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.

The Wall

I was reading an article written by Aaron Eby called The "Hypocrisy of the Pharisees. It's a very fine article that draws out a more historically accurate picture of who the Pharisees were in the first century world of Yeshua, and how they functioned. Some of the comments about Eby's blog made on Kineti L'Tziyon (including mine) support the idea that this kind of information needs to be related and spread through the traditional Christian church. Many Gentile believers who love God and who are devoted to the Messiah are still being taught old and inaccurate histories and theologies that not only separate them from the chosen people of God but from the truth. Now here's the ironic part.

Such teachings aren't (at least as far as I know) common in most churches, so as much as the church is performing what we might call "the weighter matters of Torah" such as feeding the poor and visiting the sick (something that MJ and OL congregations aren't all that good at), they aren't being provided access to such teachings. Of course, anyone with Internet access can read Eby's blog, but many of the faithful aren't made aware of how to locate such teachings and particularly, aren't encouraged to take such teachings to heart. If you're being taught that "the Law is dead" and "the Pharisees were hypocrites", you aren't likely to seek out alternate teachings and studies.

It's been suggested that the reason Gentiles are "plaguing" the MJ movement and forming OL congregations is that they are dissatisfied and disenfranchised from the church and are trying to "take over" a uniquely Jewish worship venue of Jews who have faith in Yeshua as the Messiah. What if there's another explanation, at least for some of us? What if we're looking for information? What if we're looking for truth?

Often "truth" is in the eye of the beholder. I've said repeatedly in different articles in this blog that how we interpret the Bible is largely determined by our personal point of view and our theological bent. It can often be determined by our attachment to a particular movement, congregation, or school the supports a particular perspective. How do we know who's telling the truth? How do we, Jew and Gentile alike, find what we're looking for? What is the truth about the Messiah and about God?

I'm not trying to replace or take over anything. You only have my word for that, of course. I could be some sort of covert, evil Gentile trying to impose my personal theology or viewpoint on a larger audience. In reality, I have no such ambition, but that hasn't stopped at least a few people from believing so.

What I'm looking for is what I said I'm looking for...a place in the creation of God as His creation. Lots and lots of people have suggested where I should go (sometimes for good, sometimes otherwise), but who should I listen to? Who is right? Where's the truth?

Every morning, the first thing I "tweet" on twitter is a quote from the Bible, usually from the Psalms. This morning, I quoted this:

Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save.
When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing. -Psalm 146:3-4

As human beings, when we have a question, we tend to seek out other human beings for the answer. Problem is, even the wisest and most reliable of human beings can be wrong, express personal or group bias, or otherwise not necessarily be the final arbiter of truth. So who is?

God.

That may not be the answer you're looking for, but it has the benefit of being true. Of course, it doesn't mean God is going to speak to us in an audible voice and make plain all those things we may find confusing about the Bible or about each other, but when we get in a position where we feel like our questions are screwing us into a hole in the ground, we do have the option of taking time out, praying, and asking Him for guidance.

Looking for a way to connect to God shouldn't be hard, it shouldn't be complicated, and it shouldn't require graduate degrees in theology, divinity, and metaphysics. While it's really cool to come to a certain intellectual understanding of the Bible, Yeshua did say that we should come to him like a "little child" (Mark 10:15). He  probably didn't mean "a little child" in terms of intellectual capacity, and he was likely suggesting we express and experience a certain wide-eyed wonder at the Glory of God. After all, all Abraham had to do was believe and it was "credited to him as righteousness" (Genesis 12:3, Romans 4:3). Wonder, faith, and trust shouldn't be so difficult to come by.

The occasional Gentile leaving the traditional church may be less of a trouble maker and more of a seeker of truth. In the first century, Paul, Peter, and other Jewish emissaries to the Gentiles drew non-Jewish people to the Jewish Messiah. Believe me, these Gentiles probably had a lot of questions about who they were in the Messiah and how all this worked. They probably were hungry for information and I don't believe Paul said they had to go to Sunday school to find their answers. The Gentiles consulted the source information which includes the Bible, the Jewish emissaries, and ultimately God. 20 centuries later, why shouldn't Gentiles do the same thing and not be relegated to recycling traditional Christian theologies and histories that, by design, are isolated from some of those sources and, in some cases, perpetuate myth and misinformation?

I'm looking for a way to get over the wall that separates us as believers, or to get around it, or even just to go through it. People are very good at building walls to define areas and, in the present context, suggesting that we make a few doors in those walls will probably result in me being accused of heinous things like "replacement theology", but what is the problem in being to see our commonalities along with our differences? Most of all, where's the problem in turning to God for the answers and not always having to believe the (human) experts hold all the keys?