Messianic Jewish Israelis on Israeli TV!
Friday, March 02, 2007

Via Ariel at Schmooze Blogger, a 5 minute segment from Keshet TV, a mainstream Israeli news station, on a community of Messianic Jews in Israel. The reporter interviews a number of members of the community and clips include a family at Shabbat and a Shabbat service, as well as a couple young men talking about their service in the IDF during the most recent war in Lebanon. The reporter also comments on the Haredi persecution of believers in Arad.

Schmooze Blogger gives a detailed transcription of the segment. Some highlights:

Like the Ronen family, residents of the moshav Yad HaShmona believe in Yeshu. They call themselves hayehudim hameshichim ("the Messianic Jews"). They stressed again and again that they are not nozrim ("Christians").

If you consider the people here from the moshav, our family, everyone: they are all combat soldiers, if not reconnaissance. So everyone always will try to give what he can get where he can. And also you examined from Tanakh itself and our writings, the New Covenant and everything. We are required to be faithful to the state, and to serve her.

Reporter: It is important for them not to be accused of "missionary activity," but it is also important that their truth is made known.

Tzuri [Messianic Jew]: I say, if I know this, and I believe in this, why don't other people at least hear about this, in order to be competent to choose? The choice is theirs. I am not… my responsibility is that they hear.

The reporter's concluding statement is profound:

They want us to know that their faith makes them fit for this land, that there isn't a contradiction according to their faith between the New Covenant and the Tanakh; to the contrary, that it is possible to pray to Yeshu (Yeshua, in their tongue), and in parallel, to receive the Shabbat as they have received her in millions of Jewish homes, in the wide spaces of the world.

Labels: haYehudim haMeshichim, Israel, Messianic Judaism, Yeshua