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Monday, December 26, 2011
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For 2,000 years Jews have rejected the Christian idea of Jesus as messiah. Why?One of the most common questions we receive at Aish.com is: "Why don't Jews believe in Jesus?" Let's understand why ― not in order to disparage other religions, but rather to clarify the Jewish position.
Jews do not accept Jesus as the messiah because:
- Jesus did not fulfill the messianic prophecies.
- Jesus did not embody the personal qualifications of the Messiah.
- Biblical verses "referring" to Jesus are mistranslations.
- Jewish belief is based on national revelation.
But first, some background: What exactly is the Messiah?
The word "Messiah" is an English rendering of the Hebrew word "Mashiach", which means "Anointed." It usually refers to a person initiated into God's service by being anointed with oil. (Exodus 29:7, I Kings 1:39, II Kings 9:3)
Since every King and High Priest was anointed with oil, each may be referred to as "an anointed one" (a Mashiach or a Messiah). For example: "God forbid that I [David] should stretch out my hand against the Lord's Messiah [Saul]..." (I Samuel 26:11. Cf. II Samuel 23:1, Isaiah 45:1, Psalms 20:6)
Where does the Jewish concept of Messiah come from? One of the central themes of Biblical prophecy is the promise of a future age of perfection characterized by universal peace and recognition of God. (Isaiah 2:1-4; Zephaniah 3:9; Hosea 2:20-22; Amos 9:13-15; Isaiah 32:15-18, 60:15-18; Micah 4:1-4; Zechariah 8:23, 14:9; Jeremiah 31:33-34)
Many of these prophetic passages speak of a descendant of King David who will rule Israel during the age of perfection. (Isaiah 11:1-9; Jeremiah 23:5-6, 30:7-10, 33:14-16; Ezekiel 34:11-31, 37:21-28; Hosea 3:4-5)
Since every King is a Messiah, by convention, we refer to this future anointed king as The Messiah. The above is the only description in the Bible of a Davidic descendant who is to come in the future. We will recognize the Messiah by seeing who the King of Israel is at the time of complete universal perfection.
1. Jesus Did Not Fulfill the Messianic Prophecies
What is the Messiah supposed to accomplish? The Bible says that he will:
- Build the Third Temple (Ezekiel 37:26-28).
- Gather all Jews back to the Land of Israel (Isaiah 43:5-6).
- Usher in an era of world peace, and end all hatred, oppression, suffering and disease. As it says: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall man learn war anymore." (Isaiah 2:4)
- Spread universal knowledge of the God of Israel, which will unite humanity as one. As it says: "God will be King over all the world ― on that day, God will be One and His Name will be One" (Zechariah 14:9).
Because no one has ever fulfilled the Bible's description of this future King, Jews still await the coming of the Messiah. All past Messianic claimants, including Jesus of Nazareth, Bar Cochba and Shabbtai Tzvi have been rejected.
Christians counter that Jesus will fulfill these in the Second Coming, but Jewish sources show that the Messiah will fulfill the prophecies outright; in the Bible no concept of a second coming exists.
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2) Jesus Did Not Embody the Personal Qualifications of Messiah
A. Messiah as Prophet
The Messiah will become the greatest prophet in history, second only to Moses. (Targum - Isaiah 11:2; Maimonides - Yad Teshuva 9:2)
Prophecy can only exist in Israel when the land is inhabited by a majority of world Jewry, a situation which has not existed since 300 BCE. During the time of Ezra, when the majority of Jews refused to move from Babylon to Israel, prophecy ended upon the death of the last prophets ― Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.
Jesus was not a prophet; he appeared on the scene approximately 350 years after prophecy had ended.
B. Descendent of David
According to Jewish sources, the Messiah will be born of human parents and possess normal physical attributes like other people. He will not be a demi-god, (1) nor will he possess supernatural qualities.
The Messiah must be descended on his father's side from King David (see Genesis 49:10, Isaiah 11:1, Jeremiah 23:5, 33:17; Ezekiel 34:23-24). According to the Christian claim that Jesus was the product of a virgin birth, he had no father ― and thus could not have possibly fulfilled the messianic requirement of being descended on his father's side from King David. (2)
C. Torah Observance
The Messiah will lead the Jewish people to full Torah observance. The Torah states that all mitzvot remain binding forever, and anyone coming to change the Torah is immediately identified as a false prophet. (Deut. 13:1-4)
Throughout the New Testament, Jesus contradicts the Torah and states that its commandments are no longer applicable. For example, John 9:14 records that Jesus made a paste in violation of Shabbat, which caused the Pharisees to say (verse 16), "He does not observe Shabbat!"
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3) Mistranslated Verses "Referring" to Jesus
Biblical verses can only be understood by studying the original Hebrew text ― which reveals many discrepancies in the Christian translation.
A. Virgin Birth
The Christian idea of a virgin birth is derived from the verse in Isaiah 7:14 describing an "alma" as giving birth. The word "alma" has always meant a young woman, but Christian theologians came centuries later and translated it as "virgin." This accords Jesus' birth with the first century pagan idea of mortals being impregnated by gods.
B. Suffering Servant
Christianity claims that Isaiah chapter 53 refers to Jesus, as the "suffering servant."
In actuality, Isaiah 53 directly follows the theme of chapter 52, describing the exile and redemption of the Jewish people. The prophecies are written in the singular form because the Jews ("Israel") are regarded as one unit. Throughout Jewish scripture, Israel is repeatedly called, in the singular, the "Servant of God" (see Isaiah 43:8). In fact, Isaiah states no less than 11 times in the chapters prior to 53 that the Servant of God is Israel. When read correctly, Isaiah 53 clearly [and ironically] refers to the Jewish people being "bruised, crushed and as sheep brought to slaughter" at the hands of the nations of the world. These descriptions are used throughout Jewish scripture to graphically describe the suffering of the Jewish people (see Psalm 44). Isaiah 53 concludes that when the Jewish people are redeemed, the nations will recognize and accept responsibility for the inordinate suffering and death of the Jews.
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4) Jewish Belief is Based Solely on National Revelation
Throughout history, thousands of religions have been started by individuals, attempting to convince people that he or she is God's true prophet. But personal revelation is an extremely weak basis for a religion because one can never know if it is indeed true. Since others did not hear God speak to this person, they have to take his word for it. Even if the individual claiming personal revelation performs miracles, there is still no verification that he is a genuine prophet. Miracles do not prove anything. All they show ― assuming they are genuine ― is that he has certain powers. It has nothing to do with his claim of prophecy.
Judaism, unique among all of the world's major religions, does not rely on "claims of miracles" as the basis for its religion. In fact, the Bible says that God sometimes grants the power of "miracles" to charlatans, in order to test Jewish loyalty to the Torah (Deut. 13:4).
Of the thousands of religions in human history, only Judaism bases its belief on national revelation ― i.e. God speaking to the entire nation. If God is going to start a religion, it makes sense He'll tell everyone, not just one person.
Maimonides states (Foundations of Torah, ch. 8):
The Jews did not believe in Moses, our teacher, because of the miracles he performed. Whenever anyone's belief is based on seeing miracles, he has lingering doubts, because it is possible the miracles were performed through magic or sorcery. All of the miracles performed by Moses in the desert were because they were necessary, and not as proof of his prophecy. What then was the basis of [Jewish] belief? The Revelation at Mount Sinai, which we saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears, not dependent on the testimony of others... as it says, "Face to face, God spoke with you..." The Torah also states: "God did not make this covenant with our fathers, but with us ― who are all here alive today." (Deut. 5:3)Judaism is not miracles. It is the personal eyewitness experience of every man, woman and child, standing at Mount Sinai 3,300 years ago.
For further reading: "Did God Speak at Mount Sinai?"
Waiting for the Messiah
The world is in desperate need of Messianic redemption. And to the extent we are aware of the problems of society, is the extent we will yearn for redemption. As the Talmud says, one of the first questions asked of a Jew on Judgment Day is: "Did you yearn for the arrival of the Messiah?"
How can we hasten the coming of the Messiah? The best way is to love all humanity generously, to keep the mitzvot of the Torah (as best we can), and to encourage others to do so as well.
Despite the gloom, the world does seem headed toward redemption. One apparent sign is that the Jewish people have returned to the Land of Israel and made it bloom again. Additionally, a major movement is afoot of young Jews returning to Torah tradition.
The Messiah can come any day, and it all depends on our actions. God is ready when we are. For as King David says: "Redemption will come today ― if you hearken to His voice."
For further study: . Jews for Judaism
. "The Real Messiah," by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan
. "Let's Get Biblical! Why Doesn't Judaism Accept the Christian Messiah?," by Rabbi Tovia Singer
. "The Path of the Righteous Gentile," by Chaim Clorfene and Yakov Rogalsky
FOOTNOTES
1. Maimonides devotes much of the "Guide for the Perplexed" to the fundamental idea that God is incorporeal, meaning that He assumes no physical form. God is Eternal, above time. He is Infinite, beyond space. He cannot be born, and cannot die. Saying that God assumes human form makes God small, diminishing both His unity and His divinity. As the Torah says: "God is not a mortal" (Numbers 23:19).
2. In response, it is claimed that Joseph adopted Jesus, and passed on his genealogy via adoption. There are two problems with this claim:
a) There is no Biblical basis for the idea of a father passing on his tribal line by adoption. A priest who adopts a son from another tribe cannot make him a priest by adoption;To answer this difficult problem, apologists claim that Jesus traces himself back to King David through his mother Mary, who allegedly descends from David, as shown in the third chapter of Luke. There are four basic problems with this claim:
b) Joseph could never pass on by adoption that which he doesn't have. Because Joseph descended from Jeconiah (Matthew 1:11) he fell under the curse of that king that none of his descendants could ever sit as king upon the throne of David. (Jeremiah 22:30; 36:30)
a) There is no evidence that Mary descends from David. The third chapter of Luke traces Joseph's genealogy, not Mary's.
b) Even if Mary can trace herself back to David, that doesn't help Jesus, since tribal affiliation goes only through the father, not mother. Cf. Numbers 1:18; Ezra 2:59.
c) Even if family line could go through the mother, Mary was not from a legitimate Messianic family. According to the Bible, the Messiah must be a descendent of David through his son Solomon (II Samuel 7:14; I Chronicles 17:11-14, 22:9-10, 28:4-6). The third chapter of Luke is irrelevant to this discussion because it describes lineage of David's son Nathan, not Solomon. (Luke 3:31)
d) Luke 3:27 lists Shealtiel and Zerubbabel in his genealogy. These two also appear in Matthew 1:12 as descendants of the cursed Jeconiah. If Mary descends from them, it would also disqualify her from being a Messianic progenitor.
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Thursday, February 10, 2011
Google News
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Israel, Judaism and Zionism
26th February ‘03 http://www.iranian.com/main/news/2009/11/24/israel-judaism-and-zionism
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
MASA backs away from controversial ad | JTA - Jewish & Israel News
Read, weep and be angry. We do not need to worry about outside enemies like Chavez and all the other ones who hate us. Those we now all about. The real enemy it seems is from within. MASA, HAREDIM, amost all of Orthodoxy and "modern Orthodoxy". When will the internal war amongst Jews end?
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Birthright Alumni Center Tied to Haredi Outreach Group
So, as if the fundie Christians are not the bane of Jews all over the world we see that the fundie Jews are learning to play the same game, this game though, to the detriment of all other Jewish movements.
By Gal Beckerman
Many of the young people who pass through the Jewish Enrichment Center in Lower Manhattan view it with great affection. It is often the first time they have come in contact with a Judaism that is engaging and accessible. The rabbis responsible for the center’s educational and religious programs are charismatic and approachable people who, participants say, have had a large impact on their lives.
As the official New York follow-up organization for Taglit-Birthright Israel — which sends young people on free trips to Israel and lately is trying to keep them Jewishly engaged when they return — there could hardly be a better model.
But there are also those Birthright alumni who have been turned off by the JEC, sensing that it has a hidden, religious agenda that clashes with Birthright’s declared nondenominational and pluralistic stance. Their suspicions have now been substantiated with the revelation that the JEC’s rabbis were trained at Ohr Somayach, a Jerusalem-based ultra-Orthodox yeshiva with international branches and a publicly declared goal of turning secular and nonobservant Jews into ba’alei teshuvah. The JEC, it has emerged, was launched as an outreach arm of the yeshiva.
For some Birthright alumni who spoke recently with the Forward, this confirmed what they had already surmised.
The realization for one person came when he was asked to memorize lines of Talmud and encouraged to wrap tefillin every day. For another, it was the weekend he was required to spend with a Haredi family on Long Island if he wanted one more trip to Israel. And for a few, it came only after an all-expense paid month at a Jerusalem yeshiva, where they were presented with a stark choice of abandoning their current life for a more religious one.
As the Forward reported on September 4, the JEC which has received nearly $5 million from philanthropist Michael Steinhardt since 2005, has a virtual monopoly on reaching Birthright alumni in New York and is run by Orthodox rabbis involved in kiruv, or religious outreach. What has only now become clear is the JEC’S connection to Ohr Somayach, which engages openly in a form of Jewish evangelism.
“They are ideologically ultra-Orthodox, but they would never identify themselves that way,” said Allan Nadler, a professor at Drew University who has studied the Orthodox world, referring to Ohr Somayach. “It’s the soft sell. Come for dinner, come for lunch, hang around, smoke some weed after Shabbos. But there’s always an element of deception.”
In conversations with the Forward, a handful of Birthright alumni have painted a picture of the JEC as a place where Orthodoxy is the end goal, though it is encouraged through slow, gentle steps that are often difficult to perceive.
“If they had just said, if their whole mission statement was, we’re Orthodox Jews, we’d love to present this lifestyle to you and see if it’s for you, and then did the same exact things that they are doing, that would not bother me,” said David Siegel, who was involved with the JEC for two years and went on three of the center’s follow-up trips to Israel. “But they know they can’t do that. People will get scared.”
Rebecca Sugar, Birthright Israel NEXT’s director of alumni outreach in New York, declined to comment. In a letter to the Forward in response to the September 4 article, she wrote that “NEXT, NY is inclusive regarding the various branches of Jewish expression,” and referred to the secular programming she has organized.
Michael Steinhardt also responded through his publicist that, “I stand 100% behind the work of Rebecca Sugar and her associates and I believe that Birthright NEXT New York gives representation to all views within the Jewish spectrum.”
The outreach has become a focus, especially after a report issued in March found that 44% of alumni no longer in college have not attended any Jewish program since their return from Israel. A further 39% have attended just one or two programs. Only 4% have taken part in more than four programs.
The JEC’s ties to Ohr Somayach were first noticed by David Kelsey, a blogger, on the Web site Failed Messiah. He discovered two references to the JEC on the Ohr Somayach Web site. One referred to the center as an “outreach affiliate”; the other called the JEC the “latest outreach post of Ohr Somayach’s international network.” Both references also mentioned Mordechai Mindell and Lawrence Hajioff, who attended Ohr Somayach’s Monsey, N.Y., yeshiva and are, respectively, the executive director and educational director of the JEC.
Officials of Ohr Somayach told the Forward that they had an “informal relationship around 2003” with the JEC. Tax returns for Ohr Somayach International, the organization’s Brooklyn-based office, show that donations totaling $25,000 were made to the JEC from 2002 to 2003. Presented with this information, Mindell responded in an e-mail: “The JEC has never been nor are we now an affiliate of the Ohr Sameyach organization.”
Siegel, a 33-year-old standup comic who starred in a promotional video for the center, described a slow process of being drawn into a religious life. He went on the first post-Birthright trip offered by the JEC, called Reloaded. When he returned, he got heavily involved in the center, partly as a way of earning another vacation in Israel. While the Reloaded trip cost him $600, the next 10-day program in Israel, called Legacy, was free as long as he attended several weeks of religious courses and spent two weekends celebrating the Sabbath at the home of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family on Long Island.
After that second trip to Israel, which he mostly spent studying in Jerusalem, the JEC rabbis offered Siegel an opportunity to spend a month at a yeshiva in Israel, Machon Shlomo, which would be completely subsidized. Following weeks of 10-hour study days, Siegel thought the program was interesting but knew he couldn’t go further. Some of his friends who had gone with him, he said, are still there and are now very observant.
Not everyone who attends the JEC feels nudged toward ultra-Orthodoxy. Many of the activities at the center are social and without a strong emphasis on religious practice. There are lectures from Jewish intellectuals, along with cocktail parties and an extensive adult bar and bat mitzvah program. But some of those who stay around longer, like Siegel and others, find themselves in one-on-one study sessions with the rabbis, from whom they feel pressure to become more observant.
“Each and every one of them on a person-to-person level is totally open to helping you understand life, spirituality, growth, relationships; anything you want to talk about, they’re open about it,” said another Birthright alumnus, who asked to remain anonymous. “The issue for me was eventually after spending a lot of time there, it became apparent that they did have an agenda to try and get me to incorporate Orthodox practice into my life. And that became awkward.”
After he started individual studies with a rabbi, the situation became strained. “Eventually they wanted me to start memorizing sections of Talmud even though that was not something I was interested in doing,” the anonymous alumnus said. “They wanted me to start wrapping tefillin. I didn’t want to do that, either. And instead of just saying, all right, do your own thing, they kept bringing it up and pressing the issue. It didn’t always feel as though they were willing to be totally supportive of my personal choices.”
In the end, he said, his feeling that the rabbis had ulterior motives forced him out of the JEC altogether.
Most of the young people involved with the JEC perceive no hidden agenda. They describe events and classes that take place in an open, nonjudgmental environment, devoid of any pressure. But this, too, conforms with Ohr Somayach’s methodology.
In an interview posted in 2006, Mendel Weinbach, head of Ohr Somayach yeshivas, described how outreach has helped increase the number of ba’alei teshuvahthe organization has been able to attract. “When we established Yeshivas Ohr Somayach some thirty-four years ago, our student body was made up of young people who came to tour Israel out of curiosity and were ‘picked up’ at the Wall or the Central Bus Station, etc.,” he said. “Today, such things don’t exist. We have established kiruv centers on university campuses, in communities, in many locations throughout the world and have trained hundreds of avreichim [who pursue a life of Torah study] in two-year kiruv courses to run them. This has produced many blessed products.”
Kelsey, who first discovered JEC’s ties to the ultra-Orthodox institution, was recruited to join an Ohr Somayach yeshiva 20 years ago, when he was 18. He has written on his blog and elsewhere about the successful attempts of groups like the JEC to act as a cover for Ohr Somayach while infiltrating the mainstream Jewish world.
“Mainstream organizational enabling, not just funding, is critical to their general success for recruiting in the Diaspora,” Kelsey said. “This is the only way for Haredi institutions to have substantial access in the Diaspora. In Israel, they can pick these people up at the Western Wall. In the Diaspora, they need the support of the secular Jewish community to fund and facilitate a much longer recruitment process.”
Contact Gal Beckerman at beckerman@forward.com
