We are six days away from Christmas, and as in years past, despite military clashes between Jews and Arabs, visitors are coming to Israel intending to visit the place where Jesus was born, Bethlehem.
This year, as always, the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem will lead the procession to the Church of the Nativity to venerate Jesus’ birth.
Souvenir shops, as always, will do a good trade selling manger scenes, images of Jesus as a baby, images of Mary embracing baby Jesus, and so on. Christians will decorate Christmas trees with olive wood stars of Bethlehem and sheep and shepherds, representing the events of the eve of Jesus’ birth.
While all these customs are very beautiful, they are not as ancient as one may suppose. They are a far cry from Christian customs of the days of early Christianity.
I think that once, at the time of the beginning of Christianity, the Torah, not baby Jesus or the Virgin Mary, was central to Christianity as it was and still is in Judaism, as specified in the Book of John and in many other places in the New and Old testaments.
John 14:15
If you love Me, you will keep My commandments
If you keep My commandments, you will remain in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and remain in His love.
For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”
I delight in Your commandments because I love them. / I lift up my hands to Your commandments, which I love, and I meditate on Your statutes.
Therefore I love Your commandments more than gold, even the purest gold. / Therefore I admire all Your precepts and hate every false way.
Love does no wrong to its neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilment of the law.
I couldn’t avoid comparing the custom of processions parading images of Mary and baby Jesus in church with the procession of parading the Toray Scroll in the synagogue. I have a suspicion that Christians in the early churches also paraded the Torah scroll, and not the baby Jesus.
After reading Sarit Shalev Eini’s article 1 I came to the conclusion that a change came about in the Middle Ages.
The cause of the change from venerating the law to venerating Jesus and Mary came about as the result of hardship and suffering brought on by plagues and starvation in Europe in the Middle Ages, as described in an article by Sarit Shalev Eini. (!)
“In the last decades of the thirteenth century and throughout the fourteenth century, Europe was caught in economic and demographic crises. Intense cold and incessant rains led to three years of famine (1315-1318), accompanied by long periods of price gouging, the spread of disease, and a significant increase in mortality. Churchmen were accused of extorting the public in exchange for forgiveness of sins, appointing unworthy clergy, and leading an ostentatious life, which reached its peak at the papal court. The status of the Pope steadily declined, and the spirit of opposition to his supremacy by the secular authorities reached unprecedented heights in those days.
Against this instability, religious devotion grew stronger in the hearts of the masses. It served as an antidote to the ravages of time and flourished both within the walls of monasteries and among those who were not among the faithful and monks. At its centre stood the sacrament of the Eucharist, the worship of the body of Jesus, and around this axis were celebrated his incarnation and the suffering of his crucifixion and resurrection. The daily Mass was joined by the ceremonies and processions of the feast of the Body of Jesus (Corpus Christi), which was founded in the middle of the thirteenth century and took root in the Latin West at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The infant Jesus became the focus of the conception of the Eucharist, and his mother, Mary, was seen as the womb within which the Holy Bread was created. Worship and art provided a wealth of human images of Christian divinity. These were presented to him in religious ceremonies and his personal worship and played a central role in the development of his religious devotion.” 1
Before this challenging period, most Christians adhered to the principle of loving the law of God. Following it Christians replaced John’s order to love God’s Torah as a way of loving God with representations of Jesus in art
Sarit Shalev Eini, explains it in the following way.. !
” The images appealed to the believer's most basic and intense feelings and love for God. The rosy-cheeked baby Jesus aroused the believer's feelings of parental love. In Mary's bosom, the believer could find a mother's love, a refuge from the hardships of time and the terror of the end times.”1
Jews suffered as much as Christians from these difficulties and probable would have found comfort like their Christian compatriots in loving a little baby and a nursing mother. But worshipping images was not open to Jews because any representation of God in the form of an image was strictly forbidden in the Ten Commandments.
Exodus 20:4
“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”
The Jewish reaction to hardship had to take another form, which meant strengthening love of the Torah by attributing human characteristics turning the Torah into a human love object as Christians turned Jesus into a love object.
An illustration of Maimonides' book from the fourteenth century in Perugia, around 1400, depicts a Jew embracing a Torah scroll as fondly as he would embrace a baby. The Torah, a collection of laws, is turned into a tangible object, standing at the centre of Jewish public ceremonial life.
Despite its special sanctity, it was permitted and even customary to kiss the Torah.
The Torah scroll was dressed in a coat in European countries. A crown was placed on the scroll's head in Italy and Spain.
In Ashkenaz, the Trees of Life (an eponym for Torah) were sometimes adorned with magnificent crowns inspired by the crowns of local kings.
In Germany, the scroll, as it was raised for all the congregation to see and admire, was bound and secured in a diaper used by the newborn on the day of his circumcision and dedicated to the Torah on the child's first visit to the synagogue.
The terminology of the Torah scroll accessories - coat, diaper, crown and diadem - also shows the desire to make the Torah human. Clothing and adorning it in jewellery reinforces the human image of the Torah scroll.
“The human images of the Torah received a unique expression within the liturgy. Through them, Ashkenazi Jews coped with the increasing adherence to their Christian environment and cultivated a suitable alternative to Jesus and his mother, who stood at its centre.” (1)
The visual expression of these human images is reflected in the genre of piyyut (poetic prayers). The main examples originate in southern Germany in the first half of the fourteenth century. Most of the books containing these illustrations were destroyed in pogroms In the middle of the century.
One illustration in the margin of the piyyut, 'Adon Imnani'(Lord be my nursemaid) (2) to be read in the Ceremony of Initiating Children to Learn Torahon on the festival of Shavuot the day of the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai, shows the father passing the child into the hands of the teacher, who shows the child a board of raised Hebrew letters smeared with honey. The child recites each letter and is rewarded by being allowed to lick the honey off the letters. In this way the child learns to love the words of Torah as a Christian child learns to love Jesus.
Another example of the connection which Jews made between the child and the Torah is an illustration showing the wrapping the Torah scroll in a strip of cloth which had been used to diaper a baby at the circumcision ceremony.
Ref:
Sarit Shalev Eini, Human representations of the Torah and art in the Middle Ages, in Hebrew, Zion, a quarterly journal of the Shazar Institute of Jewish history, Vol 73, 2, 2008. The text is based on her lecture at the annual conference "The Middle Ages Now", Bar-Ilan University, March 2008
Leipzig Machzor (c. 1320)
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