This summer, I’ve resolved to punctuate my routine of weekdays at Council on Foreign Relations and bacchanalian weekends at the shore with a few learning experiences.
Last week, I watched Tommy Wiseau’s cult classic, The Room. A few days ago, I attempted to camp on the beach. And yesterday morning, I attended the synagogue of a group popularly known as ‘Jews for Jesus’. An alert to my co-ethnics: I am in no danger of being ‘converted’. I’m a strong agnostic, and I don’t take to anyone’s attempts at religious persuasion. I just happen to be curious.
Fortunately, I had an in. A good friend had told me that his father, a freewheeling fifty-something Cuban-American, had recently begun to practice as a Messianic Jew. Drawing on my background as an amateur anthropologist of religious experiences (I’ve explored a Breslov Hasidic Shabbat service, the Druze hamlets of the Golan Heights, the LDS museum in Missouri, etc.), my friend invited me to Saturday morning Messianic services – a chance at which I jumped.
I didn’t know very much about Messianic Jews, other than that they adhered to the trappings of Judaism, but also believed in Jesus (Yeshua) as the Messiah. In my early estimation, they were Jewish Christians, a more generous appraisal than they’re used to. To a majority of Jews secular and Orthodox, Messianic Jews are Christians at best, and traitors at worst.
On the way to the synagogue (housed in a Methodist Church), my friend’s father spelled out a litany of differences that Messianics have with the traditional Christian watchwords – unrevered, the cross is stripped down to an ‘execution stake’; subtly re-explained, the Trinity is rebranded ‘the Unity’. Presaging an important theme of my visit, he asserted plainly: “We’re not Christians”. They’re also not so hot on being called ‘Jews for Jesus’.
I opened the door to an unremarkable, well-worn scene: the basket of bar mitzvah kippot, terse ‘shabbat shalom’ handshakes, and a bearded simulacrum of Ben Bernanke who happens to be the rabbi.
From here, things fade into dissonance. I snag a kippah and a special visitors’ kit. Bernanke scurries off to the side, and the sanctuary opens to a charismatic, decidedly Christian worship service. Many ecumenical songs of the Lord’s grace, some guitars, some exotic drums. In some liberal, creative enclaves, this could be a Reconstructionist Jewish Saturday service – except that the people here actually care, as measured by the hands waving skyward and the eyes meditatively shut.
The medium-sized cohort of black ladies dressed in their Sunday best seems especially at home – and a motley crew of ethnic Jews and white gentiles struggle to keep to the Pentecostal rhythm. But from the circle of women dancing to the melody to the large Altaic man banging away on the drum, it’s clear that everything, for a change, is with intent. Scattered and relatively new, the Messianics are a community of volition.
Nodding along to the closing bars of the worship service, the rabbi takes the podium and conducts the more identifiably Jewish part of the service in Hebrew and English, leading the basic prayers (e.g. Amidah, Barchu) in familiar Ashkenazi melodies. The slapdash – or perhaps just unfamiliar – arrangement of the service is brought to order by the opening of the ark to behold a Torah scroll, dressed normatively in blue velvet with golden stitching.
To a well-traveled visitor of Conservative and Modern Orthodox Jewish synagogues, what happens next is uncanny. The Torah is immediately returned to the ark, and the rabbi begins to reference English-language verses from the Book of Numbers – upon which, congregants draw out their own personal Bibles, ready to mark them up with commentary from the sermon (religion is rarely so personal outside Protestant Christianity). I’m caught off guard when the rabbi, fluent and animated, moves seamlessly into the New Testament book of Acts.
His sermon – d’var torah in Jewish parlance – doubles effortlessly as an apologetic. According to his reasoning, Messianic Judaism is what Judaism was meant to be. Normative Jews, he explains, fail to grasp the continuity of purpose between Old and New Testament. Christians, he accuses, have lost sight of the Jewish basis of belief in Jesus – and absolve themselves unjustifiably of the laws of Moses.
With every rhetorical flourish, I get the sense that I’m being honed in – not as a target for attack, but as the first-time visitor with olive skin and dark hair who sang along in Hebrew. At no point do I mind: though irreligious, it has always made sense to me that people who believe that they have the way to God would want to show others. I find myself less sympathetic to being shown a microphone with which to announce my visiting presence to the congregation: politely, I introduce myself as ‘Josh from Marlboro’ and return to my pew.
There’s no shortage of attention: as a first-time visitor, I’m allowed by statute to the front of the line at the kiddush luncheon. I cannot say that I mind. Congregants of all backgrounds and rabbi’s wife ferry me around the building, asking about my background and telling stories about their journeys to Messianic Judaism. The rabbi sits me down to a long-winded, scholarly talk (just the way I like them) about the biblical basis for Jewish belief in Yeshua as messiah, and I listen, mind open, bagel and hummus on my plate. And I can’t help but shake the idea that he should be spending his Saturday at the Federal Reserve.
It ends predictably: he argues well, I leave unconvinced. We shake hands. Shabbat shalom. As I suspected, there’s nothing perverse about the Messianics – except, perhaps, that unlike some Reform and Conservative Jews, they actually believe in what they’re doing. Their arguments are at least as coherent as any Chabad street rabbi’s – and to be fair, I’d be more inclined to believe in Yeshua than in Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Then again, I’m not particularly inclined to believe at all. As eager for new membership as followers of any movement, the congregants seem to have misjudged my motives (although I thank them for their hospitality). I am not looking for a new faith. I just happen to be interested in the plurality of human expression, which, if you’re lucky to live somewhere as diverse as central New Jersey, is almost always within reach.
If you get a chance, tap into it. Don’t ever believe that ‘culture’ is limited to the Met and The New Yorker. Hungarian-American community centers and Christian Science reading rooms count too. Even Messianic Jewish Shabbat services. Whether or not they manage to convince you of anything, you’re guaranteed an experience.