Overlap, Part 3: Speed Bumps

Stop separating us already! We are family and should treat each other with love . I believe it says to love your neighbor as yourself a couple of times in scripture . We have all been called to obey Torah. No tap dancing around it.

A comment from the Congregation Shema Yisrael blog

Bilateral Ecclesiology and the Gentiles Series

Last Friday, I copied the content of one of my articles on this blog called Orthodox Rabbi’s View of Torah and the Gentiles and posted it on my congregation's blog. I've received two responses there so far, and both have been like the quote you read at the top if the page.

Today, I even went so far as to use this content as the basis for my teaching at Shabbat services. It turned out to be a very lively discussion and inspired a great deal of debate.

These are the sort of teachings that, at least in my little corner of the world, I consider "pushing the envelope". I make it a big deal on this blog to question assumptions and I'm extending that to my more "public" and "in person" world. The results are predictable and not entirely comfortable.

While you can expect questioning assumptions of the "One Law status quo" (or any status quo) to yield some push back, can you (or I) expect it to do any actual good? I hope so. But on the other hand, I'm only one guy. I'm not trying to lead a revolution, I'm just trying to get people to see alternatives. I guess this is what happens when you start threatening the sacred cows (and I've done that before).

As I've probably mentioned previously, I'm extending this type of class and presenting these questions in a 16 week course I'm teaching at my congregation starting the last Wednesday of January. While, from my point of view, it's an expansion of what I've been writing about on this blog all along and contains much of what I've learned from the experience, it's also either going to open some eyes or end up shutting some ears.

I hope it's the former, but no one likes to have their assumptions questioned. I know that in traditional Talmudic study, debates, questions, and struggling with the status quo is allowed and even encouraged, but with many non-Jews or Jews who didn't have the benefit of a classic Jewish education, they respond a lot like Christians in a Bible study. If you step outside the established canon, you won't be received well.

The struggle between unity and division isn't just on one side of the equation. Everybody owns a sacred cow. When you go out "cow tipping", the cows push back.

I'm going to stop blogging now and go to sleep. Honest.

Addendum, the next afternoon:

I've never encountered problems building relationships with Christians who have repudiated supersessionism or, at least, acknowledge there is something deficient in the way that Christianity traditionally approaches the Jews, their Scriptures, and their Torah.

I have had a problem building relationships with Christians (One Law Messianics included) who are committed to the proposition that they are Israel.

I think what you identify as the "BE" corrective has nothing to do with BE at all, it has do with good sense. You shouldn't just go messing around and playing fantasy dress-up with someone else's religion.
A comment by Ovadia in

Overlap, Part 2: The Therapeutic Horse

Is it time to play Stuck in the Middle by Steelers Wheel? If I try to educate people to be sensitive to the needs of Messianic Judaism as Ovadia suggests, I get accused of not treating people with love and rebuilding the wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles in the "Messianic movement". If I devise a plan that I think will gain the best results in achieving what Ovadia suggests but moves slowly, it's not good enough and all I'm doing is playing "dress up" with someone else's religion.

If I were the character Q (played by John deLancie) from Star Trek: The Next Generation, I suppose I could just snap my fingers and give everyone what they want, but I'm not...and I can't.

Pursuing Sacred Cows

I thought I'd take a moment and pause amid frantic blogging and other activities to bring some of you up to date with what I'm doing and why I blog here. I "officially" write for my congregation's blog on matters that are of interest and concern, both to the congregation and (hopefully) to the Messianic community at large. However, as a representative of my congregation, I have a responsibility to write in a "voice" that reflects the nature and character of our group and as a part of the body of Messiah (Christ). On the other hand, there are times when I have another "voice"; my individual and personal voice.

On the personal side of my faith, I struggle with my faith in attempting to understand who I am in God. I sometimes imagine that everyone else in the community of faith has found their nice, comfortable niche and have settled into the secure arms of certainty for a long winter's nap, while I am still outside in the storm, fighting dragons and demons in my quest to discover my relationship with God (or tilting at windmills, take your pick).

OK, that's overly dramatic, but I do see faith and the pursuit of faith as a kind of struggle. I even blogged on this topic not too long ago. In fact, referencing that blog post, this is part of how I envision the struggle:

For years I had struggled with the theology of Catholicism, a theology which emphasizes belief. Once I seriously questioned that belief, the roots of my faith were shattered. Though I was taught that deeds were important, the stress was on having faith, on "believing in" something, even though or perhaps especially because it evaded all reason. In Judaism, by contrast, it is the emphasis on action, on righteous behavior that I find so attractive. The allowance, sometimes encouragement, of questions concerning belief, God, and truth is such a welcome relief. One can be religious and question; in fact, it is one's duty to question. Once I had learned that Israel meant "to struggle with God", I felt my destiny at hand.
by Lydia Kukoff in her book
Choosing Judaism

I started this blog last July to investigate the struggle in my own faith and the struggle of trying to integrate, or at least invite fellowship between Gentiles and Jews in the Messianic movement. Five months later, the struggle continues, with mixed results.

I must admit that the struggle is also one based on my personality and self identity and, while God is the author of who I am, I've also been tinkering around with his creation (me) for the past 56 years, so I have to take responsibility at this point, for what I've done with his basic handiwork. This blog is the result.

In questioning my own assumptions about faith and about a Gentile's place in the "sheep pen" of the Jewish Messiah, I also must question the assumptions of others. This makes me the pursuer and occasionally the slayer of "sacred cows". No one likes to have their sacred cows picked on and anyone who has the nerve to try will likely become unpopular.

Over these past several months, I've "taken on" various sacred cows with different degrees of zeal, but my most recent blog post (besides this one) is fully confronting the One Law/One Torah sacred cow. Keep in mind, I'm not necessarily aligning with one group over the other. If it were that simple, this blog may well not exist and I'd simply align with a particular organization or leader and settle quietly into that niche. What I am trying to do instead is to perform a bit of honest exploration on my own and see what comes up, without depending on drinking anyone's kool-aid.

Many other writers in the Messianic blogosphere focus on their areas of expertise and perhaps their comfort zones. We all like our comfort zones. I like my comfort zone. It's nice and cozy there. I've just been having trouble finding a comfort zone in the community of faith lately. Not that I don't take comfort from God and not that I can't be eased by the Spirit of the Messiah, but how that life of faith is to be lived out is another story. My personal story is compounded by the fact that my wife is Jewish but not Messianic. That means the one person in my life that God designed for me to share all of my inner self with cannot share my faith, nor can I embrace her faith which must deny the Messiah.

So I chase cows.

I try to be polite about it, but someone has to ask these silly questions. Recently, Judah Gabriel Himango commented in one of my blogs that "...since you've been pining on about gentiles..." The nature of text-only blog comments doesn't always allow me to understand the intent or mood of the commenter, so I don't know exactly what Judah meant by that statement, but when I looked up the definition of pining, it said, a feeling of deep longing. That's the noun. Synonyms (in verb form) are "ache", "yearn", "yen", "languish". In some stories, young, star-crossed lovers separated for months or years on end tend to "pine" for one another.

I don't know if that's what Judah meant to say.

However, as a Gentile in "the movement", I speak with the voice of a Gentile who is trying to understand how or if "the rest of us" fit into the Kingdom of God. I don't doubt that God accepts us. Otherwise, why did Yeshua do what he did? Why did the Messiah die for all humanity? Why would the Messiah send Paul as an emissary to the Gentiles? Why did God unfold a sheet of trief in front of Peter and then go tell him to have a meal with the Gentile God-fearer Cornelius?

But what does it all mean and how does it all work on a day-to-day basis? That's why I chase down sacred cows. It's my way of separating the chaff from the wheat in order to get down to the answer, if we can ever get to the answer. Chasing cows and removing chaff takes is a lot of work. It's pursuing faith. It's a struggle. That's why I'm here.

I chase cows.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress.