We live in strange days, folks. Various “messianic” Christian groups, from Bible-belt “Hebrew Roots” to the so called “mainstream messianics” (composed of ethnically-Jewish converts to Evangelical Christianity), now offer their fellow Christians a chance to become “Messianic Jews” through conversion, without compromising their Christian conscience. This means that no changes to the core Christian beliefs that Jews find idolatrous and foreign to Judaism (such as Trinity and deity of Jesus) are required. The chief prerequisite for a “convert” is a “calling” to be part of the Jewish people.
Here are five reasons why all such “conversions” are an oxymoron, nonsensical, deceptive and an utterly futile waste of time:
- A Jew, to put it very simply, is a person who is a member of the Jewish people, the nation of Israel. One can be a Jew only through two of the following ways: 1) being born to a Jewish mother, 2) having converted through a recognized Jewish court. Any non-Jewish person who desires to become a Jew must first come to terms with basic requirements of Jewish conversion: he or she must reject any false gods and worship only the G-d of Israel and Him alone and the potential convert must reject all past foreign religious beliefs and practices, promising to obey and practice Torah as given to the Jewish people. Within Judaism, Gentiles coming from any religion who wish to become Jewish are immediately disqualified if they wish to retain their veneration and worship of their old deities. Why? Because they fail to satisfy these most basic of prerequisites, holding on to their cherished idolatry. One cannot become a Jew while continuing to worship a false “god” (Jesus, Buddha, Zeus, a guru, etc) while swearing allegiance to the G-d of Israel. You can’t swear that you will obey Torah while committing idolatry at the very moment you are making that promise.
- No Jewish body recognizes a “messianic conversion” or people who have undergone it as “Jews”. No Jewish community, no matter how liberal and accepting, will see either you or your children as Jewish. Even generations from now, your descendants, assuming they keep your religious practices, will still be considered as Christian Gentiles who like to do Jewish things in their churches (similar to Adventists who worship on Saturdays). This means that you will only be a “Jew” to your immediate fellow messianic friends, most of whom are not Jewish themselves.
- Your children will not be able to marry Jews, unless those Jews are part of the aging and shrinking pool of Jews who converted to Christianity, most of whose children are not Jewish halachically. Even in Israel intermarriage of Jewish Christians to Gentile Christian is the norm, making their children non-Jewish (in cases where the mother is not Jewish according to Jewish law). Your chances of finding halachically Jewish people in America to marry off your children are virtually nil, and so your children will most likely marry either mainstream Christians or “messianic converts”.
- The future of the Jewish people lies in Israel, where more Jews live now than even in the U.S. and where soon the majority of the world’s Jews will reside. However, neither you or your children will be allowed to make aliyah to Israel. (You probably believe that Jesus will come and fix all that one day. Good luck!). Sure, a few have gotten around Israeli laws by obtaining false conversion papers, as some messianic have done, by lying to a mainstream Jewish court or by finding a corrupt rabbi who didn’t care about truth. Even with all that fake paperwork, you will still get into Israel only by deceiving Israel’s immigration authorities. I know quite a few messianics who have done just that (although many have been caught and asked to leave the country).
- You have converted “to messianic Judaism”. You will now go around claiming that you are now a Jew because some messianic group has decreed it thus. But in truth, nothing has changed, except in your own mind. You are not a Jew, not even a bad one. Even if you successfully deceive some Jewish people when you visit mainstream synagogues, community centers, or travel to Israel, or simply do not care about what (non-Jesus-worshiping) Jews have to say about your so called “conversion” (and most messianics truly do not care about what real Jews have to say about their actions), you will not be able to deceive the G-d of Israel. You have made your choice by worshiping a false god, and you will never be part of Klal Yisrael by trying to get in through the backdoor.
Daily Minyan 
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