Why listen to the opinions of men who have rejected Messiah?
Mat 15:14 (NIV) Leave them; they are blind guides. If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit."Consider that Jesus never seemed to miss an opportunity to stick His finger in the eye of cultural Judaism and the spiritual blindness of the Jewish sages, and yet you seem to have a weird attraction to what Jesus chided.
Rom 11:28 (NAS) From the standpoint of the gospel they are enemies...Jesus was not impressed or pleased with rabbinic traditions and obfuscations and misunderstandings of His word. He openly lampooned cultural Jewish interpretations of the Torah when it came to Sabbath observance, kosher purifications rituals, corban, externalism, fasting practices, and so forth and so on. Do you think Rabbinical interpretation has gotten better after 2000 years of denial of the revelation of the Son of God? "Beware the yeast" is a warning against this particular "spice". Do you think this warning just academic?
Luke 12:1 (NAS) ...He began saying to His disciples first of all, "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees..."Rather than hanker for what is spurious, puffed up, esoteric, old-wine, or just plain diabolical... why not go for the same-old daily bread? The gospel, for example. Life through death. Has anyone on earth completely learned this? Need we not be "reminded"--as scripture speaks--of what really matters and works? What is salient and what leads to life? So why chase after the nephtalim or Jewish-myths or other sophistries? Is this not a straining out a gnat while swallowing a big, smelly, rabbinic camel?
Mark 7:9 (NIV) And [Jesus] said to them: "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!"Get it? A fine way. It appeals to flesh. Yes, it is stupid: like not rescuing your own donkey from a ditch on the Sabbath, or the kosher laws of fastidious diet and hand washing, etc. But yeast has its charms, no? Such are fine, exquisite, sophisticated, erudite ways of missing God's whole point.Given Jesus' instinctive reaction to Jewish sophistry, do you think that if you get the "mind of Christ" that somehow He will make a little space for what He long has detested? "Leave them, they are blind guides," someone smart once said of the Hasidim du jour.
Gal 4:29-31 (NIV) At that time the son born in the ordinary way persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It is the same now. But what does the Scripture say? "Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman's son." Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.
