Yeshua and the Jewdars
I don’t know what it is, but I have an uncanny ability to spot other Jews. I can’t say how or why I can do this: sometimes I can spot another Jewish person by the way they look or talk, other times because they remind me of a family member, but most of the time it’s just a sense I get. Other Jewish friends of mine have this same impressive ability to spot fellow Hebrews. We call it using our “Jewdar” – or Jewish radar.
Some people have particularly impressive Jewdars, and can quickly spot Jewishness in celebrities and politicians. Yet when it comes to the New Testament, some people’s Jewdars strangely stop working. Jesus (Yeshua in Hebrew) was a Jew and so were all twelve of his disciples. Joseph and Mary were Jews, and Yeshua was born in Israel. The gospel writers were Jewish and so was Christianity’s most influential thinker, St. Paul of Tarsus.
Yet you still hear that Jews are nothing to do with Christianity! It’s an issue I’ve had to deal with in my life as a Jewish man who believes in Jesus. As I’ve grown up, I’ve had a lot of people ask me “How can you be Jewish and a Christian?” There are thousands of Messianic Jews in the world, and as many as one in forty Jews believe Yeshua is the king who God promised to the nation of Israel in the Bible.
In celebrity culture, you sometimes find stars playing around with Christian and Jewish identity. Bob Dylan has flirted with both evangelical Christianity and Orthodox Judaism, David Beckham has Hebrew tattoos alongside a tattoo of Jesus on his torso, and Britney Spears wears the red thread of kabbalah mysticism, despite her upbringing as an American Christian. Despite this, being a Messianic Jew is hardly a glamorous lifestyle.
In some Jewish homes, the name of Jesus is a curse or a swear word, and people who believe in him are ‘other’ and ‘foreign.’ It would be unthinkable for a Jew to believe in the Christ of the Gentiles. Yet every day, on every corner of the planet, Jews are bursting through this taboo and declaring Yeshua to be Israel’s Messiah.
Many read the prophecies of Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22, which clearly make reference to Yeshua’s life over 700 years before he was born. Others just know good Christian friends and like what they see, and want it for themselves. But following Jesus often does not come cheaply. Jews who declare they believe in Jesus may find themselves ostracised from families and even disowned by parents. In some ultra-Orthodox families, the new believer will be mourned as if he had died. I know one Messianic Jewish friend who had to hide his Bible in his car so that his parents would not find him reading about Yeshua.
If Messianic Jews are so distrusted within the wider community, then why are more and more Jews coming to believe in Yeshua? In 1948, when the state of Israel was established, there were only seven known families of Messianic Jews. Now there are maybe 15,000 Messianic Jews in Israel! Some of these serve in the army, even in crack commando units. One Israeli newspaper reported recently that Messianic Jewish soldiers are physically stronger and more committed than other troops.
Of course, none of this matters to the ultra-orthodox opponents of Messianic Jews, who are constantly seeking to explain the Yeshua factor through bizarre theories verging from the sublime to the ridiculous.
One theory is that Jews who believe in Yeshua are seeking attention, like lost puppies, because they have not been shown enough love or enough true Judaism within their communities. They misguidedly turn to Yeshua and see in him everything they had hoped for in Judaism. Another more sinister theory is that Messianic Jews are under the evil influence of the servants of Esau – Israel’s brother and sworn enemy in the Bible. If the activists of Yad L’Achim are to be believed, Esau’s “missionary” servants of doom will use any trick to win over yidden to Yeshua, from using sugar-coated language to opening up nightclubs to corrupt Israeli youth. Still others will say that Messianic Jews have voluntarily decided to cut themselves off from their friends and family, and should be treated with contempt.
My own experience as a Messianic Jew has been somewhat mixed. When I went to an event co-hosted by the Jewish society during my first year of university, the student chaplain rabbi invited me to dinner at his house. When I told him I was a Messianic Jew, he dropped the dinner invitation and invited me to come to his house and discuss Yeshua for hours instead. The rabbi was kind and respectful and gave me a much nicer impression of Judaism than I had feared. When some students tried to ban me from a Jewish Society social event because my Jewish beliefs were too subversive for them, the rabbi intervened to help me overturn that decision.
I began to study Hebrew at uni, and found myself at the bottom of the class. I had to study extra hard so that people would not think that I was ignorant of my people’s language, and I managed to win some respect in this way. Although in one lesson, the whole class sang “Jesus Christ Superstar” to me to see how I would react, and on other occasions even the teacher would offer me reasons as to why I should ‘come back’ to Orthodox Judaism! One person remarked that I clearly had a good relationship with God, and the Jewish community cannot afford to lose people like me as they are small enough already, so please abandon this Jesus and come back to us.
I reject the idea that I abandoned my people. I am still Jewish in every way, and if some cleric wants to exclude me from being Jewish on technical theological grounds, well he can think what he likes without it actually being true. Indeed, going along to events at the Jewish Society has allowed me to meet Jews all across the spectrum (from Reform to Hasidic Orthodox) who are quite happy to consider me a friend and reject the hysteria and the myths about Messianic Jews.
In Britain, the worst Messianic Jews may face is social rejection, but in Israel there are even greater threats. In 2005, a Messianic service was interrupted by activists who started singing over the worship songs, and threw the preacher into the baptismal pool. In 2008, an Israeli teenager was the victim of a terrorist bomb designed to kill his dad, who was a local preacher. The activists in question were declared innocent by an Israeli court earlier this year, whilst the terrorist was declared insane. Whilst Israel’s justice system is clearly biased against Messianic Jews, it is supported by a culture hostile to the idea that Jews can believe in Yeshua and remain Jews.
If any of this has unsettled Christians, we must realise that people who call themselves Christians have not always been pleasant to Jews. Over the centuries, professing “Christians” have not shown Jews the love of Messiah Yeshua, but instead have killed, persecuted and suppressed Jews all in the name of Jesus. The early church father John Chrysostom would preach against the Jews, whilst the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther published an anti-Jewish tract “On The Jews and Their Lies” four days before he died. During the Crusades, entire Jewish towns and villages were taken to the sword in the name of the Lord Jesus.
Across Europe, Jews were given less rights than Christians unless they should convert to Christianity. In Spain, anti-Semitic attacks became so bad that many Jews decided to convert to Christianity to avoid persecution, and then the Spanish Church launched the Inquisition, putting to death any Jewish converts they deemed insincere. In Eastern Europe following anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland, Jews became increasingly confined to shtetls –mainly Jewish ghetto villages with clear boundary markers between Jews and Christians. These boundary markers live on in many minds; not least in the psychological ghettos imagined by Israel’s ultra-Orthodox.
Christian anti-Semitism came to a crescendo with Hitler’s Holocaust, where Adolf Hitler arranged the murder of over six million European Jews, and claimed to be acting in the interests of Christianity and the “Christian” nation. Hitler said he was only doing what Luther had instructed.
As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, it is impossible for me to ignore these uncomfortable facts, as I try to serve Yeshua whilst living a good and respectful life before my Jewish friends and family.
It is a good thing that there are groups such as Christian Witness to Israel (CWI) who seek to help Messianic Jews in this impossible task of explaining to friends and family why they believe Yeshua is the Messiah, and reminding Christians of their duty to love, honour and bless Jewish people. Groups like CWI are bridging the gap, and speaking about the unspeakable: how and why so many Jewish people are trusting in Messiah Yeshua for the forgiveness of all their sins.
The work of groups like CWI fills me with hope, and anyway, no matter how much the radical clerics may theorise that I am no longer a Hebrew, it is impossible for most Jews to deny me being Jewish. Their Jewdars won’t let them.
Joseph Weissman is the President of Yahad (Messianic Jewish youth in the UK) and blogs at the Rosh Pina Project (http://roshpinaproject.wordpress.com) . Visit CWI at http://www.cwi.org.uk.