true love & eternal understanding forever & ever?


~*~

"When
Christians
were still Jews"
[and meeting Buddhist monks]
'mydicommentary/exposition/explanation'
~ ontdekking
uitleg~variaties ~
{20-06-'06
also today interacting &
continued}
...

~@~

I
suggest
that it was the difficulty
of the stark sequence of elder and younger
and the ways that Christian writers could exploit these
that led to this drastically distorted reading.
Quite astonishingly,
but understandably,
not even one of the three major medieval Jewish biblical commentators,
Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and the Ramban,
make an attempt to interpret this verse.
Ibn Ezra mysteriously says that 'the elder' here is a verb,
and that he will explain the verse somewhere else, but doesn't.
to the best of my
knowledge.

~@~

Here, then
we have an example
of precisely the phenomenon that I wish to try to begin exploring in the next weeks:
the ways that rabbinic Judaism has been influenced by its slightly older brother, Christianity.
In some ways and fashions, the midrashic equation of Esaw with Rome,
which became the Christian Church
in the midrashic imagination,
as in history,
gave rise to
a paradox.

In
what probably follows in the coming days,
I would like to exploit the temporal paradoxes of the midrashic equation
of Esaw with Christianity in order to explore a historical problem - to produce, as it were,
a midrash that never
was.

On
the background
ALSO the fact remains
that about/around two thousand years ago
Jewish travellers have been trading in and visiting the Far East
while Buddhist monks were present
in Alexandria!

The
central paradox though
that I have in mind is the following:
While Jews and Christians BOTH have thought of something called Judaism as the elder religion
and somthing called Christianity as the younger,
the midrashic implications of the verse are that Christianity is the elder
and Judaism the
younger.

THIS
would suggest that rabbinic Judaism was born on the heels, indeed, HOLDING the heel,
of its elder brother,
the Church.

The
possibility
hinted at
[AND suppressed]
by the mydrashic reading
offer a method of investigating BOTH
the complicated temporalities of the historical relationship
between rabbinic Judaism and Christianity
as religious entities and the complex intertwinings
of [at least]
THREE histories:
the history of Israel,
the history of Rome,
and the history of
the Church.

Esaw
& Ya'akov, I will argue,
continued 'jostling each other in her womb' at LEAST will into late antiquity,
and perhaps will do so
"FOREVER"?

Like
many twins,
Judaism and Christianity
never quite formed entirely separate identities?
LIKE closely related siblings,
they RIVALED each other, LEARNED from each other,
FOUGHT with each other, and perhaps
[also quite likely as in their a.o. ALSO
meeting "Buddhists"!]
LOVED each other:
Esaw, the elder,
supplanted somehow by Ya'akov, the younger,
who fed him.

IF
the younger fed the elder,
in many ways,
the elder served the younger,
AS WELL!

The image suggests
that for at least the first three centuries of their common lives,
Judaism in all of its forms
and Christianity in alls of its forms
WERE part of of ONE complex religious family, like TWINS in a womb,
contending with each other for identity and precedence,
but SHARING to a large extent the SAME spiritual food,
as well?

It was the birth
of the hegemonic Catholic Church, however,
that seems finally to have precipitated the consolidation of rabbinic Judaism as well as Jewish orthodoxy,
with all its rivals, including the socalled Jewish Christianities,
apparently largely vanquished.

It
was THEN
that Judaism and Christianity finally emerged from the womb
as genuinely independent children of Rivka.
Or, as it was put a quarter of a century ago
[by RRR], "the fourth century is the FIRST century
for Christianity AND
Judaism!"

I
want
to emphasize as well,
however, the messiness of
the metaphor of Ya'akov, rabbinic Judaism,
born holding on to the heel of Esaw, the Church -
its refusal to quite work, even the ways that it contradicts itself
in its figuring of elder and
younger.

THIS
'messiness'
serves to plot
the untidiness
of the train of thought
and the train of history
in the new midrash
proposed
herein.

"IT"
is NOT a single,
unambiguous, clear, linear
'myDi'~Story
[like our own],
but just ONE
of thousands of doublings and doublings back,
of endless contradictions and
obscurities.

~@~
23 jun 2006 - bewerkt op 25 mei 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Asih, man, 81 jaar
   
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