As king of Judah, Menasse introduces a long series of strange rituals: high places, altars to Baal, child sacrifices, divination, and an idol in the temple itself. The Bible lists these sins as a series of violations of specific commandments from the Torah. But behind every prohibition lies a deeper motive. Each practice undermines the way people treat one another. It turns children into tools, women into means of production, and neighbors into distrustful strangers. This essay shows how those ancient patterns are resurfacing today. You see them in algorithms that trap us in separate information bubbles, in a culture that judges people by their productivity, and in technology that covertly steers people without their knowledge. The labels are new. The pattern is old. The account of Menasseh’s reign in 2 Chronicles 33:1–11 is not merely a list of a king’s private sins. It is a harrowing account of the systematic unraveling of the covenantal and legal fabric that held Israel together. What Manasseh does is not an isolated transgression; every act is a curse, a direct and brutal violation of an explicit prohibition once given at Sinai. The pattern he sets in motion has several elements:

• the fragmentation of shared moral authority,
• the instrumentalist view of humanity,
• submission to soulless,
• deterministic forces,
• the exploitation of fear and grief,
• the fatal replacement of a living relationship with a controllable idol

This is no fossil from the ancient Near East. It is the living poison of our own time, and whoever fails to recognize it knowingly chooses blindness.

The three texts — Deuteronomy 29, Joshua 24, and 1 Samuel 12 — are often read as a single recurring motif: a leader who, on the threshold of death, seals the covenant with his people one last time. In fact, this pattern only holds for Moses and Joshua. Samuel delivers his speech not before his own death but at the coronation of Saul, marking a shift not in the generation of the leader but in the form of government itself, since his death is only mentioned much later, in 1 Samuel 25. What the three scenes share is not the leader's biography but a crisis of continuity, and the nature of that crisis differs in each case. For Moses, the crisis is generational: the covenant at Sinai was made with a people who had almost entirely died out in the wilderness, so Deuteronomy explicitly extends the covenant to those who are absent and not yet born, detaching its validity from the person of the mediator. Joshua at Shechem brings this ceremony to its fullest form, with a historical recounting, an explicit choice by the people, a written record, and a witnessing stone, shifting responsibility for the covenant onto the people themselves, since no successor of comparable stature will follow him. Samuel's speech is structured differently: it is not a covenant ceremony but a legal defense speech (a rîb), in which he first affirms his own integrity before raising the question of whether the existing covenant can absorb a new form of government, kingship, without losing its character. What unites all three episodes, then, is not the death of a leader but the recurring need to restate the terms of the covenant precisely at the moment when its bearer changes, whether that bearer is a generation, an individual leader, or the form of government itself. Each time, the text shows that the covenant survives the change of those who represent it at that moment, precisely because it is explicitly and newly proclaimed at the critical juncture.

Nitzavim: you are standing here.
This essay examines Deuteronomy 29:9–20 based on Rashi, Ramban, and Samson Raphael Hirsch. Rashi explains why the call to uphold the covenant appears precisely at this point in the text: the people have just defeated Sihon and Og and are therefore in danger of becoming arrogant; moreover, they have undergone forty years of instruction from Moses—the period required, according to Avoda Zara 5b, to truly comprehend a teacher. From that moment on, stricter standards apply. Ramban interprets verse 9 as a formal covenant that, unlike the covenant at Sinai, explicitly binds future generations as well. Hirsch arrives at a similar conclusion through linguistic analysis and further demonstrates how verses 9 through 20 dispel two misconceptions in succession: first, the idea that the covenant is bound to a specific time or generation, and second, the idea that an individual could hide behind the community’s faithfulness. Precisely because the covenant is so all-encompassing, the text warns against the temptation to ride on the merits of the collective, and concludes with the assurance that God judges each person individually.

When I confront the criticism of the New Testament view of marriage, I notice how it does not unfold as a diffuse landscape of scattered objections, but rather coalesces into four persistent questions that both stimulate and challenge my own theological intuition. Amid the tension between ancient norms and modern sensibilities, a debate unfolds that is more than a clash of eras: it touches on the way we understand text, tradition, and human relationships. Precisely for this reason, this four-part critique compels me to reconsider what the New Testament actually says, what it presupposes, and what it—perhaps—cannot say within the limits of its historical horizon. Thus, this constellation of objections forms the necessary starting point for a renewed, careful reading.

Based on an essay at veenpreken,.wordpress.com

This episode includes AI-generated content.

Christians often have a deep intuition that faith is not just a matter of words, but of the heart. Yet in practice, it remains difficult to truly maintain that inner focus in prayer, liturgy, and daily life. That is precisely why the Jewish concept of kavanah is so valuable: it shows how a religious tradition has been reflecting for centuries on the tension between outward form and inward attention. At a time when many Christians are seeking greater depth, more silence, and a more conscious presence in their lives of faith, kavanah offers a language and a structure to clarify that search. It reveals that inner focus is not a luxury, but an essential part of every encounter with God—and that this focus does not stand in opposition to ritual, but is sustained by it. Christians who wish to learn to pray with both their hearts and their bodies may find an unexpected source of wisdom in the halakhic reflection on kavanah.

This episode traces the powerful biblical idea of the “circumcision of the heart” from Deuteronomy to Jeremiah to Paul.

We explore how Deuteronomy 30 introduces a divine inner transformation that goes deeper than ritual, how Jeremiah re‑frames this promise during the crisis of exile as the Torah written on the heart, and how Jewish tradition consistently reads this as a deepening—not a replacement—of covenantal obedience.

We then follow Paul’s bold reinterpretation, in which the inner work of the Spirit becomes detached from the Torah and redefined through Christ.

Along the way, we draw on major Jewish thinkers—Jacob Neusner, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Daniel Boyarin—who each highlight why Paul’s move represents not continuity but a dramatic reorientation of Israel’s story. The result is a rich, provocative journey through Scripture, tradition, and theological transformation.

Emmanuel Levinas saw Christianity through a mix of respect, gratitude, and sharp critique. Influenced by Franz Rosenzweig, he believed Judaism and Christianity follow two separate but meaningful paths: Judaism as “eternal life,” Christianity as a historical mission.

The Holocaust deeply shaped his view, revealing the moral failure of Christian Europe while also highlighting the courage of individual Christians who saved Jewish lives, including his own family.Levinas contrasted Jewish emphasis on ethical action with what he saw as Christianity’s focus on faith, mystery, and salvation. For him, God appears not in a divine-human figure but in the face of the vulnerable other.

He rejected doctrines like the Incarnation and original sin, insisting that responsibility for others is the true source of holiness.He also criticized the political split between “Caesar” and “God,” arguing that it leaves politics without ethical grounding.

And he firmly opposed reading Judaism as merely a precursor to Christianity, insisting on its independent spiritual value.In the end, Levinas didn’t seek harmony between the two religions but a shared ethical horizon: the call to responsibility for the other person.

Sermon in the Mennonite Church in Schagen, March 31st 2026.

The encounter between the Jewish and the Christian reading of Deuteronomy 4:10 opens a surprisingly fertile space. In the Jewish exegesis, as seen in Hirsch and the Ha‑emek Ha‑Davar, the revelation at Horeb stands at the center as an event that teaches the people to live in a posture of yir’ah, a disciplined reverence of the heart cultivated through listening, remembering, and transmitting. The emphasis falls on the immediacy of God’s spoken word, on the collective experience of holiness, and on the pedagogical task of planting this reverence anew in every generation. The Christian tradition recognizes in the same text an archetype of revelation that unfolds not through visible forms but through the heard word that addresses the heart and forms the community. Where Jewish exegesis highlights the inner art of living before God’s presence, Christian theology sees in this verse the structure of a revelation that continues in preaching, communal life, and the transmission of faith. In this way a resonance emerges between the two traditions: the revelation at Horeb becomes both a source of Jewish spiritual life and a foreshadowing of the Christian conviction that God makes Himself known through the word that is heard, preserved, and handed on.