For those worshipers of Jesus (either Jewish-born or Gentile) who wish to imagine themselves as part of Israel and Judaism, while embracing core teachings of Christianity, life is often full of cognitive dissonance and spiritual uncertainty. Theirs is an existence where the ever hopeful ambiguity reigns supreme. They wish to tout Jesus’ Jewishness and value of Judaic oriented teaching (as they imagined it to be, wholly filtered, of course, through the New Testament theology), but they find themselves uncomfortably caught between Christian and Jewish worlds. Such a state of being is partly fueled by their imagination and partly by their sincere hope of eventual Jewish-Christian reconciliation (which will, they believe, include full Jewish acceptance of Jesus as G-d and Messiah). In actuality, however, these so called judeophile Christians and Messianic Jews are not anywhere near the Jewish world, as most of them are virtually cut off from the actual Jewish community.
Since those two worlds stand far apart on many core issues, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable often leads to much frustration, always on the part of those in the Christian world. Jews who became Christians may want to have the best of the both worlds, but in the end, like their Gentile brethren, they end up serving only one master – Jesus. Indeed, Jesus was right when he said that one “can’t serve two masters”. Although he was speaking about serving G-d while depending on riches, the same could (quite ironically) be applied to serving two very different gods within two very different religious frameworks.
Jesus dependency and fear in the lives of his worshipers
There’s a lot of emotional attachment to Jesus among his followers. I know this first hand. After all, those who believe him to be G-d credit to Jesus their very life, both in this world and the World to Come. They believe that through the divine man Jesus alone can their sins be forgiven and this creates total and absolute dependency. Although throughout their long and eventful history Jews did just fine with just G-d alone and always suffered greatly if they placed their hopes on someone else, Jesus taught his disciples (if we are to trust the author of Gospel of John) that without him they “can do nothing” (John 15:5). Christians (either Gentile or Jewish-born) take those words very seriously. As a result of such a mindset, it’s ultimately Jesus who gets the glory for just about every good thing that happens to his followers. What’s more, there’s fear – real fear experienced by Jesus-worshipers, inspired by the teachings found in New Testament, warnings constantly preached from the pulpit. Christians must be on guard to not disappoint Jesus by not living up to his exceedingly high standards, to not “trample his sacrifice”, to not fail to execute his “great commission”. However, what many followers of Jesus fear most is losing their faith in Jesus. They fear being seduced by Satan into denying Jesus and being condemned to eternal torturous hell with other unbelievers.
Judaism for Christians – beautiful, valuable and….very dangerous?
What helped drive me back toward Judaism was, in part, my recognition of and reaction to the institutionalized anti-Judaism embedded deep within Christianity. I saw it in much of the “Messianic Judaism”, which has a great distrust of the type of Judaism that takes Torah observance seriously. Because of that, “Orthodox Judaism” is a bad word among many of them and virtually synonymous with “legalistic Pharisees” that they read about in the pages of the New Testament. The refrain in the messianic circles that “we don’t need to emulate Orthodox Judaism” is a common one, even though Orthodox Jewish values are far more aligned to those that messianics inherited from Evangelicalism.
Even to those Christians and messianics most friendly to Judaism, Judaism as a whole and the rabbis in particular are gravely mistaken about the most important issue of all – the nature of G-d and his dealing with mankind. Judaism, to them, is a system where “works of the law” (as Paul put it) can stifle the relationship with G-d. More importantly, in their minds, Judaism presents a real danger to a Christian, as it can, when fully embraced and practiced, lead him or her away from Jesus, the New Testament’s god who became a man. This is why my Jewish- and Judaism-friendly Christian friends often warn other Christians not to be “too enamored by the beauty of Judaism”. G-d forbid they desire to convert! They warn those seekers to avoid getting too deep into Jewish things, lest they lose sight of something that is supposed to have been (but Jews failed to recognize), according to them, Judaism’s ultimate aim – worship of and reliance on Jesus.
In my opinion, this attitude toward Judaism betrays a [subconscious?] disrespect these Jewish-friendly Christians harbor toward the Jewish faith. This is because they see Judaism, at least in part, as superficial and even dangerous to the “weak”. Nurtured in Pauline teachings, these Christians do not see Judaism as Jews themselves see it – a relationship based on love for G-d as G-d Himself wants it to be expressed. To them, Judaism in very beautiful on outside. They even believe that it contains many valuable spiritual clues to understanding Jesus the Jew and even Paul, the founder of Gentile Christianity. But ultimately, for them Judaism does not lead to the “truth”, which they believe can only be revealed in Jesus and him alone.
To these Christians, the rabbis, no matter how devout and learned, no matter how knowledgeable about Jesus, about NT and the Christian theology, were and still are blind to THE “Ultimate Truth” (a.k.a. Jesus). At the same time, Christians, including those who hated Judaism and persecuted Jews, while sinning against Jews, were at least “right” about the most important thing of all – that Jesus is god, lord and savior of all mankind. As someone who has personally experienced much antisemitism growing up, this inherent anti-Jewishness of the Jesus-based religion just didn’t sit well with me and I had to get to the core of it. In my search, I realized that the anti-Judaism that pervades Christendom is not a later perversion of the once pure faith (as I so wanted to believed when I was in the Messianic Movement), but it’s deeply embedded within the pages of its sacred writings – the New Testament.
Where will we go from here?
Thousands of Gentiles today are coming to the realization that Christianity has fashioned another god. They realized that there’s something deeply flawed in a religion that while claiming fidelity to the Hebrew Bible both actively and passively sought to do away both with the Jews and suppress their stubborn monotheistic understanding of the Creator. By reading the New Testament with fresh eyes, they realized that this new god, a man-god hybrid, was primarily a product Paul and the visions he claimed. Paul’s and Pauline writings (letters written by his inner circle or those writing in his name years later) occupy almost half of the New Testament and it is they which have had the greatest effect on Christian theology. Paul saw an opportunity to capitalize on ecstatic messianic expectations promoted by a group of mostly illiterate Jews (a group that he himself was never a part of). Although he never met Jesus and did not reach out to those who actually knew him until he was already well into his quest, he found ready converts among the pagans for this new movement based on an exalted human figure. The people Paul “converted” knew next to nothing about Judaism and nothing about the Torah of the Jews, but they liked what they were hearing. They read no Hebrew and even literacy in Greek was reserved for the schooled elites. This enabled Paul to teach his own novel interpretations that were both contrary to those of Judaism and contradictory to the plain meaning of scripture. The deified mortal human being of Christianity has for the last two thousands years competed for humanity’s loyalty with the G-d of the Jews.
Today, however, we live in a world where there’s great access to competing ideas and the sacrifice for exploring them is nowhere as severe as it once was. I believe that when the claims of Judaism are honestly compared with those of Christianity, the artificial edifice of the latter crumbles. If Torah is truth, it can stand up to scrutiny. G-d’s all-apparent faithfulness to the promises He made to Israel is His signature on the ketubah (marriage contract) that is Torah, and one day all nations will acknowledge this.
Daily Minyan 
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