GUEST AUTHOR
The People of the Book are the People of the
Storytelling in Contemporary Jewish Ministry BY WILLIAM BJORAKER, PHD
Traditional and Orthodox Jews passionately celebrate the gift of God’s Word. To witness the exuberant dancing and singing while carrying the adorned Torah Scroll at the Western Wall in Jerusalem shames the paltry expression of devotion to the Word that characterizes most of us late moderns. Yet it is clear that the Word of God is in
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three forms: 1) The Living Word (the Memra in Hebrew; or Logos in Greek), 2) The Written Word (the final authority and judge for all faith and life), and 3) The Oralized Word (Scripture brought to life through human communicators). This article will highlight the vital role of the Oralized Word, and especially for our moment in history, and in Jewish min- istry.
The Jewish Roots of Orality and Storytelling
The Hebraic roots of storytelling pre-date the Written Torah by many centuries.
The
great stories of Adam and Eve, of Cain and Abel, of Noah and his family, of the Tower of Babel, the stories of the families of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph were transmitted oral- ly over generations by good storytellers before ever they were written in the Torah. Moses taught the people of Israel that
when they came into the Land promised to them, they were to bring the first fruits (a tithe) of their produce in a basket to the place God designated. They were to offer it to the priest,
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t the conclusion of the Fall Feasts, the Jewish High Holy Days, is the feast of Simchat Torah (“Rejoicing in the Law”).
who would set it before the altar. But then this striking practice is commanded,
“And you shall make response before the Lord your God, and say, ‘A wan- dering Aramean was my father. And he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor. Then we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders. And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” —Deuteronomy 26:5-9 ESV
Note from the bolding above that this was an oral act and a community event. The people are commanded to annually
recite, to tell the story of father Abraham, of his family’s decent into Egypt and then of the great deliverance that forged the Israelite peo- plehood. Thus, to the present time, each year at
Passover the Jewish people are commanded to tell their children the story of the nation’s founding, of God’s awesome deliverance from Egypt. “And you shall tell your son on that day…” (Exodus 13:8). The Hebrew verb is “hi
Story
gadd ata” —to tell. Hence the Passover event and the “Haggadah” is the oral “telling” and annual retelling of the story that establishes and reinforces the Jewish people’s identity. Each Jewish holiday provides another oppor- tunity to tell of God’s acts toward the people. Prior to the invention of movable type printing (Gutenberg, 1437), books were rare and expensive; readers were rare. Reading was an oral act and a community event. People did not read to themselves. They listened as someone read aloud. (See Deuteronomy 31:9- 13; Nehemiah 9:3, 1 Timothy 4:13). Printing presses changed all that. As
Eugene Peterson observed, “A thoroughgoing orality in which the word held people in a lis- tening community gave way to discrete indi- viduals silently reading books alone. Wide- spread literacy ‘changed the act of reading from an oral-aural community event into a silent-passive visual exercise’” (William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids: 1987:91). Though holistic, the Hebraic tradition
involves the hearing ear more than the distanc- ing eye. Biblically, we see God always speaking personally to His people, not writing to them. The Shema reads, “Hear, O Israel…” not “Read, O Israel….” Rarely in Scripture do God or Jesus write anything: The Ten Command- ments, the handwriting on the wall in Daniel, and Jesus writing in the sand in front of the woman caught in adultery.
Yet the phrase,
“Thus says the LORD” is repeated over 400 times. When the apostle John sent the letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor, he instructed, “Blessed is he who reads aloud the
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