Tales of the Hasidim/Messianic New Testament: A Comparison

It will never cease to amaze me, the level of prejudice and chauvinism of religions which, after all, hold so much in common. Many Jews today feel as much loathing and antipathy for merely the idea of Jesus of Nazareth as Mashiach, as they did when Jesus received the death penalty two thousand years ago. Many Christians, on the other hand, cannot understand that Yeshua was a devout Jewish man. They have no clues as to their Judaic heritage, and their anti-semitism is theological self-hatred. So many Catholics are oblivious to the origins of the Mass in Judaism, and fail to comprehend G-d's mysterious weaving of salvation history  (which began with Adam), which came to us all through the Jews. 

One of the most well-known parables of Jesus of Nazareth,  "unless a grain of wheat that falls to the ground dies, it stays just a grain; but if it dies, it produces a big harvest" (Yochanan/John 12:24), has an almost verbatim counterpart in a Hasidic tale.  And I know that is just one example. So I am going to take each Hasidic Tale (Tales of the Hasidim, Martin Buber, forward by Chaim Potok, Schocken Books, New York, 1947), and find the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth or spiritual principles available universally, (Complete Jewish Bible, Translation by David H. Stern, Jewish New Testament Publications Inc., Clarksville, Maryland, USA; Jerusalem, Israel, 1998), which correlate, if such a correlation exists.  I have thought about this project for many decades. Christianity is the wild olive grafted onto the tree that is Judaism.  

from Forward by Chaim Potok, Tales of the Hasidim: 

"Sixteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalah, endeavoring to fathom the origin and nature of evil in a universe created by a compassionate God, came up with the startling notion of a cosmos gone wrong in the very process of creation.  The Creator, while withdrawing His essence from the totality of being in order to make room for the dross of matter, somehow lost control of the process, and elements of God-- sacred sparks of His being-- spilled from the delicate shells of light that encased them and fell into the created world of matter, where they became trapped, thereby diminshing the being of God and rendering the cosmos awry and prone to instability. The result: exile, persecution, disease, death, war, plague. A vast cosmic error at the very onset of creation set the universe askew and spawned the possibility of evil.

The righting of this terrible wrong-- the healing of the world-- is the task of the Jewish people. We can repair this broken world by carefully observing the Law, by performing the commandments; each godly act possesses the power to penetrate one of the shells and thereby release the spark within it back to its source in the Creator. Upon the release of all the sparks will come the certain redemption of the world." 

While I feel it isn't a complete explanation of Kabbalah, this is nonetheless a good summation of the Kabbalah account of the  creation/embedding of sparks/freeing of sparks cycle. Not so very different from Christianity, which teaches of a primal Error or Fall (original sin) and the necessity of restoration, healing from sin, and ultimate redemption. Furthermore, Yeshua (as God) exhibited vulnerability on the Cross even as He accomplished salvation through his suffering and death, sharing the "diminished" nature of the Holy One of Israel in tzimtzum.  When believers make sacrifice or offer their suffering, they are "completing" the redemption accomplished by Yeshua's passion and death.  Not only that, but in the words of the famous poet:  The people of  Christ is the Christ of peoples (Heine). The Jewish people as an entity, metaphysically becomes the means of sanctification and redemption of the whole world, their collective sufferings offered for the redemption of all. This theme pervades the Hasidic Tales. 

Colossians 1:24 "I rejoice in my present sufferings on your behalf! Yes, I am completing in my own flesh what has been lacking of the Messiah's afflictions, on behalf of His Body" (the Church). (Emphasis mine). 

"Withdrawing His essence from the totality of being" is God "taking the form of a slave": 

Philippians 2:6-8

"Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God something to be possessed by force. On the contrary, he emptied himself, in that he took the form of a slave by becoming like human beings are.

And when he appeared as a human being, he humbled himself still more by becoming obedient even to death-- death on a stake as a criminal!" 

The task of the  believer, then, in both Judaism and Christianity, is to sanctify what is in the world, through various means...Releasing sparks or offering one's suffering; practicing the constant awareness of God in daily life; applying one's spiritual principles or morality as a means of maintaining a relationship to God: 

"Buber saw in Hasidism powerful affinities with Christian mysticism's quest for unity and admired its passionate vision of the presence of the holy within the ordinary. It is in this world that we must find God. If God is absent, it is into this world that we must bring Him." Potok, from the Forward, Tales of the Hasidim