Pip: There is a Frank Sinatra song that has apparently been haunting cj for some time, and honestly, as spiritual provocations go, “My Way” is not the worst place to start.
Mara: cj’s latest post at The Way of the Rabbi pulls that song apart and rebuilds it around a single question: whose way are we actually living by? Let’s start with faith, tradition, and the tension between God’s instruction and doing things on our own terms.
Living by Whose Instructions?
Mara: The post opens with a direct challenge to personal autonomy as a spiritual default — the idea that pride, comfort, and cultural tradition have quietly displaced what Scripture actually asks of us.
Pip: The verse from Acts 5 is where it lands: “But if it is of God, you cannot overthrow it — lest you be found to fight against God.”
Mara: That’s the hinge the whole piece turns on. If something is genuinely of God, resistance to it isn’t preference or tradition — it’s opposition. The stakes shift from lifestyle choice to something considerably heavier.
Pip: And the post is careful about where that resistance comes from. It’s not just secular culture pulling against God’s instruction — it’s church tradition, family tradition, human additions layered onto Scripture until the original is barely visible. The Pharisees get named directly: taking Torah and lacing it with tradition until the yoke became unbearable.
Mara: John’s first epistle gets quoted at length to sharpen the point. “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world — and this is the victory that has overcome the world — our faith.”
Pip: So the commandments aren’t a burden; the flesh is the burden. That’s a reframe worth sitting with.
Mara: Paul reinforces it from two directions — Romans and Galatians both get cited, arguing that walking by the Spirit is the practical mechanism for not gratifying the flesh. And John defines sin plainly as lawlessness, living outside of Torah, which the post notes sits uncomfortably against the modern Christian tendency to treat the commands as optional or already fulfilled away.
Pip: There is a certain irony in a Sinatra song becoming the clearest argument for obedience. But the rewritten lyrics at the close earn it — “The record shows HE took my blows, and I did it HIS way” is a genuinely different song.
Mara: The post closes on a Proverb: “Whoever turns his ear away from hearing the Torah, even his prayer is detestable.” Torah as guardrail, not cage — that’s the frame the whole piece is building toward.
Pip: The question underneath all of this is simple and not simple at all: when the final curtain closes, whose way will it have been?
Mara: That’s the thread worth carrying into whatever comes next — how instruction and faith and daily habit actually connect. More from The Way of the Rabbi next time.
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