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You can’t always
judge a book by its cover
By Donna Gordon Blankinship
Transcript Editor
You’re waiting in line at the grocery store a few weeks
before Passover. Your cart is filled with matza, gefilte fish,
kosher wine and horseradish. The gentleman in front of you has
a similarly filled cart and you strike up a conversation. Aren’t
matza prices high this year? How can a young family afford to
be Jewish these days. Your time passes pleasantly and when the
clerk finishes ringing up his order, you wish each other a kosher
Pesach and say goodbye.
Your mother goes to a meeting of Surviving Generations of the
Holocaust. The topic of discussion is the organization’s
speakers bureau. A woman, whose parents both survived the Shoa,
offers a few suggestions and expresses appreciation that such
an organization exists for people like us to meet and share
our experiences. Everyone smiles and nods and the meeting ends.
These are the kinds of experiences that bring Jews together
in a sparsely populated community like ours — the times
when we feel most connected to the people of Israel. What if
I told you the gentlemen buying matza was the leader of a congregation
of messianic Jews, who believe that Jesus is the messiah. And
the woman at the Surviving Generations of the Holocaust meeting?
That’s his wife, who also was born and raised Jewish.
Are the messianic Jews invading our community? Probably not.
About a dozen congregations have been meeting in the greater
Seattle area for decades. They remain quiet on the fringes of
both the Jewish and Christian communities, buying matza at our
grocery stores and books at our favorite Jewish bookstores …
until we start reading about them in the general media. A recent
news story to hit the front pages of several local secular newspapers
shared the experience of Hylan Slobodkin, whose Congregation
Emmaus in Bellevue recently had its Torah stolen. Leaders in
the Jewish community, and Slobodkin himself, expressed regret
about the way the congregation was portrayed in the general
media.
This article will attempt to offer a clearer picture of who
Slobodkin and his followers are. What do Jews think about messianic
congregations? Are they a threat to the future of the Jewish
people? What should we do, if anything, to protect our children
and other vulnerable members of our community from their proselytizing.
Searching for meaning
How did Hylan and Rita Slobodkin make the journey from a Jewish
upbringing in southern California to leading a Bellevue congregation
of people who believe in Jesus? Their travels took more than
30 years.
Three generations of Hylan’s family worshipped at B’nai
David, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, beginning with
his grandfather, the immigrant from Russia who reminded him
of Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof.” For some reason,
Hylan celebrated his bar mitzvah at an Orthodox shul, which
coincidentally was the congregation where Rita and her parents,
both Holocaust survivors, belonged. They met when Hylan was
in college and Rita was in high school and married in 1968.
Two years later, after rejecting their parents’ Judaism
and experimenting with other ways to find spiritual meaning
in their lives, including drugs, Hinduism and yoga, Hylan and
Rita decided to sell their belongings, fill up their backpacks
and travel across Europe to India to study to become yoga instructors.
They made it as far as Switzerland, when an experience at Christian
community in the Swiss Alps charged their lives.
“We heard that they were teaching the Bible there. It interested
us and we were Jewish and they were Christian and never the
twain would meet…” Slobodkin said. Part of his curiosity
stemmed from the fact that he had never read the Christian New
Testament, and the Christians at this community in Switzerland
seemed to have a real love for the Jewish people.
“We thought we’d stay for just a couple weeks and
ended up staying for six months,” he recalls. “In
that time we realized that their love for Israel was genuine.
Because of that we began to consider the possibility that maybe
Jesus was the messiah.”
And to summarize the next few decades of their lives, which
eventually brought them to the Seattle area four years ago,
their parents urged them not to make any quick decisions without
first consulting Jewish sources. The young couple spent the
next several years including a year in Israel first studying
the sciences and then the Torah. “We were searching together,
searching for God — although I didn’t call it God.
I called it universal truth,” he says.
“I remember thinking the sky is blue in L.A. and the sky
is blue in China, there must be something in the spiritual realm
that connects all human beings and that I came to believe is
the God of the Bible, Hashem,” he explains.
Slobodkin claims that at the same time he found his path to
believing in Jesus, whom he calls Yeshua, he also found his
way back to Judaism. He found the New Testament fulfilling the
prophesies of the Torah, but he was not willing to give up his
new love of Judaism to make way for these Christian beliefs.
They consulted with rabbis, including the man who married them,
and the rabbis told the Slobodkins that Jesus wasn’t for
Jews, “but they couldn’t give us any good reason why
not.” At the time, he says they didn’t know any other
people who were raised Jewish, but believed in Jesus. There
were few if any messianic congregations in the United States
or Israel, but they have sprouted up all over in the past 30
years. Slobodkin says now there are approximately 250 in the
United States and 60 in Israel.
Jew for Jesus?
Congregation Emmaus, hidden on the side of a strip mall a few
miles from downtown Bellevue, has been a religious home for
a variety of people for about 20 years. Slobodkin, who calls
himself a rabbi but never went to rabbinical school or received
ordination from any known Jewish organization, says he doesn’t
know what percentage of the congregation’s members were
born Christian or Jew. “If they want to become members
we ask them what they believe, we don’t care what their
roots are,” he says, adding that members should believe
in God and that Jesus is the messiah.
They hold worship services blending Jewish rituals, Israeli
dancing and Christian sermons on Friday night, Saturday morning
and a special service in Russian on Saturday evening. People
find them through word-of-mouth, newspaper and radio advertising,
the phone book and articles in secular newspapers, he adds with
a smile.
“We just do what we do and people hear about us and they
come to us and if they like what they see, they stay,”
Slobodkin says.
He claims the congregation does little direct outreach to Jews.
“I feel sad that my Jewish brothers and sisters aren’t
willing to consider the possibility that Yeshua is the moshiach,”
he adds.
Rabbi Tovia Singer, national director of Outreach Judaism, says
the reason Jews don’t believe Jesus was the messiah is
rather simple. “There is no relationship between what the
Jewish scriptures teach about the messiah and Jesus of Nazareth,”
he explains in answer to a question posed to him on the organization’s
informative Website, www.outreachjudaism.org. Singer explains
that the Ezekiel 37 in the Torah says we will recognize the
coming of the messiah when all the following occurs: the dead
are resurrected, the final Temple is built in Jerusalem, there
is universal knowledge of God and obedience to his Torah, the
lost tribes are restored and the Jewish people are stored to
their land. “When we carefully consider that none of this
has occurred, we can be assured that although many thousands
of individuals have claimed to be the messiah throughout the
centuries, Jesus included, none of them is,” Singer said.
Slobodkin would argue, Singer points out, that Jesus will somehow
accomplish these things in a second coming, but this is “antithetical
to the Bible,” the rabbi says.
Fighting missionaries
Giving knowledge like this, and more, to Jewish children, and
especially teens, is the key to helping them fight missionaries.
But, he adds, messianic Jews are not the people the community
should be concerned about. “In virtually all cases, the
person who succeeds in converting a Jew to Christianity is a
gentile evangelical Christian, not a messianic Jew,” he
says. Pentacostal Christian and Baptist churches are packed
with Jewish people. He estimates that up to 200,000 people who
were born Jewish are attending church these days, not messianic
congregations. The essential function of the messianic congregations
is to train evangelicals on how to reach Jews. He says the majority
of the congregations’ members are gentiles.
Rabbi Ted Stainman of Bet Chaverim, the community synagogue
of South King County, said Christian organizations may even
be putting their own organizations in jeopardy by seeking to
educate their members about Jewish practices. “I think
the Christian community has planted a time bomb in its own midst
by reintroducing Jewish practices,” Stainman said. Hebrew
Christians may become curious about the meaning behind Jewish
rituals and find themselves drawn to authentic Jewish practice,
the same way Jews by Choice have found their way to Judaism
over the year with little or no outreach efforts by the Jewish
community.
Both Stainman and Singer believe the Jewish community should
focus more on its own congregations and the unaffiliated than
on messianic groups, Singer contends.
“For some, the success of Jews for Jesus represents the
unpaid bills of the Jewish people. If we don’t do our job
with Jewish education … then the messianic world will seek
havoc with our youth. This is the second largest drain of Jews,
only second to Jews for nothing, Jews who just assimilate,”
Singer says.
What about Jews for Buddhism? Singer says this drain of Jewish
energy is also a concern, but not as great as the Hebrew Christian
movement. He says Jews often take the philosophies of Buddhism
and incorporate them into their Judaism. They don’t often
undergo a conversion to Buddhism. Buddhists also don’t
have a history of anti-Semitism and Jews have not been killed
by Buddhists for the past 2000 years.
Those in danger of recruitment by Christians include college
students with a weak Jewish education and children of interfaith
families who have been raised with a little bit of Judaism and
a little bit of Christianity.
“If young men and women have a strong connection to their
precious heritage and they have knowledge of the scriptures,
the missionaries will not be able to take them,” he says.
In addition to a strong Jewish education, Singer believes it
is important to provide an education about the messianic movement
to our youth, “to inoculate these young people.” He
travels around the country lecturing and training young people
to fight missionaries. On a recent visit to Seattle, Singer
went “undercover” at Northwest Yeshiva High School
and pretended to be a missionary to give the students an opportunity
to practice their skills. Only the teacher knew who Singer really
was and the exercise was so real that some students were upset
by the experience.
“I believe it is important to provide education about these
predatory organizations. I wish we didn’t have to teach
children about predators and molesters. We wish we could remain
silent on these issues, but we can’t,” Singer says.
The rabbi believes both mainstream Christians and other missionaries
have increased their outreach efforts toward Jews this year
because of the millenium. Last Rosh Hashana, the Southern Baptist
Convention encouraged 16 million Americans to target Jews for
conversion. “These people believe that in order for Jesus
to make his second coming, Jews need to convert to Christianity
en mass,” Singer says. |
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