Forging a separate faith

Friday, November 19, 1999

Forging a separate faith

Messianic Jews - Jews who believe in Christ - find themselves at the center of emotional controversy

James Duckworth of Bethel raises his hands during a service at Beth Messiah.
(Craig Ruttle photo)
| ZOOM |

In a Pleasant Ridge storefront decorated with stars of David and Hebrew letters, the members of Beth Messiah Congregation gather weekly for Friday night and Saturday morning services. Together they sing and dance, read from the Torah, recite ancient Hebrew prayers — and worship Yeshua, or Jesus, as their savior and lord.

They call themselves messianic Jews — ethnic Jews who believe that Jesus is the son of God, but still consider themselves Jewish. And they are at the center of a spirited debate between Jews and Christians over identity, faith and religious practice.

The movement's numbers are small: Beth Messiah has 170 members, about half of whom were born Jewish, and worldwide there are only an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 messianic Jews. Rock of Israel, a Fairfield-based messianic ministry, employs five full-time ministers who speak and distribute tracts all across the country.

But messianic Jews provoke emotions out of proportion to their small numbers. Jewish and Southern Baptist leaders have been exchanging letters over the movement in recent months, accusing each other of everything from deception to theological arrogance.

Many Jews against it
Many in the Jewish community say they are sickened by the thought of messianic Jews, while some Christians see them as a valuable prize in their conversion efforts.

Caught between a Jewish community that rejects them and a Christian community that feels foreign, messianic Jews themselves say they are unfazed by the debate over their existence.

“Spiritually, we're definitely brothers and sisters with other believers in the Messiah, but we're not Christians,” says Alissa Ashworth, who came to believe in Jesus as the Messiah while attending the University of Cincinnati. “You all can fight as much as you want. I'm Jewish, I'm raising my kids Jewish, and waving a wand can't make it any different.”

A conversion story
Mrs. Ashworth, who cares for her two young daughters at her Montgomery home, has a story typical to many messianic Jews. Growing up in Cleveland, she attended Jewish services regularly and even won Bible contests. After high school she enrolled at UC. At the time, she says, movements such as Jews for Jesus “made me feel sick to my stomach.”

“I started meeting really nice Christians. I had never met people like them before,” she says after a Saturday morning service, small gold stars of David dangling from her ears. “They started telling me that I had to accept their beliefs, and I was like, no I don't.”

She also came in contact with a Christian campus ministry, and their arguments launched her on a search for the truth. She met with rabbis and ministers across Cincinnati, attended churches and synagogues, and read everything she could find. Finally in 1980, between her freshman and sophomore years, she accepted Jesus.

“I remember saying a prayer one day, saying, you know God, if Jesus is the Messiah, that's OK with me,” she says. “It was a really rough decision, and I did face some problems after.”

Mrs. Ashworth says she was most worried about her parents' reaction. Although her father forgave her, it was years before her mother spoke to her again.

“She told me, "I could accept anything from you. I could accept Buddhism. I could accept (a) Muslim. I can accept anything but Jesus, because to me, Jesus means Hitler, Jesus means Crusades, and I can't accept that.'”

A history of persecution
A Jew embracing Christian beliefs is particularly difficult for many Jews to accept. While some Jews dabble in Eastern religions, and Jewish atheists are accepted as full members of the Jewish community, the history of persecution by Christians makes Christianity different. From the Crusades to the Russian pogroms to the Holocaust, Jews have been singled out for forced conversions and death by societies claiming to be Christian. Financial support for conversion ministries seems like more of the same.

“It's basically saying once again that Christianity, at least in some forms, is denying the legitimacy and validity of Judaism as a covenantal faith,” says Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, the president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

He was among a group of Jewish leaders who wrote last week to the Rev. Paige Patterson, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, expressing their displeasure with Southern Baptist support for messianic ministries to Jews. The group was also upset with a Southern Baptist prayer guide targeting Jews that was released during the Jewish High Holy Days.

Common ground
Jerry Spector, another Beth Messiah member, remembers going to church as a child with a Christian friend.

“I can remember, the whole time the pastor was preaching, saying Jewish prayers to protect myself from what was going on,” says Mr. Spector, a food-service manager from Villa Hills. “As a Jew you go to Hebrew school and learn about what Jews have been through throughout history.”

Mr. Spector, who is 34, took a different route to messianic Judaism. His wife was raised Catholic, and they became interested in religion after they had children. They visited many houses of worship in their search, but she felt uncomfortable in synagogues and he couldn't stomach a church. Then they found a messianic Jewish congregation in Boston, where they lived at the time.

“We went there a couple of times and even though I didn't agree with the message, I was comfortable because it was the kind of service I grew up with as a kid,” he says. “And my wife was comfortable because of the message of Christ.”

Some time later, after a period of fence-sitting, he too decided that Jesus was the son of God. When the family moved to the area four years ago, they sought out Beth Messiah. They hope to move closer to the congregation's new building on Columbia Road in Deerfield Township.

The dedication next month coincides with the last night of Hanukkah, which messianic Jews celebrate instead of Christmas. They also celebrate Passover and the High Holy Days and consider themselves the successors to the first-century Jewish followers of Jesus.

“We really hope to be able to integrate more into the Jewish community,” Mr. Spector says of his family's plans to move. “We feel like we're very Jewish in that believing in Christ is a very Jewish thing to do because all the first believers were Jewish. We feel that messianic Judaism is a very authentic form of Judaism.”

Part of the issue's difficulty comes from the unique nature of Jewish identity. Traditionally, anyone born of a Jewish mother is considered Jewish, and there is an ethnic as well as religious component to Jewish identity. Jewish leaders argue that belief in Jesus crosses an unacceptable line; messianic Jews insist they are Jewish, no matter what their beliefs.

Mainstream Jews have become more aggressive in recent years in combating missionary work targeting Jews. Some Jewish denominations have created videos to make their young members aware of conversion efforts. Jews for Judaism, a Baltimore-based outreach, counsels families, maintains a speakers' bureau, and refutes the assertions of messianic Jews one by one on their Web site.

They track more than 900 Christian-sponsored groups targeting Jews for conversion. At least several of the groups have budgets of more than $5 million, with Jews for Jesus more than $11 million. Jews for Judaism, by contrast, reports an annual budget of about $400,000.

Still estranged
If relations between messianic and rabbinic Jews are decidedly strained, the relations between messianic Jews and Christians are more ambiguous.

“Sometimes you feel like (Christians are saying), "Oh, we won one over,' like it's a personal victory for them,” Mr. Spector says. “It's not like they won one over, it's that we figured it out.”

Many denominations donate generously to messianic ministries, and in recent years some churches have embraced Jewish traditions such as Passover seders.

The Rev. Warren Frankel of Rock of Israel led about 50 seders for Christian churches last year, explaining the rituals of the Passover ceremony in Christian terms. He maintains the stripes on the matzoh, for instance, represent the wounds of Jesus at the crucifixion, and the three pieces of matzoh represent the Trinity.

This interpretation angers Jews, who see Jewish ritual and symbolism appropriated by an entirely different religion. They also point out that the current seder wasn't even in use during Jesus' life, so his Last Supper bore little resemblance to a contemporary seder.

“The issue is not only how they represent themselves to the Jewish community, but how they represent themselves to the Christian community,” says Rabbi Robert Barr of Congregation Beth Adam in Madisonville.

“For someone who purports to be Jewish to give a Christian perspective (of Judaism) to Christians, it does a disservice to Christians because they don't represent Judaism, and nobody is served by blurring those lines.”

The Rev. Mr. Frankel, who was raised in an Orthodox home, also speaks in churches, advising them of the discomfort most Jews feel when it comes to Christianity. Wearing a prayer shawl and yarmulke, he tells them to tailor their message to eliminate language that might set off alarms. The Rock of Israel and Beth Messiah have no relationship, but Rock of Israel is affiliated with the Assemblies of God denomination.

“Don't talk about Jesus, talk about Yeshua. Don't talk about the cross, talk about the tree,” he says in his talks. “Don't tell him he's going to hell because he hasn't accepted Jesus as the messiah. You can tell him he's going because there's sin in his life, but God has a plan.”

The Rev. Dr. Patterson, the Southern Baptist leader, wrote back to Rabbi Zimmerman and the other Jewish leaders last week. He defended his denomination's support of messianic Jewish ministries, but even he sounded slightly impatient with the path messianics choose.

“If I had my own preference, I would rather see Jews who embrace Jesus as the Messiah simply come into our churches, as most do,” he wrote.

To many messianics, the statement — and the beliefs behind it — show that they are misunderstood, even by people who claim to support them.

“If Baptists are using the name messianic Judaism or calling congregations messianic Jewish just to bring Jews to a Baptist-style Christianity, then that is deceptive,” says Rachel Wolf, whose husband, Michael, has led Beth Messiah for 22 years.

“The Baptists are well-meaning for the most part in their concern and desire to evangelize Jews, but they don't really understand, even from a theological standpoint, the eternal covenant that God has with the people of Israel.”



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