Hebrew and Arabic Lyrics in Aaron Weiss' Songs

The music of post-hardcore and indie rock band mewithoutYou has both haunted and intrigued me. The frontman's shouted slam poetry delivery can be hard for some listeners to become accustomed to, but once gotten used to, can become addictive and polarizing. People either hate it or love it. The lyrics, dealing with depression, suicide, self-confession, spiders (yes, spiders), talking vegetables and other talking animals can be too bizarre for some people to take. For others, they are magical. Additionally, the frontman's former vocal lifestyle of extreme pacifism, freeganism, and dumpster diving can stand in opposition to the mainstream American life. And finally, the frontman's religious identity (or lack of identity!) is a thorn in the side of those who desire clean categories. The frontman is a member of the three world religions: He is Muslim. And Jewish. And Christian. All at the same time. mewithoutYou, and its frenetic frontman Aaron Weiss, can be a bit much for some people to handle.

Aaron Weiss, along with his brother Michael, were born to parents Elliott and Elizabeth Weiss of Philadelphia. Elliott Weiss, born Jewish, converted to the mystical form of Islam known as Sufism. In addition to holding to the general Islamic tenets (there is no god but God and Mohammad is the prophet of God, prayer five times a day, giving to charity, etc.), Sufi holds that individuals can have an ecstatic and mystical relationship with God through prayer, study, and dancing. One might have heard of the so-called Twirling Dervishes. These dancing Turks were actually Sufi Muslims, and they dance in order to encounter and then become one with God. Sufi is not much different from the historical mystical strain within Christianity and also modern evangelical's emphasis on having a personal relationship with God and Jesus.

Elliott Weiss subsequently joined the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship in Philadelphia, which was a Sufi center that sought to follow the teachings of a particular Sufi teacher, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. Elliott met and married Elizabeth, who was raised Episcopal but subsequently had converted to Sufi by the time she met Elliott. Elizabeth, the former Christian, and Elliott, the Jewish Muslim (or Muslim Jew!), raised their children under the tutelage and auspices of the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship. Since their mother was not Jewish, the Weiss brothers, Aaron and Michael, are not halakhically Jewish, but Jewish influence from their father still shines through. Bawa liked to use parables of talking animals and vegetables in his teachings, and since the Weiss brothers were raised that way, that influence has shown in their lyrics.

In high school, Aaron Weiss was very shy and self-conscious and felt like he couldn't do a lot. He often thought of suicide, yet found solace in the poetry of the Sufi poet Rumi and in hardcore music. He was introduced to Jesus and evangelical Christianity through his longtime Christian friend Greg Jehanian. Aaron started going to a church where they taught you'll burn in hell if you don't believe in Jesus. One thing Aaron could do okay was to play music. So he and his brother started playing together.

Aaron played drums. But soon he realized that he didn't want to be sitting in the back hammering on the drumset—he wanted to get up, flail around, and dance. After screaming in a joke hardcore song gifted to a friend's sister, Aaron realized he could scream okay. So he decided to become the frontman and vocalist. Spiritually, he realized that the Christianity he was introduced to was manipulative by pressuring people to make decisions based on fear of hell. He also realized that it was hurtful to his relationship with his parents, as he would argue with them.

Aaron had a truly revolutionary encounter with Jesus—one that wasn't coerced—when he witnessed the Anabaptist Bruderhof community in Pennsylvania. These radical, peace-loving, pacifist Christians loved Jesus and followed him too. He decided that he wanted that sort of community or nothing. So he became a sort of Jesus hippie—sleeping under the stars on park benches, feeding homeless people, eating the wasted food from dumpsters, preaching against American materialism and consumerism, and the Iraq war. He taught to love each other and to seek God alone and not to listen to what he said because he was trying to figure it out too and he'll lead you astray, but to trust God alone and to pursue peace and never to resort to violence.

mewithoutYou became largely popular in the Christian rock scene in the mid-2000s. Aaron found it hard to reconcile his fronting a band with living a Christian life because he felt that he was glorifying himself and not God, and keeping people distracted on petty things like CDs, shows, shirts when they should be focusing on God. He was eventually able to come to some peace with his position, but not until he quit spouting off his views after talking to a teacher who reprimanded him for blabbing his mind at concerts and with fans. He now sees himself as simply an entertainer and is enjoying doing so. After many years struggling with single living and vacillating between committing himself to a celibate lifestyle and finding a wife, he recently married a beautiful young woman and has a young child.

An intriguing aspect of Aaron Weiss' paradoxical life is his use of biblical, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim imagery. As I said, he has Jewish heritage, a Muslim upbringing, and a Christian faith—and he allows all three to influence his current life, including his lyrics. He does not see any of it as contradictory (although he has stated that he does not recite the Islamic prayers in the mosque that say that God does not beget nor is he begotten, in deference to the Christian theology of Christ's sonship). He sees all truth as God's truth.

In this article, I would like to specifically highlight the Hebraic and Arabic lyrics in his songs.

Arabic Lyrics

The first song of his I heard is also one that included Arabic lyrics, probably in 2007 or 2008. Due to my upbringing in America, I associated Islam with terrorism, Satan, and the devil. So when I heard the song I immediately thought that this band played devil music. The song is called The Dryness and the Rain from their 2006 album Brother, Sister, the album title being a reference to St. Francis of Assissi's poem.

At the end of the song, a Muslim voice sings in an intimidating manner:

Isa ruhu-lah 'aliahis-salat was-salam

nastagh-firuka ya Hakam
ya-Dhal-Jalali wal-Ikram

Isa ruhu-lah 'alaihis-salat was-salam

ya Halim, ya Qahhar
ya Muntaqim, ya Ghaffar!
la Ilaha ilallahu, Allahu Akbar!

The rough meaning of the lyrics is

Jesus, o spirit of God, peace, we pray, be upon you.

We ask for your forgiveness, o Judge
o Lord of Majesty and Generosity

Jesus, o spirit of God, peace, we pray, be upon you

The Forbearer, The Subduer
The Avenger, The Forgiving
There is no god but God, God is greater!

These lyrics can be understandably frightening, disturbing, and even offensive to American listeners. In fact, the last words of the song are Allahu Akbar (God is greater!) which are the exact words that many radical Muslims use when they decapitate infidels! In another provocative lyric off of their newest LP, Pale Horses, Aaron Weiss sings, I was the ISIS flag design (lyrics). In reference to that song, Aaron humorously wondered whether it would put him on the FBI watch list.

The litany of names at the end of the song The Dryness and the Rain are some of the ninety-nine names, or titles, of God in Islam. Aaron is clearly a Muslim, but he also has a strong attachment to Jesus, as evinced by his reverent mention of Jesus and lyrics about Jesus in other songs. In fact, the Jesus lyric from this song is a quote from the Qu'ran, but Muslims interpret the line differently because different interpretations have different theological implications. The traditional interpretation is asking the spirit of God to bless the prophet Jesus. Another is equating Jesus with the spirit of God, which few Muslims would do, as it impinges on God's tawhid, or oneness.

In case any of their fans did not believe that Aaron was Muslim, in their next album, the connection to Islam is even stronger and more explicit. The last song on the album is called Allah, Allah, Allah. Consequently, many Christian bookstores banned this album it's all crazy, it's all false, it's all a dream! it's alright! because of that song title.

The first song on it's all crazy contains Arabic lyrics, Every Thought a Thought of You, which is a prayerful hymn to God:

Kul-anaya fir minh ka
Abadan ahatman enna ajab
Hayya'alal falal qad qamadis alah
Haqq: la illaha il allah

which means,

All my thoughts concern You
Never care for our being
Let's live our lives the way God intended
It’s true: God is the only one

These lyrics direct our attention away from ourselves to the Only One who deserves our worship. We should not care for our own being, but we should care to follow God's commandments as to how we live life.

Other lyrics in the album reference the incarnation of Christ, seeing God in every blade of grass and in other humans, and avoiding premarital sex. The song, A Stick, a Carrot, and a String, holds a veiled reference to Jesus as the defeater of the serpent, or devil, in Christian theology. Intriguingly, this lyric portrays Jesus in the line of sages and mystics who renounce desire in order to become one with the divine:

And the snake who'd held the world
A stick, a carrot and a string
Was crushed beneath the foot
Of your not wanting anything

Although his theology may be heterodox, his reverence and devotion is genuine.

Another Arabic lyric sings in the song Bullet to Binary, Pt. ii

Ya subhannallah
Hayyul Qayyum
Subhannallahi Amma Yassifun
Sallalah wallah Muhammad (Sal.)
Ya Rabbi sali alaihi wa salim

Glory be to Allah
The Provider of All
Glory be to Allah
May Allah send blessings and peace upon the Prophet
My teacher May Allah send blessings and peace upon the Prophet

This song clearly references the Prophet Muhammad, and is clearly Muslim. But for Aaron Weiss, none of these things are contradictory. He finds the truth in everything, just as God is in every blade of grass and reveals himself as the light within my brother's eyes.

Hebrew Lyrics

As for Hebrew lyrics, Aaron includes those as well. In a b-track from their fifth album, Four Fires, Aaron shouts his own lyrics amidst a choir singing the Jewish prayer Ein Keloheinu.

Ein kelohenu, ein kadonenu,
ein kemalkenu, ein kemoshi'enu.
Mi chelohenu, mi chadonenu,
mi chemalkenu, mi chemoshi'enu.
Node lelohenu, node ladonenu,
node lemalkenu, node lemoshi'enu,
Baruch Elohenu, baruch Adonenu,
baruch Malkenu, baruch Moshi'enu.
Atah hu Elohenu, atah hu Adonenu,
atah hu Malkenu,
atah hu Moshi'enu.

There is none like our God, There is none like our Lord,
There is none like our King, There is none like our Savior.
Who is like our God? Who is like our Lord?
Who is like our King? Who is like our Savior?
Let us thank our God, Let us thank our Lord,
Let us thank our King, Let us thank our Savior.
Blessed be our God, Blessed be our Lord,
Blessed be our King, Blessed be our Savior.
You are our God, You are our Lord,
You are our King,
You are our Savior.

while Aaron himself sings

Mama, sing my favorite hymn
As I sink deep into the grass
And the night birds beat me with their wings
With horrid laughter as they pass
The stage goes dim, its pageants finished
Fleeting worlds to which I've clung with a now extinguished longing

Mama, sing my favorite hymn
Where we make ploughshares from our swords
And the mason's barber trim our Christmas tree
In the Oneness of the Lord
What grace surrounds! what strange perfection!
Mamma, sing my favorite hymn
Remind me
Everyone is him

Aaron refers to the Ein Keloheinu as his favorite hymn, which, when mewithoutYou performs it, becomes a very catchy one indeed. I have found myself listening to this song on repeat many times, due to the catchy nature of the remake. The last line deviates from Jewish and Christian orthodoxy in that it espouses a pantheistic or panentheistic worldview—but orthodoxy is not something to which Aaron seems to care to hold fast.

Interestingly, the last song that mewithoutYou has wrote and performed so far (the last song on their latest album) contains both Hebrew and Arabic lyrics together, cementing Aaron's dual identity. mewithoutYou's latest album, the highly anticipated LP 6 of their corpus, is Pale Horses, which deals with apocalpytic issues and has disturbing and destructive album artwork. One member of a mewithoutYou Facebook fan group to which I belong said that, after hearing this album for the first time, he sat there for a half hour in stunned silence, not able to move due to the majesty and weight of the album. Most of that owes to the intense nature of the final song of the album, Rainbow Signs.

The title Rainbow Signs is a reference to the rainbow with which God covered the skies after the Flood of Noah as a sign that he would not destroy the earth through water again. Due to that promise on God's behalf, Aaron sings, G-d gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, is the H-bomb next time? He wonders what medium humanity's final destruction will employ. The song begins with a mid-tempo, melancholy sound with similar sentiments to the above-quoted, and the first section ends with, Cloud gave no one rainbow sign—Six-point starred ink flag next time? This flag is the Israeli flag, in contradistinction to the ISIS flag mentioned in another song. Aaron wonders whether we will die due to Muslim radical terrorists or radical Zionists.

Aaron then sings the most sacred words of Judaism and Islam, respectively:

שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל ה' אֱלֹהֵינוּ ה' אֶחָד قل هو الله احد الله الصمد

The Hebrew words read Shema Yisra'el, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad. This is the Shema, the Jewish profession of faith recited every day or more by observant Jews. Its words mean, "Hear, O Israel! YHWH is our god! YHWH is one!" It is a call to unity in the unitary and unique God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And Weiss sings the Shemaaccording to the traditional melody of the synagogue, bringing us back to fond memories as children.

The Arabic words from the Qu'ran read Qul Huwa-llahu Ahad Allah hus-Samad, meaning, He is Allah, One, Allah, the Eternal Refuge. Both prayers in Arabic and Hebrew have the cognate one, ahad and echad, respectively. These prayers reveal Aaron's devotion to God. And the fact that he quotes both side-by-side shows that Aaron can no more choose one over the other. They are both equally true and equally part of his identity.

The song, after these uplighting prayers of faith from its melancholy beginnings, lead directly into the chaos of hardcore rifts, as the listener is ushered into the presence of the Almighty Judge as he begins his wrath upon the world. Wielding the sanctified sword, Aaron screams, For the army of the Scarecrow Lord. The imgary is quite haunting.

The sky, I'd been told
Would roll up like a scroll
As the mountains and islands moved from their place
And the sun would turn black
As a dead raven's back
But there'd be nowhere hide
From the Judge's face

Then the song returns, like nothing ever happened, to a college dream that Aaron had, to a simple lilting melody. His father

started on the Abrahamic joke we knew
About apostrophes and pronouns and you-remember-who
But let's keep that silly punchline between me and you
Little Haroon
And the man in the moon.

The album ends with these simple yet emotionally moving words about the sacred relationship between a father and his son. Aaron chose not to end the album with the bombastic vision of the end-times, but with a seemingly inane, yet deeply profound, night-time conversation. The last song, sweeping through both ends of catharsis, captures the dual Jewish and Muslim nature of its profound lyricist, Aaron Weiss.

Listen to mewithoutYou music here.

Purchase my friend's biography of Aaron Weiss, which influenced some of this content, here.

After long hiatus, God. The Band. announces final tour on facebook

Styled God. The Band., God. The Band. were hipster before hipsters existed. Having toured for many, many years, they actually may hold the honor of being the first band ever—not because anyone knows, but because they’ve been around the longest and no one seems to remember, anyway. Their reputation is the best-known of any other band of all time, but they also simultaneously hold the position of being the most adored and most hated band ever.

Composed of three members, God. The Band. plays a very eclectic mixture of every conceivable genre. They have the largest recording library of any other band, clocking in at over 66 albums, depending on how you count them. And like the Grateful Dead, they have been touring from the outset (with some slow-downs) and have garnered the most fervent and adoring crowd following ever.

“God. The Band. is still touring??” asks Tyler Jacobs, with incredulity, “I thought they died off a long time ago. They’re what my grandmother listens to. I haven’t really gotten into them.”

Another bystander, Floyd Jones, said that they are the type of band that everything knows about, but no one listens to anymore. “I mean, they’re kinda like Elvis Presley. Everyone acknowledges he’s the King, but does anyone still listen to ‘Hound Dog’?”

Some ascribe to them a mythical place. Larissa Kenney said, “God. The Band.?? I heard they exist, but I’m not so sure. I just don’t see any evidence of their existence. I mean, I know they have all these fans, and they have so many albums ascribed to them, I’ve just never seen them live, so I can’t believe.”

Having been sampled in acts as diverse as rapper 2Pac and death metal bands Slayer and Lamb of God, to more accessible pop artists like Carrie Underwood and Meghan Trainor, God. The Band. is the most sampled, alluded to, and reverenced band in history.

Some fans exclusively listen to their early stuff. “Ever since JC took the stage, the band has gone downhill,” says Cynthia Forsythe. “I prefer the old stuff myself anyway. The new stuff is just blasphemy, in my opinion.” Forsythe is referencing the infamous replacement of the old frontman, God, with the new frontman, Jesus Christ, JC for short. God was the older, wiser, somewhat more aggressive band leader for many, many years. He went by the stage name “The Father.” Eventually, he decided he wanted to retire from the stage, so now he spends his time doing production and lighting.

Jesus was chosen by the Father as a good replacement frontman. “He has the right energy, compassion, and wit for the job,” God was quoted saying. God gave JC the stage name “The Son,” upon his taking over. Critics believe that the stuff with Jesus as the frontman has a lighter, more peaceful, loving mood to it, while the old stuff was more earthy, more moody, and more philosophical. However, JC always reminds media of the last album, Revelation, as the exception to the rule. “Revelation is brutal,” JC said, “It goes from heavenly choirs to metal blast drumming representing meteors hitting the earth and mountains falling to the sea. Our drummer, the Holy Ghost, really pulled it off.”

The Holy Ghost, as his stagename is known (also, Holy Spirit), is the most soft-spoken member of the band. He plays the rhythm section and also is the touring manager. “Without the leading of the Holy Spirit as touring manager, we could not have done it,” JC says.

JC believes that the newer stuff is more accessible to people. “I think people really liked the singles, ‘Sermon on the Mount’ and ‘Lord’s Prayer’. Those are smash hits,” and continue to be played and sung to this day. “I think people appreciated the change from the hardcore days of the Father to the indie folk of the Son.”

Said the Holy Ghost, “The Father gets really angry whenever you try to say his real name. It’s like no one can say it right. So we have just called him God, his assumed name, or his stagename, the Father. It’s not like I have a real name anyway.”

The Son said that the hardest time in the band was the collaboration with Satan. “He’s a good guy, I think, but his ambitions and pride get the best of him. Our time recording in the desert was horrible. He was just being really adversarial.”

Satan made an appearance in the philosophical album Job, as well as cameos in other albums. “The problem,” explains the Holy Ghost, “is that The Father and Satan have had a long-standing dispute about who created the guitar and the drums. The Father insists that he created them, while Satan insists that he did. And then fans of both bands have to choose to whom to give credit, and it can just get really ugly.”

JC is most excited about his collab with Paul and the Apostles. “I think people really like them. So doing a collab with Paul and the Apostles was a really good decision. It allowed people who didn’t have the attention span for 18-minute progressive rock epics like ‘Creation’ and ‘Parting the Red Sea’ to appreciate our work. Paul and the Apostles have always been very accessible to a lot of people. Without them, we might have just ended up a band no one’s ever heard of.”

John Frank, a fan leader in Tennessee, says that he only listens to the albums which Paul and the Apostles contributed to. “The rest is just so boring, and also a lot of the older stuff just no longer applies to us today. It’s just not relevant. When JC came, he made it all obsolete.”

The Son did bring a lot of changes to the band, while also maintaining the original coherence of the band as a whole. He made the music more accessible to everybody, with some dance beats and pop harmonies thrown in, created an international social media campaign, and started a global movement.

Recently, the facebook page of God. The Band. stated ominously, “The end has come.” Fans worry that it means either a break-up or a farewell tour. In an interview, the Son said, “It’s going to be epic! Kind of like our album Revelation and very interesting, like David*Crowder Band’s Church Music. The Father has some tricks up his sleeve, and no one, not even me, knows what the Father has in store for his fans.”

Jews

I find it funny when people say, "Abraham was the first Jew," or something to that effect. I find it funny because, technically, it is not true. The statement would be similar to saying that Abraham was the first Christian or that Jesus was the first Jesuit. The statement claims that what follows is the same as what came before, and that a part is the same as the whole. Let me explain.

"Jew" is the English word denoting a socio-religious ethnogroup. The English word derived from Old French juiu, which derived from Latin and Greek ioudaios (yew-DYE-oss). Ioudaios, in turn, was the Greek translation of the Hebrew yehudim, plural, or yehudi, singular, "a Jew." However, yehudi did not have the same valence as modern English "Jew."

In the Hebrew Bible, yehudi did not denote the Chosen People as a whole. Rather, yehudi designated a member of a particular tribe of the ancient Israelites. Yisrael, or Israel, was the name given by God to Isaac's son Jacob. Jacob, aka Israel, was the father of the nation of Israel. Israel had twelve sons. These twelve sons became the twelve tribes of Israel. Each son of Israel had many descendants and many people in each tribe.

One of the sons of Israel was Judah, or Yehudah, Hebrew יְהוּדָה (which could be pronounced either yeh-hoo-DAH or yew-DAH, depending on the dialect or emphasis). יְהוּדָה derives from the Hebrew word יָדָה, which means "cast or shoot forth praise." יְהוּדָה, then, means, "praised." Yehuda's birth was described thusly: "And she conceived again, and bare a son: and she said, Now will I praise the LORD: therefore she called his name Judah; and left bearing" (Genesis 29:35 KJV). Thus, the name Judah/Yehudah is related to the Hebrew word for praise.

Hebrew denotes a member of a people group with the suffix -iy and the plural -iym. Thus the descendants of Yehudah were called Yehudim. An individual descendant of Yehudah is a Yehudi, יְהוּדִי.

Most plural suffixes when referring to a people group are translated into English as -ites, as in "Sodomites" or "Canaanites," meaning, respectively, the inhabitants or members of the city of Sodom, and the inhabitants of the land of Cana'an. יְהוּדִים, then, could be translated as Yehudites (or, Judahites or Judites). Whenever the Hebrew Bible mentions יְהוּדִי, it is referring to a Yehudite, that is, a descendant of Yehudah.

In the history of ancient Israel, the nation experienced exile and deportation. The northern kingdom, composed of ten tribes, took on the name Israel and had its capitol at Samaria. The southern kingdom, composed of only two tribes (Judah and Benjamin), took on the name Judah and its capitol at Jerusalem. The northern kingdom of Israel, and its ten tribes, was exiled and deported in the year 722 BCE by King Sennacherib of Assyria. The biblical narrative records that "in the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and he carried the Israelites away to Assyria and he placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes" (2 Kings 17:6). Assyria took Israel and deported them to the north-eastern reaches of the (Neo-)Assyrian Empire. Henceforth, the ten tribes became dispersed in the world and no longer lived in the land of Israel. (Assyria brought newcomers to replace the Israelites in the land and these became part of the Samaritans.) However, the southern kingdom of the Yehudites still lived in the land of Canaan for two more centuries.

The Yehudites, also, were taken captive, but in the year 586 BCE. (It should be stated that for both the Israelite and Yehudite exiles, not *every* individual was taken; just the more urban and important population—the rural folk were largely left in the land, hence the disparaging Hebrew term am ha-aretz, "people of the land," hicks.) The Yehudites were taken to Babylon and there they lived for about seventy years, in the (Neo-)Babylonian Empire.

In the year 539 BCE, the Persian king Cyrus the Great took over the Babylon Empire and started the Persian Empire. Cyrus allowed the Yehudites to return to Yehudah and rebuild their temple to God. The Yehudites were no longer imprisoned exiles in Babylon. Many of the exiled Yehudites, however, stayed. The story of Esther is about Yehudites who stayed in the land of exile (and the Ahashverosh/Xerxes of Esther would have been Cyrus' son). The books of Ezra-Nehemiah, however, are about the Yehudites who returned to Yehudah. "In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah the prophet might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom…Whoever among you of all his people, may his god be with him and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is is Judah, and let him rebuild the house of the LORD, the god of Israel–he is the god who is in Jerusalem" (Ezra 1:1, 3). The Yehudites returned to Yehudah and they rebuilt the temple and they lived their lives in the land. The returned Yehudites, however, looked down upon the non-exiled Yehudites and the Samaritans (the intermarried descendants of the Israelites), referring to them as the am ha-aretz, which is a derogatory term similar in valence to American English "hicks" or "rednecks." The returned Yehudites began codifying their religion and canonizing their sacred literature. The Yehudites lived in the land for four or five centuries, through different ruling empires and kingdoms, until the Romans kicked them out in 70 CE/AD.

During that time, the Greek language was spread among the Yehudites because the Alexander the Great conquered the region in 333 BCE. Some of the Yehudites, then, began speaking Greek. The Greek-speaking Yehudites were called "Hellenizers," after Hellas, the Greek word for "Greece." In Greek, the Yehudites were called Ioudaioi, in the plural, or Ioudaios, in the singular. The land inhabited by the Yehudites was Ioudaia in Greek. The religion of the Yehudites was called Ioudaismos (yew-dye-EES-moss). These are terms that the New Testament, in Greek, uses in reference to the Yehudites.

Finally, when the Yehudites were again exiled from Yehudah in 70 CE by the Romans and scattered abroad in Europe over the following centuries, the word Yehudite or Ioudaios began to be less and less referring to a people and their land, but simply a people-group. Whereas Yehudite originally meant inhabitant or descendent of Yehudah, it begun to be understood as "a member of the people-group that worships one god and practices Judaism." The word became more and more a social and religious label than a geographic or national label. Hence the word "Jew." As we discussed, Yehudi became Ioudaios which eventually became French juiu which became English Jew.

The important thing to remember, then, is that, technically, Jews are only 1/12th of the Chosen People of Israel. Jews do not equal Israel, they are a part of Israel. (All Jews are Israel, but not all Israel are Jews). And so are the Samaritans, and the remaining descendants of the twelve tribes. So the next time someone says, "Abraham was the first Jew," remember, no, he was the ancestor of Jews, *and* all the other Israelites. However, until the LORD gathers all the dispersed from across the face of the earth and brings them back to Jerusalem, the Jews will be the only visible Israelites.

When people use the word "Jews" for all of Israel, they are actually using a figure of speech known as synecdoche, where the part stands for the whole. I can understand why people do so (for convenience), but as a scholar it bothers me. So as long as people know that they are using a synecdoche, it is fine to do so, but your audience may not know.

O' Brother Christ

O’ Brother Christ—A Plea and a Prayer

{Help me, I cried

I insist, oh I insist, I exist.

Sailing in each tiny caravel a cavalcade of camaraderie’s from the commodore coming with callous calipers.

Sir, I exist!

The fact has not created in me

A sense of urgency.}

o brother Christ,

it seems that you have not come near as you used to

it seems that you no longer come here as you used to

o my Christ, o my Christ, why have you have abandoned us?

                                    (mashihi mashihi, lema sabahthanu)
You have abandoned your own for the new "chosen ones"

But we were the chosen ones, why hast thou cast us off?

Why have you chosen a new possession?

For whom did you die, to whom did you preach

For whom did you sigh, to whom did you teach

To whom did you cry, as you decided whether to be taken away or go off, do your own thing and reject your father’s will like the christ as portrayed in the last temptation

Why did you stay on that cross, why did you submit to such dross

You, the son of god, could have had any life you wished, any girl you kissed

Servants would have waited you, women would have lavished you,

Warriors would have fought for you, gods would have bowed down to you.

You could have been king, The King, king of kings

But you chose to let your blood pour forth, and as it flowed down, it sang and bubbled along and formed a stream into which doubters and sinners can dunk their heads and assuage their thirst.

Drink my blood and eat my flesh. For every time you do this, you do it in remembrance of me.

And by inaugurating that meal, you left your people, the little people of this world, a people small and few of number

You entered the upper room as a Jew celebrating a pesah seder, and you left as a Christian celebrating your own feast

You entered the world as the son of a poor girl from the house of bread, and you left as the exalted son of a god whom the little people no longer recognize

You taught as a rabbi, walked in halachah, studied from torah, — but died as a Grecian martyr

You changed from man to myth

You were one of us, until you decided to leave your domain, and become one of them,

the resurrected son of a triune god —

from echad to epikoros

why did you leave? Why did you go your own way?

You have chosen the worship of Christians over the reverence of Jews,

The adulation of Gentiles to the respect of your people

Why have you desired this glory for yourself?

After your death, you went to them and taught the gentiles

During your life, when the gentile woman approached, you reproached her,

But now you gloat in the glory of the goyyim.

Two-faced Yeshua, fat in the heavens, you enjoy your premature adoration.

If you would have just waited, if you would have waited three more days,

If you would have sat,

If you would have suffered,

You would have found your purpose in your people, as you taught.

G-d, your g-d, would have exalted you to his right hand,

If you dwelt and suffered with your people, you would have seen light.

By his knowledge, he will make many righteous.

Why couldn’t you wait?

Instead, you ceased to be a man and you left your people, and you became a god, a god whose resurrection was patterned after the gods of the goyyim.

You neglected the love of your community

For the adulation of millions.

And are you ever going to come back to your people, or will you stay in your gold-encrusted, lavishly decorated palace of the Greek gods and drink the immortal juice,

Or will you appear, bedraggled and beaten, bruised and bitter, among your people

Again make your appearance with the ghettos and the ghosts and the lost souls and lost lives, where you found yourself at the crossroads of your death.

You chose the path more travelled by.

O my Yeshu, o my Yeshu, why hast thou forsaken us?
                                    (yeshui,  yeshui, lema sabahthanu)

Yeshu ben Yosef haNotsri, alav ha-shalom, haShem yinkom damo

ישו בן יוסף הנוצרי עליו השלום השם ינקום דמו

May g-d have mercy on his soul            

Spiritual Truths in Popular Music: "Roses" by The Chainsmokers ft. Rozes

There's a reason songs are popular. It's because these songs resonate with many people across boundaries and divides. These pop songs are called pop because they are popular, something about them touches on the human condition that many people can relate to.

One such song is "Roses" by the American EDM duo The Chainsmokers, featuring vocals by the American singer Elizabeth Rose Mencel, better known by her stage name Rozes.

Whenever I hear this song, I feel some sort of a nostalgia and a sense of finding something again, of rekindling a relationship, and that I'm missing something until that happens.

The song, from the video and lyrics, is about a boy and girl who are rekindling a relationship.



"Deep in my bones I can feel you," the female vocalist sings, amidst visions of a female dancer, "Take me back to a time when we knew / Hideaway." Take me back to that time when we "We could waste the night with an old film / Smoke a little weed on the couch in the backroom." The singer pines for the time when the two could hang out together, could just watch an old film and smoke together, relax. In an alternate version, the lyrics are "take me back to a time when we knew / how to be." The time when we knew how to be, when we could just sit together and just ''be.'' No agendas, no plans, no worries—just ourselves, our eyes, and our bodies. We could just be.

But that time of innocence, you could call it, has been broken. We have moved on, we had better things to do, we forgot how to just be, how to just hang out together.

In the video, it shows the man spending the night with the girl where they do light it up and make some love (there's nothing R-rated), but then it shows him in leaving the girl in the morning. He has to move on, he has plans, he has shows to catch.

When I watched that, I thought something about this isn't right. That's not the way we were meant to be. We weren't meant for hook-ups. We weren't meant to leave our partners on the couch. Instead, we were meant to ''be'', we were meant to stay with each other, to be committed to each other.

The video shows the disappointment of the two lovers now that they are apart. The girl lights some more up and wanders her apartment without purpose. The man drives away and frets.

Yet the girl, like the girl in the Song of Songs, searches for her lover and finds him. Suddenly, as the two come together, the tempo picks up and the beat drops just as they kiss. The scenes of the female dancer became more exaggerated. Rose petals fall from the sky. All is better, all has been re-united. It's a joyous occasion.

The video ends with them embraced in another kiss.

This video, I believe, is a microcosm of the human experience. It starts out searching, looking for something, then it finds that object of desire, then they are separated, and finally they are brought back together. We could call it desire, consummation, separation, and re-unification. I believe that's the story of our lives, either in our relationships with others or in our relationship with the divine.

As single people, we are always looking for that person, that person who will make our heart sing and make our dreams come true. We know that it is not "good" to be single. There is an achingness, a missingness, without that person. Then we find them, and everything is wonderful, we can be ourselves.

But unfortunately, that love is short-lived. Something comes up, our own messed up behavior draws the person away, and we are separated. What was whole is now broken.

And so we live our lives in quiet desperation. We know that ''if only'' we could be reunited with that person, it will all be well (so we think). We live our lives aimlessly and try to forget and move on.

Some of us find other lovers and are content with that. But if we are lucky, we are reunited with the ones our soul loves. And it is good. Rose petals fall from the sky. The peace and satisfaction has returned. We no longer have to wander. All is well. And it is better than the first time because we have worked through the problems that broke the relationship up. It is for the better.

So it is with God.

We start our lives looking for that something to fill us. (Those of us raised in situations where they are already connected with the divine don't necessarily have this step.) Some us find God. And it is good.

We feel like our lives are new, we have an inner peace. Everything is in harmony. It's the age of innocence.

But through the struggles of life, that relationship is neglected. We lose contact with God. We forget to pray. We find other things to distract us.

When we find him again, it is amazing. The grace has returned, our lives are clear again, we have peace.

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There was a time when humanity was in relationship with God. All of us. But since that primeval time, humanity has lost that. We are broken. We sin. We kill each other. We are wandering. We search for something to fill us, but not for God.

It was God, however, that can fill that hole. Nothing else works. Other things can distract, but not satisfy. God created us with that relationship with him, but we lost it, so only he can fill it. We must be re-united with God. And when it happens, it is good.

"I'll take you to paradise
Say you'll never let me go"

God will take us to paradise and never let us go. The search will be over. Our satisfaction has been attained. We have found our home.

Daniel Boyarin - The Jewish Gospels book review

I had a Facebook friend recommend this book to me, and the title certainly caught my eye, so I read it. It is called The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. The author is Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and a self-described Orthodox Jew.¹ Jack Miles, the Christian author of the famous God: A Biography, wrote the praising forward. The book was published by The New Press, a publisher dedicated to publishing "books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world."

As I read, I was shocked by what I was reading. Here was a Jew, not a Jew for Jesus, not a Messianic Jew, not a Christian in any way—an Orthodox Jewish talmudic scholar—claiming that Jesus legitimately fulfilled the messianic prophecies. Boyarin also argues that ideas such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, central to mainstream Christian theology, are essentially Jewish ideas, not only hinted at in the Tanakh itself, but also believed by Jews up until the first few centuries of the Common Era. Here is this Jewish scholar claiming that ideas that modern, mainstream Judaism rejects as heresy and idolatry are inherently Jewish ideas, not later Greek-influenced, Christian ideas.

These arguments, on Boyarin's part, are actually injurious to modern, mainstream Judaism. So why would a Jew be arguing such things? In reality, it seems, from reading his book, that he wished to take a stab at Christianity by arguing that Jesus and Christianity were not original, but simply took their pre-existing ideas from Judaism. So, in a way, he denigrates Christianity. At the epilogue at the end, Boyarin discredits Jesus. He says that even Jesus' extraordinary nature cannot explain the perceived 'newness' or uniqueness of Christianity: "Taking even the remarkable nature of Jesus—and I have no doubt that he wasa remarkable person—as the historical explanation for a world-shifting revision of beliefs and practices seems to me hardly plausible" (159). Rather, everything that Jesus had, Judaism had (this may be an exaggeration of the argument), and so Judaism had a pre-A.D. idea of a dying and rising messiah: he writes that "the notion that some kind of experience of the risen Christ preceded and gave rise to the idea that he would rise seems to me so unlikely as to be incredible" (159). Jesus' followers did not believe that he had risen because they saw him risen. Rather, they saw him risen, because they believed him risen. That is, they already had believed that the messiah would rise from the dead, so when their perceived messiah died, they saw him risen, even though he did not. "Perhaps his followers saw him arisen," Boyarin continues, "but surely this must be because they had a narrative that led them to expect such appearances, and not that the appearances gave rise to the narrative" (159). Boyarin, after demolishing the central tenet of Christianity, then gives a footnote trying to be kind, relegating belief in the resurrection to mere faith: "Let me make myself clear here: I am not denying the validity of the religious Christian view of matters. That is surely a matter of faith, not scholarship. I am denying it as a historical, scholarly, critical explanation" (159n). Postmodern revisions of Christianity aside, how is demolishing one's belief as ahistorical and then saying, "Oh, you can still believe it [even though it is not historically true]," supposed to make Christian believers feel any better? Also, such an argument completely ignores the Gospels' depictions of the post-resurrection witnesses as shocked and surprised, certainly not expectant and eager (NBC's New Testament-based TV show A.D.'s depiction of Mary Magdalene and John as eagerly awaiting his resurrection despite the boo-hooing of the rest of the disciples notwithstanding). Well, what should I have expected from academia?

Let us move on to the more uplifting parts of the book. The first move of Boyarin's book is to demonstrate that the Judaism of Jesus' day (called Second Temple Judaism, the history of Israel from the rebuilding of the Temple in the sixth century BCE until its destruction at the hands of General Titus in CE 70) was much more diverse and pluralistic than modern Judaism. This idea is a well-known scholarly fact by now—in fact, the Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, titles its article on Judaism "Judaisms of the Second Temple Period." Judaisms—plural. To give you a sense of the Judaisms of Jesus' day, consider that there were apocalyptic communities such as the Essenes, innovators such as the Pharisees, secularists and assimilators such as the Sadducees and the Herodians, as well as messianic spectators and regional variations in outlook and language (e.g., Galileans versus Judeans). Thus, Judaism was far from being a monolithic entity.

But Boyarin takes this idea a step farther. He argues that through the first three centuries of the Common Era the relationship between Judaism and Christianity was fluid and undefined. In fact, according to him, it may even be anachronistic to even speak of them as two separate religions at that point in time. People belonged to groups with a common identity, but the idea of Jewish "religion" itself, in the modern sense of a set of beliefs, a priesthood, and scriptures did not exist. "Everybody then—both those who accepted Jesus and those who didn't—was Jewish (or Israelite, the actual ancient terminology)," Boyarin writes; continuing, "Actually, there was no Judaism at all, nor was there Christianity. In fact, the idea of 'a religion,' that is one of a number of religions to which one might or might not belong," did not exist at that time (2).

Here is how Daniel Boyarin paints the Jewish religious landscape of the first few centuries: "There were no Rabbis yet, and even the priests in Jerusalem and around the countryside were divided among themselves.…Some [Jews] believed that in order to be a kosher Jew you had to believe in a single divine figure and any other belief was simply idol worship. Others believe that God had a divine deputy or emissary or even son…" Basically, Boyarin's picture allows for a broad spectrum of Jewish belief.

Buy this book on Amazon.

Amazon link

Jewish Bible

For an article-length summary of Boyarin's argument, see his article in the Jewish journal Tikkun.

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¹For an article summary of Boyarin's work and his relationship with the Jewish and academic communities, see the article in the Jewish San Francisco Bay Area periodical JWeekly.↩