Being Taught After the Manner of the Jews, Again

In 3 Nephi too, when the new lawgiver appears, New World Israelites do not "remove or stand afar off" but instead embrace their lawgiver and his law, so much so that they become the holy nation for a time just as their ancestors were commanded to be at Sinai (Exodus 19: 6; 20:18). And, in Ether, one man, the brother of Jared, possesses so much faith that he is welcomed back into God's presence, just as Adam was cast out from it so long ago.

Haftarah Connections

In this way, reading the Book of Mormon side by side with the Hebrew Scriptures, in sections, reinforces many of the points those scriptures make by providing positive examples of people making wise choices to augment the negative examples of people making foolish ones. Furthermore, the Book of Mormon often updates these points in order to show their modern application more easily. The book of Alma, for instance, details a cycle of pride much as Judges describes a cycle of sin. However, in Alma, the quadrants of its cycle are prosperity, pride, strife, and humility—qualities modern readers can easily relate to—rather than peace in the land, idolatry, captivity, and heroic deliverance.

Furthermore, these qualities are causally connected in Alma: prosperity, as Alma and Helaman present it, is dependent upon social and religious unity; pride, in the form of status-seeking and class warfare, disrupts this unity; and without unity, internal strife naturally occurs and makes societies vulnerable to external strife as well. Only humility, the kind where everyone in a community sees everyone else as equally valuable before God and stresses serving over status-seeking can restore the kind of unity required for prosperity. In this way, one of the main messages in Judges makes more sense to modern readers and they are in a better position to understand and implement it.

After about forty minutes of insightful questions and helpful responses, I thank our Jewish visitors for coming and consider, at least for a second, reading complementary passages from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Book of Mormon as a haftarah to our session. After all, it would be a fitting conclusion to our meeting and would show how our two faiths can augment and enhance each other. But there is no time. Instead I reiterate how blessed I am by these visits and how much I learn from them. I may never know what will happen or what will be said, but these sessions always broaden my view of Judaism and deepen my understanding of Mormonism.