Haaretz
Iyyar 25, 5766
We were driving in the Galilee, waiting for a
red light to change, when they came up to the car. Their smiles were
engagingly open as they wished us a fine trip. Then they offered us the
flyer.
Jews for Jesus. Who says that evil can't be imported, and
delivered, free of charge, direct to your car door?
Don't get me
wrong. The members of Jews for Jesus are pure souls. They are among the
most wholesome, guileless, truly well-meaning, fundamentally lovely people
you will ever meet.
More's the pity, therefore, that there's a
special place in hell just for them.
I would like to begin by
saying that I have nothing personal against these people. But that would
be a lie.
The reason is that, grinning all the way, they want to
take something personal from me. My history, my belief system, my
ancestry. The flyers say they are concerned for my soul, and I believe
them with all my heart. It's precisely my soul they're after, all right,
mine and as many others as possible.
They're out to harvest Jewish
souls in the name of Christ. And they're out to do it right
here.
Make no mistake, I believe that these Christians must have
every freedom to worship Jesus as their lord and messiah, perform every
ritual, celebrate every holiday that they see fit. If they want to do
Born-again Kiddush and Last Supper Kneidelach and Savior Shalosh S'eudes -
gezunterheit.
And if missionary activity is a commandment
in their view, I wish them every success - just one thing:
Leave
the Jews alone.
The world is a target-rich environment for the
missionary, the Protestant Christian world in particular. There's no end
of lapsed Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists,
Anabaptists, whom you're free to try to cajole into Christ.
You
don't need us. Jesus doesn't need us. Leave us alone.
It's a safe
bet that the Jews for Jesus who may be reading this are rolling their eyes
by now, classifying me as Unbeliever Type G-639-L and writing me off.
But bear with me for one brief moment, if only to read the next
sentence, which has specifically to do with you, as well as with your
Jewish prey, thousands of years of Jewish history, and
evil:
Proselytizing is persecution.
Granted, it's not the
same as burning us at the stake for Christ's sake, firebombing our homes
for Christ's sake, staging apres-church pogroms for Christ's sake,
ostracizing and terrorizing and beating our children for having killed
Christ, lynching Jewish adults for church-distributed blood libels,
torturing Jews to force them to convert, converting entire Jewish
communities on point of death, deporting entire Jewish communities on
point of death for having resisted conversion, or, after eliminating the
conversion option, annihilating entire Jewish communities with the
complicitous blind eye of the Holy See.
But there's more than one
way to wipe out a people, and poison, like gas, comes in many forms.
Sometimes it looks like a leaflet. Sometimes it looks like the Internet.
Sometimes it looks like a smile.
It should have occurred to you by
now that Jews in the post-Holocaust era have a mission, no less than you.
We have some saving to do of our own. In ways which are as individual as
each Jew in the world, it has been left to us to save Jewry itself - its
faith, its culture, its values, its memory, its history - from
extinction.
Look around. There aren't that many of us left. There
are 2 billion Christians in the world, and nearly a billion and a quarter
Muslims.
There are barely 14 million Jews left alive on this
planet. In 1933, that number was 15.3 million. Leave us alone.
The
true evil of Jews for Jesus, is the movement's readiness to take
advantages of the weaknesses of Judaism in our day, in order to further
weaken it. Judaism's agonizing inability to reach its estranged youth is
the stuff of Jew for Jesus dreams, the fantasy that, in the end, they will
succeed in converting us.
Sorry, I'm not supposed to use that
word. Under the Jews for Jesus creed - which appears aimed at confusing
its own adherents at least as much as it seeks to "turn" us non-believers
- Jews for Jesus members do not convert you, they just get you to believe
that Jesus Christ is the lord, and that only through Jesus can one be
saved.
The faithful may well be much too busy with salvation to
concern themselves with extinction. There's clearly plenty for them to do,
judging by some of their Websites, where I happened upon this useful piece
of instruction from the founder of Jews for Jesus,
Martin (Moishe) Rosen:
"Hey, if you don't know any Jewish people,
you can look in the phone book for surnames that are always Jewish: Cohen,
Katz, Levy, Rosen (and anything that begins with Rosen, like Rosenberg,
Rosenbloom or Rosenfeld)."
And now, here in Israel, in a venture as
predictable as it is indecent, they've set themselves a new target,
Russian Jewish immigrants, descendants of the Jews Hitler didn't get the
chance to kill.
May they fail.
There are those who will
say, and I applaud them, that we should engage and embrace members of Jews
for Jesus, showing openness to them rather than the cold shoulder that
drives them further away. I applaud those who say this and act
accordingly, but I don't have it in me.
It really comes down to
this: It's hard enough to be Jewish as it is. It's tough to be Jewish if
you're secular, and it's no less difficult if you're religious. It's tough
to be Jewish in the Diaspora if you live among non-Jews. It's tough to
live there if you live among lots of Jews. And it's tough as nails to be
Jewish in Israel, atheist, knitted kippa, Haredi, or fusion JUBU.
If you're a Jew for Jesus and
you're still reading this, you may well be thinking: This guy sounds
riled. He needs a friend in Jesus.
You're thinking wrong. This guy
needs you to keep your salvation to yourself.
Believe whatever you
want. Practice whatever you preach.
Just stay the hell away from
us.