In 2011, Fr. José Ángel Castillo, SS.CC. was appointed to be the spiritual director of the Redemptoris Mater Seminary in Galilee--part of the Neos' Domus Galilaeae complex. Fr. Castillo is also part of the founding team of catechists that established the Way in Nicaragua and, according to Crux Sancta, is among Kiko's "Seventy-Two." This basically means that he is a person of no small importance or influence within the Way.
Upon assuming this new job, he took it upon himself to write a short blog for his religious community back in Spain (the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, not the Way), detailing his impressions of his first week in the Holy Land. Gloria from Crux Sancta also happened to notice this blog, and took it upon herself to offer some commentary on it. We now offer this translation of Fr. Castillo's reflections, along with Gloria's--and a little of our own--commentary (in italics and brackets, respectively).
I have finished my first week in the Galilee Redemptoris Mater Seminary. Founded by the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem (Israel, Palestine, and Jordan) in communion with the Byzantine and Maronite Catholic archbishops of Galilee. The first three seminarians will finish their theology in June 2012. My arrival has coincided with the celebration of Sukkot (the feast of booths). There are three festivals of joy: Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (the feast of weeks), and Sukkot. Sukkot makes present the journey of the people in the desert, living precariously in tents, pilgrims and foreigners without a home.
The pious Jew, year after year, must live as in the desert, abandoning a stable house for an unstable hut with a flimsy roof through which the stars can be seen shining. This should awaken in him the feeling of how fleeting earthly things are, and thus strengthen his trust and faith in God, who accompanied him through the desert in the Tent, in a tabernacle. You can read about Sukkout in Leviticus 23:42-43.
Curious. According to the author there are three festivals of joy... but he "forgets" to say that he is referring to another religion--one that, by the way, does not recognize Jesus as God or as the Son of God. In Christianity, the first festival of joy is Christmas.
Neither does one need a vast array of knowledge to know that Sukkot is a festival that Jesus himself considered surpassed, and that is how it is related in the Gospels, especially in John. So instead of two verses from Leviticus, I advise reading this document (starting at point 5), which explains it in fairly simple language. [Both this article and this one are also good.]
Last Sunday the 16th we went with all the seminarians to Safed, the fourth holy city after Jerusalem, Hebron (Tomb of the Patriarchs), and Tiberias (tomb of the Spaniard Maimonides). [Safed is] famous because great Sephardic rabbis from Spain, as well as from the center of the Kabbalah lived there. You can see the different tents and shacks around the city, some better made, some worse, some on the sidewalks... We were in a small, poor synagogue with a rabbi and his wife and 7 children. They were explaining the party to us and singing in Hebrew... He's a well-known rabbi who's been to our seminary.
What would a rabbi be doing in an allegedly Catholic seminary? Could it be that in that seminary, he discovered that Christianity was not his thing and he became a rabbi?
[Likely these questions of Gloria's are just being facetious. Rabbis are often the honored guests of RMS. But still... Also, how delightful that this Neocat bigwig brags about being in a city that, by his own admission, is holy because it was home to the Kabbalah movement.]
And on Wednesday the 19th in the late afternoon we returned to Safed. It was the eighth day, the day that Simchat Torah (The Joy of the Torah) is celebrated, a great celebration to close Sukkot.
The reading of the Torah (Pentateuch) ends each year on this final day of the festival with the last chapters of Deuteronomy, and immediately Genesis (Bereshit: In the beginning) is also read. The Torah has neither beginning nor end, as Psalm 119:96 says: "I have seen that everything has a limit, but your law (torah, commandment) subsists forever."
Don't miss the tradition of deforming quotes to make it seem like they say what is convenient for the author! Because the reality is that Psalm 119:96 has no reference to the Torah, neither with parenthesis or without them. [The word used for "commandment" in this passage in the Hebrew Bible is not תּוֹרָה (Torah), but מִצְוָה (mitzvah). Mitzvahs (technically "mitzvot") are the "commands" or duties that God obliged the Jewish people to fulfill--the Torah, or Pentateuch, contains 613 such mitzvot. More generally, God praises Abraham for keeping his commandments (mitzvot), and clearly one of the Torah's earliest protagonists had no Torah of his own to work from.] Furthermore, the Torah - like Sukkot - is superseded by the New Covenant.
We visited three synagogues of different origins and tendencies, from Sephardic to Ashkenazi. There are many in Safed, almost always small. The men are the ones who celebrate and the women have a separate place. That day, they dance carrying the Torah in their arms--several copies, and some smaller ones for the children, who also sing and dance--for more than two hours. Since you can enter freely, and we were wearing black pants, white shirts, and a kippah (the little cap on the head, or skullcap, which only the bishop wears among us, but in Israel even the children wear it), we got into the group, circling around the the "ambo," which is in the center of the synagogue.
That is, they disguised themselves and pretended to be what they are not... Or are they?
[I also just love his snide little aside about the skullcaps, like he's disappointed in our uppity gate-keeping bishops for keeping to themselves something that even little Jewish children wear! Never mind that, while similar in appearance, the Catholic zucchetto and the Jewish kippah, or yamulke, are entirely different garments with very little (if any) shared religious significance.]
The Torah for Israel is like the "wife" - he hugs her, kisses her, dances with her... The Jewish holidays always leave a Christian dissatisfied, as if something were missing. That's right, the Messiah is missing, Jesus. St. John says: "the Word (Torah) became flesh and placed his dwelling (sukkot) among us."
No, Saint John, who has clear ideas, does not reduce the Word to something outdated like the Torah, nor does he restrict God to a little party that, originally, comes from paganism and celebrated harvesting.
[I would add that the Torah is still Sacred Scripture and is not as such "outdated." The Old Covenant, in which the Torah played a central role, is outdated, but the Scriptures themselves never will be. As to Sukkout's pagan origins, certainly, there are statements out there about that, but then, there are (entirely wrong) statements about the pagan origins of Christmas out there, too. So who knows? However, it is absolutely correct to say that John has a much wider focus when he says that the Logos, the Divine and Immutable Word of God, became flesh. Logos is hardly on par with Pentateuch (the Greek word for Torah)--though it certainly includes it.
Fr. Castillo, though, is not entirely wrong when he uses sukkot (in English, "booth," "tent," or "tabernacle") to refer to "dwelling" in his reference to John 1:14. John's verb, dwelt, is "eskēnōsen," which literally means "tabernacled." The same Greek root word appears in the Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) in the context of God dwelling with his people (in a tent or tabernacle) in the desert, so contemporary Jewish readers would certainly have been familiar with it. As Christians, however, we don't associate that word with desert wanderings or a Jewish festival. John tells us that the God who once dwelt in the tabernacle in the wilderness and in the Jerusalem Temple now dwells in the flesh of Jesus, the Logos. And as we see later in John's Gospel, the Body of Christ overrides any allegiance to tent (Sukkot) or Temple. The tabernacles in every Catholic church around the world do indeed still contain God's presence with us--precisely in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist.]
Celebrating this feast, chapters 7, 8, and 9 of St. John gain new light. At Sukkot he [Jesus] had to manifest himself (Jn 7:10-13, 25-30). It is the festival of water--which rose from the pool of Siloam (which means Sent) and spilled abundantly through the temple (Jn 7:37-39; 9:1-7)--to ask for rain to sow after having collected the grapes and olives (it rains little in Israel. Rain is expected in November). On Sukkot, there are always seven special guests who must be in every Jew's tent: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, and David.
Moses was given the two tablets of the Torah "written by the finger of God" (Ex 31:18). Jesus, like the new Moses, appears in front of the adulterous woman, writing "with his finger on the ground" (Jn 8:1-11). Abraham is the father (Jn 8:33, 39). But Jesus presents himself at this feast as someone greater than Abraham (Jn 8:53) since he says: "your father Abraham rejoiced thinking to see my day; he saw it and was glad." This insistence on Abraham's joy is surprising: "he rejoiced," "he was glad."
There is only one precept for this eighth day festival of Simchat Torah, Joy of the Torah: be happy. It is forbidden to be sad. While they sing and dance, they drink wine and eat sweets, to the delight of the children who have a great time and for this reason want to go to the synagogue.
There is an echo of this joy in the letter of St. Paul to the Philippians: "Rejoice always in the Lord; I repeat to you, rejoice" (Phil 4:4). On this day, one thing that the Jews continually repeat is this: Be happy, be happy...
The Jews still haven't found out; that's why it's not to set an example. Saint Paul--who is not about drinking a lot, nor eating sweets, nor dancing with the Torah in his arms--knows that only in the Lord can one be happy. But some people have not found out.
[This guy is brilliant with his subversive throw-away remarks. Why do the children want to go to synagogue? Obviously, because of all the singing and dancing and partying that goes on there! Subtext: You got that Catholic Church? More singing, more dancing, more partying at Mass--just like the Jews, exactly how we in the Way do it. That's how you bring the kids back! That's how you evangelize!]
And on Friday the 21st we celebrated the first Eucharist of this course in the seminary in the Greek-Catholic or Byzantine or Melkite rite, which are the majority of Christians in Galilee. It comes from St. John Chrysostom, no less. Very solemn, colorful ornaments, endless bowing, blessings, you constantly cross yourself, fat bread, not unleavened and perfumed...
And it stays so fresh! A "seminary" that uses fat bread, not unleavened and perfumed, to make it richer...
[Here I have to disagree with Gloria's take. While she's rightly cynical of the Neos' typical history of using leavened bread for their Eucharists, leavened bread (called "antidoron" in Eastern Christianity) is entirely legitimate in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. I actually get a good chuckle imagining Neocats at a Melkite Divine Liturgy...they were probably squirming to no end with all the "natural religiosity", familiar leavened bread or not!]
With such examples [as Fr. Castillo], I do not want to imagine the state of the ordained.
[Too true. If you told me, "here's an article about a Catholic priest in his first week as a spiritual director for seminarians," the last thing I would expect is a detailed description of all the Jewish parties he went to and all the reverence he felt towards the hometowns of Spanish rabbis. And this isn't just any Catholic priest--he's a highly-ranked, highly-respected Neocat. His words are not those of a lone rogue; instead, they are likely revered and echoed up and down the hierarchy. Chag Sameach, everybody!]
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