NEWS FEATURE: `Messianic Believers’ Embrace Jewish Rites, Rituals

c. 2000 Religion News Service AMESBURY, Mass. _ Fifty-seven-year-old car mechanic William Morris leaves work early on Fridays to begin the Sabbath at sundown. He also keeps a kosher diet and celebrates Yom Kippur among other annual Jewish feasts. All this would seem quite normal for a devout man, except for one thing: Morris is […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

AMESBURY, Mass. _ Fifty-seven-year-old car mechanic William Morris leaves work early on Fridays to begin the Sabbath at sundown. He also keeps a kosher diet and celebrates Yom Kippur among other annual Jewish feasts.

All this would seem quite normal for a devout man, except for one thing: Morris is not Jewish. And he says he doesn’t want to be.


Morris is actually a fundamentalist Christian who prefers the moniker of “Messianic believer.” Yet rather than reinforce traditional Christian ways, his literal reading of the Old and New Testaments has led him and others to swap Christmas and Easter holidays for the Jewish rites Jesus himself observed.

“Am I going to believe what people tell me or what God tells me?,” Morris asked at a recent Shabbat dinner in Amesbury, Mass. “I wanted a better understanding of Christ. So I had to learn what his life was all about.”

That quest, which began for Morris in the early 1980s, has made him aware of tens of thousands across the globe who accept Jesus as Messiah and also live according to Jewish Torah. Some are Jews who have embraced Jesus. But a growing number are zealous gentiles who believe God never authorized the abandonment of precise behavioral codes given to Israel through Moses.

Verifying the population figures for Messianic believers is tricky because congregations are highly independent and warily shun any sort of centralized, tracking authority. But Web sites promote congregations as widespread geographically as Florida, Arizona, Australia and New Zealand. Scholars also say something interesting is afoot.

“I would say (the Judaizing movement) is intensifying,” said Richard Landes, director of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. For evidence, he cites reports of non-Jews studying the Talmud in universities and black, New York City Baptists who have started facing Jerusalem when they pray.

Since Jews and Christians share a corpus of sacred Scripture known as the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, both groups agree God commanded ancient Israel to rest on the seventh day, avoid pork and shellfish and obey other holy laws. But Christians have traditionally overlooked the letter of that law because, they say, faith is what God requires now that the Messiah has come.

“Those things, like keeping the Sabbath and circumcision, are not mandatory by any means. (The apostle) Paul is very clear about that,” said the Rev. Bill Swilling, pastor of the American Baptist Hope Community Church in Newburyport, Mass. “People who require those things are undoubtedly sincere people, but they wouldn’t be consistent with the New Testament.


But just as some Christians choose to follow the Ten Commandments, some are now going further by choosing also to keep kosher, celebrate Passover and otherwise live as those who call themselves Messianic Jews do.

So why do some Christians take this step while others don’t?

One reason, Landes says, is that some harbor a “millennial” expectation of a final judgment in the near future. For them, he says, “Jewish religiosity is more in keeping with their millennial philosophy than the Christianity they grew up with is.”

Torah-observant Jews, Landes says, are willing to withdraw from the world in a way that apocalyptic Christians can appreciate and claim for themselves.

One who expects the end soon and withdraws from the world at least one day a week is 61-year-old Jacqui Paskowski of Amesbury, Mass.

Paskowski has no Jewish roots. She “gave” her life to Christ in 1984. Since her divorce in 1998, however, she has repudiated Christmas and Easter as ungodly holidays of pagan origin. She instead leaves all worldly cares behind every Friday night for 25 hours of what she calls godly rest.

“I can’t explain to you what it does for your soul to leave your bills and your shopping behind until Sunday morning,” Paskowski said. She expects Christ to come soon, specifically when Jews (Judah) and Christians (Ephraim) are united under Jesus (Yashua), according to the prophecy of Ezekiel 37:19. It reads: “Thus says the Lord God: I am about to take the stick of Joseph (which is the hand of Ephraim) and the tribes of Israel associated with it; and I will put the stick of Judah upon it, and make them one stick … and one king shall be king over them all.”


Those expecting the end times, however, aren’t the only non-Jews drawn to aspects of Judaism at this time, according to fundamentalism expert Brenda E. Brasher, assistant professor of religion at Mount Union College in Ohio. She says societies go through cycles of anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism, rejecting things Jewish at certain times and reveling in Jewish roots at other times.

“We’re at a philo-Semitic moment in the history of the Christian tradition,” Brasher said. For evidence, she points to Pope John Paul II’s joining Jews to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and to stories of fundamentalist tourists to Israel being inspired by Jewish piety.

“Anti-semitism made (claiming Jewish roots) less possible, and philo-Semitism makes it more possible.”

Growing up in the 80-percent Jewish town of Sharon, Mass., Tobi Hawksley sadly felt she had broken away from neighbors when she became a born-again Christian in 1964. But today she says she feels closer than ever to Jews as she leads a congregation of 40 Torah-keeping, Messianic believers in Foxboro, Mass.

“I don’t walk in this lifestyle for any other reason than the fact that the Lord never called us away from it,” said Hawksley, 50. She quotes Jesus in Matthew 5:18: “not one stroke of a letter will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”

Not all Messianic believers agree, however, on God’s will for their movement. Paskowski and Morris, who take communion and study Scripture at home through a loose network of home-based congregations, expect to see Jews and Christians re-united in both Jesus and Torah. They belong to the Florida-based Messianic Israel Alliance.

But other Messianic groups have severed ties in protest. Rabbi Yeshayahu S. Heiliczer of the Maryland-based Association of Torah Observant Nazarenes detached his group from the Alliance recently, saying its members had turned their backs on Jews and instead courted “more and more gentiles who want to be part of `that Jewish stuff.”


Meanwhile, Messianic believers continue to live with the bittersweet irony that their religious passion has left them estranged from mainstream Christianity as well as Judaism. But they take comfort in the belief that they’re living by God’s “manual:” the Bible.

“If your belief will not stand up to the manual, then you need to rethink your belief,” Morris said. “I do what I believe is right.”

DEA END MACDONALD

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