A woman I will call Naomi found my site through Substack a while back. She is Jewish. She came to faith in Yeshua as an adult, and she has spent every year since trying to witness to Christians who do not quite have the ears for what she is carrying. She has been patient. She has been careful. She has translated herself a thousand times for people who never quite hear her back.
Yesterday, after reading “The Gospel”, she sent me a text.
“Okay,” she wrote. “I’m not understanding this tie to Genesis 15.”
That is not the kind of sentence a confused reader sends. That is the kind of sentence a person sends when they have been carrying a heavy bag for a long time and they want to check whether the bag you are carrying is the same one.
The Tie
Still, I owe you the tie, because Naomi asked for it, and this piece is her conversation, not mine.
YHWH cut covenant with Abram in Genesis 15 the ordinary ancient Near Eastern way. Split the animals. Both parties walk between the halves. The walk is the oath. What happened to these animals, let it happen to me if I break this.
But Abram never walked. He went under a deep sleep, a tardemah, and only YHWH passed between the halves, alone, in the form of a smoking firepot and a torch of fire. He took both sides of the oath. On Himself. For both of them.
That is the tie. It is not a doctrine. It is a single seam in the garment. Abram was asleep, and YHWH absorbed the whole clause. Whatever came later, whatever got broken, the death the covenant owed was already owed by one walker, because only one walker had ever sworn.
I typed that out to Naomi in a handful of sentences. I did not teach her anything. She has known Genesis for longer than I have known I was supposed to love it. What I did was speak her own covenant language back to her in a register that did not make her translate herself first.
That was when she got emotional. It hit her deep.
Why This Kind of Thing Makes It Come to Life
I want to say this plain, because I did not understand it until it hit her.
Naomi was not getting emotional because she finally understood the gospel. Naomi understands the gospel. Naomi has been trying to explain the gospel, in covenant terms, to Christians who keep handing her back a transaction, for years.
It hit her because for a moment she was not the translator.
I have been doing this long enough now to know that the writing I am doing on this site is not for the person who has never heard. It is for the person who has been trying to say something and has not been heard back. One small seam pulled is not a teaching moment. It is a recognition moment. And a woman who has been holding up a whole garment by herself for a long time will feel something give when someone finally names the seam she has been pinching the whole time.
I think this is what b’chavruta actually is, when it works. Not two students learning together. Two people who already know, finally meeting in the same grammar.
There is a version of this story I could have written where I am the teacher and Naomi is the student and the moment is the payoff. That version would be a lie. The truth is the other way around. Naomi has been witnessing to Christians her entire adult life. I did not draw out the thread for her. I happened to have the same thread in my hand on the same afternoon.
Naomi, if you read this, you already know which paragraph is yours. You have been carrying this for a long time. Thank you for handing it to me for a minute, so I could hand it back to you.
Selah
Is there a friend in your life who has been trying to tell you something for years, in language you were not quite tuned to?
Have you stopped listening before they finished, or offered them an answer that did not use their grammar?
What would it cost you, this week, to let someone hand you what they have been carrying, and to hand it back in the shape they gave it?
Shalom v’shalvah, your brother in the Way,
Sergio
