Jews
for and against Jesus
By
Israel Adam Shamir
Jews are
evil, and there is a special place in hell just for them. I’d
say to them: Believe whatever you want. Practice whatever you
preach. Just stay the hell away from us.
Do not rush to denounce me, do not send this
piece post-haste to your local branch of ADL or LICRA, do not
send police to my home. I did not quote Adolf Hitler, no worry.
This was
a direct quote from Haaretz newspaper, from an
article by the newspaper columnist Bradley Burston. With one
omission: “for Jesus”. The evil ones, according to Haaretz, are
only the ‘Jews for Jesus’, who should be sent to hell. ‘Jews
against Jesus’ are perfectly loveable.
Burston’s outburst of hate deserves to be
analysed. Jews are good, he says; what makes some Jews evil is
their love to Christ. Ergo, Christ is really hateful in the eyes
of Burston; and apparently the most liberal newspaper in Israel
finds nothing objectionable in this line. I bet the Christian
supporters of Israel also will wipe the spit off their face and
claim it was just a spot of rain. The Pope and Kofi Annan issued
no reproach, and the Congress did not declare a day of mourning,
as they do whenever Jews are mentioned in less than favourable
context. The very Christian president Bush did not mention this
hate talk to Prime Minister Olmert, when they met in the White
House. The newspapers of the West were busy spreading lies about
Iran, and paid no attention to the assault on the faith of their
silent majorities.
Burston dissimulates somewhat to cover his
tracks. Instead of saying outright: “Yes, I hate Jesus and
despise Christians”, he looks for another fault of the “Jews for
Jesus”: they carry out a missionary activity. Proselytizing is
persecution, he whines; do not preach to Jews. If “proselytizing
is persecution”, why does the Jewish state spend a lot of their
taxpayers’ money (and it includes taxes collected from
Christians, too) to proselytise and convert the Christians into
Jewish faith? There is an official state program to convert
200,000 Russian Christians in Israel into the faith of “Jews
against Jesus”. The program is headed by a government official,
and is quite active.
Moreover, if “proselytizing is persecution”,
why “Jews against Jesus” carry out their anti-Christian
propaganda from New York to Moscow? If you do not like your
beliefs being undermined, why do you undermine the beliefs of
others? Indeed, Jews often say they do not proselytise. It is
true up to a point: while Christians want to turn Jews into
their brothers-Christians, the Jews do not want to turn others
into full-fledged Jews, they are quite satisfied if others are
profaned and turned away from Christ. And they work for it: they
sue churches, spread horrible stories about paedophile priests,
ban Christmas, propagate the Gospel of Judas. They do it under
the cover of “secularism”, which is but a gentile-facing
Judaism, a form of Mammon-worship. “Just stay the hell away from
us”, calls Burston to the ‘Jews for Jesus’. Well, should not he
give this advice to his coreligionists, ‘Jews against Jesus’,
and march them back to ghetto?
Burston bewails: “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.” Well, it is tough
because it is unnatural. It’s tough to live believing that
everybody hates you and wants to kill you. It is tough to deny
Christ because His sun warms us all. It is tough and it is
unnecessary, like sleeping on sharp nails. People who describe
themselves as “Jews” are also human; they also need Christ, and
His denial is much more harmful for their souls than any denial
of holocaust can be.
“Respect
this religion (of Jews against Jesus), let this religion live”,
says Burston in his
sequel. No way. Your “Jewish religion” which includes
“secular Jews” is not a religion.
“Secular Jew” is as impossible as “secular
Christian” but its implication is much worse: if an observant
Jew still believes in God, a secular Jew is a man who placed his
ethnic origin in stead of God; a man whose superiority complex
of chosenness is not mitigated by meekness required by the
faith. Why is it not enough for a secular person to be what he
is, an Israeli in Israel, an American in America, a Russian in
Russia? Isn’t it just a desire to be special, when one is not?
Of them, the Gospel says: “they claim they are Jews but they are
not”. There is nothing inherently wrong in the descendents of
Jews: after parting with their superiority spirit, they can
become as good as any, and it is up to each one to decide
whether to claim that one is a Jew or just an ordinary Israeli,
American, Russian.
In Israel, as elsewhere, more and more people
stop to count themselves among ‘the Jews’ and join the nation
they live amongst.
An important Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua and the philosopher
Menahem Brinker noticed that the Palestinians
are part of their nation much more so than the
Jews of Manhattan or Chicago - the connection with whom, in
their eyes, is a thing of the past. It is a beginning of
an independence movement: until now, the state of Israel is a
colony of World Jewry, but we feel that this umbilical cord
should be severed as it stops the development of the new nation,
which includes all inhabitants of the Holy Land and excludes the
Jews elsewhere.
The Holy Land can work wonders. An American
Jew cried to Lord saying: “I have sent my son to Jerusalem and
he turned to Christ”, and the Lord replied: “It happened to My
Son, too”. The old joke may become true on a large scale, as the
Jewish state in Palestine proves ethical impossibility and
undesirability of Jewish paradigm. All gloomy prophecies of
anti-Judaic thinkers were materialised here. The goyim are
locked up, starved and bombed in this window-case of Jewish
generosity, Gaza strip. When the Jews do not lobby for nuking
Iran, they shoot at Lebanon. The foreign workers have zero
rights, are frequently deported and even their meagre salaries
are often not paid to them. Israeli workers’ lot is not
enviable, either: while landlords, usurers and stock exchange
players operate tax-free, labour is taxed to brim. The Jewish
state is good for dentists, money dealers and rabbis; it is not
good for the rest, because it is a Jewish state.
As for Burston’s request for respect, it is
impossible for us to respect your “religion” that teaches hate
to Christ and Christians. Long before Inquisition, in the first
century, the Jews incorporated a special
birkat haminim, Anathema to Christians in their daily
prayer; it is said even now by pious Jews every morning. T’is
better to die than to be healed by a Christian, ruled the
Mishna. Talmud improved on it and allowed to kill Christians,
especially ex-Jews, at any occasion, and turned it into a
commandment. Maimonides, the great luminary of Judaism,
turned simple hate into the whole system: a Jew should not
follow Christians, should not bow to His image, should not make
His image for oneself or for others, but a Jew should burn down
a Christian city, and never allow to rebuild it. Furthermore, a
Jew has to dislike an active Christian (a “misleader”), not to
refrain from hating a Christian, not to save a Christian
missionary from death, not to credit a missionary with any
merits, not to refrain from doing bad to misleaders etc. To our
luck, the Jews of our days do not follow these commandments
anymore than they observe the ban on shaving their beards.
Still, Burston chose “Jews for Jesus” as his
favourite object of hate. Indeed, Jewish hatred to Christ and
Christians is deeply entrenched, but their hatred to their
former brethren who defected from the gang, takes the proverbial
cherry. The South-Eastern corner of Temple Mount enclosure
retains a gruesome memory of an encounter between Jews for and
against Jesus. In year AD 65, some thirty years after the
Resurrection, love to Christ made great inroads into the
community of hate, and burstons of that time decided to deal
with Jews for Jesus the only way they know. They invited Jacob,
the Brother of the Lord, (apparently he was a son of Joseph from
an early marriage and grew up together with Jesus) and asked him
to explain to people that Jesus was not the Messiah nor Son of
God. Jacob agreed to appear before the people. A huge crowd
gathered on the Temple grounds, waiting for the much publicised
appearance of Jacob who was well-known for his saintly ways. His
knees were like those of a camel for he knelt a lot, said the
people. He fasted and prayed all the time for Jerusalem and its
unruly folk. Jacob was also the bishop of the Church of
Jerusalem, and a man who still tried to be a Jew and a Christian
in the same time. The priests asked for quiet, and called Jacob
to witness. And the old saintly bishop came up and witnessed:
Jesus is Christ. Burstons of the time roared: these Jews for
Jesus are evil; and dropped the old man down from the Temple
corner. As he did not die immediately, they went down and killed
him. That was the end of ‘Jews for Jesus’, for centuries to
come.
Since then, many, many Jews embraced Christ,
but they did not try to seat on two chairs or dance on two
weddings at once. In a way, I agree with Burston: let us leave
the appellation of ‘Jews’ to Christ-haters like Burston and
Steinsaltz, to war criminals like Mofaz and Wolfowitz, to
supporters of genocide in Palestine like Elie Wiesel and Alan
Dershowitz, to crooks like George Soros and Marc Rich. Leave
this appellation to the small community of Neturei Karta
who observe all the commandments and support Iran and the
Palestinians, for they are the just men in the Jewish Sodom. But
we do not have to stay in Sodom. Much as I sympathise with ‘Jews
for Jesus’, and ready to defend them from burstons, I disagree
with their clinging to the past. They try to put new wine into
old skins (Luke 5:37, Matthew 9:17). Good that they discovered
Jesus, but it is ‘Jews’ part of them that should be discarded.
They remind of the Talmudic adage: “tovel vesheretz beyado”,
they baptise while not letting go of the reptile tail. If they
live in the Holy Land, they can be Palestinian (or Israeli)
Christians; if they live in the US, they can be Americans of any
Christian denomination they choose. They are chosen as the
members of a new chosen folk, that of the Church which is New
Israel, and they do not need the old trappings. Let them follow
bishops and saints of Jewish origin, who gave up the pretensions
of Jews and accepted the crown of Christ. Nobody has to be a
Jew, and as their crimes in Palestine multiply, it is imperative
not to be one.
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