Carl Thomas dot net

On Being a Christian Jew

I am not now, nor have I ever been Jewish, but some of the folks I love the most are including my mother-in-law, my wife, and my kids.  For this reason I have a stake in the discussion.  The fact that I am a minister of the Gospel in an area that has many Jews gives me another reason to weigh in on this matter.

What makes you Jewish?  What makes you no longer Jewish?  This is the heart of the question.   Many people believe they cannot come to my church because they are Jewish.  Others tell me that a Jew cannot be a Christian and that a Christian cannot be a Jew.  This may seem like a trivial matter unless you have to pastor people whose family members have cut them off because they were born again.  I have heard stories of people who were cut off from their families, declared dead and sat shiva for.

Here is the funny part.  Virtually all rabbis believe that you are a Jew because your mother is a Jew or you converted to Judaism.  Clearly, believing that Jesus is the Messiah does not change your mother’s heritage.  Yet folks argue time and again that Jewish believers are not Jewish.

Here is the really funny part.  Departing from Judaism does not matter, and has no effect on your standing in the community if you practice any of the eastern religions.  Lots and lots of Jews are into Budism, Yoga, TM, and go so far as to practice outright witchcraft (talking to spirits, communicating with the dead, fortune telling, using crystal balls) without any effect on their standing in the Jewish community.

The majority of the Jews that I know are like any other secularist and align with their particular faith only by self identification and heritage and not by practice.

I understand this and still battle the notion that a person cannot become a Christian because they are Jewish and don’t want to deny their heritage.

I bring all this up because today there is an interesting article in the New York Times about admission standards in Jewish elementary schools in England. The school was told that they cannot determine admission based on heredity but on the faith of the student.  The school had to partially ditch the heredity test and put together a ‘“religious practice test,” in which prospective students amass points for things like going to synagogue and doing charitable work.’

The reply to this test brought forth this quote:

Orthodox Jews, of course, sympathize with the school, saying that observance is no test of Jewishness, and that all that matters is whether one’s mother is Jewish. So little does observance matter, in fact, that “having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish,” Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue, said recently.

And I would add, neither does believing the Scriptures and receiving Jesus as the Messiah.