Rabbi Eckstein is the president and founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
I watched an excellent documentary last night about the wall, and it opened my eyes. The settlers must move out of Pali lands and the Palis in Israel should move out in exchange. Of course, we should pray that the new Palestinian leader will be successful in both securing the rights of his people and in reining in the terrorists.
There has got to be a middleground or else the sad cycle of bloody retailiation will continue.
Terrorists get their power when the whole Pali population is oppressed, and this occurs when Hamas and ilk blow people up. Then the Israelis blow something up and tighten the noose on civilians (to find the needle in the haystack)and Hamas gets new recruits. It is not unusual for Palestinian laborers to wait 2 hours at a checkpoint, then wind their way around a huge wire barrier just to wait at every other checkpoint. Something has got to give. The documentary showed the aftermath of a roadside suicide bomb and it broke my heart to see a female Israeli soldier choking back her tears and saying she couldn't take it anymore. Likewise it breaks my heart to see a Palestinian mother weeping over the death of a child.
More hate is not what is needed on either side. If Israel is to remain Jewish, there needs to be a solution acceptable (and fair to) to both sides. Otherwise Palestinians will outbreed and outvote Israelis. The other solution is to keep up the cycle of retailiation and then deny Palestinians the vote, which is anti-democracy.
With that said, I am so thankful I was born here instead of there.
"Spreading the good news" cannot rationally be divorced from the meaning and content of the gospel.
Nonbelievers in Jesus often find this irritating. Jews recall a history of violence in the name of Christianity.
If it is of any comfort to Jews, there are 2 things that should be noted:
1.) In the evangelical understanding, individual conscience plays a very large role. A conversion not flowing from individual conviction and conscience is invalid. Thus "forced conversion" is an oxymoron.
2.) When Christendom was persecuting the Jews, the spiritual forebears of today's evangelicals were also being burned at the stake. Sometimes Jews are angry that evangelicals aren't more repentant regarding the persecutions of the the Jews. But it is also true that evangelicals often don't see themselves as connected with the anti-semitic state churches of Europe, except as their victims. My grandparents left everything behind and came to America to be free of those churches.
The criticism evangelicals have of Jews is that they have often forgotten that their God is THE God, the God of all. Monotheism inherently engenders opposition --sometimes violent (and the Jews have had more than their share, for sure) so there is the contradictory attempt to squeeze the Only God into the role of a tribal deity, so as to make it easier to get along with outsiders. The problem that arises, is that being "the chosen people" only makes sense in the context of a global mission, a mission the Jews continue to fulfill, even though they are often unaware of it themselves.