 One of the basic differences between Judaism and Christianity centers on the issue of atonement from sin. How do we get forgiven for our sins? Christianity insists that the only way for human beings to be forgiven for their sins is by believing that Jesus' blood was shed as a sacrifice on our behalf. And if you believe in the atoning death of Jesus, your sins can be forgiven. Otherwise, you face an eternity in hell. That's basically the bottom line of Christianity. In Judaism, there's a very, very different response to this problem. In Judaism, the response to the question of sin is basically called repentance. Repentance means that a person acknowledges they did something wrong. They regret they did something wrong. They confess to God verbally what they did. They have to articulate that I acknowledge that I did X, Y, and Z wrong. They pray for forgiveness. They resolve never to repeat the mistake in the future, or if they sinned by not doing something, they resolve to actually now do it. For example, if they sinned by not honoring their parents properly, now they have to resolve to properly honor their parents. And if it's a situation where they can make restitution for something they did that was wrong, so if they stole your bicycle, they have to return your bicycle or pay you for it. They have to make up for the damage that they caused if that's relevant. And in Jewish thought, that is the path to forgiveness. So again, in Christianity, forgiveness comes by believing that Jesus died for your sins. In Judaism, forgiveness comes through the process of repentance. Now, the problem that Christianity has in this regard is that the Bible speaks many, many times, many times directly and clearly about the topic of atonement from sin. This is not a question that is unresolved in the Bible. The Bible speaks about this numerous times, and it's not in a way which is fuzzy or unclear. The Bible speaks about it very clearly, very directly, very consistently throughout the Bible. And what the Torah says in all of these places is that the path to forgiveness is through repentance. That's what the Torah says, plain as day. And the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, never, not even once, speaks about the need to believe in the death of the Messiah as an atonement for your sins. This is the big problem that Christianity faces. Their big problem is that their central belief is simply not in the Bible. And it not only is not in the Bible, it actually is contradicted by the Bible. Because the Bible says many, many times that one person, a person that's innocent does not die for the one that's guilty. There's a consistent teaching in the Bible against the idea of vicarious atonement. The Bible also speaks many times about the wickedness and the evil of human sacrifice. So the idea that the Bible on the one hand is going to say dozens of times that human sacrifice is an abomination. And then on the other hand, for God to specifically violate that by having Jesus sent to die for the sins of the world as a human sacrifice is just irreconcilable. And there are many other difficulties. But the one I wanted to focus on simply is that the Hebrew Bible gives us clear testimony, many times that the path to forgiveness is through repentance. And the Hebrew Bible never gives you the Christian approach, the Christian formula, which is by believing in the death of the Messiah. So what is a Christian to do? So one of the things that's done is that to support their theology, which is not supported by the scriptures, by the Bible, Christians scoured through the entire Talmud and the entire corpus of rabbinic literature to try to find some support for their theology. And to be able to say that there is a rock solid foundation for their belief that forgiveness for sins comes through believing in the death of the Messiah. That was very important for them. What they found was that in several places, in rabbinic literature, there is a reference to the idea that the death of a righteous person can serve as an atonement. There is such an idea in rabbinic literature, that the death of a righteous person is able to serve as an atonement. And based upon this teaching, these Christian apologists say, look, don't accuse us of inventing something that's outside of Jewish thought. It's right there in your Talmud. So what I want to do for the next few minutes is to consider this claim and to see if it's really able to support the Christian theology. Is this teaching from the rabbis really a rock solid support for Christian theology? So one thing I want to say basically almost as an aside to introduce the discussion, it's not really germane to what I wanted to share, is that this idea obviously presupposes from a Christian perspective that Jesus was righteous. Meaning that in order for them to usefully use this teaching in the Talmud, they have to be able to say with some certainty, well, that Jesus would qualify. Jesus is righteous, and that's why his death can serve as an atonement. The question is, well, how do we know? What is the evidence that Jesus was a righteous person? Now, the truth is that there is no evidence either way. Meaning that I don't think personally we have strong evidence either way about Jesus. Although if you accept the idea that the Talmud does speak about Jesus, we actually have done a video on this topic, we see numerous references in the Talmud to someone with a name in Hebrew that sounds a bit like Jesus. Yeshu or Yeshu Hanotzri. There are many scholars who believe that these references are not about the Jesus of Christianity. It actually was a common name 2,000 years ago. Many of these references are about someone who lived approximately 160 years before Jesus or 100 years after Jesus. But if you accept these Talmudic stories as about Jesus, then Jesus would clearly not be a righteous person, because the stories in the Talmud speak about him as a wicked person. So if you take the position which I personally take, that these stories in the Talmud are not clearly about Jesus, so I would say we don't really have any clear information either way if he is righteous or not righteous. It would basically just be an assertion of the Christian that he was righteous and that as a righteous person he fits into this teaching that the death of the righteous serve as an atonement. So if we're starting from the point where we don't have any evidence that Jesus was righteous, then this teaching in the Talmud really does not help the Christian case. But let's just think a little bit deeply into this question. What is the verdict we would have on the historical movement that we call Christianity? We've had a movement for the last 2,000 years approximately that we call Christianity. And what is it's, how do we grade them? How have they done historically? Have they been a wonderful success? Or would we say, at least as Jews, that our experience of Christendom has been anything but stellar? Meaning that we have experienced essentially, except for the rare exception of some Christians living today, but more or less for almost 2,000 years our experience of Christianity has been a disaster. It's been 2,000 years of hatred and persecution to the death. Now the Christian Bible says that a good tree does not produce bad fruit. So how is it passable if Jesus was really such a righteous person that you'd have emerging out of him was such a disastrous movement? I'm not even speaking about the plundering of most of the world by Christianity over the past 2,000. I'm just speaking about our national experience. It has not been a positive experience. So is it possible that someone who was truly righteous, God would allow such a disaster to emerge out of him? It's hard to really believe. I don't think this settles the question. I'm just raising it as something to think about. What is the evidence that Jesus was truly a Tzadik, a righteous person? He may or may not have been, but I don't see the evidence and the proof strongly pointing that he was. Now the more germane questions. Christianity believes, and I want to show you now how this teaching that the rabbis have of the death of the righteous can be an atonement, it doesn't really help the Christian cause. Number one, Christianity believes that the only way, the only way, the exclusive way to be forgiven for our sins is through the death of Jesus. There's no other way that we can be reconciled to God. The Jewish concept of the death of the righteous atones never says this. Our rabbinic concept never says that the only way to be forgiven by God is if a righteous person dies. The Talmud just says this can serve as an atonement. It's not the atonement exclusive. So the Jewish concept simply does not support what Christians actually believe. They believe that there's only one possible way to be forgiven for your sins and it's through the belief in the death of the Messiah, the idea that the death of the righteous can serve as an atonement does not support that exclusive idea. Number two, the Jewish concept of Misa Tzadik Mechaper, that the death of the righteous can serve as an atonement is not about one particular righteous person in the history of the world. The Jewish concept can be about any righteous person and there have been many over history. There have been many righteous people and so our concept is not exclusively about only one person in the history of mankind. Now what Christians might say, what they might say in response is that Jesus is different than all the other potential righteous people that have ever existed. How is he different? Because Christians will insist that Jesus was the only one that was totally sinless. They will say that maybe great righteous people lived but they had sins. But Jesus they will say was different and unique because he was totally sinless. The problem is that this claim is refuted by the Bible. The Bible says, the Torah says in the book of Coelest Ecclesiastes chapter 7 verse 20 and in the book of Eove Job chapter 15 verse 14 and again in the book of Eove the book of Job chapter 25 verse 4 that any human being born to a mother, born to a woman sins. There is no such thing the Bible says as a person that's born of a woman who does not sin. It just doesn't exist and it's not just a belief or a theory. The Bible teaches it very very clearly. So just to make the claim that Jesus is sinless is just that it's an assertion, it's a claim. Again there's no evidence for it and the Bible contradicts it very clearly. The next idea, the Jewish concept of the death of the righteous atones does not require that we believe in the righteous person. It doesn't even require that we are aware that a righteous person died for us. We could be living here today in Toronto and there could be some righteous person in Israel that died recently and we don't even know who it is. And the Talmud is saying that the death of that righteous person can serve as an atonement for our sins. We don't have to believe in it. We don't have to know the person. We don't have to be aware of their suffering or who they are and it works. Whereas in Christianity it only works if you believe in Jesus. So again what I'm trying to share with you is that we do have a Jewish concept but in terms of Christianity is growing your shelter. It doesn't help them. It's not congruent as we say in mathematics. The two concepts do not go hand in glove. So they would like to desperately grab on to this idea in the Talmud in order to say, look we have support but they don't have support because our concept really has nothing to do with their beliefs. Next idea, when Judaism speaks about Misa sadaq mechaper that the death of the righteous can serve as an atonement for sin. The rabbis are not teaching this as a directive for our lives. It's not teaching us anything about how we are supposed to live. It's a statement about how God runs the world. That in God's benevolent providence, the way he runs the world, God takes into consideration the death of the righteous when he judges individuals or the nation. It's a teaching not about how we're supposed to live. It's a teaching about how God runs the world. But what Christianity did was to totally take this concept and stand it on its head and transform it into not just a teaching about how we're supposed to live. They transformed it into the most pressing responsibility for a human being to have. Meaning that in Christian terms, unless you believe in Jesus you will burn in hell forever. And so Christianity tries to take this idea of the death of the righteous atons and make it into something which it's not. It's not teaching us anything about what we're supposed to do. And in Christianity the death of their righteous Messiah they believe is all about our responsibility to accept him and to believe in him. Again, this is a distortion and a perversion of the rabbinic concept. Another idea, the way a sacrifice worked in the Bible was not as a magical event that cleared you of your sins. As a matter of fact, the Bible teaches very clearly that the sacrifice of a wicked person is an abomination to God. One of the major teachings of the Bible is that if you think that you could bring a sacrifice and they'll do whatever you want, to God that's disgusting. That's horrible. So the sacrifice in and of itself didn't affect forgiveness. It didn't work like that. One of the things that the sacrifice was supposed to do was to be a catalyst to inspire you to change. The sacrifice was really more of a pedagogical experience where you had to bring an animal of your own. That's why it was called a sacrifice. You had to give something up. By the way, as opposed to Jesus where you're not giving up anything. The sacrifice, it's called a sacrifice because you were sacrificing something. You take an animal which is valuable to you and you had to bring it to the temple in Jerusalem and you had to place your hands on the animal's head. On some level there was almost an identification where the person has to see an experience that you know what, maybe I deserve to go through a death like the animal is going to go through. Meaning that the sacrifice was a way of impressing and impacting the person to be a catalyst for them to change. And so many of the commentaries, when they discuss how does this work? The death of the righteous atones. So the Talmud teaches that anyone who cries, sheds tears over the death of a kosher person, all their sins are forgiven. Why is that? Why is it that if we cry over the death of a righteous person, our sins are forgiven? It doesn't work automatically. But here we have a little bit of a clarification. It's not just the death of the righteous. The Talmud says if you cry about this. Meaning that if we see a righteous person and we see the tragedy of their death, because now we see a great spiritual light has gone from the world, that makes our world a much poorer place to live. And so if we cry, we're expressing a recognition that I am much poorer now because we don't have this person in our midst. And what the rabbis teach is that the death of the righteous can serve as an atonement if you cry. And that crying is part of the repentance process. Meaning that you look at the righteous person and maybe you say to yourself, well, how do I compare to that person? Am I on their level? And maybe it just shakes us up to get us to change. So again, the idea does not work magically by someone dying and your sins are forgiven. There's a process and it's not magic. One last idea that when we go through the rabbinic sources, we will see that some of their teachings are not referring to the atonement of an individual, that an individual has their sins forgiven. But what it's referring to is the nation as a whole, the nation. And when it speaks about atonement, what it speaks about is not that all their sins are forgiven. What it speaks about is that any punishment that may be coming in the way of the nation, that sometimes the people as a nation, as a corporate entity, we might be deserving of God's punishment. And if we go through the death of a righteous person and acknowledge the tragedy, it could be that the punishment that we are deserving might be on some degree ameliorated and maybe it will be lessened. So it's not necessarily even a teaching about having your sins forgiven. But it serves an atonement in the sense that maybe some of the punishment that's coming our way will be done away with because we experienced that punishment in the tragedy of the death of the righteous person.