On Christmas Eve, I’m once again, like every year, struck by the wonderful example Jesus provides all people – Jew and non-Jew alike – of a human being who achieved full spiritual and human potential. (I wrote a short piece about this earlier today in my Examiner.com column, but I wanted to expand upon the subject here.) I realize that Christians believe he was not a mortal man but the only son of God. While I can’t buy into that belief, I do see this rabbi – yes, he was born a Jew and lived as a great Jewish teacher with a following of Jewish disciples and students – as someone who provides a role model of what it looks like to reach the height of spiritual potential as well human potential. Indeed, his ability to produce miracles at will probably served as an example of the height of human potential – expressing oneself a spiritual being in physical body.
Jesus was a man who had reached the pinnacle of spiritual enlightenment. He wasn’t the only “christ,” he simply was a “christed being.” A christed being is one who has reached the height of spiritual enlightenment.
Jesus knew how to place God before himself always.ย This Jewish teachingย lies at the heart of Judaism, but it is one that few Jews really learn to live. Shiviti Adonai L’negde tamid. ย How many of us can say that we place God before us always? And out of this, I believe came Jesus’ teaching that we must learn to be in the world but not of it. If anyone provided an example of how to accomplish this, Jesus did. He remained totally connected to God while walking in this world. He knew that his soul served as his link to Source. He knew he housed a spark of Divinity, and that spark tied him to the Divine. He was a walking, talking link to God, and he expressed as such.
I like to think of Jesus as the first reform Jew, since his beliefs were a bit…well…different. I know some rabbis who teach courses on Jesus. One calls him the “rebel rabbi.” We don’t have to throw Jesus and his teachings out of the tribe just because post mortum someone (or a group of people) decided he was the son of God and named a religion after him. We can, instead, learn from him and hold him up as a model of human potential achieved. We can even strive to be like him. We can study his teachings in as pure a form as we can find, because they come from the Jewish tradition.
At a deep level, in our soul, we allย have theย desireย to reach our full human potential and to be connected at all times to our highest spiritual self, the part of ourselves (our souls) connected to God. We want to be like Jesus. We want to reach our full spiritual potential, which is our full human potential. So, why not embrace this man for who he was – a superb role model of who we all want to become. If you are Jewish, don’t let your Judaism get in the way of seeing what Jesus has to offer you. He may not be “the way,” “the savior” or “the messiah,” but he’s definitely worth a bit of study. You might actually find his life and teachings quite inspiring…and that’s my point.
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Very nice article..I am one of those Rabbis who teach a course on Jesus the Jew, and liked this…though Jesus was an unlikely model being unmarried at a time when most Jewish men were married with children — I like the notion of Jesus as representing a wing of the Pharisaic party, and a paradigm of human potential within Judaism. His message was distorted and changed for political purposes when the Gospels were written at the end of the first century