Open Letter

Tales of Hasidim p.72  "Love"  "The Baal Shem said to one of his disciples:  'The lowest of the low you can think of, is dearer to me than your only son is to you.'"  Complete Jewish Bible p. 1246  Mattityahu (Matthew) Chapter 18 verses 12-14  (Words of Yeshua) "What's your opinion? What will somebody do who has a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away? Won't he leave the ninety-nine on the hillsides and go off to find the stray?  And if he happens to find it? Yes! I tell you he is happier over it than over the ninety-nine that never strayed!  Thus your Father in heaven does not want even one of these little ones to be lost."  and this from the Introdction by Martin Buber (Hasidic Tales): p. 19 "One such utterance is the basis of one of the Rabbi Pinchas' major teachings:  that we should 'love' the evil-doer and hater 'more' in order to compensate for the lack of the power of love he himself has caused in his p...

Hasidic Tales p. 71 - 72 "With the Sinners"  "The Baal Shem said:  'I let sinners come to me, if they are not proud. I keep the scholars and the sinless away from me if they are proud. For the sinner who knows that he is a sinner, and therefore considers himself base-- G-d is with him, for He "dwelleth with them in the midst of their uncleannesses."  But concerning him who prides himself on the fact that he is unburdened by sin, G-d says, as we know from the Gemara:  "There is not enough room in the world for myself and him."'  Complete Jewish Bible p.1317  Luke 18 verses 10-14 (words of Yeshua)  "Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Parush and the other a tax-collector.  The Parush stood and prayed to himself, 'O G-d! I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity-- greedy, dishonest, immoral, or like this tax-collector!  I fast twice a week, I pay tithes on my entire income.'  But the tax-collector, standing far off...

Tales of the Hasidim, Martin Buber, p. 59 Tale entitled "The Seventy Languages" in which the Baal Shem Tov speaks to his disciples in ordinary language but they hear or experience other languages:  "The Baal Shem began to say words of the teaching, but what he said seemed to have nothing to do with the subject of the question, and his disciples could not glean an answer from his words...In the middle of the Baal Shem's address, Rabbi Joseph rapped on the table and called out:  'Turkish!' and after a while:  'Tartar!' and after another interval:  'Greek!' and so on, one language after another.  Gradually his companions understood:  from the master's speech, which was apparently concerned with quite different things, he had come to know the source and the character of every single language-- and he who teaches you the source and character of a language, has taught you the language itself." This experience was enabled in order to answer ...

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 th...