#baal shem tov

[mydawns]

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

Let me fall, if I must fall. The one I become will catch me.

Baal Shem Tov

[entheognosis]

From every human being there rises a light that reaches straight to heaven, and when two souls that are destined to be together find each other, the streams of light flow together and a single brighter light goes forth from that united being.

Baal Shem Tov

art by Phazed

[apenitentialprayer]

are there any Jews who view Jesus in a positive way (aside from like messianic Jews who, as far I’ve understood, are considered evangelical Christians by all other Jews)

Okay, ah, to answer this question simply: to my knowledge, as far as Jewish communities who (1) self-identify as Jewish, (2) consider themselves practicing Judaism, and (3) deny that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah go, none of them have an "official" stance on Jesus. Jesus may be a false Messiah, but this is only a "doctrine" in Judaism the same way that the fact that Vissarion of Siberia is a false Parousia of Jesus is a "doctrine" in Christianity — which is to say, not so much an actually asserted belief, but a natural corollary to more deeply held beliefs.

That being said, individual Jewish people have held a variety of beliefs about Jesus of Nazareth. Some of them are, well, quite negative. For example, one Hasidic story tells of how the Baal Shem Tov saw Jesus and Sabbatai Zvi (both false Messiahs) stuck in the same level of Hell together; the infamous Toledot Yeshu, a parody gospel, certainly does not paint Jesus or His Mother in a particularly good light; Maimonides doesn't even use the usual "may his name be blotted out" as he would when talking about an enemy of Israel, but instead uses "may his bones be ground to dust" after citing Jesus by name.

There are relatively sympathetic views among those whose views are negative too, for the record; for example, there's a story of a Rabbi, Yehoshua ben Prachya, who was said to have been incredibly cruel to a student, and by the time he chose to relent that student had already gone off to form his own idolatrous sect. Struck by the consequences of his harshness, he would go on to emphasize the importance of kindness and giving people the benefit of the doubt. Though the timeline doesn't match up (Yehoshua lived two hundred years before Him), some commentators identified this student as Yeshu the Nazarene.

But, let's actually answer your question. You will find a spectrum of relatively positive views. Bob Dylan technically falls outside the parameters I listed above because he does seem to believe Jesus is the Messiah, but I'll use him as the extreme example, because he continued to be active in his Orthodox Jewish community after his conversion. You also have Leonard Cohen, whose Jewishness was very important to him, who could at least understand the importance of the mystical connection to Jesus that Christians claimed as their own — "the figure of Jesus, nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering."

You have some scholars, like Amy-Jill Levine; in the work she did in The Misunderstood Jew, The Historical Jesus in Context, and The Jewish Annotated New Testament, she tries to emphasize the idea that the Person of Jesus is something that can bring Christians and Jews into closer ecumenical dialogue; that if Christians could get more comfortable with the Jewish context of Jesus, and if the Jewish community could see the New Testament as a corpus of texts that isn't non-Jewish, but rather a particular type of first century Jewish, then there could be ground for both groups to better understand each other.

During the early modern period, there were attempts by some Jewish thinkers to reclaim Jesus. Rabbi Jacob Emden argued that Jesus never meant to abolish the Law, and that He has actually "done a double kindness in the world" by increasing veneration of the Torah and bringing light to the Gentiles, if only the Gentiles could learn how to properly interpret their own Scriptures (talk about flipping the script!). Moses Mendelssohn also claimed that Jesus never meant to abrogate the Law, and suggested that Jesus and the early Christian community could be models that modern 19th century Jews living among oppressive Prussian authorities could emulate.

The above paragraph was about Jewish individuals who tried to distance Jesus from traditional Christian understandings of Him. So I'm going to end, I think, with Rabbi Jacob Neusner, who engaged the Gospel on its own terms. In 1993, he published A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. In this book, Rabbi Neusner imagines himself as a first century Jewish man and tries to earnestly listen to and consider the words of Jesus as depicted in the Gospel of Matthew. This work places the words of Jesus in conversation with the Rabbinic tradition, and ultimately ends with Neusner being unconvinced and unable to follow Jesus as His disciple. Pope Benedict lauded this work as an authentic exercise in interreligious dialogue, and cites it frequently in his own Jesus of Nazareth.

[theglasschild]

– Baal Shem Tov

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"Let me fall if I must. The one I will become will catch me."

~ Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism

[Ian Sanders]

[girlactionfigure]

joanofjudea

[eyeoftheheart]

“From every human being there rises a light that reaches straight to heaven. And when two souls that are destined to be together find each other, their streams of light flow together, and a single brighter light goes forth from their united being.”

~ Baal Shem Tov

The Golden Mountain by Meyer Levin [1932]

[apocrypals]

Halloween isn’t over until we say it’s over

[mydawns]

[santmat]

"Whenever feeling downcast, each person should vitally remember, 'For my sake, the entire world was created.'" (Baal Shem Tov) "For whose sake heaven and earth came into being…" A universal saying turning up East & West explored during this 10-Minute Podcast

[entheognosis]

Let me fall if I must fall. The one I am becoming will catch me.

Baal Shem Tov

[brother-hermes]

Tikkun Olam & Conflict

Schwer zu sein a Yid… It’s true. To be Jewish bears a responsibility to live a Jewish life. It is one of prayer, meditation, Keeping kosher and fasting relentlessly. Silently wrestling with Hashem while striving to be better today than we were Yesterday…. Otherwise we’d have no need of tomorrow. Which is great when we can forget the struggle of Jewishness and every misplaced bit of anger…

[ellisdee161]

TS6

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Lights Of Kabbalah

The Baal Shem Tov teaches that at the moment right before a person is given a test from the Heavens, one loses all of their previous knowledge and enters a state of Katnus Hamochin, a “small mindedness” - facing the test with only our basic instincts. Meaning it’s not when we know what to do that we get tested, but exactly at the time where we feel we’ve lost everything we once knew. That is how The Most High can really see if we’ve grown.

[alive on all channels]

[wellconstructedsentences]

Let me fall if I must fall. The one I will become will catch me.

Baal Shem Tov