Minding My Own Business – Nehemia Gordon (Open Door Series – Part 9)

Minding My Own Business – Nehemia Gordon (Open Door Series – Part 9)

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Nehemia: A little over 10 years ago, I was sitting up in the ivory tower, quite literally the ivory tower, at the Hebrew University. And they talk about the ivory towers of the university. We actually have an ivory tower at Hebrew U, and they even have the symbol of the ivory tower on the ivory tower. That’s how pompous they are at Hebrew U.

I was sitting there, minding my own business, and I was on an academic track. My plan in life was to finish my master’s degree and then go on and do a Doctorate in Biblical Studies. And the last thing I expected is that I would be standing here in front of a group of Christians and Messianics, and having little children come up and recite a Hebrew version of the Lord’s Prayer. I never expected that, never planned on that. That was beneath me. That was for the masses. I was going to be a professor. I wasn’t going to deal with simple people. [laughter]

And something happened. The God of the universe, I believe, had different plans than what I had. One day, I’m minding my own business there, and I get a call asking me to come and meet some minister from America who was a chaplain for the Vikings, or something like that, something to do with football players. I didn’t really care about that. As I was studying for my master’s degree, I had a little side job where I was doing research. I actually worked on this book, among others, the Dead Sea Scrolls Reader, and one of my jobs there was to check the texts that they were translated correctly, and then translate other texts that had never been translated in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I worked on a few other things.

One of the side things that I did is I gave tours to VIPs that would come over to Israel from the US, because I had studied Biblical Studies and Archaeology for my bachelor’s degree, and my master’s was in Biblical Studies. So it was second nature to me to take people around ancient biblical sites, and I loved it. I love the land of Israel, and the sites of Israel. And so I would take people around the sites, just to make a little bit of extra money. They asked me to take around this chaplain, this minister, and I’m like, “All right, sure.” And they want me to come and have dinner beforehand at the Mount Zion Hotel. So I go and I meet these guys at the Mount Zion Hotel, and everybody’s sitting around and they’re telling their stories.

And then, this pastor, this Methodist pastor starts to tell his story. And he starts off the story about how he had a dream. And my response, of course, was to try very hard not to roll my eyes. [laughter] “Here’s the Christian, come to Israel and he’s had this spiritual experience.” And I’ve seen this a million times, and I’m not impressed with it. It’s certainly not something that I, as an academic, would deal with. That’s for the simple people.

And he starts to tell me how he had a dream, and in the dream… the gist of the dream is that he’s supposed to come to Israel, to Jerusalem, for Shavuot. And that caught my attention when he said, “Jerusalem for Shavuot”. I didn’t let on at the time, but it did catch my attention. And the reason it caught my attention is that there’s something special about coming to Jerusalem, of all places, for Shavuot, because in the Torah there are three pilgrimage feasts, three chagim, say, “Chagim.”

Audience: Chagim.

Nehemia: Chagim, chag is a pilgrimage feast. It’s where you come up to the place of the Temple three times a year. It says, “All males shall appear before Me,” in the Torah, in a number of places. And so, he having a dream, telling him to come to Jerusalem for Shavuot, I said, “Well, that’s interesting. But then again, he’s a Christian pastor, a Methodist. God doesn’t speak to those people.” [laughter] This is certainly the paradigm that I was raised with - that there is a person who’s unkosher, and I’m not going to be dealing with somebody like that. And certainly, God isn’t going to.