Bridging the Vastness

..one of the paradoxes of history that the very power of Hillel's moral teaching, having likely affected Jesus, his disciples, and the religion founded in his name, might have been responsible for provoking an anxiety about those very teachings in Jews who felt threatened by the rise and growing popularity of Christianity..
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
Hillel: If Not Now, When?

I’ve continued to ponder the matter this morning and am coming to realize that the gulf between Gentiles and Jews, even in the Messianic movement, is a great deal wider than I’d previously considered. If indeed Jews in the Messianic movement, like religious Jews in general, need to have synagogues and communities to serve their unique needs, then Gentiles may very well not be able to “join in” without provoking a great deal of anxiety.
My comment at Daily Minyan

Bilateral Ecclesiology and the Gentiles Series

If you follow the link to the Daily Minyan blog and read the entire contents of my comment (comment #10), you'll understand the event that prompts my thoughts and the thoughts that inspired this blog post (and I should give up trying to restrict myself and admit that I'll be writing an entry a day). Please read my words on Gene's blog before continuing here. Much of what I say won't make sense unless you do.

I feel like a significant part of my rationale for creating this blogspot was flawed. I wanted to use this blog as a platform for questioning my assumptions about my personal faith, my assumptions about the expression of my faith within a "Messianic" or "Hebraic" context, and to attempt to add my voice to the effort of building a bridge between Jews and non-Jews in the "Messianic" community (I put the term "Messianic" in quotes based on recent comments on Derek Lemans's blog).

But there's something wrong with the bridge.

It's not a complete collapse of the bridge I'm experiencing. After all, I have a regular dialogue with Gene, Yahatan, Justin, and even recently with Derek. However, based on last night's and this morning's ponderings, I am coming to understand that the gulf I've been trying to bridge is much wider than I previously realized. The commonalities are far fewer than I imagined, and the differences are far more abundant than I had ever calculated.

A few days ago, I looked up the term "Judeo-Christian" at Wikipedia and found this:

Judeo-Christian is used by some to refer to a set of beliefs and ethics held in common by Judaism and Christianity. Others-usually Jews-consider it a "contradiction in terms" that "appeals to a nonexistent historical unity and calls for a banal, modernist theology."

You might say that my emphasis on the phrase nonexistent historical unity is a bit too harsh because there was a brief period when Gentiles and Jews in the First Century Messianic movement overlapped relative to their faith in the Jewish Messiah, but maybe I've been overestimating the degree of overlap. I said the following in a previous blog:

As Christianity and Judaism continued to diverge and finally completely separate, that particular threat died down (though throughout history, Gentiles have been threatening Jews in many other ways), but here we are, 20 centuries later, and we've re-entered the same conflict again.

I doubt that anything was "settled" with any finality in "the early church" relative to Jewish vs. non-Jewish participation and discipleship. In earlier times, I looked to that part of our history in an attempt to locate a model of mutual fellowship and brotherhood between Messianic Jews and Gentiles and have since concluded that such a model did not exist, hence the resulting schism between synagogue and church that exists to this day.


For all my high riding principles and ideals, an encounter with one Orthodox Jewish woman caused me to come back down out of the clouds and land firmly on the reality that the space we are attempting to traverse (or rather, that I was attempting to traverse) isn't what I imagined. I saw a small, gentle river in place of the storm tossed ocean that is now before me.

Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1865 and H.G. Wells published The First Men in the Moon in 1901. However, Neil Armstrong didn't actually step foot on the moon and utter the now famous phrase "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" until July 21, 1969.

I'm not saying the bridge can't be built. I'm not even saying we shouldn't attempt to build that bridge right now. But I am reminded that there were Rabbis who opposed the founding of the modern state of Israel because the Messiah had not yet come. I believe that modern Israel is one "giant leap" in bringing the coming of the Messiah, but it's not the final step...not by a long shot. While we continue to make our efforts to build a bridge and truly unite humanity under the banner of the King, our journey is in its infancy and the frontier lies before us as a boundless vista. Gene recently said he believes the bridge won't be complete until the Messiah returns. Right now, I believe him.

Stepping off of the end of a bridge not yet completed leads to nowhere. We must keep building, one painful inch at a time.

The ocean is vast.