OCT Webinar Follow-up
We received many thoughtful questions during our first webinar. Here is one that did not get addressed, with replies by our panelists.
Question: Judaism is more than a religion or ethnicity though it includes both. It is in fact a civilization that has been shaped by a communal experience that has often been one of exploitation and oppression by the historical communions. How do you imagine that this worthy effort is going to communicate the entire Jewish communal experience?
Mark Kinzer:
That is a weight that falls on all of us who seek to follow Yeshua. Even those Messianic Jews (of which I am one) who do not employ the name “Christian” as a self-designation are saddled with the burden of centuries of hostile conduct towards Jews in the name of Jesus. The only way that any of us, whether Messianic Jew or Jewish Christian, will be able to embody and communicate the Jewish communal experience will be by active involvement in the life of the Jewish people as a whole. That is not easy for us to do, since our involvement is not appreciated by most of our fellow Jews. But it is essential if we are to fulfill our calling as Jewish followers of Yeshua.
Antoine Levy:
"Jewish civilization" - I like the expression - is neither a dead thing nor an essence to be found in Plato's perfect realm of forms. It was living - and how kicking! - long before so-called Christians - and Christian anti-Semitism all the more - came to be. HaShem only knows how many radical metamorphoses Jewish civilization underwent throughout its millennia of existence. Just think of what transpires from these collective transformations in the Tanakh!!! I am not even delving into what happened after the destruction of the Temple and during more than two millennia of Galut. One simply cannot allow Christian anti-Semitism (a particular, if remarkable, type of anti-Semitism among an almost boundless variety of them) to define the essence of Jewish civilization. I understand Messianic Judaism in the very broad sense of the term (Jews who welcome Yeshua as true Messiah of Israel) as being a new and most probably ultimate step in this more than 3000-year-old evolution of Jewish civilization.