I Don't Agree With Them, So They Must Be Dishonest

Lenore Skenazy has written an article in the New York Daily News about her rage at Jews for Jesus. Ok, maybe not rage. But she seems upset.

Usually I take any piece of paper some poor soul is handing out, be it breakfast menu or psychic healer special. I even take the Jehovah's Witness magazines, when they're in English. So why do my hands clench into don't-get-that-thing-NEAR-me fists when someone tries to hand me a pamphlet from Jews for Jesus?

Ok, I'm hooked. Why?

I honestly didn't know - until I started talking with the Christians and Jews who have studied the group's tactics.

"They're not like anybody else," says Ruth Guggenheim, spokeswoman for the anti-cult group Jews for Judaism. "Most evangelical Christians are straightforward, they come to the door and say they want you to become a Christian. They're honest."

The problem is that the Jews for Jesus - in town this month with their biggest mission ever - say nothing of the sort. While they, too, want Jews to embrace Christ, they only call this becoming a more "fulfilled" or "completed" Jew. And to make it look, well, kosher, they dress it up with Jewish symbols.

So they are upfront that people should believe in Jesus as the Messiah. But because they don't believe that Jews cease being Jews when they believe in the Jewish Messiah, they are being dishonest.

Actually, if you believe the New Testament, you should believe you can be Jewish and believe in Jesus. First, Jesus is the Messiah. Secondly, almost 2000 years ago the question was whether people can believe in Jesus without becoming Jewish. Somewhere and somehow that got turned on its head.

"Acknowledge what you're doing! Acknowledge that you're asking people to convert to Christianity!" says Michael Miller, executive vice president at the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. Like me, Miller has nothing against people with religious convictions trying to share them, so long as they don't stoop to deception. And this group is trying to look as Jewish as Jackie Mason.

"Jews for Jesus". They are upfront with Jesus. But Lenore Skenazy sincerely believes that you can't believe in Jesus and be Jewish. So she equates "joining Christianity" with "not being Jewish anymore."

She cannot conceive of that not being the case. So it appears she cannot understand that someone can actually believe you can believe Jesus is the Jewish Messiah (he's everyone's Messiah) and be truthful about remaining Jewish.

This week, the pamphlets themselves feature Jewish jokes. "Good news should make people smile," says Susan Pearlman, a spokeswoman for the group, which is capping a five-year, 65-city tour with its mission here. The jokes are all used as parables to explain why Jews should accept Christ.

Sorry. Jews can't. That was decided 2,000 years ago.

On whose authority? Doesn't God, who set apart the Jewish people, get to define who is Jewish? Even the Talmud agrees that one can't stop being Jewish.

But beyond even the evil of deception, there is one more thing that hits me in the gut when a Jew for Jesus tries to convert me. It's a soul-deep sense of insult.

"Someone is trying to get you to betray not just your religion, but your parents and your grandparents," says Prof. Berger. "And these people are using Jewish symbols."

That's it! It is an invitation to betrayal dressed up as a celebration of my roots.

No wonder I don't take the pamphlets.

Let's assume for a moment that Jesus is the Messiah. Let's assume for a moment (and indeed it is the case) that Jesus is risen from the dead. Would it be wrong to believe in Jesus?

I can't help Lenore Skenazy that she feels it is a betrayal. It's a common feeling, as Stan Telchin famously (in Messianic Jewish circles) wrote about his experience to faith in Jesus as Messiah.

But I would ask this first: is it true?

If it is true, not believing in Jesus would be a denial of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

If it is true, there is life in the Messiah. There is forgiveness. There is peace.

No wonder the Psalmist wrote:

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the LORD counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.