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"It is better to take refuge in Adonai than to trust in human beings; better to take refuge in Adonai than to put one's trust in princes." -Tehilah 118:8-9



What is Messianic Judaism? Part Two: The Christian Reaction

"Actually, I'm a Messianic Jew."

"A what?"

"A Messianic Jew. I believe in Jesus and practice my faith the way His followers and the rest of the first century believers did- Jewishly."

"Oh. Well. That's close enough."


"That's close enough." The girl who was supposed to be my new roommate in college then asked if it was okay for her boyfriend, a praise and worship leader at their church, to spend the weekends in our room.

I'd like to begin by saying that I do not dislike Christians. I do, however, dislike Christianity a great deal. By "Christianity" I mean the set of practices and doctrines built up by pagan priests around a belief in Yeshua as the Messiah. I do not dislike nor do I argue with the idea of having faith in "Jesus," although I do dislike not calling Him by His proper name, Yeshua. I do not dislike Christians, I do however dislike the way they choose to practice their faith in Messiah. This doesn't mean that I'm casting judgement on a fellow believer; it means that I believe that their actions do not match up to the Biblical template designed by HaShem, the instruction sheet for how to worship Him properly. In other words, it's the hypocrisy of Christianity that I can't stand.

The idea that roughly 1600 years ago a group of pagan priests decided to steal the religion of a growing sect of believing Jews and grafted in gentiles, cancel out the majority of the faith in favor of adapting a bunch of pagan practices and justifying them "in the name of Jesus Christ," and then use their newfound religion to justify the murder of Jews throughout the centuries burns me up, quite frankly. The argument made by many modern day believers, often Protestants of various sorts and Evangelicals, that their church today is in no way connected to the church of 1600 years ago also burns me up. Just because your ancestors listened to Martin Luther doesn't make your history any different; he hated the Jews, too. He called for a negation of Torah practice, too. He perverted faith in Messiah into a reason to replace Israel, too. Your church may not hold any of those distinct beliefs, but Church history still impacts how you believe and practice your faith in Jesus today.

And that can be a very dangerous, very sad, and very boring thing.

As I've said before, I spent the first ten years of my life in churches. It was a long enough period of time for me to develop a very solid belief in Yeshua as the Messiah. It was also a short enough period of time that I avoided being indoctrinated into the majority of Christian theology. Since I was eleven years old, I have lived out my life among Jews, some Messianic, some not. While this has left me well equipped to communicate with the Jewish world, I am often left confused when confronted with the Christian thought process. Not long ago, I participated in a comment-conversation on a fellow believing blog regarding the use of Christian hymns in Messianic practice. The owner of the blog commented on the "Christology and logos" of the hymns, and, in reading that, I realized how completely different Christianity is from Messianic Judaism. Literally, it IS all Greek to me. I can't help but think that it would be all Greek to Messiah and his talmidim as well.

We once invited a Pastor and his wife over for coffee. They had just established a new church in our area and were walking around one day, introducing themselves to the neighbors. In striking up a conversation with my mother, the Pastor shared some of the tenents of his church; they did not celebrate Easter or Christmas, as they are not Biblical holidays, etc. etc. Recognizing some common ground, my mother offered him a copy of her book, The Unified Body and invited he and his wife for an evening of discussion. Being a pleasant, affable sort of man, he took her up on her offer.

What a night that was.

Of course, the core of the conversation revolved around Torah observance. You don't realize how different Christianity is from Messianic Judaism until you get to the subject of Torah observance. The Pastor didn't see the need for Torah observance, because, according to what his theological school taught him about Rav Shaul- er- the Apostle Paul- the Torah was moot. Dead. Old. Cancelled out.

"But you believe in the importance of Israel," I asked.

Of course they did! They pray for Israel all the time. They pray for the Jewish people to be saved. They didn't believe in replacement theology one darn bit.

"Then why do you think Torah is somehow cancelled out?"

I got a lot of slack-jawed "uhms" that night. I don't hold it against them; I do, however, have a serious bone to pick with his theological professors.

After explaining the importance of Torah observance and the fact that the teachings of Yeshua never cancelled out Torah observance, because He came to fulfill the promises of the Torah (Deuteronomy 18:15-19; Matthew 5:17-18), I got to explaining the teachings of Rav Shaul, namely in Romans 9-11. You see, you're grafted in. Gentiles are grafted in. They never started their own faith; the Torah was never cancelled out. The gentiles who believe in Yeshua are grafted into the Hebrew faith! You're a part of us now!

When the Pastor's wife asked me, "So what is Jesus to you?" I knew I had been tagged as a heathen.

As the conversation wore on, we went from explaining Messianic Judaism to defending it and defending our very belief in Messiah. Because we practiced as Torah outlined and Yeshua Himself explained, because we practiced as Jews and not according to the way of Christian theologians, we were the ones in the wrong.

Near the end of the night, the subject of Israel came up again. "We pray for Israel all the time!" the Pastor's wife said. "We love Israel! We want all of the Jews to go back to Israel! I mean, after all, when they do, Jesus will come back!"

Huh? The Jews are only important to you, Israel is only important to you, because they'll get you one step closer to Jesus? The grand irony in that statement is mind-boggling. You take the Jewishness out of believing in Jesus, spend hundreds of years persecuting Jews, and then turn around and decide that you like Jews, because if you like them, Jesus will come back.

Do you see? Do you see how thousands of years of pagan-created and influenced teachings have turned a Jewish faith in Yeshua the Messiah into some bizarre, non Biblical practice? Do you see the far-reaching consequences of it? The pagan priests declared Torah to be dead, which allowed them to call the Jews Christ-killers, which allowed how many pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, and the Holocaust to happen, which created a huge divide between believers in Messiah and the very olive tree that they are grafted into, which caused these believers- these Christians- to float upstream without a paddle. They had to make one of their own instead of relying on the model that works. That model belonged to a group of people who didn't matter anymore; whose G-d had rejected them; whose Torah was dead.

Over time, the hatred may have dissipated to a degree (although I have been in churches where it has not) but the ignorance remains. Suddenly, you have Christians who don't hate Jews anymore, but who don't know how to relate to them either. At most they are "the people of the Book" who should return to their Promised Land so Jesus can come back. To a Christian that sounds very nice and heartwarming; to a Jew, it sounds cold, cruel, calculated. I once asked a Jewish friend if he ever thought of making aliyah. He didn't have any use for it. "They only want us to move to Israel so Jesus can come back," he answered wryly. The Jewish people don't find any love in a statement like that; to us it just sounds like you want to use us to get to Jesus-- we're the bargaining chip between you and your maker. To Christians, I ask this: When did the Jewish people become the sacrifice?

As a believer, I can understand that many Christians who spout out statements like that do have a genuine- if somewhat misinformed- love for Israel. As a Messianic Jew I can also understand where the Jewish people are coming from when they're turned off by such comments. That's the game we play as Messianic Jews; we can see the good and the bad on both sides of the coin. And, sometimes, we can be seen as both good and bad ourselves. The Pastor and his wife contacted us several months after that evening's discussion to let us know they were praying for Israel, and to share with us a book explaining why Torah was moot. To them, in their wardrobe of drab grays and browns, they who did not do Christmas and Easter, but who did not celebrate the Feasts either, who sang the Psalms but did so without instruments, to them that lived in a kind of middle-ground, a purgatory of their own making, we were in the wrong. But to other Christians, I wasn't all that bad.

Telling some Christian friends that I was a Messianic Jew and explaining what that meant made them more comfortable around me, not less. In fact, some felt so comfortable around me that they felt free to sling Antisemitic slurs and jokes around, as if I wasn't really Jewish at all. One time, a Catholic girl who worked in a hotel was telling me about a woman who wanted to reserve a ballroom for her son's Bar Mitzvah party. "She was trying to bargain us down on the price, just like a cheap Jew." To our mutual friend's immediate rebuke, she replied, "Oh, it's all right, Shoshana's not one of those Jewy-Jews." Don't worry; for clarification, she made sure to explain what "Jewy-Jew" meant for about ten minutes.

Awkward doesn't even begin to describe that experience.

Then, of course, there are the random slurs. They don't come out much, and they usually aren't in reference to me, but I have had both friends and family members express things like, "You know, she's one of those real Jewy ones," or, "They Jewed us down on the chicken," from time to time. For some reason, Christians tend to read the term "Messianic Jew" as some sort of code that says, "Okay, you like menorahs and stuff, but you ain't one of those Heebs we really have to worry about." It's bizarre what you will take for granted when you don't understand the difference. Try telling one of those Christians that they're a Heeb, too, and see what kind of reaction you'll get. Maybe your grandmother and grandfather will sit you down with a book titled How to be a Good Christian. Maybe you'll have your Christian friends chasing you down with invites to join their "Pastor who was born Jewish" for a chat about what Jesus means to you. There's more than one meaning to Yeshua's statement, "a prophet is never accepted in his own hometown." Try telling your average Christian that we are all mishpocha- family- in Messiah, and see how welcoming they are to you for bringing up the idea of being a part of the tribe.

It is the hypocrisy of Christianity that I can't stand, and I can't stand it because it divides us, the family of believers. For thousands of years that hypocrisy separated millions of believers from Torah, from Judaism, from the Jewish people, from Israel-- all of which they have a share in as believers in Messiah Yeshua! I cry for these people and their lost inheritence as much as I cry for the millions of Jews out there who associate a belief in Yeshua with a hatred of Jews and Judaism, thanks to that same hypocrisy that dared to say "Well, this is what the Torah says, but we can do it better."

We are the same tribe, but we live in two different worlds and we often look at each other through a glass darkly. What is important for Christians to realize is that we can see each other face to face through the light of Messiah Yeshua. As believers in Him, it is the responsibility of Christians to do everything in their power to help facilitate that face-to-face connection. To my great joy, there are a growing number of Christians out there embracing their Jewish roots; to my elation there are a growing number of former Christians out there who now know the fullness of their Messianic JEWISH identity. Now, we must realize together that we are under the call to be a light, "to the Jew first and also to the gentile" (Romans 1:16) by provoking both camps to jealousy, because, truly, both have missed out on the Torah they so desperately need.

Then He added, "Those experts in Jewish law who are now my talmidim (disciples) have double treasures, from the Old Covenant as well as from the New!" Matt. 13:52

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posted by Shoshana @ 2:04 PM

3 Comments:

At 3:16 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

B"H

Shoshana,
Wonderful rant sis but after all that with the history, the pagan lifestyle, idea of Torah being gone and "get those jews back home so jesus can come hall'e'lu'yah!", and the back handed and upfront slurs, you still consider them mishpocha? Come on sis, you know that light and dark cannot co-exist, they are in error and are not worshipping Hashem as he said. When they truly want to seek after Hashem, then he will remove them from paganism, egypt(christianity) and bring them to truth. Try to reach them but consider them outsiders. If its faith only as they believe then we all should stop keeping Torah and do what they do. faith w/o works is dead sis, stop making excuses for them.
Shalom B'Yeshua
Ezra

 
At 8:02 AM, Blogger Shoshana said...

Ezra,

Wow! And I questioned whether or not I was being harsh!

If faith without works is dead, then works without faith must be equally as useless. I do not believe that anyone who knows and puts their faith in Messiah is lost in darkness; that makes no sense. "By faith alone are we saved." To insinuate that these Christians do not know Yeshua because they adopt pagan practices is the same as to insinuate that non-believing Jews do not know G-d because they value Talmud, the teachings of men, over Torah.

Quite frankly, I don't make excuses for anyone, as that is not my job. However, I do see a difference between intentional and unintentional sin, and I know that, in the end, I am not the judge of either. My calling as a believer in Messiah Yeshua is to love my fellow believers and be a light unto them, just as the talmidim were a light to those believers around them, both Jew and gentile.

You point out the history, the slurs, the lack of Torah as reasons not to consider these fellow believers mishpocha. I question this: How many non-believing Jews have ever slurred you for your faith? Yet, as Messianics, we continue to fight to be seen as Jews on equal footing. The slur is not the point; the point is, where did it come from? What miseducation caused that prejudice to happen, and who proliferates that miseducation today? No, our battle is not with each other, but with the "powers and principalities of darkness," that seek to divide and conquer our souls. Our weapon is the love of Yeshua, and sometimes that love has to be tough--especially when it comes to both the non-believing Jews and the Christians in our midst.

But, thank you for taking me back to the thought-process of the talmidim's council in Acts 15. Some of them still wished to view these goyim believers as outsiders for maintaining pagan practices as they grew into their new faith. Yet, the prevailing opinion was this, "we should not put obstacles in the way of the goyim who are turning to Adonai." The solution was to draw them into the Jewish life, including full Torah observance. Some goyim may have fallen away after reading those instructions, but it is not our job to make choices for them; it is our job as Jews to guide our grafted in mishpocha into life in Yeshua, not view them as outsiders with blood on their hands.

Until we stand as a house united, we will continue to fail as a body of believers. I am not willing to allow the bad choices of dead men to get in the way of the success of the Eternal Almighty.

B'Shalom,

~Shoshana

 
At 3:57 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I know it has been a long time since I first posted but I would like to not only correct my previous statement to you but ask your forgiveness. I had a lot of issues with christians and christianity back then but I have since changed in my view. Now that I read this post again and your response I see not only how wrong I was, but how right you were. I think your last statement said it best. So in all I'm sorry if I upset you and hope you can forgive me. :)

Shalom
Ezra

 

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