I don't wannt be a Pharisee

This appeared in God's Politics, a blog associated with Sojourner's Magazine a few weeks back. It arose after working with students here at LU who seem to be addicted to describing the Pharisees in the most dark language - hypocrites who hated Jesus. While there is truly an offense to the Jews in the gospel (one which I am reluctant to soften), it seems to me Christians can work harder to appreciate those Pharisees. So here we are - 'I don't wanna be a Pharisee!'

In the fall of 1997, I began a graduate program in Bible at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. One of the things that surprised me in studying the Bible with rabbinical students was the degree to which they perceived the New Testament to be fundamentally anti-Jewish. As an orthodox Christian, I found it troubling to hear the teachings of Jesus described as ‘anti-Jewish’ and as contributing factors to Jewish suffering. Jesus’ teachings in Matthew 23 – in which he calls the Pharisees hypocrites, blind-guides, children of hell and much more!– are felt more deeply by Jews than Christians sometimes realize. They know that the Pharisees were direct precursors to the rabbis who shaped the Mishnah which lies at the core of the Talmud.

This discomfort has been only accentuated in hearing Christian children sing silly camp-songs like, “I don’t want to be a Pharisee, ‘cuz they’re not fair, you see.” My daughter who is nine just asked me what I was writing about. When I said “the Pharisees” she responded in song, “I don’t want to be a Pharisee!” To my rabbinical student friends, this is the equivalent to saying, “I would never want to be a rabbi, because they are all a bunch of hypocrites.” A woman once asked me if Jews tire of having a religion made up only of rules and regulations. “It must be so tedious to be legalistic and not have the Holy Spirit.” It is out of these experiences that I wish to write to help Christians know how to think not only about what Jesus says about the Pharisees, but about how this relates to modern Judaism.

It is often said, and worth remembering, that Jesus criticized his contemporaries as an insider much as the prophets of old had done. The church which collected and cherished these teachings of Jesus did so as powerless underdogs. They could not have foreseen or imagined a triumphant Christianity which would later use such texts to justify acts of violence against Jewish neighbors as sometimes has occurred in the history of the Church. As one of my professors, Ellis Rivkin claimed, “The New Testament is not anti-Jewish because Jesus didn’t aim to destroy Israel but to purify it. It was later perverted by Christians who had meaner intentions.”

But more could be said. Was Jesus really right about the Pharisees? Were they hypocrites who didn’t practice what they preached (Matt 23:3)? Were they primarily concerned with spiritual showmanship but not spiritual authenticity (Matt 23:5-7)? Did they emphasize details of the law over the weightier issues like justice, mercy and faithfulness? Did they strain at gnats and swallow camels (23:23-24)? A quick answer might be, “many did, many didn’t.”

The most famous rabbinic text of all, often called Pirke Avot or “Ethics of the Fathers” illumines Jesus’ teachings. The Mishnah lies at the center of the Talmud, and Pirke Avot lies at the center of the Mishnah and is in many ways its ideological core. The fact that rabbinic teachers were called “Fathers” is evident from the title. The absolute reverence for the ‘Fathers’ which Jesus sought to overthrow (Matt 23:8-12) is evident in Pirke Avot where Jose ben Joezer says, “Let your house be a meeting house for the sages, and sit in (literally ‘roll in’) the dust of their feet, and drink in their words with thirst” (Avot 1:4). Jesus, as Matthew tells us, sought to create a new egalitarian community of equals. Jesus is the New Moses whose interpretation of the Law is definitive in a way the rabbinic unending legal discussion is not. He is the teacher. We call none else ‘Father.’

Even the famous Rabban Gamaliel seems to be the object of Jesus’ critique when Gamaliel says, “Do not accustom yourself to giving tithes by guesswork (Avot 1:16). A whole tractate of the Mishnah is devoted to spelling out in exquisite detail how one is to offer tithes. Another Tractate Damai is devoted to the question of giving tithes when there is some doubt as to its calculation. While the Mishnah didn’t take its final literary form for about 170 years after Jesus lifetime, the laws of the tithes clearly are in development when Jesus criticized the Pharisees for their anxieties about tithing herbs correctly (Matt 23:23-25).

The early progenitors of the rabbinic movement were known to have commanded a fence to be built around the Torah: “Build a fence around the Torah” (Avot 1:1). The concept here is quite simple: in order to achieve covenant holiness, and to attain the true blessing of the covenant (and ultimate freedom from exile), we must interpret the law so as to insure that we keep it in all its detail. For instance, if the law says, “Don’t drive over 65 mph,” we will legislate a 55 mph speed limit.” This is the secondary fence (rabbinic oral law) around the Torah (biblical written law). This theory which lies at the core of Rabbinic thought had a tendency to lead to endless legal wrangling about exactly what was required by the biblical law and what the rabbis should require to make certain the biblical laws were kept. The system also had a tendency to lead to casuistic special-pleading as Jesus points out in Matthew 23:16-22. For similar reasons, modern Reform Jews also de-emphasize the Talmudic law and seek social justice rather than legal purity.

The thing that many Christians do not see here is that while many of Jesus’ criticisms of the Pharisees were valid in their own right, it is a fact that many other rabbis of Jesus’ day were making similar points and were similarly concerned. Conflict within the rabbinic community between the Hillelites (a more lenient interpreter) and the Shammaites (a stricter interpreter) sometimes has Jesus sounding more like Hillelites and other times (notably on divorce) more like Shammai. It is common knowledge that Jesus sided with Pharisees against the Sadducees on the topic of the resurrection. Many Rabbis at this time were aware of the dangers of hypocrisy and special-pleading the legal system enabled. Other rabbis felt the dangers of the system and sought to ground it in core values and warn against hypocrisy. Finding warnings against hypocrisy such as the following in Pirke Avot are easy to find: “Do his will as if it were your will. Then He will do your will as if it were his will” (Avot 2:4).

It is well-known that Hillel, who lived just a generation before Jesus, once told a would-be convert to Judaism that the primary rule of Judaism was not to do anything to a neighbor (Heb. haber) that one would personally find hateful (Bavli Shab. 31a). The rest, he said, was so much commentary. Some Jews claim that this, in fact, is a higher more challenging moral standard than the positive version of the Golden Rule taught by Jesus since it makes the effect of your actions on others the regulating principle (see The Golden Rule in the Jewish Encyclopedia).

Some have thought that Hillel’s statement, in using Hebrew word haber for ‘friend’ restricts the command to fellow Jewish legal sages as the word sometimes means. But the context speaks otherwise; Hillel says these words to a would-be convert who could hardly qualify as a haber in the advanced sense. In Avot 1:12, Hillel encourages the broadest kind of human sympathy with the exhortation to love your fellow creatures and bring them to Torah. The language he uses here clearly embraces all humanity.

Again, the point here is that there were differences of opinion in Israel already about how crucial the details of legal observance were. Some rabbis already realized that the heart of their faith could be lost in the blizzard of legal opinion and sought to prevent this. Many rabbis were aware of the need to clarify what lies at the heart of the law and to prevent hypocrisy. In words that lie at the beginning of Avot and are sung, to this day in many synagogue services, we read, “On three things the world is sustained: on Torah, on Temple service, and on deeds of loving-kindness” (Avot 1:2). A clearer statement of the legal centrality of love could hardly be imagined.

In a strange way, the New Testament illustrates this Rabbinic interest to place love at the core of the law. In Matthew 22:34, Jesus is asked by a Pharisee which was the greatest commandment. That Jesus’ response was a fairly typical one in Judaism is illustrated in Luke by the story that leads up to the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-28). In this case, Jesus asks the legal expert how he understood the law’s basic requirements. The response given sounds almost exactly like the same the opinion Jesus gave in Matthew 22:34. What Jesus does with the following parable is somewhat unique: he makes absolutely explicit that ‘neighbor’ is to be understood radically inclusively; we are commanded not only to love fellow Jews but even Samaritans (thus the following parable). But what is unique is only the explicit inclusion of even Samaritans, not the general principle.

The point of all this is quite simple. While Jesus certainly had abuses in the practice of Pharisaic piety and hypocrisy to condemn, he was not alone. Other rabbis had similar criticisms of their fellows. As Christians often will notice, our faith also has a tendency to bring out the best and the worst in us. Modern believers can easily become hypocritical, legalistic and petty just as the Pharisees of Jesus’ condemnation. Jesus, in the best of his prophetic tradition, called Israel to a higher form of piety and covenant loyalty (Be ye perfect!). He was not alone. In many ways, Hillel would have agreed. Christians could do well to use the term “Pharisaical” more carefully We still casually use the term to mean “spiritually false” or “hypocritical.” Let’s be fair to these poor Pharisees, or we’re not being fair, you see?