Destined4Torah

Dr. Sanjay Prajapati

Speaker | Author | Helping Christians understand Jesus in His Jewish roots | Book me to speak | Get my books ⬇ https://linktr.ee/destined4torah

  1. Aug 27

    The King is in the Field

    Elul is the last month before the King sits down to judge, which sounds like the worst possible time to want to be near Him. Jewish tradition insists on the opposite. Its very names, the way its shofar is sounded every morning, the psalm assigned to it, and a famous parable from the Alter Rebbe all teach the same thing from different angles: for these thirty days, the King is not behind a palace gate. He is out in the open field, and anyone who wants to reach Him only has to walk toward Him. This teaching traces Elul's four Hebrew letters through four different verses, including the acrostic behind "Ani LeDodi VeDodi Li, I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine" (Song of Solomon 6:3), and follows the Alter Rebbe's 1797 parable of a king who leaves his palace to walk the fields outside the city, where anyone can approach him exactly as they are, unwashed and unprepared. The Gospels tell almost the same story, except the king doesn't wait to be approached. He runs down the road first (Luke 15:20). Along the way: why the shofar sounds every weekday morning from the second of Elul on, what Psalm 27 has to do with holding both confidence and fear in the same breath, an old parable about a man who mutilates himself to fit a suit that was cut wrong to begin with, why shame never opens what warmth can, and how Joseph's two years in an Egyptian prison, David's two tests with a sleeping Saul, and a woman left alone with Yeshua in John 8 all point to the same door: a clean slate that isn't earned gradually, but is already standing open. Drawing on the Talmud, the Alter Rebbe's teaching, the Rambam, and Scripture itself, this is Elul as the sages actually understood it: not a countdown to judgment, but the one month of the year when nearness costs nothing at all.

  2. Aug 27

    The King, The Book, and the Trumpet

    The Mishnah records that the Sages built the entire Rosh Hashanah liturgy around three sections: Malchuyot (Kingship), Zichronot (Remembrance), and Shofarot (Shofar Blasts), recited in the Musaf Amidah on the day itself. A King. A book. A trumpet. Centuries before that Mishnah was written, and centuries after, those same three elements open the strangest book in the New Testament, when John describes being caught up "in the Spirit on the Lord's day" and hearing "a great voice, as of a trumpet," commanding him to write in a book (Revelation 1:10-11). This teaching walks straight through the Sages' own outline for Rosh Hashanah and lets Revelation answer back at every step. Malchuyot crowns a King who is already reigning, the same King the twenty-four elders thank rather than petition in Revelation 11. Zichronot opens a book of remembrance where Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, and a forgotten prisoner named Joseph are all found, and where Yeshua tells two struggling churches to "remember therefore" in almost the Talmud's own words. Shofarot traces four meanings folded into a single ram's horn: the ram that stood in for Isaac at Moriah, the voice that thundered at Sinai, the trumpet that will one day gather the exiles home, and the "last trump" Paul says will raise the dead. Along the way: why the shofar is shaped like a birth canal, what Adam's first day says about the day you were formed, why a coronation can also be a celebration, and what thirteen ancient attributes of mercy, still recited every year during the Ten Days of Awe, have to do with the name of Yeshua. Drawing on the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Rosh Hashanah machzor, and Scripture itself, this is Rosh Hashanah as the Sages actually built it: a King, a Book, and a Trumpet, still speaking to each other across two thousand years.

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
5 Ratings

About

Speaker | Author | Helping Christians understand Jesus in His Jewish roots | Book me to speak | Get my books ⬇ https://linktr.ee/destined4torah