A text about Genesis 15, and for one minute Naomi did not have to translate herself.
A woman I will call Naomi found my writing 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 a piece I wrote on 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. It is the sentence of a person who has been carrying a heavy bag for a long time and wants to check whether the bag you are carrying is the same one.
The tie
Naomi asked for it, so 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, 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 to Naomi in a handful of sentences. I did not teach her anything. She has known Genesis 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 is when it hit her deep.
Why it hit her
I did not understand this part until I watched it happen. 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 to know the writing 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. 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 that 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 where I am the teacher, Naomi is the student, and the moment is the payoff. That version would be a lie. Naomi has been witnessing to Christians her entire adult life. I did not draw the thread out 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 it a long time. Thank you for handing it to me for a minute, so I could hand it back to you.
