For A Confederation Of Noachides (Rabbi Shmueley Boteach On Attracting Non-Jews To Monotheism Alert)

Jerusalem Post ^ | 10/11/05 | Rabbi Shmueley Boteach

[Steve_Seattle]

For various reasons that I won't get into, I've sometimes thought that there was a Jewish element in my family's past. But my interests are more in discovering the authentic origins of Christianity - which I think were much closer to Jewish belief than is admitted by mainstream Christianity - than in converting to Judaism or some other religion. And the Noachide movement has a kind of "wannabe" attitude that I don't like.

[tkas]

Ethnicity is not the right word. It is a TRIBE!! If you choose to leave the tribe (like through conversion out) you may have had Jewish parents, but you are NOT a member of the tribe. You can have a wonderful family and be a good Christian, but you are not longer a member of the tribe. I joined the tribe. I did not change my ethnicity, neither did the children who were adopted from Cambodia, or who were born to black parents. They also joined the tribe.

A third of the children in my son's Jewish private school has one parent who is a convert and joined the tribe. We have an Irish Jew who married an American of Irish descent who converted. It is tribal identity, not ethnicity. Looking at it this way incorporates born Jews who choose not to observe their religion.

[Sabramerican]

which I think were much closer to Jewish belief than is admitted by mainstream Christianity

No kidding.

From the idea of baptism by water to Catholic Cardinals wearing yarmulkes, not to mention some of Jesus's more famous holdings, I, and I imagine most Jews, can't understand Christians who fail to see the obvious. And particularly wonder about those Christians who hate us so.

[hlmencken3]

...the Noachide movement has a kind of "wannabe" attitude that I don't like...

The closest thing the Noahide movement has to leaders are people like Jack Saunders in Tennessee and the colorful eccentric Vendyl Jones. Both discourage 'wannabe' practices, which in my considerable experience belong more to the solitary and insecure.

And the 'wannabes' always make me suspect they are non-Jewish Jews for Jesus anyway.

[mvpel]

You are throwing a tradition at me which has a nice sound as myth, but no such thing could ever be demonstrated rationally.

That's why they call it "religion" and "spirituality" rather than "science."

I never saw that Seinfeld episode, which is probably a good thing.

[Question_Assumptions]

But my interests are more in discovering the authentic origins of Christianity - which I think were much closer to Jewish belief than is admitted by mainstream Christianity - than in converting to Judaism or some other religion.

Having looked into this fairly extensively, myself, I think it's important to remember the point that Timothy Luke Johnson makes in his response to the "Jesus was just this Jewish guy" historical Jesus movement. Basically, he points out that if you reject and strip away all of the evidence that disagrees with the sort of Jesus you want to find, you shouldn't be surprised that you'll find the sort of Jesus you were looking for. Basically, there is a lot of selective evidence use in a lot of these theories used to support them. I also think that the early founders of mainstream Christianity were right to reject gnosticism. And while it's not clear that Jesus intended to create a new religion nor that some of the disciples (e.g., James) were ready to leave Judaism behind, I'm not sure that makes their perspective any more authentic or correct than the perspective followed by the mainstream. Ultimately, you find God and/or Jesus in faith, not in the pages of a book. The Bible contains directions to a destination but you ultimately have to get there yourself.

[MeanWestTexan]

"Ethnicity is not the right word. It is a TRIBE!"

I describe myself as a Messianic Jew, and most --- with the exception of the Orthodox members of my family who don't refer to me at all --- so refer to me.

I have not "left the tribe."

Indeed, theologically, Christians consider themselves Jews by adoption --- that is, heirs to the Promise of Abraham, by and through the gift of Christ.

You, apparently a religious Jew, reject that theologic point and therein lies the rub.

We must agree to disagree, I suppose.

As an aside (but on the issue of ethnicity) my uncles and I (although not knowingly a Cohen or Levite, and we always considered ourselves Sephardic, although we knew there was at least one Ashkenazi of unknown origin in the woodpile) carry both the so-called "Levite" and "Cohanic" genes.

We discovered this when doing tests for Tay-Sachs.

[Wicket]

"Why have we Jews not proselytized? Firstly, our standards for conversion are high, and we refuse to water them down to allow people to enter. And we would prefer not having converts to having insincere converts, and that is admirable and necessary. We can brook no compromise with the lofty standards that Jewish observance demands.

But the bigger reason we don’t proselytize is even more noble, namely, that unlike every other religion in the world, we don’t claim a copyright on truth. We don’t believe that by becoming a Jew you come closer to God than you would be as a devout Christian or Muslim. We actually respect the Godly qualities of other faiths that lead to a righteous life. And we shouldn’t want to change that and tell the world that unless they are Jewish they are all going to hell."

I thought these two paragraphs were fascinating. The God of Jewish history did claim exclusivity, and required that the Israelites not intermarry with other non-Jews. I don't think his attitude is necessarily reflective of all modern Judaism - certainly not Orthodox Judaism.

As another poster pointed out, that unfortunately causes difficulty in mixed faith marriages.

We have the same sorts of issues in modern Christianity. Is it a social construct of "moral people" or are the Bible's claims of sin, salvation, and Jesus the Risen Savior true? If the Bible is true, and it is, doing the "We are the World" stuff - where Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists are on equivalent footing with God is desperately, eventually fatally, wrong.

If the Bible is true, and it is, it is our obligation to tell that Truth - it doesn't change with changing times.

[Steve_Seattle]

Ethnicity is not the right word. It is a TRIBE!!

It is interesting you came up with the word "tribe," because after a long to-and-fro with sabramerican earlier today, I went off to lunch mulling this over, and decided that a better word to describe my point was, indeed, "tribe." Judaism does function, even today, as something of a tribe, in which there is a collective memory stemming from the experiences of the Hebrew peopls thousands of years ago, which has over the centuries eventually come to incorporate members from other ethnicities. But membership in the group is still bestowed through birth (apart from converts), and one always remains a member of the tribe even if guilty of apostasy.

[Steve_Seattle]

"I think it's important to remember the point that Timothy Luke Johnson makes in his response to the "Jesus was just this Jewish guy" historical Jesus movement. Basically, he points out that if you reject and strip away all of the evidence that disagrees with the sort of Jesus you want to find, you shouldn't be surprised that you'll find the sort of Jesus you were looking for."

I'm critical of many of the revisionist views of Jesus, which I think are indeed efforts to create a Jesus in our own image. And I'm not at all sympathetic to the Gnostic texts, which I think are mostly pompous rubbish, compared to which the gospels of the New Testament are actual repositories of wisdom that can be grasped by the average person.

I think it's possible to reject the Nicene Jesus without reducing him to "just another Jewish guy." One can still believe that he was a true prophet, was resurrected from the dead, ascended to heaven, and will have a role at the End Times, without believing that he is literally God incarnate. In fact, that is what I think the earliest (Jewish) Christians believed, and if that kind of faith was good enough for them, maybe it is still good enough today.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Boteach is not a member in good standing of Chabad in particular or of orthodoxy in general.

That's pretty much what I thought.

[hlmencken3]

"Goy Vay"

...His methods at Oxford went over poorly with Chabad, which forced the L'Chaim Society out of the organization. "It got to be a running joke among Oxford students: You want to pick up a shiksa, go to Shmuley's Chabad House," one Chabad rabbi who knew Shmuley at yeshiva told me. "Always, he wanted to be the big Jew. He lacked that Chabad self-nullification."

When Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, a spokesman for the Chabad Lubavitch movement, met me for dinner at Le Marais, the kosher chophouse in midtown, he said right off that Judaism's restoration did not lie with the Gentiles. He cited a passage in the Mishnah, Ethics of Our Fathers, a favorite of the Rebbe Schneerson: "Love the creatures. And bring them closer to the Torah." Once you get over the idea that goyim are referred to as creatures, it's a compelling notion. "It is we who are responsible to bring them closer to the Torah, no matter someone's level or how far he has strayed," he said with a sigh of Weltschmerz. "But we have no right to bring the Torah to them, to water it down and change it."

[onedoug]

Nuts. Just go to synagogue.

[goldstategop]

The passage in the Torah refers to those who "hear" the Torah as those then present and those yet to come - e.g - the future. Any one who accepts God as its author also accepts its promises. And this also even includes those who live before the Torah was formally given, Abraham, Issac and Jacob since in Jewish thought, those who died are only gone in a physical sense but their souls still participate in the work of the living. So the Jewish people can never die. They are truly an eternal nation and this is precisely what all their enemies have never grapsed.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[goldstategop]

Yes... No Jew is an "official" spokesman the way Christian priests are for their religion. Jews don't even have a formal doctrine. Its true the Sh'ma comes close to a credo of faith but Jews have never felt comfortable with abstract theological details. They are more interested in ascertaining how to carry out God's will on Earth.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[goldstategop]

The Torah never changes - but the circumstances surrounding it do change. God requires exclusivity in terms of affirming his Oneness. It is more... Jews should not marry pagans since then the Jewish soul will eventually be lost. The Torah contains a list of nations who are not allowed to enter the Jewish people but they are no longer operative since it is impossible to identify with exact certainty today who comes from them. And God clearly approved of Ruth becoming a Jew since she was a prohibited Moabite and the lesson derived from it is the prohibition is in effect against one who hates the Jewish people. A person's values matters more to God than the particular circumstances of their birth and we are all His Children. The Torah can never be changed and while the covenant at Sinai was meant for the Jews but its timeless message is also addressed to the nations of the world. Love God, do good deeds and you will stand next to the High Priest in the World To Come. Once mankind realizes what it has to do to earn God's blessings, it will finish the work of Creation and banish evil and death from the world.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[Zionist Conspirator]

Yep, Shmuley is quite a character. I have no idea what happened to him (since he is technically a CHaBa"D rabbi, and one of his articles on Mashiach, so far as I know, is still posted on the CHaBa"D website). But unfortunately he seems to have strayed way into left field.

[Question_Assumptions]

I'm critical of many of the revisionist views of Jesus, which I think are indeed efforts to create a Jesus in our own image. And I'm not at all sympathetic to the Gnostic texts, which I think are mostly pompous rubbish, compared to which the gospels of the New Testament are actual repositories of wisdom that can be grasped by the average person.

Agreed, though I do think the Thomas Gospel has some value and there migth be grains of truth in some of the other gnostic texts. It's the whole elitist attitude of the gnostics, itself, that I'm happy was rejected by the mainstream. I was reading Elaine Pagels' latest book where she's clearly sympathetic to the gnostic point of view, thinking that I'm glad the gnostics lost the battle over early Christianity.

I think it's possible to reject the Nicene Jesus without reducing him to "just another Jewish guy." One can still believe that he was a true prophet, was resurrected from the dead, ascended to heaven, and will have a role at the End Times, without believing that he is literally God incarnate. In fact, that is what I think the earliest (Jewish) Christians believed, and if that kind of faith was good enough for them, maybe it is still good enough today.

Have you read the what the inscriptin inside of the Al Aqsa (Dome of the Rock) on Jerusalem says? You can find a translation of it here.

I admit that I also have a certain fondness for Arianisn (as well as Palagianism -- I tend to think that Augustine was a big wrong turn for Chistianity, but that's a whole other issue), which is why I sometimes call myself a heretic Christian. I personally feel that Jesus was more than just a prophet but I agree that it's quite possible to have other interpretations of who He was. Arianism was a much harder heresy to squash than gnosticism and different groups still have somewhat different interpretations of the nature of Jesus and the Trinity (e.g., the whole "filioque" controversey).

Overall, I'm getting the impression that our research into early Christianity has taken us both to similar ideas, though.

[Steve_Seattle]

"Arianism was a much harder heresy to squash than gnosticism and different groups still have somewhat different interpretations of the nature of Jesus and the Trinity (e.g., the whole "filioque" controversey)."

Just the other day I stumbled upon a website for an "Arian Catholic Church," centered in Britain, but with international aspirations. The website reveals an interesting - some might say bizarre - combination of beliefs, e.g., an Arian Christology coupled with a belief in the Avalonian/Glastonbury myths that Jesus travelled to Britain, an anti-Santa Clause rant, a critique of political correctness, and a critique of easy immigration and mixing of different national/ethnic groups which was perhaps borderline racist, in my opinion. It was a very unusual complex of liberal and conservative ideas.

[dervish]

I'd say that's more than a few.


Aliyah From Ethiopia

1948 40
1949 1
1950 5
1951 1
1952 40
1953 3
1954 13
1955 25
1956 1
1957 5
1958 4
1959 3
1960 3
1961 2
1962 11
1963 17
1964 8
1965 9
1966 21
1967 13
1968 17
1969 14
1970 13
1971 7
1972 40
1973 41
1974 24
1975 19
1976 10
1977 90
1978 37
1979 45
1980 259
1981 650
1982 950
1983 2,393
1984 8,327
1985 1,886
1986 236
1987 231
1988 595
1989 1,448
1990 4,121
1991 20,014
1992 3,648
1993 863
1994 1,197
1995 1,312
1996 1,411
1997 1,661
1998 3,110
1999 2,290
2000 2,201
2001 3,274
2002 2,656
2003 3,029
2004 2,121
TOTAL 70,465

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/ejim.html