The gentleman from the high council rested his right arm on the podium and leaned forward into the microphone. Looking into the congregation, he lowered his voice and took us into his confidence. “The Old Testament,” he said, “concerns itself with carnal commandments intended to cleanse the body, with outward performances and all that sort of thing.”

Fortunately, there’s a lot more to the OT than the polemics of Heb 9:10, or there would be no reason to spend a year studying it in GD. For example, there’s a bit of Good News called the Shema, a passage that takes its name from the Hebrew imperative of the verb “to hear:”

Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God is one Lord. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and will all your soul, and with all your might.

Then there’s another nice morsel of Good News, this time from Lev 19:18b, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” In fact, Rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef seems to have been particularly fond of precisely these passages. And as commandments go, they don’t sound all that carnal to me.

It will not surprise you to learn that I have another piece of Good News, this time drawn from a narrative context in the Elijah cycle.

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Poor guy. His name means “servant of the Lord” and now he’s about to find out just what that service requires.

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Well, we’ve had a long and fun day discussing this topic on our back channel group email. But I guess it’s time to cut bait or fish. We may yet be reduced to contemplating FHL’s timely question, “Where am I going and why am I in this hand basket?” but at least we’ve had a good time with it. The errors are, of course, all mine.

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