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An
Open Letter to Stan Telchin from Menahem Benhayim
Winter 2000 Issue 210
Dear
Stan, Shalom in Yeshua. First of all, please accept the sincere condolences of
Haya and myself for you and your family on the passing of your beloved Ethel.
Separations are painful, even if they are temporary.
A dear brother active in the Messianic Jewish Alliance of Israel asked
for my comments on your article in the last issue of Chai.
I told him that you and I, in addition to our common faith in Yeshua, share many
biographical details leading up to that faith. We were both children of East
European Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish immigrants to the USA around the turn
of the 20th Century. They settled in the Lower East Side ghetto of New York City
where we were both born in the same year, only a few months apart. We were both
sent to Talmud Torah, went through Bar Mitzvah, observed Shabbat and the
festivals, were active in Zionist youth groups, and we both served in the US
Army during World War II.
It was while serving with the Medics in the UK that I bought my first
complete Bible. I was preparing to read Sholem Asch’s novel The
Nazarene which had provoked much controversy in the Jewish world at the
time. It was then that I came to the conclusion after reading the Gospels that
Yeshua was the only Messiah that Israel could ever expect. By this time I was no
longer Orthodox, but deeply devoted to my Jewish identity. Still, I had no
problem relating to my Catholic, Orthodox Christian and Protestant friends
serving with me. I occasionally visited churches (mainly Anglican), and still
attended the Jewish chapel services when possible. I also admired some of the
staunch Roman Catholics that I met, and experienced no anti-Semitism from them.
I could not, however, see myself becoming one of them in faith while remaining
Jewish.
Eventually, through family and personal crisis and much searching,
fourteen years after first reading the Gospels I accepted immersion at the hands
of a Jewish believer, a Holocaust survivor, the late beloved Rachmiel Frydland.
It was he who introduced me to what was then called the Hebrew Christian
movement and later became the Messianic Jewish movement.
It is this movement (to the extent that it isn’t just a semantic change
of terms for Hebrew Christianity), which I believe offers hope for restoring the
ancient Nazarene movement which the apostle Paul compared to the faithful
remnant in Elijah’s day. (Romans 11:1-5; Acts 24:5,14).
You write that you were born a Jew and will die a Jew and no one can take
your Jewishness away. Obviously; surely modern anti-Semitism and the Holocaust
proved that even the most assimilated and Christianised Jews died as Jews. (The
nun Edith Stein and her sister Rosa were not Catholic martyrs but two of the Six
Million Jewish victims.) The issue, however, is How
shall we live as Jews?
The fact is that we all have multiple identities which we share with
others, inside or outside our faith, even as born-again saved Heaven-bound
believers in Yeshua-Jesus. We relate to these identities as men, women,
Americans, British, Israelis, etc. We should not quote out of context the words
of the apostle Paul about unity in Christ when he fought bravely for the freedom
of Gentile believers in the Body of Christ; basically, his opponents demanded
that Gentiles abandon their national and ethnic identities and live as religious
Jews. Is this what the modern Messianic Jewish congregational movement is aiming
for? I don’t think so.
You yourself have written extensively (about half your last book) about
the many reasons why belief in Yeshua is so alien to most Jews, whether
religious, traditional, or secular. In addition to violent anti-Jewish theology,
pogroms, collaboration of some churches with modern racist anti-Semitism, you
overlook the importance of the quiet “genocide” that many Christians have
encouraged by persuading their Jewish converts to forget their Jewish past and
live like good Gentile Christians.
How many Jews have entered the Church with its approval in order to be
rid of the burdens of Jewishness? We meet their children and grandchildren
struggling to unearth the “dark secrets” of their Jewish past. If the
Messianic movement is to be nothing more than a halfway house into total
assimilation (as much of the Hebrew Christian movement became), then we are
compounding the tragedy, by helping forward the disappearance of the Jewish
component within the universal church and the messianic component within the
Jewish people.
Can’t we see that we don’t live for ourselves nor die for ourselves?
Our identities as Jews (or Gentiles) is a vital part of God’s program of
salvation. The Gospel in the West has often been so completely focused on
individual salvation that it has almost become seemingly irrelevant to the
purpose of God to save the nations. Scripture constantly refers to the salvation
of nations, as well as Israel. (“Thy salvation among all nations” [Psalm 67]
“and the leaves for the healing of the nations” [Revelation 22] “and so
all Israel shall be saved” [Romans 11]
For centuries the Church and Synagogue collaborated to make it impossible
to follow Yeshua as Jews with a national Jewish commitment. Now we live in an
era when neither Church nor Synagogue can impose its prejudices on Jews or
Gentiles. What right do any of us have to stress only the negatives of Messianic
Jewish congregations without relating to the much greater failings of the
long-established Gentile Christian congregations? Criticise, correct, rebuke
wrongdoing? Of course! But to deny the necessity of re-establishing a vital
corporate remnant within the Jewish people of followers of Yeshua, and in
fellowship with the wider Body of Messiah, is a recipe for the eventual
assimilation and disappearance of a dynamic Jewish witness to the Church and to
the Jewish people.
In the opening chapter of the New Testament we are told: “You shall
call his name ‘Yeshua’ (Jesus) for he shall save (Yoshia) his people
(Israel) from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21) How shall it be fulfilled if Jews
who accept his salvation are unwilling to help recreate a corporate witness to
this salvation even if for the time being we remain “outside the camp” as he
and his followers were? (Hebrews 13:13)
(Menahem Benhayim served as Israel Secretary of the
International Messianic Jewish Alliance (1976-1993) and helped found the Israel
Messianic Jewish Alliance, serving as Secretary from 1989-1993. He and his wife
Haya live in Jerusalem.)
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