I’m writing this post ahead of time. Go figure. I’m writing this while having been studying for a Bible study lesson I will have taught by the time you read this. The thing I’m covering, as the title of this post suggests, involves rabbis. Without going into the hefty religious connotations of Christ being a rabbi, I want to give you some quick summary information and then ask you a question or three. Even if you’re not a Christian, this post has some relevance, so stick with me.
What’s a rabbi? Here is a short bit of text I wrote for my handout (it is by no means thorough):
Rabbis would have been teachers of the Old Testament, but primarily the Law or Pentateuch. Typically a student would approach a rabbi and ask if he may follow the rabbi, if the rabbi rejected him, he would then go off to a trade. The student of the rabbi was called a talmidim. If you’ve ever heard of the talmud, it is the a Judaic book that outlines traditional rabbinical teachings. Christ operated contrary to this and sought out His disciples and told them to follow Him. Furthermore the disciples were at least in part already involved in trades – so they would have to walk away from their careers and lives as they had expected them to be and instead joined themselves to Christ.
A rabbi was expected to have a physically following disciple or disciples, and Elijah and Elisha were an important example of this concept in the Old Testament [I Kings 19:19-21]. Time was to be spent together and a lifestyle that represented the teacher was to be lived in front of the following disciple. Discipleship meant being seen with the rabbi so that others would begin to see what the rabbi taught as see the fruit of the teachings worked out in the lives of the disciples.
What I have been thinking about is this question: Who are today’s rabbis? Who do people follow and identify themselves with? Historically it was a life devoted to a teacher and their teachings. In modern first world America, do we have time for this rabbi/disciple concept? Today we follow people on twitter, television, the Internet, and of course in our cars to the store, but do we really follow teachers and devote ourselves to their teachings?
Are rabbis Richard Dawkins, Rush Limbaugh, or Barry Obama? Of those three one is anti-religion but religious about his anti-religion, one is a right-wing-loud mouth, and one is a president with big words and many promises but single handedly incapable of delivering on what he wants to promise. Do we follow them? I personally wouldn’t follow them. I wouldn’t follow Oral Roberts, Bill Gates, or Joel Osteen.
Who is your rabbi?
