation than the Messianic interpretation prominent. As I
have shown before, the rabbi keeps essential information from his audience
time and time again and only tells the part that support his claims) What’s
funny is that this is what has been the testimony of the Tenach about Israel,
yet rabbi Singer points his audience to the New Testament to make it seem
that the New Testament says that Jews reject the truth when it’s right
there in front of them. Notice that the New Testament is written by Jews,
but still is called anti-Semitic by the anti-missionaries. Well, then if you
speak bad about Yeshua then, as a Jew, you can still be called anti-Semitic
as well. This, then, also goes for the Tenach. So let’s look at some
amazing “anti-Semitic” statements of the prophets in the Tenach that
show us Jews rejecting the truth. And I say Jews instead of Israel because
that’s the terminology that rabbi Singer uses himself. Remember, we are
only being consistent and want to avoid the use of double standards. We will
see that even when knowing that God has just acted or a true prophet spoke,
they rejecting him anyway. I will replace the word “Israel” with “the
Jews” for shock-value, to increase the “anti-Semitic” tone of the
prophet and see what happens if rabbi Singer holds the Tenach to the same
standards as he does with the New Testament:

Ezekiel 3:4-7:

This is what the
prophet says that God told him about the Jews: 4 And He said unto me: ‘Son of man, go, get
thee unto the Jews, and
speak with My words unto them. 5 For thou art not sent to a people of an
unintelligible speech and of a slow tongue, but to the
Jews; 6 not to many peoples of an
unintelligible speech and of a slow tongue, whose words thou canst not
understand. Surely, if I sent thee to them, they would hearken unto thee.
7 But the Jews will not
consent to hearken unto thee; for they consent not to hearken unto Me; for all the
Jews are of a hard forehead and of a stiff
heart.

Excuse me? This known
prophet Ezekiel is sent to the Jews and God says that they will reject his
words nonetheless. Even when they know he is Gods true prophet! But God
doesn’t stop there, He even goes beyond that. He says that had He sent
Ezekiel to the Gentiles, they would have listened to him and received the
words of God, even though they didn’t speak the language. But the Jews?
Now way! Talking about anti-Semitic statements! Knowing that Ezekiel is a
true prophet and understanding every word he says, God says that they will
reject whatever he says anyway. Can you imagine what the anti-missionaries
would have said if this testimony would have been found in the New
Testament?

Now the next
anti-Semitic statement; 1Kings 18-19.

Eliyahu (Elijah) on
Mount Carmel with everyone present taking on the prophets of Baäl and
defeating them hands down, showing without any doubt that he is the true
prophet of the one true God. Yet in spite of that incredibly miraculous
event that took place and people witnessing the glory of the God of Israel,
they still went with Baäl and rejected God and His prophet! Now the New
Testament is often criticized for being anti-Semitic because of it’s
testimony that although the people saw all the miraculous deeds of Yeshua,
they still rejected him? Herewith implying that they didn’t take place,
because had they taken place as the New Testament witnesses, they wouldn’t
have rejected him as they did. But what are we then to make of this account
in 1 Kings 18-19? By anti-missionary standards it couldn’t have occurred.

Well, how about the
testimony of the Torah about the Exodus? The testimony of Israel, after
seeing the miraculous works God did through Moshe (Moses) and the glorious
victory over Egypt, which they saw with their own eyes, an entire dynasty
wiped away without one man lifting up a sword, totally demolishing that
country and still the people spoke about going back to Egypt to live there
as slaves because they thought they would be better off, continuously
mumbling against God and Moses to the point that they even wanted to stone
Aharon and Moshe (read Numbers 14), constantly rebelling after almost
constantly being witnesses of God’s miracles. Building the golden calf,
where “all the people” brought their gold to make the statue. (even
though anti-missionaries will claim that only 3000 people participated in
this event, but the reality is that the entire nation participated and only
3000 failed to repent and didn’t choose for God and were therefore slain)
“Only the Devil can do that”? No, that’s not what the Tenach tells us!
The Tenach, not Christians, tells us that the Jews are capable of knowing
and still rejecting. So where is rabbi Singer’s outrage now?

Have you noticed, by
the way, how highly rabbi Singer speaks about the prophets in his lectures?
This is all after the fact. In the time of the prophets they weren’t
esteemed so highly by the religious leaders of our people as they are now.
It all started in Egypt, Moses came to the people and they rebelled against
him in the wilderness, in the time of the prophets some were ignored, some
were rejected, some were persecuted, some were killed. Then the people went
into exile and they eventually came back to the land, where they, completely
in harmony with the behaviour of the previous generations, rejected and
killed the Messiah. Of course, we are all to blame for him being slain
because we have all sinned, Jew and Gentile alike. So this is no lashing out
to the beloved Jewish people. But notice the pattern all the way back to
Moses: when prophets didn’t live up to their expectations and asked too
much from them (i.e. let go of their wicked ways and start to obey their
words) they rebelled and rejected the message of the prophets. When the
Messiah came and did exactly the same, not living up to their expectations
and obey his words, they rebelled again and rejected him altogether as well.
So what I am trying to say is that it shouldn’t come as a surprise that
the Messiah wasn’t recognised by his people when he came to them.

“You don’t understand!…” 16:00

Then rabbi Singer says
that we can’t tell Jews what their books say. According to the rabbi this
would be like the Chinese telling an American that he doesn’t know his own
constitution. But this is comparing sticks to stones, because for starters,
the gentiles didn’t come to the Jews by themselves to tell them that they
have figured it all out. They learned it from the Messiah Himself and His
followers, who were all Jews. This would be similar to Chinese people who
got their information from the likes of Abraham Lincoln and the founding
fathers and then came to the American and tell him what certain
constitutional laws really meant to say.
They don’t need to know how to read the language, since they got
their information in Chinese and still got the right interpretation from the
founding fathers. As shown before Ezekiel 3:4-7 bears witness to this fact.
So Gentile don’t make their case based on their own knowledge, but based
on what Messiah has said.

Difference between Messianic Judaism and Pentecostals Evangelicals 29:30

Rabbi Tovia Singer
claims that the only difference between Messianic Judaism and Pentecostals
Evangelicals is rabbinic Jewish customs. This is partially true. Although
there are religious expressions that are in conformity with rabbinic Judaism,
because it has a lot of beauty in it, this is not the only thing that
separates us from Gentile Pentecostals congregations. That the rabbi comes
to this conclusion maybe because the traditions are all outward expressions
of the faith. But these traditions are in no way binding! So the expression
may be in agreement with traditional Jewish way, but the experience
is anything but conform traditional Judaism. If you go into a Messianic
Congregation that observes Torah you immediately notice the difference
between that and a traditional Jewish meeting. As rabbi Singer correctly
points out in his lecture on “Sin and atonement” at 01:06:20-01:08:55.
The main thing we and Gentile congregations disagree on is the centrality of
the Torah, which, according to mainstream Pentecostals, was abolished by
Yeshua. However, there are more and more Gentiles that see the importance of
the Torah and observance of the Shabbat and feasts and kosher laws (i.e.
biblical kosher, NOT halachic kosher!), (and in some cases) teachings of
cleanliness due to the message Messianic Jews are spreading. Other than that,
there are hardly differences. That we make kiddush and wear kippah does not
“define” our Judaism! Also, we use the Hebrew names, not necessarily for
Jewish people, but to remind the gentile believers that Yeshua and his
disciples were all Jews, which is something the gentile believers tend to
forget and instead see them first and foremost as Christians. The Messiah is
part of Israel and the faith of the gentile believers is the inheritance of
Israel, which they share in. Not as the heirs, but as co-heirs to the
promise God made to Abraham, that through him, all the nations would be
blessed. So it’s not a ploy “to lure Jews into Christianity”, but
rather to set the record straight with our gentile brothers in Lord Yeshua.
Furthermore, I want to use the analogy rabbi Singer uses in another setting:
If you would step into a time machine and go back to those days, I would bet
that if you would ask someone where Jesus, the son of Joseph was, people
would ask you what you were talking about. They didn’t know any Jesus, or
Mary, or James, or John, or Matthew, or Peter. But if you would ask for
Yeshua ben Yosef, people would know whom you were asking about. People were
familiar with the names Yeshua, Miryam, Ya’aqov, Yochanan, Mattityahu,
Kefa. So it has nothing to do with “trying to sound Jewish” because IT
WAS JEWISH!

As for all the other
slander of Messianic Judaism, I urge you to go and see for yourself and meet Messianic Jews to see that
if rabbi Tovia Singer’s allegations are correct or not. By now you should
know better than just to take rabbi Singer at his word. But rabbinic
tradition is hardly considered “keeping the commandments”. Furthermore,
we have nothing against rabbinic tradition. On the contrary: we find a lot
of wisdom and beauty in the traditions. What we do reject is the teaching
that these traditions are Torah, given from God. That is simply untrue. Even
the New Testament makes the distinction between the Torah and the
“tradition of the Elders”. So either it’s from God and it’s not
tradition or either it’s tradition and it is not from God. Therefore, we
see the beauty of the traditions and apply these traditions and don’t see
them as a bad thing, we absolutely do NOT see them as Torah
and therefore, religiously binding, since that claim can’t be
substantiated from the Tenach. God is not interested in the Jewish ness of a
religion but in the truthfulness of people to his word. So if I must set
aside my Jewish pride to gain what I know to be true, the resurrected
Messiah, then I will follow the example of the apostle Sha’ul in
Philippians 3:7-8 and do just that.

Yet more lies! Why? (40:10)

Then rabbi Tovia Singer
expands on Gen. 49:10 and tells his audience about a Christian that
interpreted it in a certain way. But then rabbi Tovia Singer goes on to do
something remarkable. He presents that interpretation as “the” Christian
position. If this is “the” Christian position, then I wonder why this is
the first time I have ever heard of it. This interpretation is one I have
never heard of! So instead of this being “the” Christian interpretation,
this is just one individual that understood the text as such.

Check your theology! (41:33)

Then rabbi Tovia Singer
points us to Hoshea 3 to show that Jews aren’t supposed to have a king.
But, again, as I pointed out in the “Rabbi Singer Answers Questions”
section, these things don’t just happen “because the prophet says so”.
There had to be something that caused this. And because Israel, as a
majority, rejected Yeshua’s sacrifice for their sins, his role as mediator
and High Priest, his role as their king, they don’t have these things. It
is only when they accept him in the latter days, these things will be
restored. When they “turn to Yahweh, their God, and David, their
king” in the latter days. By the way, also notice that the text
also speaks about Israel not having idols. So what does that tell us? How
many secular Jews are into idolatry, séances and all that stuff? I thought
that “Jews are not gonna have it”.

He then goes on to say
that according to Christianity it all comes down to the sacrifice on Calvary
and that it teaches that you can be a lousy person, but if you believe in
Yeshua, you’re saved. Where does the New Testament teach this? I dare
rabbi Singer to come up with the quote where the New Testament says that any
lousy person is saved by just “believing”. What the New Testament DOES
teach is that belief with repentance is
essential for salvation and that without repentance that changes the
lifestyle into God-fearing obedience, your belief is worthless. Yet another
misrepresentation of Messianic Jewish faith.

Ecclesiastes (49:50)

Rabbi Tovia Singer
tries to demonstrate that sacrifices have no meaning to king Solomon. The
only problem is that he is using the wrong text to demonstrate this. What is
Ecclesiastes all about? It’s about things in life, how people live their
lives in vain. What does it say about atonement? NOTHING in any way, shape
or form! So why use something that has nothing to do with atonement to prove
that it doesn’t say anything about Messiah’s atonement? What king
Solomon says, and who could disagree with him on that, is that as far as the
way of life is concerned, keeping Gods commandments is the best thing man
can do, because all the rest has no profit whatsoever. We can again, put the
shoe on the other foot and say that king Solomon says nothing about prayer,
repentance and charity as well. What does that tell us about these three
important aspects of life? Nothing, because we understand that he isn’t
making a case about atonement, he is trying to explain that the best man can
do in life is not to pursue the things of his own heart, but to keep God’s
commandments. That’s the conclusion of a man that had it all, but saw no
profit in them. One should ask, why rabbi Singer feels compelled to make
these baseless allegations time and time again?

No accounts of blood sacrifices in the Tenach (52:30)

Rabbi Tovia Singer then
gives his audience something to think about. He asks his audience that if
sacrifices were so important, then why isn’t there one case of someone
bringing sacrifices for sins in the entire Tenach? This should make you
wonder, right? Here is the answer: because the Tenach emphasizes Gods mercy
rather than the way to get atonement. The Torah has already laid out the
atonement system. Think about it: the Tenach deals with just a few cases
where people sinned. In those instances, when people are forgiven the
authors show God’s love for His people Israel and His compassion for them.
Does this mean that no one ever brought sacrifices for their sins? If the
Bible kept count of every single sin in Temple times and every single goat
or lamb that was offered, the authors would still be writing to this day,
trying to keep track of sin sacrifices. However, the point the authors
wanted to make is to show the grace of God towards His people. But to say
that no one ever brought sacrifices when they sinned is to say that every
one disregarded the Torah that explicitly commands sacrifices to atone for
sins. And if we are to believe the anti-missionaries (rabbi Singer in
particular), the Torah was too caught up with blood and the prophets, seeing
this, repudiated Torah-sacrifices, therewith rectifying the error that was
made in the Torah. Sure!

The New Testament teaches reliance on man (1:01:30)

Again, I would advise
you to read the New Testament and talk to Christians and see if they “look
horizontally” and not “up” instead of taking rabbi Singer at his word.
Look at some of the following references in the New Testament itself:

Let your light so shine
before men, that they may see your good works, and
glorify your Father which is in heaven…But I say unto you,
Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you,
and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may
be the children of your
Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on
the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust…
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your
Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Mat 5:16,44-45,48)

Take heed that ye do
not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of
your Father which is in heaven…After this manner therefore
pray ye: Our
Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. (Mat 6:1,
9)

Insomuch that the
multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed to be whole,
the lame to walk, and the blind to see: and they
glorified the God of Israel. (Mat 15:31)

And immediately he rose
up before them, and took up that whereon he lay, and departed to his own
house, glorifying God. (Luke 5:25)

So
when they had further threatened them, they let them go, finding nothing how
they might punish them, because of the people: for
all [men] glorified God for that which was done… And when
they heard that, they
lifted up their voice to God with one accord, and said, Lord,
thou [art] God, which hast made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all that
in them is: (Acts 4:21, 24)

Virtually all epistles
in the New Testament start with words like: “I thank my
God always on your behalf, for the grace
of God which is given you by Jesus [the Messiah].”

So
take my advice and look for yourself. Only then you will know if there is
any truth to rabbi Singer’s allegations.

Celibacy (1:06:57)

Rabbi Singer then gives
his audience the impression that the New Testament teaches that celibacy is
the way to go and that being married is something one should only consider
when one “burns”. He does so to demonstrate that “the biggest knackers”
of the New Testament were all bachelors in contrast to prophets in the
Tenach. He then lists prophets who were married with children, to prove how
the teachings of the New Testament is anti-Tenach. But, as is the custom of
this rabbi, what he does again is not telling his audience the whole story
and conveniently leaves some of “the biggest knackers” in the Tenach out
of his line-up. Why? Because they don’t support the story he wants his
audience to hear. What about Jeremiah? What about Elijah? What about Elisha?
It’s obvious why he doesn’t mention them! So what does Paul mean? He is
saying that all people, who give themselves to God in ministry, would do
good to stay single for the purpose of being able to completely give
themselves to God without having to consider (read: compromise), for example,
how to feed their family, etc. What is so wrong about that?

Then the rabbi acts as
if Messianic Judaism has anything against physical pleasure. This is
absolutely erroneous. What Messianic Judaism DOES teach, is that the lure of
having too much physical pleasure is always there and can overtake a person.
And one should be careful not to get too carried away in the process. And
what is wrong about being worried about having sex and afterwards going to a
religious meeting? Notice that the question from “dear Abby” is not just
about having sex. It’s about having sex “on Sunday morning” (i.e.
before the meeting) and then going to the meeting right after. Doesn’t
Torah teach us that after having sex, we are physically unclean and remain
unclean until the evening? Then why is this being ridiculed by the rabbi?
First we are ridiculed for NOT keeping the Torah and now we are ridiculed
for asking questions that are derived from the Torah. Rabbi Singer’s
entire analysis is totally irrelevant.

Again you need to ask
yourself the important question: Why does rabbi Singer use these arguments
and does he make claims that are just untrue and why does he have to be
inconsistent in his approach in order to make his story stick? I’ll let
you decide for yourself.

In closing I would like
to point you to an interesting lecture of a Jewish man called Mariano
Grinbank, who gives an interesting insight about the messianic teachings
according to traditional Jewish sources. You can find his lecture called
“rabbinic Judaism” here: http://calvarysantafe.org/player.php?ServiceID=90

See how
you will find the traits of the Messiah in those sources. Rabbi Singer can say
all he wants about the Christian Messiah being foreign to Judaism, but his
sources say otherwise.

Nakdimon

Email me!

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geovisit();

Taken from Nakdimon’s page.  Nakdimon, who is a Dutch Messianic Jew is the original author of this article.

Here is the actual link:

http://www.geocities.com/nakdimonspage/orallawpt1rts.html

http://www.geocities.com/nakdimonspage/orallawpt2rts

This section needs an introduction. I have discussed the oral law many a times with anti-missionaries and in these debates I could hardly believe what parts of Scripture they used to try to prove that there was an oral law given to Moses, handed down to Joshua and then to the Elders and so on. Proofs of which the opposite could easily be found in the Tenach. We will see in this section how rabbi Singer and the anti-missionary movement misuse scripture to prove there was oral law given on Mt Sinai and we will look at the evidence against it. We will see how the proofs of the rabbinic Jewish side are extremely vague and the proofs against these claims are abundantly clear.

Rabbi Tovia Singer claims that there were 2 Torahs given on Mount Sinai. This, however, is impossible, as we will soon find out. The evidence for this simply lacks in the entire Hebrew Bible. The claim is that God gave the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, which interprets the written. So to give you an example of what they want you to believe, and as the rabbi explains himself: The commandments in the Written are only the chapter headings and the Oral Torah is supposedly the actual elaboration of what the Written says. God told Moses to write the headings down, but not to do that with the Oral Law. This was to be transmitted orally. Now seriously consider this line of reasoning. This makes as much sense as a college professor, telling his students every class for a whole semester to only write down the topic of the classes they follow, but they are only allowed to memorize all the words that have been said during the class. In addition, the professor will then emphasize that they should remember the unwritten words and that if they would be forgotten, they wouldn’t be able to graduate. Now be honest: What is the most likely thing to happen with the information that the students didn’t write down? Why do we make notes?

According to what anti-missionaries from the Messiah Truth website have told me, the oral law was given before the Written Torah. We need to ask ourselves then, why Moses, when he didn’t know what to do, always went to ask God for answers and never made a decision based on what he had learned from the oral law. He never knew what to do until he asked God and got a decisive answer from Him and never consulted any oral interpretation of any commandment! An example of this would be Num 15, which anti-missionaries use to prove that we need the oral law to understand what we can or cannot do on Shabbat. The man violates Shabbat and then is put to death eventually. “See, you need the oral law to know what ‘don’t leave your place’ means”, anti-missionaries have often told me. But a closer look at the text doesn’t support the existence of the oral law, but it actually blows a hole in that very point they actually try to make with this example. Because the death sentence for violating the Shabbat was not made based on an oral law that was supposedly already given. Moses went to God and asked for council and based on what God told him, the sentence was carried out. I thought the oral law was supposed to be the decisive factor here. I thought the oral law was supposed to give Moses clear instructions about what was violation of the Shabbat or not and what was to happen with that man. What ever happened to the notorious “39 M’lachot”? (the 39 prohibitions that define what “work” is) Obvious Moses knew nothing about any oral law or “39 m’lachos of Shabbos” and that’s why he never bothered to consult any oral law and went to God instead. And there are more such examples. One other would be the circumcision, which rabbi Singer brings up. How do you know how to circumcise your sons? You need an oral law for this, right? No, not exactly. The Arabs circumcise their sons as well. How did they know? Because they are direct descendants of Yishma’el [Ishmael], a son of Abraham, to whom the covenant of circumcision was given initially. Did they need an oral law to know what circumcision is about? The answer is obvious! If they didn’t need it, then why does rabbi Singer claim that the Jewish people need an oral law to know what circumcision is?

Why did “Christianity” reject the oral law? (11:40)

Rabbi Tovia Singer then asks his audience that question and answers it for them. According to the rabbi, Christianity couldn’t see the oral law as divinely inspired because it had no access to it and, other than first century Christianity, modern day Christianity rejects the oral law. This claim is just untrue. But since the New Testament is used to try to prove the existence of an oral law, it is also fair to use it as valid proof against the existence of an oral law. We should consider this: someone of whom it is said that he accepts and believes in the oral law as God-given, will not question it’s validity and wouldn’t speak against it. Although the first believers saw the beauty of the oral law and they kept certain parts of it, they never saw it as God-given set of laws. They simply never knew such a thing. They did speak of customs and Yeshua made a clear distinction between God’s Law and “the traditions of the Elders”. (e.g. Mat. 15:2-9) and calls it teachings of men, referring to Isaiah 29:13! Therefore, as far as the Messiah goes, the washing of the hands is just tradition and hardly “law” and it is called teaching of men and hardly of God. Furthermore, Yeshua would have had access to that “oral law” since he was hailed as a rabbi. Also, Paul, who as shown in the essay “Who is the Messiah?” was a Pharisee, would have had access to an oral law too. All the apostles would have had access to it, had they considered it divine, yet they all categorically failed to forward it as binding in any way, shape or form. Why? Because it simply didn’t exist. So rabbi Singer’s claim, that the first believers believed in the oral law, holds no weight whatsoever.

No oral law, no language (16:10)

Then rabbi Singer makes the weird claim that you can’t have a language without an oral law. This would mean that before Sinai the Hebrew language was incomplete. Who would accept that statement? It wasn’t until the 6^th century CE that vocal signs were used in Hebrew literature, to make sure that the correct pronunciation would be preserved. If there was an oral law given to the people with a vowel system to clarify speech and understanding of the language and pronunciation of words, then why did it take 1800 years for it to become publicly known? And why was the oral law written down anyway, when even Moses didn’t get permission to write it down? The argument goes that it was written down because it was endangered to be lost due to upheavals. But that danger was there from day one! If you give someone thousands of instructions and you don’t allow him to write those instructions down, what is the most likely thing to happen? There is a great likelihood of forgetting at least some of the instructions or that the people might mix things up. So after all those upheavals from Sinai until the 3rd century CE there was no reason to write down the oral law and until the 6^th century CE to introduce the God-given vowel system? Especially when you think of the fact that Hebrew was being overshadowed by Aramaic. By the time of the beginning of this era a large number of the Jews were speaking Greek instead of Hebrew.

Rabbi Singer then comes with the story of Hillel and the wanna-be convert. The moral of the story is that since you trust the rabbi to teach you the aleph-beth correctly, so you must also trust him when it comes to the legitimacy of the oral law when he tells you it is Torah from Sinai. But as I told anti-missionaries over and over again, this is comparing sticks to stones. Because, for one, the aleph-beth is linguistically a fixed rule. In other words, when someone tells you to recite the Hebrew aleph-beth you can’t deviate from the fixed pattern. You can’t say, for example, that the alphabet goes “b-z-h-y-“ because it is fixed in the order “a-b-c-d”. So the student of Hillel was correct to point to that error. Second, what this parable says is that you should believe whatever the rabbi says and not question anything he teaches you. This would be the same as saying that you should believe everything your parents teach you without hesitation. Although I love my parents dearly and I trusted them to teach me all the good things in life when they raised me, I wouldn’t just take their word for it if they would tell me that there were aliens creeping in the house at night. I’m going to want to find out if that is true or not. So I might trust you when you teach me, but if I go and do my research I will draw my conclusions based on what I found out.

So what I have found concerning the oral law is that I don’t question that there were some customs developed after Sinai that flowed from those events, but in no way is the concept of the oral law anything the traditional Jewish position claims it is, namely, that it is given from God, to Moses, to Joshua, etc. Evidence for it is simply too vague and the evidence against it is simply too apparent. We will look at the proofs that rabbi Singer raises for the oral law but first will look at what the Scriptures say about what Moses received and handed down. I can point to many parts of scripture, but I’ll just name a few.

The Bible testifies:

What was given on Mount Sinai?

I will start with the “slam-dunk” which is found in Joshua 1. Here God tells Joshua to be strong and gives him instructions how to walk in His ways. Look at what He tells Joshua:

8. This book of the Torah shall not leave your mouth; you shall meditate therein day and night, in order that you observe to do all that is written in it, for then will you succeed in all your ways and then will you prosper.

This verse totally blows every argument that ever can be made for the case of an oral law to smithereens. It can be divided in three parts, which we will examine separately to understand what is clearly being said here and there is just no other conclusion to be drawn from this text:

1: This book of the Torah shall not leave your mouth; you shall meditate therein day and night, You would think that God would say that the oral law shouldn’t depart from Joshua’s mouth. But that is not what He is saying! He says that the BOOK of the Torah should not leave Joshua’s mouth and that he should meditate it day and night. Well, this excludes Talmud study, which traditional Jews do for the overwhelming majority of the time. And the reason Why Joshua is told to meditate in it day and night?

2: in order that you observe to do all that is written in it But that was simply NOT possible without an oral law! Yet God says that by meditating in this BOOK of the Torah, you will make sure that you observe all that is written in the Torah. This was an excellent moment to promote an already given oral explanation. Yet the Bible, for the ten thousandth time, says that the WRITTEN Torah is decisive and doesn’t mention any oral law. But Joshua is told that by meditating in the Torah day and night to be able to observe it. Why? Because…

3: …then will you succeed in all your ways and then will you prosper. What ever happened to the already given oral law? God doesn’t point Joshua to any oral law. He presses him to take heed of the Written Torah and the Written Torah alone.

Surely this is all that needs to be said to convince anyone that there was no such thing as an equally important oral law given at Mount Sinai. The next verses I want to bring to your attention is the WITNESS of the Covenant. What is the witness of the Covenant at Mount Sinai, the Written Torah or the oral law?

24 And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished, 25 that Moses commanded the Levites, that bore the ark of the covenant of the LORD, saying: 26 ‘Take this book of the law, and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee.

The witness of the Covenant made at Sinai, according to the Talmud, is the oral law. How does that fit in the above text from Deuteronomy 31? Let’s proceed.

7 And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the hearing of the people; and they said: ‘All that the LORD hath spoken will we do, and obey.’ 8 And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said: ‘Behold the blood of the covenant, which the LORD hath made with you in agreement with all these words.’ (Exodus 24)

Again, abundantly clear! NO oral law! Moses took THE BOOK of the Covenant and said that God made the Covenant based on those words in the BOOK. Not by virtue of any oral law. It simply didn’t exist then. Let’s move on.

Another profound text we find in Exodus 34:27. This text is used in an extraordinary way by the Talmud. This is what the Torah says in Exodus 34:27:

27. The Lord said to Moses: “Inscribe these words for yourself, for according to these words I have formed a covenant with you and with Israel.”

Did you get that? God tells Moses to “write down these words” and that He has made a Covenant with Israel based on these words. So the whole basis for the Covenant at Mount Sinai is the WRITTEN Torah! But, amazingly, it is from this very verse that the Talmud manages to conclude that the oral law is the most valuable of the two! You can see an analysis of this text as used by the Talmud in the section “Questionable rabbinic interpretations of the Scriptures”. However, anybody reading these words, will conclude that God is saying, that based on the words Moses is to write down He has made a Covenant with Israel.

The next piece of evidence comes from 1 Kings 2. David is about to die and wants to give his son, Solomon, some last words which he will need to be a successful king. Now these last words are the most precious words you can give your child. This is what king David says:

2. “I go the way of all the earth; you shall be strong, therefore, and show yourself a man;

3. And keep the charge of the Lord your God to walk in His ways, to keep His statutes, and His commandments, and His judgments, and His testimonies, as it is written in the law of Moses, that you may prosper in all that you do, and wherever you turn; 4. That the Lord may continue His word which He spoke concerning me, saying, ‘If your children take heed to their way, to walk before Me in truth with all their heart and with all their soul, there shall not fail you,’ said He, ‘a man on the throne of Israel.’

Look at that! David tells his son that he should keep Gods statutes, commandments, etc. as is WRITTEN in the Law of Moses! NO oral law, no nothing. If it’s such an important piece of information for the kings successor, then why doesn’t he tell him to keep that as well? Especially when you think about the fact that all the traditional Jew does is study Talmud all day instead of Scripture! But David doesn’t say “follow the written and the oral law”. He says walk in Gods ways as is written in the book of Moses.

The last piece of evidence comes from the book of 2 Kings 22. Here, the book of Kings tells us that the book of the Torah was lost for a period of time and rediscovered by Hilkiah, the priest. Now this is what the text says:

8 And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe: ‘I have found the book of the Law in the house of the LORD.’ And Hilkiah delivered the book to Shaphan, and he read it…. 10 And Shaphan the scribe told the king, saying: ‘Hilkiah the priest hath delivered me a book.’ And Shaphan read it before the king. 11 And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the book of the Law, that he rent his clothes. 12 And the king commanded Hilkiah the priest, and Ahikam the son of Shaphan, and Achbor the son of Micaiah, and Shaphan the scribe, and Asaiah the king’s servant, saying: 13 ‘Go ye, inquire of the LORD for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that is found; for great is the wrath of the LORD that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is written concerning us.’

So if the Written Torah was lost for a period of time, how can there possibly have been an oral law that told them what was in the Written Torah? Josiah obviously had no idea whatsoever what was written in the Torah about certain things. But when he heard he rent his clothes. How can you ever explain to someone that the Written Torah was lost, but the oral law was still at large and the people still did what the oral law required? If the oral law explains the Written Torah and by doing what the oral law says you automatically do all that is written in the Torah, then why does king Josiah say that “our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is written concerning us”? This happened in the 18^th year of his reign and he was a righteous king that followed the footsteps of his father David. Yet that was the first time he laid his eyes on the Torah and in all those 18 years there was no oral law to set him straight. Obviously, Josiah had no idea of any oral law and it’s impossible for an oral law to be preserved, when even the Written Torah was lost!

What more could have been said to make one realise that this oral law doesn’t go back to Sinai, let alone to God? Yet in spite of all this, the traditional Jewish side has still managed to come up with parts from scripture that supposedly “proof” that there was indeed an oral law given to Moses. Well, let’s examine that claim and look at this evidence presented by rabbi Singer. And as we do so, keep in mind that these are examples that are supposed to persuade others that there was an oral law given at Sinai, so consider this the strongest evidence from Scripture the rabbi could come up with.

“Toroth” referring to 2 Torahs (30:20)

Rabbi Singer then claims that whenever the Torah speaks of “Toroth” (plural of Torah) it speaks of the Written Torah and the oral torah., which is only between God and Israel. This can also be refuted by just looking at the application of the word Toroth and we will see that this argument of rabbi Tovia Singer is totally fabricated. For example, if we look at the first time the word Toroth is used, in Genesis 26:5, we see that God is speaking to Isaac and telling him that Abraham kept all his laws (Toroth). It is then fair to ask the question to what “bibles”, as rabbi Singer claims, God is referring to here! What “two sets of laws” did God give Abraham that He would speak of “toroth”?

Next example is from the prophets, namely Ezekiel 43:11. God tells Ezekiel to tell Israel about the Temple. Ezekiel is to make known all the laws (Toroth) and to write them down. Again the question raises: What “bibles” was God referring to by using the word “toroth”? Certainly couldn’t be the oral law, since that is transmitted orally and the prophet is clearly told to write the Toroth down. Obviously this isn’t referring to 2 sets of laws at all.

Now, lastly, we will look at an example from the Writings. Next example is Nechemyah 9:13-14, where the prophet extols God and recounts the history of Israel coming out of Egypt. He says that God gave commandments and laws (Toroth) and the next verse tells us what he is referring to: He refers to the Torah that God commanded “by the hand of Moses, your servant”! (b’yad Moshe, av’decha) Whatever happened to the oral law? How did Nehemiah first refer to the “toroth” and in the very next verse the prophet explains that it is the Written Torah from the hand of Moses that he is referring to and not any separate set of teachings called oral law.

So we see three clear examples from the Torah, Prophets and Writings where rabbi Tovia Singer’s claims about “toroth” having the meaning of two sets of laws or two “bibles” is proven to be dead wrong. The word “toroth” simply means “instructions”, contained, of course, in one set of laws: The Written Torah. This would be false claim #1.

What to do? (35:00)

Then rabbi Singer gives us a few examples of what he means when he says that you need an oral law to perform the commandments. We will look at the largest argument he makes in the list: the Shabbat. The rabbi then asks his audience what “work” is since it is not specified in detail in the Torah. But since God intended for the Shabbat to be a day of rest and rejoicing, let’s see what rabbinic Judaism has come up with to observe Shabbat as a day of rest and rejoicing. Now if I would carry a pot of soup and a big basket of bread to a square and feed the hungry and homeless, I would violate the Shabbat commandment according to rabbinic standards, since that would be qualified as “work”. But let’s see what is considered to be work on Shabbat. Here is a small sample of how to observe Shabbat and what to watch out for in order not to violate the Shabbat:

q It is permissible to scratch one’s head of beard lightly, and one need not be afraid that one might thereby pull out some of the hairs.

q It is also permissible to extract the remains of food stuck in one’s beard, so long as one takes care not to pull out any of the hair.

q One is allowed to remove loose dandruff from one’s hair with one’s hand, but

q One must be careful not to remove dandruff which is still attached to the skin.

q One may neither comb one’s hair, nor

q Brush one’s hair with a hard brush

q …if the end of a nail as become detached for most of its width and is therefore, close to coming off and

q it is causing, or one is afraid that it will cause, pain, it may be removed either by hand or with the teeth, but not with an instrument.

q One is generally not allowed o wash of shower the whole, or the major part, of one’s body in such water [i.e. water that has been heated before the Shabbat], even if one does so bit by bit.

q Anyone washing himself on Shabbat should take care to avoid squeezing water out of his hair.

q If, upon opening an electric refrigerator on Shabbat or Yom Tov, one finds that the internal light has automatically been switched on, one should consult a qualified rabbinical authority about what to do with regard to closing the door of the refrigerator again.

q One shall not search his garments for or kill vermin on Shabbat.

q One who searches his garments and finds a louse shall not crack it, but simply rub it with his fingers and throw it away (on the Sabbath).

And we haven’t even scratched the surface yet. Add to this hundreds of other prohibitions and discussions, such as if one is allowed to stretch his arm outside of his residence to receive something and then pull it into the residence, or if it’s allowed to throw something in the air and catch it with the other hand or with the same hand and if such activities qualify as “work”, and the restrictions from the oral law are an equivalent to the commandment “play dead”! This way, one is more occupied with worrying not to violate Shabbat then one is with honouring God on Shabbat. How resting, liberating or rejoicing can this be?

Fast days (39:50)

The proof of the fast days in Zechariah is brought up next. Rabbi Tovia Singer uses this passage to prove that those days are kept just as the oral law says. But is the prophet Zechariah really testifying about an oral law? No way! The Bible itself tells us where the fast days come from and it has nothing to do with an unbroken chain of traditions coming from Sinai. Look at one chapter before the quote of rabbi Singer. In Zechariah 7:4-5 God says:

4 Then came the word of the LORD of hosts unto me, saying: 5 ‘Speak unto all the people of the land, and to the priests, saying: When ye fasted and mourned in the fifth and in the seventh month, even these seventy years, did ye at all fast unto Me, even to Me?

This has been going on for only 70 years, since they went into exile. So this is not oral law, but a later instalment of custom and hardly a mitzvah! And what God is saying about the fasts in Zechariah 8 is not that they will be holy days in the Messianic age. What He is saying is that He will turn their misery (their fasting) into joy in the Messianic Age. He explains that He first did them harm, but now will only do them good (v. 14-15) Notice also that he only mentions that it will be for the house of Judah, so this is hardly a national feast God is referring to. Why does He mention the house of Judah only? Obviously because they have been fasting in those months for 70 years now, since the destruction of the first Temple. So, again, this serves as no proof for an oral law either. This would be false claim #2. So even if rabbis didn’t make up “tisha b’Av” they took a biblical example and made it mitzvah when such a thing is never intended. Which is something that has been done with many things.

2^nd level of evidence

Daniel 1: Food & wine (46:50)

Rabbi Tovia Singer then goes to Daniel to prove that the prophets even kept the Oral Law. There, Daniel refuses to eat the food of the king and the wine of the king as well. So rabbi Tovia Singer takes this as observing the Oral Law, because it says that Jews are not allowed to eat the food and drink the wine that is touched by a heathen, which is nowhere commanded in the Written Torah. Well, sounds convincing again, doesn’t it? Why does Daniel refuse to eat the food of the king and refuse the wine? Because of the idolatry. But do we need oral law for that to explain this to us? NO! Scripture testifies that the people in Israel did that very thing when they were in their idolatry, so Daniel refused to follow that example, since that got them exiled in the first place. This is no teaching of the oral law, Daniel experienced it first hand! For instance, look at Deuteronomy 32, which says:

35 Vengeance is Mine, and recompense, against the time when their foot shall slip; for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that are to come upon them shall make haste. 36 For the LORD will judge His people, and repent Himself for His servants; when He seeth that their stay is gone, and there is none remaining, shut up or left at large. 37 And it is said: Where are their gods, the rock in whom they trusted; 38 Who did eat the fat of their sacrifices, and drank the wine of their drink-offering? let him rise up and help you, let him be your protection. 39 See now that I, even I, am He, and there is no god with Me; I kill, and I make alive; I have wounded, and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of My hand.

This is a testimony of wine being offered at false gods and God taking away his protection to leave His people to be protected by their deities, challenging His people to seek the help of those false gods, who really can’t help them. From verses such as these, Daniel could have known that he wasn’t to touch the wine of the king, since he had experienced this himself in the idolatry of his people that caused their downfall. How is that something from the Oral Law? It’s right there in scripture! This is what Hoshea 4 says about the use of the wine of his people:

10 And they shall eat, and not have enough, they shall commit harlotry, and shall not increase; because they have left off to take heed to the LORD. 11 Harlotry, wine, and new wine take away the heart. 12 My people ask counsel at their stock, and their staff declareth unto them; for the spirit of harlotry hath caused them to err, and they have gone astray from under their God. 13 They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and offer upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and terebinths, because the shadow thereof is good; therefore your daughters commit harlotry, and your daughters-in-law commit adultery.

So according to rabbi Singer and the anti-missionaries, verses like these couldn’t have been Daniel’s reason to refuse the wine of the pagan and idolatrous king of Babylon, but the oral law was the reason for it. Of course they will claim that and not mention verses such as these to try to convince their listeners of an oral law, since verses like these will dramatically decimate their chances of finding any proof of oral law in Scripture. Note that rabbi Singer is probably more versed in the Tenach then I am, yet he simply disregards verses such as these to be able to prove there was an oral law given. There simply is no proof for it and therefore they have to do things like this to come up with “proof”. As for the food, we also have to consider that there might have been the case of non-kosher food (fat, pork, etc.), which Daniel refused to eat. And there is an interesting account in Jeremiah, where Jehojachin was granted favour by God so that he found mercy in the eyes of the king of Babylon and ate at his table. You could argue that Jehojachin was a wicked king after all, so this hardly serves as proof. But this was after it’s said that he repented and God granted him favour. So much for an Oral Law, which says we’re not supposed to touch the food and drinks of the heathens. This would be false claim #3.

Daniel 6: three-times-a-day prayer (56:35)

The next “proof” for the oral law is Daniel 6 and the proof that oral law was kept by Daniel, since it teaches that we are to pray 3 times a day. Rabbi Singer gives his explanation based on this text. But does this prove that his claim is valid. To show you how weak this claim really is I will ask you the following: What would rabbi Singer say if a Christian told him that Daniel prayed 3 times a day, because he believed in the trinity? Would he think that Daniel 6 would be a valid proof for that position? Of course not! He would ridicule that statement all day in his lectures. How is this then used as a proof for oral law? It just says that Daniel prayed 3 times a day. What the real issue is here is that the satraps wanted to prevent Daniel to call unto God in any way possible, since they saw that he was blessed by Him. If they really wanted to prevent him to pray 3 times a day in order not to keep oral law, they could have argued for a 1-time-a-day prayer instead. But what they wanted is to move God out of the way and replace Him with Daryavesh (Darius), which is actually idolatry and forbidden per Written Torah! So this has nothing to do with any oral law that Daniel supposedly kept. Another argument anti-missionaries use to prove the oral law from this text is that Daniel prayed 3 times a day to coincide with the 3 times a day sacrifices in the Temple. As Dr Brown correctly points out:

“…there is one major problem: There were only two daily times of sacrifice (see Num. 28:1-8; Ezra 3:4l for references to “the evening sacrifice,” se 1 Kings 18:29; Ezra 9:3-5; Ps. 141:2; Dan.9:21). The correspondence doesn’t work because the correspondence isn’t there.

Then why did Daniel pray 3 times daily? I’ll answer this question with a question: Why not? We often make reference to doing something “morning, noon and night,” and it is really quite natural to divide the day into three parts. On the other hand, the psalmist spoke of praising God seven times a day (P. 119:164), yet we would never think of making a doctrine out of this practice. He also said, “At midnight I rise to give you thanks for your righteous laws” (Ps. 119:62). What Temple ritual was this replacing? The answer, of course, is self-evident. None at all.” (AJOJ Vol.2, pg 143)

That makes this false claim #4.

Deuteronomy 12:21 (1:08:45)

Then rabbi Tovia Singer goes on to demonstrate the existence of the Oral Law and gives us another of his “proofs” from Scripture. From Deuteronomy 12:21 he reads that if you want to slaughter the animal to eat it, you have to slaughter is in a certain manner, meaning ritual slaughter. So he says “you can stand there all day, you won’t find it” in the Written Torah. Well, if you are talking about “ritual slaughter” then he is right and you won’t find it in the Written Torah, since it is only in the Oral Law which is invented by the rabbis. But if he is talking about the manner of slaughtering, then you will find it in the Written Torah, even in the same chapter he uses as proof for an Oral Law. What God meant is explained a couple of verses earlier in verse 15-16:

“15 Notwithstanding thou mayest kill and eat flesh within all thy gates, after all the desire of thy soul, according to the blessing of the LORD thy God which He hath given thee; the unclean and the clean may eat thereof, as of the gazelle, and as of the hart. 16 Only ye shall not eat the blood; thou shalt pour it out upon the earth as water.”

That’s it! Do you need ritual slaughter for this? God gives us here His instructions on how an animal is allowed to be eaten. It’s right there and repeated in verse 22-23: 22 Howbeit as the gazelle and as the hart is eaten, so thou shalt eat thereof; the unclean and the clean may eat thereof alike. 23 Only be stedfast in not eating the blood; for the blood is the life; and thou shalt not eat the life with the flesh. That’s it! But if you want “ritual slaughtering” so badly, you “can stand there all day, you won’t find it”. But do we need ritual slaughtering to understand that you have to drain the blood out in order to be able to eat a clean animal? Says who? This makes false claim #5.

T’filin (phylacteries 1:12:10)

Rabbi Singer makes a case for the Oral Law, based on the t’filin, tiny boxes attached on leather bonds, which are tied on the head and on the arm. According to traditional Judaism, this was mandated by God to wear. This comes from the passage of the “Sh’ma” in Deuteronomy 6:4-9, which says:

4 Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. 6 And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart; 7 and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. 8 And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes. 9 And thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house, and upon thy gates.

I can be very brief about this. Why do rabbi Singer and the anti-missionaries ignore verse 6? If this is talking about literally binding upon the hand and the forehead then we should take “upon thy heart” literally as well, shouldn’t we? Of course this is not about “totafot” (frontlets) between your eyes. This passage is about keeping them in mind at all times: They will be on your heart always, everything you move your hand to do (for a sign on your hand) and everything you look at (frontlets between your eyes) should be in accordance with all I command you, from the time you get up till the time you sleep.

There are so many other examples for this:

Tie them upon your heart always, don them upon your throat
(Prov 6,21)

8 Hear, my son, the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the teaching of thy mother; 9 For they shall be a chaplet of grace unto thy head, and chains about thy neck. (Prov 1)

9 And it shall be for a sign unto thee upon thy hand, and for a memorial between thine eyes (Exo 13:9)

16 And it shall be for a sign upon thy hand, and for frontlets between thine eyes (Exo 13:16)

Note that Exodus verse 9 says “ul’zikaron” and verse 16 says “totafot” yet they mean the exact same thing. The word “zikaron” means “memorial/remembrance”. But if you want to tie them on your forehead and hand, then by all means. But don’t say that we should all do that because it’s mandated by Torah. This has nothing to do with phylacteries either because then we should have them literally put on our hearts also. This concludes part one of this lecture with false claim #6.

Nakdimon

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Oral Law pt 2

Jesus believed in the Oral Law?(0:15)

Rabbi Tovia Singer makes the amazing statement that Yeshua believed in the oral law. Now we have already seen that Yeshua rejected the idea of an oral law and never heard of such a thing. We also saw that he called it Tradition of the Elders instead of the “oral law”. Also, we have acknowledged that a religious Jew who believed in the oral law would never entertain the idea of speaking against it, let alone act against it. And as also shown, he did speak and act against it, even juxtaposing it to the Written Torah! As far as the claim goes of what Yeshua should have said to the Pharisees if the oral law was an invention of the rabbis, Yeshua already made his point clear about the Traditions elsewhere, passages that rabbi Singer, of course, doesn’t quote to his audience, lest it blows his argument to pieces. But in this instance he wanted to make another point. He points them to the story of David and strangely enough, rabbi Singer claims that Yeshua doesn’t get the story right and starts picking on the New Testament’s accuracy. Let’s look at the story of David in 1 Samuel 21:2-7 before examining what Yeshua did say about this:

2. And David came to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest, and Ahimelech came trembling toward David, and said, “Why are you alone, and no one with you?” 3. And David said to Ahimelech the priest, “The king charged me with a matter, and said to me, ‘Let no man know anything concerning the matter upon which I am sending you, and with which I have charged you.’ And I troubled the young men (to advance) to a hidden, secret place. 4. And now, what is there in your possession? Five loaves of bread? Give them into my hand, or whatever is found.” 5. And the priest answered David, and said, “There is no ordinary bread in my possession, but there is holy bread, if the young men have but kept themselves from women.” 6. And David answered the priest, and said to him, “But, women are withheld from us as of yesterday and the day before yesterday when I left, and the young men’s garments are hallowed, and that is in a manner common, and even if today it would be hallowed in the vessel.” 7. And the priest gave him hallowed (bread), for there was no bread there, except the showbread, which was removed from before the Lord, to place warm bread on the day it was taken.

So the story says that David came alone but was to share the bread with his companions. So although he was alone it was understood that the intend was to share the food with his companions. As for the reference to Avyatar “the high priest”. This is obviously a wrong translation of the Greek word, which has it right. The Greek word used here is more often used in reference to “chief priests”, rather than high priests. For example, when we look at Matthew 26:3

Then assembled together the chief priests [archiereus], and the scribes, and the elders of the people, unto the palace of the high priest [archiereus], who was called Caiaphas,

The word “archiereus” is used for “chief priests” as well as for “high priests”. So instead of speaking about “Avyatar, the high priest”, Yeshua spoke of “Avyatar, the chief priest”, probably mentioning Avyatar rather than his father Achimelech, because Avyatar was the only survivor of the massacre Saul caused at that place, killing everyone accept Avyatar, who got away. So it is actually the translation of the Greek that is unfortunate, instead of Yeshua not getting it right. So let’s look at what Yeshua says about this in Matthew 12:2-6:

But he said unto them, Have ye not read what David did, when he was an hungred, and they that were with him; How he entered into the house of God, and did eat the shewbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests? Or have ye not read in the law, how that on the sabbath days the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are blameless? But I say unto you, That in this place is [one] greater than the temple.

So how did Yeshua NOT get it right? It is clear that rabbi Singer, yet again, works for the sole purpose of slanting the New Testament faith and that he is the one that doesn’t have it right since Yeshua was right on point! He tells the heart of the story just as it is supposed to be read. But because rabbi Singer wants the New Testament to err so badly, that he doesn’t even see that the New Testament has it correct.

Matthew 23 forwards the Oral Law? (5:30)

Rabbi Tovia Singer claims that the Pharisees and the scribes have the authority of Moses as far as Matthew 23:2 is concerned. This, of course, is nothing but wishful thinking from the zeal to prove that there was an oral law and he therefore has to claim that Yeshua enforces the oral law. There are a couple of ways to dismantle this claim:

1. Yeshua pointed to the Pharisees and the scribes rather than to the Sadducees because the Sadducees only found the Torah to be authoritative and not the Prophets and the Writings. They also didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead, which is something the Prophets and the Writings clearly teach. So they basically rejected the majority of God’s revelation to His people.

2. In light of this, Yeshua correctly points to the Pharisees and the scribes instead, but NOT saying that they had the authority of Moses, i.e. authority consisting of an Oral Law.

3. Evidence against rabbi Singer’s position is in the very next verse: the heavy loads they put upon people! What other “heavy loads” could he be talking about if not their traditions, the oral law? They make their t’filin extra wide and their tsitsit extra big to show off and seek the favour of the people by their “display of holiness”. This behaviour we are to distance ourselves from. So again there is no acknowledgement of the Oral Law where rabbi Tovia Singer claims it is.

4. Another way to handle this absurd claim is Yeshua’s words in Matthew 21:42-45. Here Yeshua tells the religious leaders that those who reject him will lose their authority over God’s matters and be given to those that accept the Kingdom of God. So even IF one wants to take Matt 23:2-3 as saying that followers of Yeshua should adhere to Pharisaical (i.e. rabbinic) authority, Yeshua says here that the people who reject Him will nolonger have that authority. This authority belongs ONLY to those who except Him. This should take care of anti-missionaries constant pointing to Matthew 23:2-3 and claiming that we are to follow rabbinic authority.

Keeping up count from part 1 of this lecture, this is false claim #7.

Talmud: arguments or agreements? (6:50)

First thing that should be noted is that the rabbi himself (12:12) says that pieces of information went missing because of “dark periods” in our history. Which is exactly what I am talking about when I say that such an exhaustive set of laws is destined to be forgotten if it’s not written down. The funniest thing is that the Oral Law is preserved up to now BECAUSE of it’s written form! I assure you that, if you burn all the volumes of the Talmud and transmit it all orally, within a few generations most of it will be lost forever, since there will be no longer any source to look things up anywhere. He claims that the Sages had to come together and say if things are in comparison to situations in the past. This is the whole story of the Talmud. They are constantly bickering about how things should be viewed. The conclusion, for example, of the marital value in the story about the penny and the dollar is also unclear to me. How can those two views be in agreement about the value if they give two different minimum values? It could be sufficient for both parties to accept a dollar or more because both criteria are met, but you can’t come with half a dollar, since that’s more than a penny but less than a dollar, which is the minimum criterion for a marriage. How do they then agree? They don’t! That’s like the Republicans say that the budget for Defence should be at least half a billion dollars to go to war, while the Democrats say that the budget should be at least 2 billion dollars to go to war. If the budget, then, is 1 billion it meets the requirements of the Republicans, but certainly not that of the Democrats, since you are at least 1 billion short! So there is no agreement whatsoever. Another example is from the Talmud itself. Now look at this lists of prohibited works and see how the Talmudic rabbis are in agreement:

We have learned, R. Simeon b. Elazar said: “One shall not kill vermin on the Sabbath.” So said Beth Shamai; Beth Hillel, however, allowed this. R. Simeon b. Elazar used also to say in the name of R. Simeon b. Gamaliel: “One is not allowed to negotiate marriage engagements for children, nor to engage teachers or artisan masters for children, nor to pay visits of condolence to mourners, nor to visit the sick on the Sabbath. Such is the decree of Beth Shamai; Beth Hillel, however, allows all this.

Yet another example from the Mishna:

MISHNA V.:

The Beth Shamai said: Ink, dye material, or fodder (for animals) shall not be put into water (on Friday) unless there is still time for them to soak through while it is day. The Beth Hillel, however, permits this.

The Beth Shamai prohibits putting bundles of linen thread (to bleach) into the oven unless there is sufficient time left for them to become heated through while it is yet day, or wool into a dye-kettle unless there is still time for it to be soaked through the same day. The Beth Hillel permits this.

The Beth Shamai says: Traps shall not be set for animals and birds, or nets for fishes (on Friday), unless there is still time for them to be caught before sunset. The Beth Hillel permits this.

The Beth Shamai says: One shall not sell anything to a Gentile (on Friday) or help him load his animal, or help him shoulder a burden unless he (the Gentile) can reach (with his load) the nearest place while it is yet day. The Beth Hillel permits this.

The Beth Shamai says: Hides shall not be given to a tanner nor clothes to a Gentile washer (on a Friday) unless there is still sufficient time left for him (the Gentile) to finish it while it is day. The performance of all these acts of labor heretofore mentioned was permitted by the Beth Hillel (on Friday) while the sun was still shining. Rabbi Simeon b. Gamaliel said: At my father’s house it was the custom to give out white clothes to a Gentile washer three days before the Sabbath. Both schools, however, agree that the presses may be put on olives and grapes in the press-pits (as long as it is still daytime).

Where is the agreement between the two most authoritative rabbinic schools of the day of Shammai and Hillel? (except for the last point in this list) Totally absent! Yet rabbi Singer wants us to believe that the rabbis in the Talmud are in agreement with each other when they have different opinions. Sure! This makes false claim #8.

Also notice that this is Mishna, which is supposed to come from Sinai. This is the system that is supposed to clarify for us what to do and how to do it, yet it creates more confussion by giving us contradictory statements AND it lists the opinion of rabbis! If this was from Sinai, why isn’t God’s decree anywhere to be found? Where is God’s decree in all this? Instead of telling us what God said at Sinai, the followers of this rabbi is arguing with the followers of that rabbi about how to keep Shabbes! There is no “HaShem told Moshe Rebeinu…” at all. And we’re supposed to believe that this comes from Sinai?

3rd Level of evidence:

Prophets telling us to keep Oral Law? (22:16)

Rabbi Tovia Singer is now going to give us a few examples of the prophets forwarding the Oral Law. Now bare in mind that when someone wants to prove something, if he wants to persuade someone of a certain point, he will try to gather the best evidence from Scripture he can find to support his position. Likewise we should remind ourselves that rabbi Singer is presenting us the best proofs from the Tenach that he is able to find. So let’s look at his proofs from the Tenach regarding the prophets telling us to keep the Oral Law.

1. Nechemyah 10:29-34:

First evidence rabbi Tovia Singer comes up with is the proof of the 39 m’lachot (39 categories of prohibited work) of Shabbat. This proof consists of Nechemyah 10:29-34 and 13:14-22. Now of all the proofs in the Scriptures this is one of the best he could come up with. Here, Nechemyah speaks about not buying and selling on Shabbat. Because we don’t find this specific commandment in the Written Law, it must be in the oral law, so says rabbi Singer. But is that what’s being referred to here? Not at all! The people only give one example how they will honour the Shabbat. That’s all! As the prophet Isaiah tells us, we are not supposed to go about our business on the Sabbath say:

13 If thou turn away thy foot because of the sabbath, from pursuing thy business on My holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, and the holy of the LORD honourable; and shalt honour it, not doing thy wonted ways, nor pursuing thy business, nor speaking thereof;

We are not to pursue our business on God’s holy day, this is NOT the way to honour it. And Isaiah wasn’t quoting from the oral law! So if we are to pursue our business six days of the week but aren’t to do that on the Sabbath, it stands to reason that you’re out of order if you try to make a buck on Shabbat. This also goes for Nechemyah 13:15-18, treading winepresses and carrying burdens are not from the 39 m’lachot of the oral law. Instead, the oral law got these examples from these texts and made them law! As we saw earlier with the fasts, which was said to be from the oral law, but in reality we saw that it has nothing to do with that. It is not “selling and buying” specifically that’s being referred to as what Moses told our forefathers at Sinai, but the honouring of the Sabbath is what is being referred to, which is exactly what Moses told us to do. To honour that commandment we don’t do what we usually do on weekdays, when we pursue our business and are so caught up in our labour that we tend to forget God. Instead we are to rest and look back at what God has given us the power to do and honour Him and seek Him, especially on that day! THAT’S honouring the Shabbat, not not-doing specific work! This makes false claim #9.

2. Jewish by mother and not by father

Second piece of evidence is Ezra. This one is a simple one, says rabbi Singer. Ezra sends away the Gentile women with their children. So if the children were Jewish they wouldn’t have been sent away. This proves that one’s Jewish ness doesn’t go through the father. Pretty convincing story and surely is the “checkmate” rabbi Singer is talking about, isn’t it? Not at all! We have the same story in Nechemyah 13 and look at what Nechemyah says about intermarriage:

1 On that day they read in the book of Moses in the hearing of the people; and therein was found written, that an Ammonite and a Moabite should not enter into the assembly of God for ever; 2 because they met not the children of Israel with bread and with water, but hired Balaam against them, to curse them; howbeit our God turned the curse into a blessing. 3 And it came to pass, when they had heard the law, that they separated from Israel all the alien mixture….23 In those days also saw I the Jews that had married women of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab; 24 and their children spoke half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews’ language, but according to the language of each people. 25 And I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God: ‘Ye shall not give your daughters unto their sons, nor take their daughters for your sons, or for yourselves. 26 Did not Solomon king of Israel sin by these things? yet among many nations was there no king like him, and he was beloved of his God, and God made him king over all Israel; nevertheless even him did the foreign women cause to sin. 27 Shall we then hearken unto you to do all this great evil, to break faith with our God in marrying foreign women?’ 28 And one of the sons of Joiada, the son of Eliashib the high priest, was son-in-law to Sanballat the Horonite; therefore I chased him from me. 29 Remember them, O my God, because they have defiled the priesthood, and the covenant of the priesthood, and of the Levites. 30 Thus cleansed I them from everything foreign, and appointed wards for the priests and for the Levites, every one in his work;

The concern was never about the race of the children. It had to do with the fact that these women could lead them from God to follow other gods. Just as even Solomon, in all of his wisdom and grace, was led into idolatry due to his foreign wives. The fear was therefore idolatry and assimilation and had nothing to do with ethnicity. Furthermore, if the prohibition of intermarriage had anything to do with fear of non-Jewish offspring, then why were men allowed to take the beautiful women of the countries they conquered in war as their wives? (see Deuteronomy 21:10-14) Why was that allowed if the concern was the “Jewish ness” of their offspring? However, for a priest it WAS unlawful to marry a gentile woman:

14 A widow, or one divorced, or a profaned woman, or a harlot, these shall he not take; but a virgin of his own people shall he take to wife.

And that’s the primary concern of Ezra and Nechemyah when they saw that the people married foreign wives and they took drastic measures and cleansed the entire land from ALL those “aliens”. (Notice that Nechemyah and his came to this conclussion only after READING about it from the BOOK of the Torah! And NOT from any oral teaching!) Look at Nechemyah’s words in verse 29 when he says “they have defiled the priesthood, and the covenant of the priesthood, and of the Levites “. That’s why only the men are addressed, but it stands to reason that the Jewish women were included to release their foreign men too. Really honestly tell me that this had anything to do with oral law and the ethnicity of the children.

This whole argument, that you are only a Jew if your mother is a Jewess is not even logical. Since the children of a Jewish mother and a gentile man are likely to get an upbringing that corresponds with the beliefs of the father rather that of the mother, especially in ancient times, where there was no such things as equal women rights movements. Which would automatically mean that the Jewish child would get a non-Torah based upbringing. And if someone is Jewish by mother alone and not by father, then we can safely conclude that Rechavam (Rehobeam), the son of Solomon was NOT a Jew, since his mother is said to be a gentile from Amon. And the excuse of conversion can’t be used either, because it is explicitly said that Solomon’s Gentile wives, without exception, caused him to practice idolatry. And since there is no proof of “conversion” of any kind, we would have to conclude that Solomon’s son was a Gentile based on oral law standards and Israel had a Gentile king sitting on David’s throne. This has actually been an argument an anti-missionary moderator used when I confronted him with this. The best response he had was “do you really think that G-d would have a Gentile rule over Israel after He prohibited it in His Torah?”. Well, that is exactly my point! It was because Rechavam was NOT a Gentile but thoroughly Jewish even though having an “unconverted” Gentile mother and a Jewish father that he was able to sit on his grandfather’s throne. Which, by the way, is totally contrary to the oral law! This also goes for the offspring of Achav, who’s wife, Jezebel, was a Gentile and absolutely not a “convert to Judaism”. Yet, Achav’s child sat on the throne and ruled over Israel, which is, again, totally contrary to the so-called “oral law”. Clearly another false claim, moving the tally up to #10.

3. Jeremiah 17:19-27

Then rabbi Tovia Singer is trying to prove that Jeremiah tells us that God commanded us not to carry any burdens and that this goes back to Sinai. But, again, God is NOT saying that He told our forefathers about not carrying any burdens at Sinai. He is telling us that He told our forefathers to “hollow the Sabbath day” as a holy day and not to labour thereon. Nothing more and nothing less! Obviously the people were carrying their merchandise on the Shabbat to be able to labour, just as we have seen at Nechemyah. And then rabbi Singer does something remarkable again. He actually is trying to make his case for the oral law based on words like “hear” and “listen”. You’d have to be very desperate to try to prove the existence of an Oral Law based on the word “hear”. These words have nothing to do with any oral law. They have everything to do with the Written Law. People didn’t have their own copy of the Torah at home as we do nowadays so they would “hear” the words at their assemblies, when the Torah was read out loud. There they would “listen” to the Written Torah! Just look at the following example from Nechemyah 9:14-16:

13. And You descended upon Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven, and You gave them right ordinances and laws of truth, good statutes and commandments. 14. And Your holy Sabbath You made known to them, and commandments and statutes and the Law You commanded them, by the hand of Your servant Moses. 15. And bread from heaven You gave them for their hunger, and You took water out of a rock for them for their thirst, and You said to them to come to inherit the land that You raised Your hand to give them. 16. But they and our forefathers behaved wickedly, and they stiffened their necks and did not hearken to Your commandments.

Now this should be very interesting. Notice that in verse 14, as noted before, Nechemyah speaks of commands and laws “b’yad Moshe” (by the hand of Moses), which can only refer to the Written Torah and then in verse 16 says that they didn’t “listen” (velo sham’u) to those laws. What “auditory language” is being spoken here? How can one honestly claim that the words “listen” and “hear” actually refer to “auditory language” which naturally “proof” that the oral law is being referred to? There is simply no merit at all for the reading of rabbi Tovia Singer and there is no oral law being forwarded by the prophets at any time in history and certainly not in the Tenach. The “proof” is simply not there, which makes this false claim #11.

Proof of Oral Law given by God

Fish: Rabbi Singer then goes on to give us an example of the wisdom of the Sages who spoke of things that people didn’t know at that time. He mentions that the Sages said that a fish can have fins and yet have no scales, but you will find no fish that has scales and yet has no fins. So what does this prove? Nothing at all. The secular world has come up with a lot of things that aren’t in the Bible that people didn’t know. Does that mean that everything they claim is “given from God”? Again, rabbi Singer assumes what he wants to prove.

The Calendar: There are some that argue that the rabbinic Calendar is off by at least a few minutes per year. Which doesn’t sound that dramatically at first glance, but this will eventually mean that it needs to be revised if you want to, let’s say, keep celebrating Pesach in spring time in a few millennia from now. I will not get into details here, because it is very complex stuff, but I will give you a website that argues for a revision of the Hebrew (rabbinic) calendar. You can find this information at http://individual.utoronto.ca/kalendis/hebrew/index.html .

Perhaps this will be of some value for you.

Summary: In part one of this lecture on (29:50-30:24) rabbi Singer tells us that the Sages make a comparison to the relationship between a man and a woman, saying that the written law is like a ring that is for everyone to see and that the oral law is like the words that a man speaks in the ears of the woman which is only for her to hear. Subsequently he then asks which of the two is more precious to that woman. And he points to the fact that the spoken words, in other words, the oral law, is the more precious one. This is clearly a statement that the oral law is above the Written law in importance and value! According to rabbi Singer THESE ARE THE WORDS OF THE SAGES!

Here is what the Talmud says: “These laws were given at Sinai to the Children of Israel through Moses> God did not make a covenant with Israel except by virtue of the Oral Tradition (Gittin 60b).”

Also: Rabbi Z. H. Chajes, a leading nineteenth-century authority said, the Talmud indicates that the words “that were transmitted orally” by God are “more valuable” than those transmitted in writing.

Well, there is no denying this statement. The oral law is more valuable than the Written Torah, according to the most authoritative rabbinic sources! That is to say, that the books that contain the words of the Living God Himself as believed to be dictated to Moses are LESS IMPORTANT and INFERIOR to the books that contain NO WORDS of God, but only gives us the opinion of human beings! So, according to this statement, the words of the God of Israel come SECOND to the words of the rabbis of Israel! The question, of course, would be: Where do we find this in Scripture??????

Bottom line remains that all the proofs that rabbi Singer brought up for the existence of an oral law are simply not there and he is just trying too hard to prove that there was an oral law given by God to Moses and being forwarded by the prophets, using texts from the Tenach and even from the New Testament (!!) that say no such thing. Any reference being made to violating the Word of God and being unfaithful to His Covenant is ONLY made to the Written Torah, which is the foundation of God’s Covenant with the Jewish people. The bible doesn’t only forget to mention any oral law, but it testifies that there is nothing besides the written and that there was not a word said that was not written down. Also consider that every time the Torah mentions sin or transgression of Gods Torah, it always makes reference to the Written Torah and never to the oral law. If an oral law was already given at Mount Sinai and if the oral law was an equally important (or even MORE important) norm to determine sin, then how come it’s completely ignored in crucial parts throughout the Scriptures? Because it wasn’t there! Something to really ponder is that words are written down so that they can be reviewed to make sure they aren’t forgotten. And if they are forgotten they can be looked up and remembered. That’s why we make notes. But we are to believe that God gave us a Written Torah to remind us of the testimony and the Covenant with Him, but told Moses not to write the part that is many a times larger, more exhaustive, and more important than the Written Torah? Sure!

Nakdimon

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