Then Yeshua went out and departed from the temple, and His disciples came up to show Him the buildings of the temple. And Yeshua said to them, “Do you not see all these things? Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” Matthew 23:37 – 24:2

The temple of which Yeshua spoke, built by the Jewish remnant that returned to Jerusalem under Ezra and Nehemiah, and later expanded and beautified by Herod the Great, stood for nearly 500 years. Finally, it was destroyed in the year 70 on Tisha b’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av—the same date that the temple built by Solomon had been destroyed centuries before. Both temples were desecrated and burned by occupying imperial forces, who slaughtered many of the inhabitants of the holy city. In both events, Tisha b’Av was a day of sorrow, defeat, and exile of the Jewish people that has ramifications even to this day.

There was, however, one apparent difference in the circumstances of the two catastrophes, which led to a discussion recorded in the Talmud (Yoma 9b): “Why was the first temple destroyed? Because during its time there were three sins: idolatry, immorality, and bloodshed. . . . But in the time of the second temple, they studied Torah, performed the commandments, and did kind deeds. Why then was it destroyed? Because there was hatred without a cause—sinat chinam—among them.”

What was the hatred of which this passage speaks? In the years leading up to and including the Jewish revolt against Rome, great divisions emerged among the Jewish people. Some Jews were preparing for armed uprising, and others opposed it. Some were in active collusion with the hated Romans, and others, zealots called Sicarii, used concealed daggers to assassinate Jews they suspected of collusion with Rome.

The phrase sinat chinam, or hatred without a cause, comes from the Hebrew Scriptures, where it appears several times. Perhaps the most striking appearance is in Psalm 69:5 (69:4 in Christian Bibles): “Those who hate me without cause are more than the hairs of my head.” This is a Psalm of David, but readers for centuries have seen David’s description of sufferings as going beyond his own experience. Many rabbinic commentators read the entire Psalm as a prophetic vision of Israel’s sufferings during exile, and her eventual restoration: “For God will save Zion, and will rebuild the cities of Judah; that they may dwell there, and have it in possession. And the seed of his servants shall inherit it; and those who love his name shall dwell in it” (36–37; 35–36 in Christian Bibles). Thus, in his classic commentary, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch writes, “David beholds the people of Israel, generation after generation, wandering through the dark centuries of exile, and, in this psalm, he utters the thoughts that rise up in Israel’s soul as it marches through the history of nations.” Note, however, that David describes Israel’s sufferings in the first person, not “they hate them without cause,” but “they hate me without cause.” As Israel’s king, David anticipates and embodies the future story of his people in his own life. He identifies so strongly with his people that his sufferings are a prophetic sign of the sufferings to come upon all Israel.

If David’s sufferings in Psalm 69 foreshadow the sufferings of Israel, however, they even more clearly point to the sufferings of his descendant the Messiah. Like David, Messiah ben David will take upon himself and act out the destiny of all Israel. Thus, when Yeshua drove the moneychangers out of the temple courts, “his disciples remembered that it was written [in Psalm 69:10 (9)], ‘Zeal for your house has consumed me” (John 2:17). Later, when Yeshua described his rejection by the religious authorities of his day, he told his disciples that it happened “that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, ‘They hated me without a cause’” (John 15:25). Like David in Psalm 69:9 (8), Yeshua can say, “I have become a stranger to my brothers, and an alien to my mother’s children.”

Yeshua, as he embodies Israel’s story of exile and eventual redemption, is rejected by the rulers of his generation and experiences hatred without a cause, the same hatred that the rabbinic literature ascribes as the cause of the temple’s destruction just 40 years later. Indeed, a famous passage in the Talmud records warnings of the destruction going back 40 years before the event. “Our Rabbis taught: During the last forty years before the destruction of the Temple the lot [‘For the Lord’] did not come up in the right hand [of the high priest]; nor did the crimson-colored strap become white [on Yom Kippur as a sign of forgiveness]; nor did the westernmost light shine; and the doors of the Temple would open by themselves [as a sign of the temple’s vulnerability], until Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai rebuked them, saying: Temple, Temple, why will you alarm yourself? I know about you that you will be destroyed, for Zechariah ben Ido has already prophesied concerning you: ‘Open your doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour your cedars’” (Yoma 39b).

It may be simplistic to state that the temple was destroyed because the religious authorities rejected Yeshua, but surely the rabbinic explanation is on target: “Why was it destroyed? Because there was hatred without a cause among them.” Yeshua so deeply identifies with his people Israel that he becomes the ultimate recipient of hatred without a cause . . . and the temple is gone within a generation.

Paradoxically today’s Messianic Jewish community must guard against allowing this hatred without cause to divide us from the wider Jewish community. We might feel that we, like Yeshua himself, have been on the receiving end of sinat chinam. But, if we follow Yeshua, we will continue to identify with all Israel and take responsibility for any unnecessary division we have caused. We will express our solidarity in tangible ways and not allow our legitimate differences with the rest of our people over Messiah to alienate us completely. This is one reason why our current efforts to reconnect with Jewish life and tradition are so important, even if they are often misunderstood. We may remain marginal because of our loyalty to Yeshua, but from our side we must eliminate sinat chinam and stand with our people, as did Yeshua, who took upon himself the sufferings and exile of all Israel. When we consider the current recrudescence of anti-Semitism in the form of anti-Zionism, such a show of solidarity becomes even more compelling.

Tisha b’Av is the anniversary not only of the beginning of exile, but of many tragic events during the exile, culminating in the expulsion of the once-glorious Jewish community of Spain in 1492. Paradoxically, the convergence of so many similar tragedies on this date provides a note of hope, because there appears to be a divine pattern behind it all. The exile is not a meaningless turn of history, but is part of the much larger plan of redemption. Thus, one tradition has it that Messiah will be born on Tisha b’Av.

How are we to respond to this hope? Not passively, but with intercessory prayer. As we stand in solidarity with our people on this day, we can pray for victory over our sins, for the end of exile, and for the restoration of Jerusalem that is a key to the restoration of the whole earth. The conclusion of the Book of Lamentations that we read aloud on Tisha B’Av provides the words of intercession: Hashivenu Adonai elecha v’nashuva chadesh yameinu ki-kedem. “Turn us again O Lord to you and we shall return; renew our days as of old!”

Surprises were more abundant back when I was eighteen than they are today, but one surprise from those days I still remember. In early June, 1967, I was finishing my first year at the University of California in Santa Cruz, a beach town 70 miles down the coast from the counter-culture glories of San Francisco. I earned my spending money as a dishwasher in the school cafeteria, where one of my fellow workers was a scraggly-bearded Jewish anti-Vietnam activist named Harris. One day in June, he surprised me. We were hearing rumors of war in far-off Israel, and the militant anti-war Harris announced that he was going to drop out, get to Israel somehow, enlist in the IDF, and fight. Before he could get himself organized, however, the war ended with the huge Israeli victory that still shapes the events of today.

I was surprised by Harris’ Jewish identity, I suppose, because mine was quite dormant. I was a second-generation American Jew: three of my four grandparents were born in the Old Country. Their children, my parents, were born and grew up in New York City, and settled in the suburbs of Southern California. My father’s father, Samuel, was part of the great wave of millions of Jews, mostly poor and uneducated, who fled the Tsar’s empire after 1881. Family legend has it that when he landed at Ellis Island, he looked up at the cracked and broken windows of the processing center and saw, not disrepair, but opportunity. He got his start in America peddling panes of window glass from a rack on his shoulders through the streets of Jewish New York. Soon he married my grandmother Nettie, who was born in America of German-Jewish parents. Both families frowned on the union, because German and Russian Jews represented two different classes in that era, but the young couple stayed together, prospered, and had four daughters and a son, my father, born in 1915.

My mother’s parents, Sam and Ida Mandel, were also part of the great wave of immigration that began in 1881. They started out on the Lower Eastside, raised five children, including my mother, born in 1920, and eventually followed their married daughters to Southern California. Once, when we went to visit them, the neighbors told us they had gone out for a walk. We spotted them walking down Fairfax Avenue, past open-air produce markets and delis flashing neon signs in Yiddish. I was about to run up and greet them, but my mother stopped me. She was afraid they would be frightened and think it was the police coming after them, as they might have done in the old country.

My family’s move to Southern California was part of another vast migration, not specifically Jewish, that brought millions of Americans from the old northeastern population centers to the West Coast after World War II. My parents were not fleeing poverty and oppression as their parents had, but were seeking a better life of economic opportunity, elbow room, and sunshine. Jewish identity had a place in this better life, as long as it did not become too intrusive. Not long before my bar mitzvah at the Reform Temple Beth Israel, Leon Uris wrote his bestseller Exodus. Israel, the Jewish homeland, had been born out of the ashes of the Holocaust to become a model state. Being Jewish was a source of pride, but its place in my young heart was soon overshadowed by the heady mix of 60s politics and counter-culture. Like many post-bar mitzvah Jewish kids, I began to take Judaism for granted and seek new horizons. My parents were part of the first generation of eastern European Jews to attain education and financial stability in America, and they valued them according-ly. For many in my generation, however, these concerns meant little. My parents’ ordeal through the Great Depression and World War II seemed like the distant past, and now their lives struck me as too comfortable, too narrow.

I left home in 1966 to begin college in Santa Cruz, where I attended one more year after my surprise encounter with Harris’ Zionist zeal. I dropped out after my sophomore year, spent half a year traveling in Europe and North Africa, returned to Santa Cruz more restless than ever, and was swept along by another migration, joining some of my fellow flower children in a remote commune in New Mexico. We lived communally, far from the complexities and corruption of suburban society, without electricity or plumbing, cultivating our plot of land by hand and irrigating out of ditches we maintained ourselves, all the while continuing our experimentation with drugs and alternative religions. It was here that I met Jane, my future wife, a beautiful and engaging young woman who had drifted to New Mexico a couple of years before me with a bus-load of hippies from New York City. In the fall of 1971, Jane and I moved to an even more remote and beautiful corner of northern New Mexico. There, at 8000 feet elevation, I learned how to drive a team of horses and cut timber, and tried to survive on subsistence farming. Andrew and Connie Shishkoff, a couple who shared our vision for peace and simplicity, soon joined us along with their little boy.

The following fall, Jane returned to our old commune to stock up on winter supplies. Our two small sons got sick there, and Jane was stranded. Finally a friend offered to take her to a spot on Highway 44 where we often caught rides back to our part of the state. As they neared the spot, Jane asked God--whoever He was--to just get her home. She looked up and there was a made-over Greyhound bus idling by the side of the road, inscribed with the words, JESUS: ONE WAY. The Jesus people inside were from New Jersey, where they had felt directed by the Spirit to go to the mountains of New Mexico for a year to study the Bible. They had laid hands on their bus before they left, praying that anyone who came into it would accept Jesus before he got off. They gladly took Jane on board, along with the little boys and hundreds of pounds of winter supplies. When they began to bombard her with Bible verses, Jane felt that she should listen; after all, this bus ride was an answer to prayer. And so it was that Jane, always the pioneer among us, became a believer in Jesus on that ride home. Connie soon accepted Yeshua too, and she and Jane invited two young men from the bus to our adobe for dinner. After the meal, Andrew and I sat with them while they pointed out Bible verses to us by the light of a kerosene lamp. They told us that if we would accept Jesus in our hearts, and confess the words ‘Jesus is Lord’, God would save us and place His Spirit within us.

By now, five years had passed since Santa Cruz and the Six-Day War. Author Bill Bryson debunks “the great myth . . . that childhood passes quickly,” and his words apply to youth as well—“it goes on for decades when measured in adult terms. It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.” Five years had been long enough to undo my hippie dream, and leave me standing one day at the edge of our mesa, looking out at the red and gold cliffs of other mesas just before me and the snow-capped San Juans of Southern Colorado in the distance, feeling like I was standing on the edge of an abyss. All of this—our idealistic quest, the return to a simpler, uncorrupted way of life, the mountains and mesas—in a moment I saw it all as just a distraction from the truth that life was meaningless and headed nowhere. But now I was in for the greatest surprise of my life. As these young men started talking about faith in Jesus, I found myself believing it. Like any good Jewish hippie, I looked down upon Christianity (along with Judaism, I must add), but in recent months, the Bible, and Jesus above all, had begun to draw me. Now, to my great surprise, the Spirit of God opened my eyes to see Him, who had been altogether foreign to me for most of my life, as Messiah, as what I had been seeking all along. My road in life had brought me to the edge of the mesa to look out at the void. Now God stepped in and suddenly I was headed in an entirely new direction.

The change was undeniable, but I still could not get myself to say ‘Jesus is Lord’. In the polite suburban Jewish home of my childhood, the name of Jesus was simply not spoken. Our Catholic next-door neighbors had an eerie picture of Jesus on their wall with His heart exposed in His chest. In an older part of town I had seen a neon sign that flashed the mysterious words ‘Jesus Saves.’ You could pick up redneck preachers invoking Jesus on the local radio. I remembered all this, along with Crusades and Inquisitions, forced conversions and expulsions. I wanted Jesus, but my long-neglected upbringing held me back. It had not protected me from all kinds of exotic religious practices in the past, but now it kept me from saying the words that I already believed in my heart. Finally, after three days, I was able to say aloud that Jesus was my lord. But then came another surprise: My dormant Jewish identity suddenly revived. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it was important that I was Jewish, and that it was somehow a major part of the plan into which God was drawing me.

Jane and I, and our friends, entered a whole new way of life. We discovered other, like-minded believers through a ministry in Santa Fe that was reaching out to the hippies, many of them Jewish. One evening the director stood up and read a passage from the prophet Jeremiah, which he felt applied particularly to us:

"I hear voices high upon the windswept mountains, crying, crying. It is the sons of Israel who have turned their backs on God and wandered far away. O my rebellious children, come back to me again and I will heal you from your sins. And they reply, ‘Yes we will come, for you are the Lord our God. We are weary of worshiping idols on the hills and having orgies on the mountains. It is all a farce. Only in the Lord our God can Israel ever find her help and her salvation’" (3:21-23; Living Bible).

It was true; we had wandered far and grown weary of our ways. Now we had returned, not only to the God of Israel, but also to the people of Israel. As a result, we often said that we felt ‘more Jewish than ever.’ Yet, even though we had returned, our search was far from over.

The Christians in Santa Fe seemed to have a great love for us, and for our people as well. Sometimes when I was introduced as a Jewish believer, they would say, ‘Oh that’s wonderful; you have the best of both worlds; all the riches of the Jewish heritage and Jesus too!’ True enough, but our Christian friends did not realize the tension this embrace of both worlds created. We moved to Albuquerque and became immersed in the Christian world, but never felt quite at home there. We soon discovered that Christians did not always feel at home with us either. Some told us that we were no longer Jewish at all, but had converted and left our old religion behind. Paradoxically, from the Jewish world, we heard a similar message: we had converted; we were no longer Jewish; belief in Jesus was completely incompatible with Judaism.

As recovering hippies, we did not view such marginalization as the end of the world. If this Jesus-Jewish identity was from God, we could handle the rejection. But we weren’t sure it was from God, or how it would actually work. During that period, we met Eliezer Urbach, an older Jew who had fled Hitler’s Europe, served in the Israeli war of independence, accepted Yeshua in the mid-50s, and eventually ended up in Denver, where he became a mentor and father-figure to many young Messianic Jews. Eliezer started visiting Albuquerque every month and soon took me under his wing. One day he said, “Russell, one tuchas cannot dance at two weddings. You’ll have to decide—will your children take part in the Christmas pageant, or the Chanukah play?”

The choice seemed obvious enough to me, now with four children, but how to do it was not so clear. By 1980 I had become an elder of a charismatic, pro-Israel church with a sizeable Jewish contingent. We led a Friday-night home fellowship of about two dozen, mostly Jews and intermarried couples. Some of our friends in other parts of the country were leaving the church world altogether and joining Messianic Jewish congregations, but we were not so sure about that option. After my involvement in the counter culture, I was not eager to join another rebellion, even one taking the form of a religious movement. Besides, some of what I saw of emerging Messianic Judaism was not too inspiring, with a Jewishness that often seemed contrived or superficial. Furthermore, it raised the inevitable theological questions; was it really OK to form our own congregations to strengthen Jewish identity as believers in Yeshua? At the same time, our closest friends were joining such congregations. Even Eliezer, who initially opposed the whole idea, dropped his reservations and became instrumental in founding a messianic congregation in Denver. These were the people I trusted most in the world; shouldn’t I go with them on this issue?

In the summer of 1983, things came to a head. One of our commune friends, Ed, had become involved in a messianic synagogue in Philadelphia. Tired of arguing with us about Messianic Judaism, he offered to fly Jane and me to Messiah ‘83, a major conference where we could see things for ourselves. There we were re-united with Andrew and Connie Shishkoff, who had moved east to join Beth Messiah congregation in Maryland. We were thrilled to hear so many Jewish voices praising the Lord with New York accents. We felt ourselves being drawn into the vision, but still wondered—was this movement really from God, or just the bright idea of some creative Jewish believers?

One night Messianic Jews from all over the world were giving their testimonies. The stories were similar: ‘When I came to faith in Yeshua, I thought I was the only Jew in the world who believed the way I did. Then I found some other Jewish believers and we started to get together for Erev Shabbat to pray and eat together. Before long, this grew into our messianic congregation in France (or England or Australia).’ Somewhere amidst these testimonies, Jane and I looked at each other and knew. Here was another great surprise: this was of God! Messianic Judaism had not been invented in Philadelphia or Chicago, but was springing up all over the world as the Ruach moved upon Jewish believers. That night we received our most powerful call from God since we had accepted Messiah. We were to give ourselves to the messianic movement.

We returned to Albuquerque with a vision to transform our home group into a messianic congregation. But first Eliezer sent me to another conference, of a new group called the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations. There I encountered the same broad vision, but with more focus on establishing congregations, building community, and connecting leaders. Our home-group-in-transition joined as an associate member, and by the next year, with help and encouragement from the UMJC, we qualified for full membership. Since then the vision has matured, from the early realization that is was OK to be Jewish even though we were saved and born again, to our current efforts to live out a Judaism of Messianic presence.

My return to the Jewish people has involved not only vision, but also friendships, some very deep, with other Jews. In 1995, I met Matthew, a prominent art dealer about my age who was battling a terminal disease the whole time that I knew him. Matthew meditated on the mystical poetry of Rumi, studied Kabala, prayed daily from the siddur, practiced serious tsedakah . . . and was interested in meeting a Messianic Jew. We quickly discovered a shared love for the weekly Torah portion and began to study together. Matthew would ponder my occasional Yeshua connections and even bring in some of his own, but he always resisted any effort to tie things together too neatly. He demanded more dialogue, more story, more questions, and less dogma. In short, he helped me approach my first love, handling the text of Scripture, more like a Jew.

Even though Matthew resisted the idea of Yeshua as Messiah, he said he felt closer and closer to him as his body descended into pain and incapacity. A week or two before he died—the last time I saw him—he drew me close because he could barely talk, and prayed, “Our father in heaven, thank you for everything” (he emphasized that word) “for everything that Russ has brought into my life and all that we have talked about together.”

Life holds fewer surprises with the passing years, but God forbid it should be without any. Some, of course, are not so sweet. I was surprised that Jews did not flock to us in droves as soon as we developed our authentically Jewish, spiritually vibrant services. More recently I’ve been surprised at how costly it can be to maintain an authentic Jewish identity as a follower of Messiah. I’m also surprised that adult life, or a good chunk of it, “is over in a twinkling,” that I’m nearing my 60th birthday and Yeshua has not returned yet, that my retirement package might involve Social Security and Medicare instead of just millennial repose under my own vine and fig tree.

There are good surprises too: Every Jew who turns to Yeshua, despite centuries of alienation, is still a great surprise. So is the breadth of Jewish tradition that is not only compatible with faith in Yeshua, but actually enhances it. I am surprised by the steadfast commitment to Yeshua among my colleagues, including younger colleagues who seem to bridge the Jewish-Jesus divide with such grace and energy. And, standing here in Jerusalem, I am happily amazed at Israel’s 60th anniversary. The apocalypse briefly glimpsed in June 1967 has not arrived, but life goes on in Eretz Yisrael despite all the challenges, with growing visibility and even grudging acceptance of Messianic Jews.

My journey from assimilated Jewish suburbia, through a remote corner of the American counter-culture, and into a Jewish experiment in following Yeshua will end up right here, when Messiah’s feet stand on the Mount of Olives, living waters flow out from Jerusalem, and the Lord becomes king over all the earth (Zech. 14:5, 8-9). Since this is the destination we have hoped for all along it may not come as a surprise, but surely it will amaze us beyond words as it comes into view.

Ron and I spoke with Leah Ortiz, Ami's mother, for a while, and then she called him on her cell phone to come meet us. A few minutes later, a tall (6' 2"), lanky, 15-year-old boy with a shy but pleasant smile walked through the door. He seemed glad to see visitors, but was clearly in pain from the way he moved and held his body. I presented him with a t-shirt that the youth at the UMJC conference had signed and filled with best wishes and prayers for Ami's recovery, and he was happy to receive that. (I'll try to send a photo later, but my computer is currently down, so I'm limited in what I can do). When Ron asked Ami how we could pray for him, he just mentioned the pain and his desire for a quick recovery.

Leah said that the attack had crossed a line that had never been crossed before in Israel--the attempted murder of a Messianic Jewish family. The bomb was strong enough and sophisticated enough to destroy the whole family, and only God's protection had preserved Ami. She felt that the response of the authorities has been slow and indecisive, and that this would not help in warding off future attacks.

We prayed together that instead this attack would turn out to be the high-water mark of violence against the Messianic community in Israel, that when the perpetrators see the strength of public outcry against them, and the growing sympathy for the Messianic community in Israel, they will realize that their plan backfired and has produced the opposite of what they intended. Instead of being weakened and intimidated, the Messianic community has grown stronger and more united from this attack. Even the broader Israeli community has expressed sympathy. Ami is a basketball player and fan. When the Tel Aviv Maccabee basketball team heard his story, the sent him a brand-new basketball that they had all signed, as one small sign of Israeli public concern for the Ortiz family, and opposition to the bombing.

We are circulating a petition in Israel calling on the department of public security to push forward more aggressively with this investigation. We are also sharing some financial support for the family, and Ami's future medical needs out of recent Shavuot offering. Please pray with me that the perpetrator or perpetrators will be swiftly found and punished. Pray that Ami will have relief from pain and will continue to recover at an amazing rate. And pray that God will continue to bring forth good out of what the enemy meant for evil.

RR in Tel Aviv

The Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations (UMJC) will hold its annual business meetings and conference at Yad Hashmona, 26-28 June. ... Conference planners anticipate 250-300 attendees from outside Israel, most of whom are part of a UMJC-sponsored tour, and a like number from within Israel. The UMJC held a similar conference in 2003, along with a tour, that attracted over 600 participants during a low point for tourism in Israel. As in 2003, the UMJC has raised thousands of dollars to distribute to worthy causes in the land in conjunction with the tour.

A major concern at the UMJC business meetings is the recent and highly publicized persecution of Messianic Jews in Israel, including the Purim package bombing of a young Messianic Jew in Ariel and the New Testament book burning in Or Yehuda, apparently coordinated by the Deputy Mayor of the city. UMJC President Jamie Cowen, two of whose daughters have immigrated to Israel, comments on these events; "Israelis must repudiate these blatant acts of discrimination and violence if this country hopes to provide an alternative to the religious persecution and hatred that are so well known in this region." At its business meeting on Thursday, June 26, the UMJC plans to issue an important statement about Messianic Jews in the land of Israel.

The conference theme—"Honoring the Past; Embracing the Future"—ties into celebrations of Israel’s 60th anniversary. UMJC Executive Director Russ Resnik comments, "Messianic Jews see Israel as the place of our past, from the earliest visit by Abraham to the modern rebirth of the Jewish state, and as the place of our future, which will culminate in Messiah’s return. We are also avid supporters of Israel in the present, and that’s why we brought our conference here."

When I first became a follower of Yeshua, I had a serious case of end-times fever. So did just about all the other Yeshua-believers that I knew. We not only believed in the glorious hope of Messiah’s return, but we believed it would happen within five years for sure, and we were suspicious of anyone who didn’t. We saw the signs all around us, especially in the Jewish return to the Land of Israel, and in the liberation of Jerusalem in 1967. Today, I still believe in the return of Messiah, but I’m not so sure about the timetable. Counting the Omer (April 20—June 8 this year; see Lev. 23:9-21) reminds us that God’s plan will come together on schedule. We depart from Egyptian bondage at Passover and will arrive at Mount Sinai for Shavuot after seven weeks—so keep counting!

Lag b’Omer, Day 33 of the Omer (May 23), is a minor Jewish festival on which kids in Israel build bonfires out of brush and wood scraps and shoot each other with toy bows and arrows. There are various traditional explanations for the holiday and its strange customs. What stands out to me, though, is that this day is that it is exactly 2/3 of the way through counting the Omer. Its message: Don’t quit now! We will make it to the goal! Keep on counting!

The same message helps us stay alert as we await Messiah’s return; God’s plan will come together on schedule, so do not lose heart. But Yeshua adds a vital condition: First the plan, “the good news of the kingdom,” must be announced worldwide, “and then the end will come.” Our assignment is not only to keep counting, but to help spread the message . . . which of course is a big problem in today’s relativistic culture, which is fine with you believing just about anything as long as you don’t try to convince anyone else of its truth. It is an even bigger problem among Jewish people, who feel like Christians have wielded the good news of the kingdom like a weapon against them for centuries.

Just today (May 21), I read about a bunch of over-zealous haredim (religious Jews) in Israel burning piles of New Testaments that were being distributed in their community (see "Or Yehuda deputy 'sorry' about burning bibles" at www.jpost.com. Scroll down to the story under “Jewish News” on the home page.)

Now, I believe that the bigger story in Israel is the growing numbers, influence, and visibility of the Messianic Jewish community there. Even in this article, several Israeli Messianic leaders were able to tell their (and our) side of the story in a positive way. But it is good to remember that the countdown to Messiah’s return, just like the annual countdown of days from Passover to Shavuot, is not automatic or impersonal. We have a part to play, and possibly even a price to pay, in reaching the goal for the age in which we live.

The Messianic Jewish community encompasses a wide range of theological perspectives, and cooperates with Christians representing an even wider range. We do not need to become embroiled in doctrinal controversies, but when a prominent Christian advocates a position that directly counters our vision and self-understanding as a community, we need to speak up. Such is the case with Pastor John Hagee’s new book “In Defense of Israel.”

Pastor Hagee, of course, is a key figure in today’s Christian Zionist movement, who has raised tens of millions of dollars for Israel and rallied many thousands of Christians in support of the Jewish state. As with other Christian Zionist and Jewish reconciliation efforts, Messianic Jews have been kept on the margins in Hagee’s efforts. From a practical perspective, this is understandable; if I as a visible Messianic leader were recognized at a Night to Honor Israel (Hagee’s signature event), many of the other Jews in attendance would be likely to walk out. I can accept this sort of marginalization because of the benefit of raising support for Israel, and bringing Christians and Jews together in cooperative efforts. Hagee’s book goes beyond this sort of pragmatic marginalizing of Messianic Jews, however, to theologically marginalize us in a way that demands a response. “In Defense of Israel” distorts the teaching of the Scriptures, attacks the foundation of today’s Messianic Jewish community, and weakens the very cause of Christian Zionism to which Hagee has lent such laudable efforts.

For the sake of brevity, I will focus on Hagee's claim that Jesus did not come to earth to be the Messiah, thus making it inevitable that the Jewish people would reject him as Messiah. Obviously such a claim completely contradicts our Messianic Jewish vision. It also suggests that Hagee’s avoidance of Messianic Jews is not just a tactical step to avoid offending other Jewish people. Rather, in reading Hagee’s book we discover that we do not fit into his doctrinal grid, which reflects an extreme form of dispensationalism. According to Hagee, we are mistaken in thinking that Jesus is Yeshua, the Jewish Messiah, who came for our whole people. Apparently it would be acceptable from Hagee’s standpoint for us to get individually saved, but to maintain our connection with the Jewish world, and to propagate Yeshua among our people, counters his whole idiosyncratic understanding of Scripture.

Hagee writes, “If there is not one verse of Scripture in the New Testament that says Jesus came to be the Messiah … And if Jesus refused by his words or actions to claim the be the Messiah to the Jews, then how can the Jews be blamed for rejecting what was never offered?” (page 136; emphasis in the original). Even a cursory reading of the Gospels leaves one puzzled at how Hagee can claim that Jesus did not come to be Messiah, unless he has made the mistake of reading “Christ” as a different title than “Messiah.” Christ, of course, is based on the Greek for “the anointed one” (as even Hagee acknowledges on page 94), just as Messiah is based on the Hebrew for the same phrase. John explicitly equates the two terms in 1:41 and again in 4:25, but Hagee seems unaware of this connection.

The Gospel of Mark, generally considered to be the earliest of the gospel accounts, opens with the words “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (NRSV), which can also be translated, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus the Messiah . . .” When Yeshua asks Peter who he thinks he is, Peter responds, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” or in the NRSV, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Yeshua affirms this statement with the words, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (Matt. 16:16-17). Only after this, “he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah” (Matt. 16:20). Ironically, Hagee only touches on this crucial passage to make the claim that “Simon son of Jonah” does not refer to Simon’s father, but to the prophet Jonah. Like Jonah, Simon will be forced to go to the Gentiles with God’s message (page 138). In this passage and the others that Hagee cites, Jesus does not deny that he is Messiah, but chooses for various reasons to keep this fact hidden. John, the latest of the Gospel writers, concludes his account with the words, “But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31, NRSV).

Hagee defines the term Messiah in a way that seems to reflect the anti-Jewish stereotyping that he deplores. He says, “If Jesus wanted to be Messiah . . . to rally the support of the general public for the overthrow of mighty Rome, he would not go around the country saying, ‘Tell no one!’” (page 139). Hagee spends the next few pages showing how Jesus refused to be thought of as the one who would liberate Israel from the Romans, and concludes, “He refused to be their Messiah, choosing instead to be the Savior of the world” (page 143). In other words, in Hagee’s understanding, the Jews could only conceive of Messiah within a narrow context of national liberation through military-political victory. He seems to reserve Christ, on the other hand, for the loftier notion of universal salvation from sin. Thus, in trying to exempt the Jews from “blame” for rejecting Jesus, he misrepresents the Jewish messianic hope and denies any real role for Jesus-believing Jewish people today. If Jesus did not present himself as the Jewish Messiah, why should Jews today believe in him? But of course, the New Testament in many passages does present Jesus not only as the savior of the world, but very specifically as the Messiah of Israel. Hagee reminds one of Christian attempts throughout the ages to portray Jesus apart from his Jewish context, as someone entirely unique and distinct from any culture, and the Jewish Messianic hope as sadly mistaken.

To be fair, Hagee does imply that Jesus will indeed be the Jewish Messiah at his second coming. The Jews “don’t see Jesus for who Christians believe he is, but they will in the future” (page 7). He draws a parallel between Joseph’s revelation to his brothers in Egypt and Yeshua’s self-revelation at the end of the age: “When the Jewish people recognize Jesus for who he is-—when they actually see him—-‘they will mourn as one mourns for his only son’ (Zechariah 12:10).” In the meantime, in this present age, Hagee provides no basis for a Jewish response to Jesus, and certainly no basis for a communal movement for Yeshua among the Jewish people.

We can appreciate Hagee’s stance against Jewish corporate blame for rejecting Jesus, and against the anti-Semitism that has so often resulted from this blame. But there are, of course, ways to understand the Jewish communal leaders’ rejection of Jesus during his lifetime, and the gradual estrangement of the wider Jewish community over the following centuries without denying Jesus as Messiah. Paul speaks of the Jews who did accept Jesus as Messiah in his own day as a remnant within Israel that served as a reminder and anticipation of God’s unchanging purposes for the whole people (Romans 11:1-6, 16). Messianic Jews are living evidence that Jewish people can recognize Yeshua as Messiah today, and remain loyal members of the Jewish community and committed supporters of the state of Israel.

Hagee’s book also weakens the cause of Christian Zionism to which he has devoted so much of his life’s work. If his theology is so clearly aberrant on the Messiahship of Jesus, why should thinking Christians accept anything he says in support of the Jewish state? Indeed, the book includes a surprising number of factual errors, along with its careless handling of Scripture. For example, Hagee writes, “The Pharisees in the school of Hillel were as mad as hornets because Jesus would not endorse Shammai’s teaching on ‘divorce for every cause’” (page 129)—-a statement so fraught with errors that one can hardly respond. On a similar level, he says of Joseph and Jesus that, “Their names even come from the same Hebrew root word, Yeshua, which can be translated into English as Joshua, Joseph, or Jesus” (page 189).

“In Defense of Israel,” despite Hagee’s good intentions, succeeds in reinforcing the stereotype of Christian Zionism as a branch of far-right fundamentalism. The extreme interpretations that he advocates, however, are not necessary to build the case for support for Israel and the Jewish people. Christian Zionism does not need to diminish the position of Yeshua. There is no incompatibility between faith in Yeshua as Israel’s Messiah and loyalty to Israel and the Jewish people.

To teach that Jesus refused to be the Messiah for the Jews is ultimately anti-Jewish. Jesus becomes the savior of the world, but with no particular relationship to the Jewish people. If they want to respond to him as savior they have to leave Israel and its Messianic hope and become part of something universal. In contrast with this erroneous interpretation, when we declare Jesus to be the Messiah of Israel, we do not invalidate Israel or the Jewish people. Yes, Jews need to respond to Jesus as do all people, yet in this response we discover that he is distinctly Jewish, distinctly relevant to us, and very much part of the Jewish story.