Rabbis blogging on "Jews for Jesus"

Got this from Belief Net.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006
The Limits of Identity
My friend Jenny Moyers is not the most connected Jew ever to walk the earth. She doesn’t belong to a synagogue and does not celebrate any of the Jewish holidays in her home. She seems to regard my rabbinic career path with something bordering between amusement and disdain.

So it came as something of a shock to me when one day we were walking together in the Philadelphia subway and a yellow-shirted Jews for Jesus missionary approached us to offer some literature. Jenny went completely ballistic and started yelling at him at the top of her voice, screaming that he ought to be ashamed of himself for calling himself a Jew. “Jews do not believe in Jesus!” she yelled. “What you are doing is disgraceful!” Needless to say, Jenny’s outburst made quite an impression on me, and it got me thinking.

Jews for Jesus push a lot of people’s buttons–even people who would otherwise not really care about Jewish tradition or practice–because they reside at the messy little intersection of identity and belief. For the most part, you can believe (or not believe) and do (or not do) whatever you want and still be Jewish. That’s because being Jewish isn’t a function of a particular belief or set of actions so much as it is a cultural, historic, and spiritual identity into which you are born or choose to convert. You’re just Jewish and, like Jenny, you don’t really need to worry about the particulars.

Jews for Jesus messes that all up.

If you really can believe whatever you want as a Jew, couldn’t you be Jewish and believe in Jesus? The answer is no, and I think it has less to do with theological objections–although these certainly exist–than it does with identity issues. For 2,000 years, at least in the West, Christians are what Jews defined themselves against. Oppressed, victimized, expelled, and slaughtered simply for who they were, Jews had their identity and outsider status reinforced over and over again. They were Other, and the oppressors were Christians.

The symbol of Christianity par excellence, the defining element, is Jesus. So to hear the words “Jew” and “Jesus” strung together into the phrase “Jews for Jesus” hits a very raw nerve for many Jews today–I imagine something akin to what Jews for Allah(!) would do to Jews who were oppressed in Islamic societies.

It’s not out of hatred of Jesus, or of Christians, or of Christianity, but rather as a reaction to hundreds of years of oppression. And for the many Jews like Jenny who don’t participate in Jewish life in any way, rejecting Jews for Jesus affirms their own bona fide Jewish identity. But, perhaps just as revealingly, the forceful reaction also acknowledges an underlying insecurity and doubt about whether you really can do or believe whatever you want and still be Jewish. Because the truth is, you can’t–there are some lines that just can’t be crossed.

posted by Rabbi Joshua Waxman @ 9:41 PM
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Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Go Bother Someone Else
Ah… summer in New York City: Central Park concerts, café life, sweaty subways, and who can forget those smiley young boys and girls passing out Jews for Jesus pamphlets. Every year they come with more zeal and more ambition, peddling their product and hoping that someone with a kippah will say yes, now that I have read this beautiful media-savvy pamphlet, I see the light and have accepted Jesus into my life.

Most Jews would like to ban Jews for Jesus outright. Understandably so, they feel threatened by a group trying to make Jews believe something that they know is a social and theological impossibility (On the Jewish understanding of Jesus see Judaism's view of Jesus, and Irving Greenberg’s more welcoming ideas).

Irrespective of whether or not Jesus was a Jew, a failed messiah, or a prophet, the bottom line remains: it is both socially and theologically impossible to be a Jew and accept Jesus as the messiah.

When I was younger, I used to clench up every time I passed by a Jews for Jesus salesman/woman. But then I realized that they are no different than half of the things sold on Manhattan streets everyday: bad merchandise.

But one cannot, nor should they, try to ban bad merchandise just because its bad merchandise. Lots of things get sold everyday on the street. If there is one thing Jews know it’s that they don’t accept Jesus. The notion that New York Jews en masse are going to be duped by these 20-year-old bright-eyed kids from Middle America is simply preposterous.

Jews for Jesus salespeople are nothing more than used-car salesmen who truly believe the stories they heard from the previous owner. But that does not nor should it make it illegal for them to sell cars.

Personally, I don’t listen to used-car salespeople, and I would tell anyone I know not to give them the time of day. But if it gives a few young folks a chance to get a free trip to the Big City, then good for them. I hope you all are having a good time running around the city telling lies. Just do me a favor when I tell you I am not interested: Leave me alone.

posted by Rabbi Eliyahu Stern @ 6:46 AM

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Monday, August 28, 2006
Jews for Jesus: Who's Who & What's What
If you believe Jesus is the messiah, died for anyone else’s sins, is God’s chosen son, or any other dogma of Christian belief, you are not Jewish. You are Christian. Period.

We Jews may not like to admit it, since we prefer live and let live, but sharing the message of their faith is a basic tenet of belief for Christians. However, there are ethical and unethical ways of doing so. The self-proclaimed Jews for Jesus, Messianics, and other Christian groups that clothe their Christian beliefs in Jewish language and ritual are nothing better than wolves in sheep’s clothing, luring often-unsuspecting Jews with unscrupulous advertising and deceptive programming, like Passover Seders and Hanukkah parties. Their methods are unethical. They often prey on the emotionally vulnerable.

Unfortunately, their success is built upon the significant financial and in-kind support they receive from both evangelical churches like the Assemblies of God, dedicated to the mass conversion of Jews as part of their apocalyptic vision, and from the local mainstream churches in my area whose leadership doesn’t seem to understand why the Messianic or ‘Jew’ for Jesus form of Christianity should be as offensive to them as it is to us.

Unfortunately, the success of these groups is also built upon our own failures in the Jewish community: failures to sufficiently fund Jewish outreach to the unaffiliated; to take seriously the need to train outreach workers; our own reticence to push our enthusiasm for Jewish observance (unless you are Lubavitch) on other Jews and to go out of our way to care for those in emotional need in our community, whether from a divorce, a job loss, problems with parents, loneliness, or any number of other reasons.

Every Jew who converts to Christianity is a failure for the Jewish community. However, as much as I feel pain over Jews who convert to Christianity, it is even worse if the Jew has become a ‘Jew’ for Jesus, because such merging of beliefs is anathema to Judaism.

Since the Christianization of the Roman Empire, Jews have chosen to die rather than accept that Jesus is the messiah, the savior, or in any way different than any other child of God. They did so because we Jews believe in the unambiguous unity of God, that God hears everyone’s prayers (without the need for an intercessor), that there is no vicarious atonement, only the atonement each person seeks through asking forgiveness and doing good deeds, and that the messiah has not yet come, for the world is not yet perfect and at peace. That these groups imply that someone could be a Jew and believe otherwise (in Jesus as their personal savior) is simply a lie.

The best defense is a good offense. That is why we should give three cheers to Jackie Mason on deciding to sue Jews for Jesus and demanding truth in their advertising, let alone not using famous people in their deceptive advertising without permission.

That is also why we should be providing more support to such groups as Jews for Judaism, why each of us can and should learn more about what Judaism believes, and why each of us can and should do more to reach out to our Jewish neighbors and bring them home to an honest and true expression of their Judaism.

posted by Rabbi Susan Grossman @ 5:59 PM

JEWISH SMALL WORLD

I remembered Prof. Cohen was talking about Jdub Records and thought "Where did I just read about that?"

It was on a CD in my bag.

At the HT, my job is asst. to the editor, so I deal with editing letters, guest columns, syndicated columns, I do the editorial page. Since I started back working full-time a couple of years ago, I haven't really written. (In past years, when I was part-time, I did some articles on Jewish holidays, on Miriam's Cup at Passover, etc.)

But at the HT, as Lotus Festival approaches, it's "all hands on deck."

(If you haven't been to Lotus Fest, I highly recommend it. A wristband for $30-something gets you in and out of an incredible variety of music all evening long...walking downtown among the crowd, watching a street parade, eating, drinking, dancing, drumming -- it's magical, and the bands from all over the world are fascinating. It's Oct. 5-8 this year, which doesn't conflict with High Holy Days, as it has sometimes in the past.)

Anyway, at the last staff meeting, they said "If you want to write a Lotus story, grab a CD from Andy's desk." So I grabbed a klezmer CD named GOLEM.

Anyway, turns out that GOLEM is also a Jdub Records CD. And, Lenny Kaye, who is a guest on the CD, is a guitarist in the Patti Smith Band.

We sold Jordie's dad's house (may his memory be for a blessing) in Highland Park, NJ (a very cute little Jewish town between Edison and New Brunswick) to Tony Shanahan and Gabrielle Wilders. Tony is also a guitarist in the Patti Smith Band. And after I emailed Gabrielle to tell her of this funny coincidence, she told me that Emory Dobbyns, who produced the GOLEM CD, is partners with Tony in a production studio they just opened in Hoboken.

So that really is a small world. I'm really looking forward to writing about this band now.

ONE JEWISH FAMILY

Amalia flew from LA and met us at O'Hare. I took this picture with my cell phone! The three kids took the train and went to Lollopalooza and we took Amalia's suitcase and went north to the suburbs to stay with Jordie's cousin Ika (Judy) and her husband Shlomo. I discovered Ika last winter on jewishgen.org. (Jordie thought almost everyone on his mom's side died in the Holocaust and we were so, so happy to discover FAMILY in Chicago! It's as if we have known them for years.)


Lynne and Jordan during our 25th-anniversary vacation week with the kids!




I asked Adam to take good care of his little sis at Lollopalooza and he really did, protecting her from bodysurfers and getting her through the crowds.





Abby went out to LA to visit Amalia earlier in the summer, just hanging out with her book and sketchpad at Starbucks while Amalia worked. The girls have blondy-browny hair, and when she was younger, Amalia had freckles. When somebody says to Amalia "You don't look Jewish!" she says "This is what a Jew looks like!"