Jews Who Accept Jesus: Can we distinguish between “Status” & “Identity”?

 

What Happens When Status and Identity Should Be Exclusive, But Aren't?

I’d like to tell you a story about a childhood friend of mine. I’m changing his name to Paul for the sake of his privacy.  Paul grew up down the street, in one of the fairly rare kosher homes of our neighborhood. He attended the local Schechter day school, and even staffed Camp Ramah.  It was there that he took his kosher observances to the biblical ideal, coming home and announcing his complete vegetarian commitments.  Paul fell in love to a woman who promised to convert to Judaism.  They were married less than a year before she announced that she was not going to convert, that she was pregnant, and that she was leaving Paul.  He was crushed, became a father, had a crisis of faith with Judaism and all organized religion, and life went on.  Eventually he met the love of his life, Isabella.  Her family were committed Baptists.  Isabella invited Paul to join them for church one day, and out of respect for his beloved and her family, he did. The more he went, the more the message of Christianity spoke to Paul.  After a while, Paul decided to pursue studies at the First Baptist church.  Eventually he accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior.  After a while Paul became a teacher in the Southern Baptist Sunday school.  To his surprise he realized that he never felt more connected to his Jewish history and heritage than as it informed his new faith as a Christian.  There was no question that Paul and Isabella grew their family as a practicing Christian household even though Paul would always feel that a core part of that identity was still a discrete Jewish identity.

This Messianic T-Shirt does a great job in packaging a very Jewish approach to Jesus: The Cross is central to and framed by the Star of David, the Hebrew name Yeshua for Jesus emphasizes the Jewish connection to the possibilities.

I recently heard a story from Amy-Jill Levine, a New Testament scholar at Vanderbilt University.  A friend of hers is the head of a particular and prominent Messianic Hebrew movement on another continent. She asked him why he chose not to worship in the context of a mainstream Christian church community.  He replied that his daughter has chosen to be an evangelical minister.  His two sons have had conversions to Judaism overseen by the local, presumably Orthodox, rabbinate.  He points out that had he not preserved an active connection to his own Jewish heritage, it never would have been as accessible for his sons. 

The need for a vital conversation about the question of Status and Identity is underscored by the fact that many of evangelical denominations promote programs that provide seminary training for and ordination as Messianic Jewish rabbis. Get used to that term.  It will have an increasing presence in intra-communal Jewish conversations. For a few years now, these rabbis have been applying to and are being accepted for military chaplaincy billets as rabbis. The Jewish Welfare Board Commission on Chaplaincy is the Jewish community’s historical, official, trans-denominational office for the Jewish military chaplaincy. When they first encountered Messianic Jewish rabbis they were advised with great enthusiasm that many more were coming through the process. The JWB decided that there were more strategic battles demanding their attention.  It is likely that Messianic Jewish rabbis will seek other chaplaincy ministries, for instance on campus, or in hospitals.  It is equally likely that many family members of Messianic Jews will be unprepared to sever family ties over the matter of theology.  That in turn promises some interesting implications for community conversations on local, national, and potentially even international levels.

Perhaps one policy that this emerging reality will make us reconsider is the easing of stringencies associated with conversion.  There are historic precedents and even detailed conversations of the practical as well as theological issues in traditional and contemporary Jewish law.  All I know is that Paul still finds his way into a synagogue for the High Holy Days, listening to hear something that speaks especially to his Jewish soul.  At what point does status become identity?  I have no idea.