A Christian-Pastor’s Conversation with Orthodox Rabbis’ on Faith & Israel

You look at the division in the Christian world post the establishment of the state of Israel, and I’m saying maybe this is a little simplistic coming from an Orthodox Jew, I’m an outsider to the, but I look at Christians who are honest and grappling with what’s real, even if it was uncomfortable at first and trying to rethink so many things that they thought before. And I have great respect for that.

But replacement theology is very neat and clean, right? In other words, all the T’s are crossed. All the i’s are dotted. It makes sense once you reject replacement theology, it’s very messy.

In the Christian world, we talk about the fruit of the spirit and humility is actually not mentioned. You would think that would be a fruit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness. You’re like humility should be up there. And I’ve heard some people have argued, well, humility is the soil because nothing can grow out of that.

It’s the infrastructure upon which all those other traits are built. Yeah.

Welcome back to another episode of the Covenant and Conflict podcast. We are so excited to have Rabbi Ellie and Rabbi Pesach with us. These are handsome Jewish Orthodox men who are from Israel who have come to Dallas for many reasons, but one of them is to have this conversation with us. We’re so excited to have you. Thank you for being here, honored to be here with you.

Pleasure.

So we just had breakfast, which is great, and you kind of asked what’s this podcast about? And I explain covenant and conflict. We see this theme throughout scripture where God makes a covenant or he chooses something. He chooses something or someone. And typically what follows that is conflict. God chooses Isaac. There’s conflict with Ishmael. God chooses Jacob. There’s conflict with Esau. Joseph is the beloved and there’s conflict with his brothers. David is chosen and there’s some schisms there. And so you kind of see this throughout scripture and we I think are living in it now today because we believe strongly that there’s still a chosenness on Israel is still the firstborn. God is not done when we see this in the book of Romans. Has God given up on the Jewish people? May it never be said. So there’s still this chosenness on Israel and that still offends anyone who’s not a part of that.
And that’s kind of the theme is when God chooses something, the ones who are not chosen or offended, there’s an orphan mentality. There’s kind of a younger brother offense, and we believe that that is sometimes the root of antisemitism. Maybe the root of all antisemitism is this, why are they chosen and not me? But it also kind of pertains to many areas where anything that God kind puts his finger on the world around it can come in conflict. So we just want to talk about those things. We want to talk about the areas of covenant and the areas of conflict.

It’s interesting that people would feel jealous or kind of like, why am I not the center player in the story? Why is someone else chosen? For most of Jewish history, no one, people didn’t feel that way about the Jews because right now with the prophecy of the in gathering of Israel, after thousands of years of exile, the most repeated prophecy in the Bible being fulfilled. And so it’s easy to say, oh, the Jews, why do you get to be the ones who are chosen? Why do you get to be the ones who have the covenant? But for most of our history, that status really just meant that we were horribly

Persecuted.

It’s not like people were trying to usurp our position when we be part of community. It’s interesting.

No, it is interesting and I think, I think we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about is this Jewish Christian relationship because the dominant reading of the New Testament from many Christians is this idea that now we are all chosen because when you receive Jesus, then you are grafted into Israel as verbiage Paul uses or adopted into the family, Romans eight, all these analogies where what does he use of Israel or part of the commonwealth of Israel, which means not we aren’t Israel, but we’re part of the commonwealth now. But you can take that and kind of twist it and make it well now it’s about us. And I think one of the issues as Christians typically read the Bible and find themselves in the story. And so we want to be the main characters. And so if we don’t feel that we’re the main characters, we’re going to try to make ourselves the main characters.
And so we can kind of take that status. And this is about me now, so I’d love to hear your perspectives on a lot of things. A lot of things we’re going to agree about. There’s things we’re going to disagree about, but at the end of the day, we want to find that tension of where does this covenant and conflict come together and where’s heart in all of it? So I’d love to just talk about that. We talked about particularity, and I’d love to start there because it seems like one of the themes in scripture is God chooses the particular with the universal in mind. God chooses Abraham, Genesis 12, so that all nations are blessed. So God’s heart and mind is still on all his children. And you can almost read for Genesis one to 11 is God trying to do this universal thing through Adam and Eve and then again through Noah that keeps on failing. And so it’s almost like, all right, new plan. I’m going to choose one guy and his family. And through that family, all nations will be blessed. So how do you see that idea of particularity but universalism playing out in God’s grand plan?

Well, in the narrative of Abraham’s life, I think the best passage to tease that out is the covenants of circumcision. Because in that passage, it’s in the very same prophecy in the very same time that God speaks to him, that God does two things. He commands him the covenants of circumcision, but he also changes his name. And the fact that those two things happen simultaneously really puts a finger on this whole tension

Between

The particularism and the universal mission to bring blessing to all the families of the earth. Because Abraham’s name change from Abraham to Abraham, now it’s a play on words in Hebrew and it says it’s a play on words right there in the text. When God changes his name, he says, your name will now be Abraham because I’m making you into a father of a multitude of peoples, of a multitude of nations. And the word father of in Hebrew is also used both biblically and in later Hebrew, not only to mean a genetic father, but also to mean kind of like a leader or a patron. So he’s now being called to a more universal mission. You’re going to become a father of a multitude of nations. Interesting. His previous name was Abe Ram because he was from a place called aam. So his name implied a kind of leader or father

Of those

People, aam of his own people, and now he’s the leader of the whole world. That’s how the Jewish commentators going back thousands of years interpreted that. But it’s right there in the text. God says, I’m going to change your name to Abraham because you are now a father of a multitude of nations. And then in the same passage, he commands him to do the circumcision. And there’s this emphasis when I say emphasis in biblical text, the Bible doesn’t have bold or italics or underline the way things are emphasized in the Bible. And this is a good thing just separate from everything else we’re talking

About. Just a good note to take. Yeah.

Good thing to know about reading the Bible because when you’re reading the Bible, we are 21st century people and we’re reading a text that’s from the ancient near East.

Yeah,

Totally. And we make huge mistakes when we read it just with the lens of our own perspective, and we don’t

In our own context.

So one of the important issues in reading the Bible carefully is that the way the Bible emphasizes things is through repetition. Sometimes it’s not overt repetition, it’s saying something you already knew or it’s saying something in a number of different ways. But repetition is the Bible’s way of emphasizing. And there’s this emphasis in that passage when God is talking about the covenants of circumcision where he keeps saying over and over to Abraham, between, it’s a covenant between me and you and your children after you very particularistic. And the covenants of circumcision is meant to be particularistic. It’s only going to be you. This isn’t for everyone else. But in the same passage, he changes his name from a more particularistic name to a more universalistic name. And I think that just to put a bow on this point, that the point here is that Abraham is being told, look, you have a universal mission to bring blessing to all the families of the earth. As what was said in Genesis 12 and over and over again to him, and it’s reiterated throughout the Bible, people of Israel stand at Sinai. They’re called to be a kingdom of priests, which means that they have a priestly role helping the whole world reach God.
There’s this universal mission of the people of Israel, and it plays out through all the prophets as well. But the way you’re going to achieve that universal mission is through your particularism, because if you’re like everyone else, then you’re not going to be able to influence everyone else. And I think anyone who’s involved in any kind of ministry work, you have this own tension yourself, which is you want to influence, but in order to influence people, you can’t be a product of the culture you’re trying to influence. So you have to separate yourself in order to be able to engage. And I think that’s really where the, and for Abraham, it’s attention. He doesn’t want to throw out Ishmael, he’s praying for the people of Sodom and Gamara. He wants everyone. He loves everybody, and God is constantly forcing him to be more.

Yeah. There’s also this mistake that we often make where we read the Bible with 2020 hindsight because we know how it ends and we forget sometimes Abraham is going through a process. Sarah is going through a process of growth, and initially he thought they were a childless couple, they were older, and he thought that his way of influencing the world was going to be through students. It talks about at the very beginning of his story, the souls that they made in Harran. It’s an amazing language in the Bible there that it says they made these souls, meaning these are people that they

Shaped

And they thought that that was their life mission and their product. They didn’t have children, they weren’t blessed that way, but they were going to influence the world in that way.

And

Ultimately, where did those students go? We don’t know. But it seems that ultimately what they spent so many years of their lives, decades and decades investing in through really the prime of their lives when they were younger and more energetic, all of that disappears and it all goes through a child that they thought that they were never going to have right through a nation. It’s not just when we talk about universalism versus particularism to be more specific, shifting from students

To

Children, and that shift that God is teaching Abraham, no, it’s going to be a nation, which is something which the world is still struggling to understand generations and gener thousands of years later, millennia later. Wait, are Jews a nation? Are they a religion? What are they Exactly right, but this unique creation of a people that is also with a religious mission in this way, that was something that Abraham never envisioned at the start and which God blessed him with later. So he himself had to go through this universal to particular mission, which he struggles. I think as Rabbi Paysa was saying, that in many ways he struggled against that because his natural self was one of complete openness. The world, everyone, everybody come into my tent and God is saying, no, no, no. It’s going to go through not just your children, but one of your children.

Yeah. Wow. That brings me to a question, and you see this kind of recapitulated in scripture, and I think of David who’s like, I’m going to kill Goliath and when I kill him, the nations will realize there’s a God in Israel. So it’s that still kind of universal language because what we do is Israel, the world will then know that the God of Israel is the one true God. How does that play out from a Christian worldview? We see everything retroactively through Jesus, and so the way that the nations come in through Jesus and the sacrifice that he made now gentiles, people of the nation, the gom can through Jesus then kind of become partakers. They don’t, and this is where we would disagree with a lot of the church or find tension. That doesn’t mean we become Israel or we become Jewish. Now we remain gentile, but are kind of adopted into this family.
We still, I keep on forgetting this word, part of the code nations, what do you say? The common wealth. The common wealth of Israel, and that’s how the nations come in. That’s the fulfillment of Genesis 12 is now the Gentiles can come in and be a part of it without replacing it. What is the Orthodox theology for the nations knowing that the God of Israel is the one true God. What does the fulfillment of Genesis 12 look like from your perspective? Is it that we just know that the God of Israel is the one true God kind of theologically? How does that change the way that we live? Should it change that we live? I’m just

Interested, okay. You’ve asked a whole bunch of questions here. I’m just trying to take notes in my mind here. Sorry. No, there’s a lot of different issues you’re raising in terms of the mission of Israel to the world. I want to go back to something you said earlier about because, and circle back to this. This is the heart of the issue, which is that desire to see yourself as the protagonist of the story, and that if you embrace the fact that the Jewish people, the people of Israel are God’s chosen and have this unique mission, and it’s their story

Through

Which God reveals himself to the world. You mentioned David killing Goliath saying, oh, now the nations will know. You see that also with the plagues in Egypt where God tells Moses over and over again, the reason he’s doing this is so that the Egyptians will know that I’m God. Meaning the story of Israel isn’t a story about Israel. The story of Israel is God using the people of Israel to show himself to the rest

Of the world, to be a light to the nations.

But again, being a light into the nations speaks to maybe what we have to do.

But

There’s something else going on here, which is how God uses us and the people of Israel are like the chief pawns in God’s game.
There’s a phrase that appears, especially in the book of Ezekiel a lot, but it appears all over the Bible where God will say, X, Y, and Z, or a prophet will say, X, Y, and Z and say, and everyone will know that I’m the Lord and you will know that I’m the Lord and they will know that I’m the Lord or something like that. You have this over and over again, especially in Ezekiel. He loves that phrase, the vast majority of the times in the Bible where that phrase appears where God declares X, Y, Z, and you will know that I’m the Lord. It’s talking about the in gathering of the nation of Israel at the end of the exile, that one prophecy, as I said before, the most repeated prophecy in

The Bible, Ezekiel dry bones,

And then at the end of that, and they will know that I am the Lord. What God is saying is that if you stop a person of faith on the street and just say, how do you know God? How do you know that God is God? Most people wouldn’t give that answer, even though that’s the answer the Bible gives. How do you identify God in the world? Look at the history of the Jewish

People,

And the reason is very straightforward, the way God reveals himself in the world. We call it miracles, right? What’s a miracle? I’m going to give a definition of the word miracle. I made up this definition, but I think it makes noted, it makes a lot of sense. Here’s my definition of the word miracle. A miracle is when the rules of nature are broken for God’s purposes. But let’s add in, and it was predicted in advance what really makes it, I mean, it’s a miracle anyway, if the rules of nature are broken for God’s purposes, but when it’s predicted in advance, that’s a whole different level. And then that’s like the biblical prophecies. The biblical miracles like the plagues in Egypt. That’s why most of the plagues, there was a system to them, but most of the plagues are announced in advance. This is what’s going to happen, and then it goes ahead and happens and then you know, have a miracle. The exile for many, many generations and ultimate in gathering of the nation of Israel to retake our land and become more numerous and more prosperous than our ancestors, in the words of Deuteronomy, is not only the most repeated prophecy in the Bible, it’s also the most impossible prophecy in the Bible
Because it happened. We kind of think of it as, oh, that’s the way history happened. The Jewish people are back, but many, many nations in the ancient world, all these nations you read about in ancient books, the Bible or ancient near Eastern texts who don’t exist anymore. It’s not because they all died out over the course of time, people moved around, they were exiled,

They

Took on new identities, they assimilated, and the only nation from the ancient world that was sent into exile for a long time and came back to their land is the nation of Israel. And we’re also the only ones that the Bible said it would happen in advance. So it fits all. So it fits my definition of miracle, right? The rules of how things work, the rules of nature are suspended for God’s purposes, and it was predicted in advance.

Yeah, that’s

Good. So the people of Israel are the tool that God uses to reveal himself to the nations of the world. So when we ask, going to the end of your list, your many questions about what does this mean in terms of how do we see the nations, what are they? So first and foremost, all over the Bible, the nations recognize they see God through the history of the people of Israel. Israel. Like in Psalm 1 26, the nation say, wow, look what God has done for them. Or Psalm one 17 nations praise God for what he’s done for the people of Israel. First and foremost, it’s recognizing who God is, recognizing his relationship with the people of Israel, seeing it, but then of course, taking on the basic morality and the basic way of life that is in there in the Bible. Yeah,

That’s so good. Well, do you want to say anything? Go ahead. I was going to say you guys are a part of Israel 3, 6, 5, and you do a lot of work with Christians, and like we said at breakfast, we live in a postoc October 7th world, and we’ve seen how needed this relationship and this partnership is for many reasons, but one of them being we have the same foundation, we have the same moral views for the most part, we have so many common interests in shared bonds. So what would you say is the importance, because talking about Israel and the nations, and now it’s kind of laid out before us, so what does that look like for you guys?

So this has always been true, right? Ever since Christianity came onto the scene that we’ve been bound together by this common belief in the Bible. And again, sometimes we take these things for granted, but the very fact that there are over 2 billion Christians in the world that believe that God gave the Bible, the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai is astounding, and which I remind our fellow Jews of all the time that that’s crazy. That actually is true, is astounding. So that’s always been the

Case,

But for all sorts of other historical factors and reasons that often let to tension as opposed to us coming together. But because of where the world has gone now, and I think I speak for Rabbi Pesach as well, when I believe that we are in the throes of redemption right now, we have entered a new stage of history in which there are alliances in the world that have come together against the people of Israel that are bringing Jews and Christians together in a very, very profound way. The very fact that you have your radical Islam joining together in an alliance with woke atheists, which hard rationally to understand,

Yeah, it’s hard to get there

And wrote a whole book about this this’s, not just a historical circumstance. That is, there’s something very big that’s happening there that is Ishmael and Esau joining together. But the effect that that has is, is that it is bringing Jews and Christians together, whether they realize it or not, meaning the people who believe in the Bible are radically opposed to both of these groups, right? To radical Islam and to the radical left and anti-God left. And so I think for the first time, many Christians, and you could speak to this, many Christians believe and feel that they are in a minority in America, even with many electoral outcomes over the last few months,

Nevertheless,

The big picture feeling under attack. And that’s been the case where Christians have been under attack in so many different ways, and in a sense, I think Christians are beginning to feel the way Jews have felt

For

A long time, but it’s not just negative that we’re both under attack, but rather the negative is revealing the significance of this shared relationship. There is something that we share together. We love all human beings, but the fact that Jews and Christians share this biblical worldview at a time when it’s under threat from so many has brought this relationship, I think to the forefront in a way that we haven’t seen before. I’m seeing it particularly since October 7th. There’s a newfound awareness and openness to this relationship from Jews in particular who have always been the more nervous participant as a minority. There’s a new openness to this that we haven’t seen before. It’s a special time in history,

And it’s understandable why the Jewish community would be the ones that are maybe a little bit more hesitant. That’s one of the things that we try to talk a lot is church history, because typically Christians don’t learn a lot about church history. If we do, we want to learn about the good parts of church history. And what’s often left out of that is the persecution of Jewish people by the hands of many Christians, and we talked about the book, our Hands are Stained with Blood, which is a title that tries to encapsulate like this has been at our hands for centuries and lives in the psyche of many Jewish people that when they see the cross or they see Christians or they hear Christ, those do not drum up images of love and peace and joy and brotherhood and friendship. It’s the exact opposite. So there’s so many things that we’re trying to do, many of them that we’re linking arms with how can we understand our history, understand our errors, understand we’re theologically, we’ve completely adopted this idea of replacement theology that Jesus fulfilled Israel, the plan of Israel, he embodied Israel, whatever we want to say, that then basically nullifies the covenant that God made with Israel, which we don’t read in scripture.
I don’t know necessarily how, I know a little bit of how we got there, but basically this resurgence of the Jewishness of Jesus, the Jewishness of the gospels, the foundation of the covenant God made with Israel, and then how that affects our relationship with the Jewish community, which as you said is now this thriving community that we couldn’t say for almost 2000 years.

Yeah. The issue of replacement theology of how Christian, lemme tell you a story,

Please.

A few years ago I was invited by a Presbyterian pastor who had come to Israel and wanted to meet a rabbi with their church group, so Presbyterian pastor from Wyoming and from the P-C-U-S-A, now that denomination is very anti-Israel, okay? The P-C-U-S-A is, so that’s the Presbyterian church. So I’ll educate you a little bit about

Some of the United States of America, of the

United States of America, got it. The Presbyterian Church of the United States of America. But the Presbyterian church split a couple decades ago, I think,
Into the PC USA and then two other splinters, the PCA, which is the more conservative Presbyterian church and something else called eco, which is a little bit more conservative than the CUSA. They disagree on a few issues, one of them being Israel, but the P-C-U-S-A, which is still the majority of Presbyterian churches in America is very woke, and they’re one of these mainline denominations that’s gone left-wing and they support BDS, they’re very anti-ISIS Israel and this Presbyterian pastor from Wyoming who had come to Israel with her church, she wanted to meet a rabbi. She was kind of going off the reservation a little bit, and she’s going meet with an orthodox rabbi,

Stone Rogue,

And she even came into Judea, known as the West Bank. She came into Judea to do it, to meet me at my office at the time was in a frat. And then after that, she invited me out to Wyoming, her and a few other rogue, more conservative leaning P-C-U-S-A pastors there to have me come out and speak to their churches. But because it’s the Presbyterian church and has this structure, they have to ask permission. So she had to ask permission from the state presbyter of Wyoming and the state Presbyter of Wyoming didn’t want me to be speaking to a bunch of Presbyterian churches. The guy was very anti-Israel,
But he reluctantly agreed because he doesn’t want to say no to these pastors, and then he’s got an internal problem. He sent an email. So they sent him an email asking if I could for permission. He Googled me and found that I was some radical right-wing extremist, but he reluctantly agreed to have me speak to their churches. He had certain conditions he wanted to be recorded, and the recording sent to him immediately, so you can hear what I said, whatever. But the opening line of his email back to them, he didn’t know that they were going to show me the email. The opening line of the email said, let me make my position clear. I do not see any relationship between today’s Jews and the Jewish people of the Bible. It’s very interesting. And I was like, I wasn’t offended by this. I really don’t care what the state, presbyter of Wyoming thinks about the Jews. But I found it fascinating. And I said to myself, that is, and at the time I wrote an article about it in the Jerusalem Post about this story, but what was interesting about the claim that the Jewish people today are not the same as the Jewish people of the Bible,
It struck me is that there’s been a lot of anti-Jewish doctrines in the church for centuries, Augustine put forward what is known as witness theology, right? That the Jewish people have lost their covenant with God. And the only reason we continue to exist is because we will perpetually be persecuted and exile and powerless as a witness to what happens when you reject Jesus. That was Augustine’s view. And then you have Luther who wrote a whole book called Jews on the Jews and their lies, and he did a lot of good things, but his position later in life on the Jews was very dark, and it actually inspired a lot of the Nazi ideology. Totally fine. You have people like Augustine and Luther who had these anti-Jewish theologies that they put forward, and I don’t hold anything against them. They were interpreting the reality at the time.

I do. But

Okay, that’s fine. You can do that as a Christian. I’m just saying, I don’t anachronistically, go back and shake my fist to people. Everyone hated us back then. And Augustine, by all accounts, seems like he was a very pious person. He interpreted the reality he saw. But that’s exactly the point. So what I thought when I saw this line from this state presbyter of Wyoming that were not the same Jews, I was like, here’s what’s interesting. There’s been a lot of nasty things said by Christian thinkers throughout the centuries about the Jews, but none of those Christian thinkers ever made the claim that this state presbyters making meaning Luther living in the 16th century, didn’t say in his writings, the Jews today aren’t the same as the Jews of the Bible. You could have said

That,

And the link between us and the Jews of the 16th century, well, that’s easy.

We

Have family trees that are clearly cemeteries. You can look at the gravestones. There are Jewish books written by rabbis and other types of community leaders from certainly every century, almost every generation going all the way back to biblical times.

There

Is no gap. There’s no gap. We even have lists of rabbis, teacher to student lists. This rabbi is a student of this rabbi who’s a student of this rabbi, direct students going from rabbis who are alive today to

Moses.

No joke, you could look these up online. We have an unbroken chain of our history. We have communal records. We know exactly where we were at all times. So when this state Presbyter says that the Jews today have no relationship to the Jews of the Bible, does he believe that we have a relationship to the Jews of the 19th century? Well, yeah, of course he’d agree to that. How about the Jews of the 17th century? How about the Jews of the 16th century? How about that? And keep going all the way back. There’s no gap. Where does the lie begin? So I was thinking about this as I read this note. I was like,

Okay, how’d we get there?

So why did he come up with this? Why did he say something that Augustine didn’t say? Luther didn’t say? Why did he invent this new one? Here’s a new one, right? It’s one thing to say, oh, the Jews are rejected. The Jews are going to hell, the Jews,

Jews are been there, done that.

The Jews are replaced. No, no, no. He’s got a new one. We’re not even the Jews.

Yeah, totally.

So where does he say that? So he says that because he has to. Why does he have to? Because Luther had it easy. Luther could look at the Jews of his time who’ve been in exile for 1500 years. They’re powerless. They’re decrepit. They’re in exile forever. The Christians are powerful. We’re running the world.

And

It’s easy for Luther to say, you’re never going home. You’re never going back. You don’t have a covenant anymore. In fact, Luther not in that book, but in a different part of his writings, is a great line from Luther where he writes, let the Jews return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple with a Davidic king on the throne. We’ll be the first to become Jews along with them. He was being sarcastic. Luther Point was they’re never going back. Luther could say that Augustine could look at the Jews in exile for 400 years or 500 years at that

Point,

400 years and say they’re going to be in exile forever. But this guy, this state, presbyter of Wyoming, he has no luxury like that, right? He can’t because there’s a Jewish state with millions of Jews in gathered from the four corners of the earth, more numerous and more prosperous than ever before. He doesn’t have the luxury to say the Jews are the Jews, but they’ve lost their covenant, his only option to delegitimize our history. And to say that we’re not fulfilling the biblical prophecy of the return of Israel to our land

Is to discredit your,

It’s to say that we’re not Jews.

Totally.

So my point is that the replacement theology, the anti-Jewish sentiment doesn’t necessarily always come from the theology. It’s often imposed on the theology.

That’s really good. Yeah. When we talk about replacement theology, we have to remind Christians, this was really easy. This was an easy leap to make when Israel laid in ruins

Made perfect sense.

And you’re like, I guess, how do we interpret this now spiritually? Because most Christians take anything in the Hebrew scriptures and to find its application, they give a spiritual Well, that

Starts with origin.

Yeah. It’s just like, well, now that’s spiritually fulfilled. So I guess when we read Israel, clearly it can’t mean the desert out in the middle of Middle East. I mean, hardly any Jews are even there. So I guess where the New Israel or the church is the new Israel, and that’s now the land, but 1948 really put a thorn in our side theologically. Now we have to start thinking through, well, the church can’t be Israel if Israel pops on a map again. So how do we then reinterpret that to make it make sense? That’s the next generation’s way of saying make it sense to me. And I think that’s the tension that we find ourselves in now,

A man here is what he wants to hear that disregards the rest. And you look at the division in the Christian world post the establishment of the state of Israel, and I’m saying maybe this is a little simplistic coming from an Orthodox Jew, an outsider to the, but I look at Christians who are honest and grappling with what’s real, even if it was uncomfortable at first and trying to rethink so many things that they thought before. And I have great respect for

That.

It’s not an easy thing to do. We define ourselves by our views, by what we believe. And so I am always amazed when somebody who’s been out there for decades with a particular view, and then the world contradicts it, and then they’re willing and able to say, you know what? Maybe I was wrong on that. Let me go back and rethink. I have, even though it seems like it’s easy, it’s not easy because we define ourselves by what we believe

And

We shape our whole view of reality based upon what we’ve thought for many years. And so the fact that there are Christians who paused and stopped and said, no, we, this to me is worthy of tremendous respect. And at the same time, you get the state Presbyter and Wyoming where he makes a fool out of this stuff, he’s doubling down, he’s doubling down. And that’s a very human thing to do.

You’re raising a really important point though, which is non-super secessionist approach in Christianity. When you reject replacement

Theology,

And I say this as an informed outsider, I spend a lot of time with Christians and I’m a kind of professional fly on the wall, but replacement theology, one of its advantages is that it’s really neat and clean,

And you’re the main character.

First of all, you’re the main

Character.

You’re the main character that

Feels good.

You’re the protagonist of your story, which is also why I believe that Christianity has such an emphasis on personal

Salvation,

Because that makes you the main character in your story. And Judaism is no such thing as personal salvation. It’s all collective,

Which is true on that for an

Interesting topic to discuss. But for Christianity, you have that personal salvation. But replacement theology is very neat and clean, right? In other words, all the T’s are crossed. All the i’s are dotted. It makes sense,

Nothing to wrestle with.

Once you reject replacement theology, it’s very messy. And so it’s very easy to dismiss the, okay, Christians who’ve rejected replacement theology get criticized a

Lot

For their, first of all, you’re breaking with tradition. And that doesn’t sound good to people who are faithful. We want to stay with, we have a respect for you’re breaking with tradition. Your theology is now messy, and you’ve got all sorts of questions that are left unanswered. And what do we do with the Jews and what do we do this and what’s our role and why the land and how do I make this fit with that? And it’s much more difficult. And also, there’s a lot of people outside of the Christian pro-Israel movement or non-super secessionist movement who look down their nose at people who are Christian Zionists, who are supporters of Israel, who are into this relationship. And they look at it almost like it’s not a serious theology, but really what the point that rabbi is raising here is that it’s actually coming from a place of great humility and engagement with the fact that God has a say to connect what he said. Back to what I was saying about let’s say Augustine, when Augustine comes up with his theology that well, why are the Jews still around if they rejected Jesus and they lost their covenant? And what are they still doing here? Well, I guess they’re here to serve as a witness for how bad things get for you if you reject Jesus, if you reject Jesus, would Augustine have formulated, this is an obvious question. Would Augustine have formulated his theology of the Jews that way? Had he lived now
With a state of Israel with millions of Jews there restored in Orlando, of course he wouldn’t do. Yeah,

It doesn’t fit.

So for someone to now say, well, I respect Augustine, one of the, he’s such a great thinker, such a great thinker. I’m going to adopt his theology. Well, if Augustine was alive today, he wouldn’t have said that because Augustine himself said this famous line that theology is faith seeking understanding. You heard that line.

No

Faith seeking understanding. That’s how Augustine defined theology. And I first heard that from a Christian academic friend of mine, and I thought, that’s such a beautiful line because Augustine didn’t say that theology is faith achieving,

Understanding.

He said, it’s faith seeking understanding. So there’s a certain humility, you understand, well, what’s the role of the theologian? God didn’t give us a book where everything makes perfect sense. You read the Bible and you don’t have a clearly laid out theology, understand God’s saying things. He’s doing things. Some of them look like they don’t make sense. You try and what’s the role of the theologian? You look at the Bible, you look at how God operates in the world

And

You try to make sense of it. How is God operating the world? You look at the reality in front of you. Augustine looked at the reality in front of him. He saw the state of the Jews. It had been going on already for centuries and centuries, and he came to the conclusion he came to, and it made sense to him at the time. So when God makes a major move in history like the state of Israel and what’s happened to the Jewish people in the last 75 years

Shattering worldviews

And theology, and it shatters it, and you, someone like yourself says, okay, we need to reevaluate certain points of our theology here. Obviously the replacement theology approach to Israel and the land, it doesn’t work. We got to come up with a different approach to this. And when you do that to be criticized for breaking with tradition, it’s like, hello. God has a say.

I think for your listeners to share something that’s happening in parallel in the Jewish community would be really interesting today. There are still traditional Orthodox believing Jews who cannot grapple with the current reality. They thought, and maybe in the 19th century this still made sense. They thought that redemption was going to come. The people of Israel would return to the land of Israel. They had a very particular vision for how that would happen. It was going to be led by, of course, God-fearing Jews. Maybe there were going to be magic carpets that brought us to Israel. They had all sorts of miraculous ideas. But the reality is what brought us here, secular leaders. It was a combination of communist and socialist Jews,

Totally

On the one hand, and Christian Zionists on the other who played critical roles,

Even back even early

On, early on, I mean already from the 19th century, but then certainly Arthur Baer in 1917 and so on. And this combination is too much for them to handle. That’s not how we think redemption was supposed to happen. So maybe that made sense. They could argue that in the 19th century, but today they look increasingly foolish. And it’s the exact parallel to people who keep holding onto super secessionist theology,

The state,

We have the same thing. They’re like the Jewish state presbyters. It’s

The rigidity to hold

Onto

What you believed in the past.

It’s very clear. David says, Psalms, that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. He has plans that are deeper than ours. Just have some humility recognize that God is bringing redemption in a way that is not how you thought it should

Happen. Yeah, that’s so good.

And they struggle to accept it, and they look more and more foolish all the time. But again, it’s very hard to give up our ideas, our perception, our theology,

And the point about how you’re saying that they’re kind of stubbornly holding onto their belief. The irony is that while their thinking both on the Christian and Jewish sides, their thinking is that there’s a certain piety in not changing the traditional viewpoint. This is the inherited view we have from our sages going back hundreds of

Years.

And there’s a certain, and you look like a kind of renegade or liberal or compromiser if you’re willing to reevaluate points of theology, whereas they’re actually redefining reality in order to do that. To say that the Jews today aren’t the Jews or

Yeah, totally.

But when you hear about Jews in Israel, what are called ultra, ultra-orthodox Jews who are not Zionists, who don’t serve in the army, things like that, that’s where they’re coming from. They’re in this worldview where in the name of holding to a tradition, they’re not embracing the changes that God has brought about.

And the fear would be missing God, missing what God is doing on the earth to hold onto whatever belief system you thought was right. Something that the leadership at Center for Israel, Nick Les Meister, Wayne Wilkes, one of the kind of foundational statements was we reserve the right to change our minds because we know there’s going to come a point where we’re given information that we didn’t have or things changed, and we have to have flexibility. So what are we holding fast to? And then what are we holding open-handed to say, we might be wrong on this. We’ve thought deeply about it. We’re nuancing it, we’re wrestling with it, but we might change our minds.

Part of the debate here really to frame it a little differently is does God speak to us through history?

Yeah, that’s

Good. And this is a debate certainly within the Jewish community, and clearly we believe that God does. And what is happening in the world is God speaking to us. We may not have prophets talking openly like Ezekiel and Isaiah today in the same way, but God is still speaking to us. But then there are people believers, and I would assume both Jews and Christians who take the view that God is not talking to us. And if that’s the case, then you can hold onto these anachronistic beliefs and say, against all reality, it’s all facts.

And if you think about when the prophets were talking, they weren’t particularly well-liked by the mass community. So would we expect them to just get a red carpet welcome?

And he quoted the verse from Isaiah a couple minutes ago that where God says, my ways are not your ways. My thoughts are not your thoughts or my thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are not your ways. I think that’s the order. And there are a lot of people, again, on both sides, the Jewish side and the Christian side, who think they have got all figured out. So if I meet someone who their theology makes perfect sense, everything fits into its place. Again, the i’s are dotted, the T’s are crossed. If someone thinks that that their theology makes perfect sense, I know they’re wrong. Now we can try to figure out how they’re wrong. But when God said, my ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts, he didn’t just mean I haven’t told you yet. He meant that fundamentally my ways, my thoughts, meaning God’s plans are not understandable to us.

It’s like, Joe, I spoke of things I knew not

Of. Right? So being in a state of a little bit of confusion, a little bit of mystery, trying to figure God out, he throws us curve balls all the time. Look, that’s what Paul says about this exact topic right at the end of Romans, after discussing this whole issue about the Jews, the gifts and callings of the Jews are irrevocable, but also there are enemies in Christ.

Yeah, he’s wrestling. Yeah,

This right? He’s wrestling with it. And what does he say at the end? Oh, the mysteries of God. Right? In other words, he basically throws up his hands and says, I’m not sure how all this works out.

Totally.

So for Christians to say, oh, no, no, no,

I figured it

Out. I know how it all works out. I’m saying from a Christian, I’m not a Christian. I’ve got no skin in the game. I’m just a

No. We see it. I’m looking

At it. You can read our YouTube

Comments. You got to

Pick it out. Paul didn’t have it figured out. You do.

Yeah.

Yeah. To be you must be nice. We have to distinguish between the way we look at the past and the way that we look at the future. And there’s this tendency sometimes to look at prophecy, and anyone who speaks with any great certainty about what will happen is obviously very foolish and is not absorbing this verse of My ways are not your ways. At the same time, we’re not completely clueless in the world. God gave us a Bible, and when we look backwards with the book, then we are getting God’s message and that we are obligated to use our minds and to understand and to absorb. So we have to balance. On the one hand, we can’t be saying, oh, I don’t know anything. I don’t know what’s going on, and therefore I’m not going to talk about Israel. I’m not going to about any of these things. God will figure it out for me one day.

No,

We have an obligation to grapple with this.

Yeah, totally.

And we do know a lot more than our great-great grandparents did. Right? There are things that we know that the holy men and women of earlier generations simply didn’t know. Not that we’re greater than them. We just happened to live at a later time in history,

And there’s things we forgot that they really

Understood. Exactly. But where the humility must come in is when we’re looking to the future. And let’s be honest, all of us have our strong beliefs in this room.

Yeah, totally.

But what’s going to be and what those prophecies mean exactly. None of us here know.

Yeah. Well, it’s so good. We’re bringing up humility, and I think that’s got to be the foundation. Or maybe even we talk in the Christian world, we talk about the fruit of the spirit and humility is actually not mentioned. You would think that would be a fruit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, like humility should be up there. And I’ve heard some people have argued, well, humility is the soil because nothing can grow out of that.

It’s the infrastructure upon which all those other traits are built.

And I see that in Gentile, and I see it in male female. And so I’d love to get your guys perspective on this. We talk about this all the time. We see a similarity, God-given distinctions. God created male, he created female. And in that dynamic, he created this partnership where he said, you guys are going to become one. No one in the Christian world right now, or at least maybe I should say majority are not arguing that male and female don’t exist. In fact, the church is kind of taking a pretty firm stance that no, the Bible’s very clear, male female still exists even though there’s this unity. And then you get to the New Testament and you have Jew and Gentile, which is again, consistent all throughout the scriptures. There’s Israel, the nations, Jew, Gentile, and he says, I’m going to make two and you’re going to become one.
And Christians have always interpreted that of, that means Christian. So when Jew and Gentile receive Jesus, they become this third thing. So we call it third race theology. Oh, he created this third thing and we say, no, this is similar to what he did in the garden. This is two becoming unified one. And in that unity and oneness, there’s still distinction. And what he tells in Ephesians, Paul says, husbands love your wives. And then he says, wives honor your husbands. So he’s talking to them about each other. He doesn’t say, husbands be the best husbands that you can possibly be. Wives be the best because that would be selfish. You need to work on yourself. Instead, he says, I want you to focus on the other. And he does the same thing in Genesis 12 with Israel. He says, Abraham, I’m choosing you. But he’s almost like, but it’s really not about you, it’s really about the nations.
I’m just choosing you. So that actually should humble Israel and humble the Jewish people. But then in Romans 11, he says the same thing, the Gentiles. Paul says, if you’re going to start getting boastful that, oh, now you get to be a part of this tree. He said, the only reason that you’re here is so that you can provoke Israel because this really isn’t about you. So it’s actually leading to provocation because I care about them. So he’s secretly telling the Gentiles like, this actually isn’t about you. It’s about Israel the whole time. And again, he’s doing the same thing. He’s talking to the husbands about the wives, wives, about the husbands. He’s talking to Israel about the nations, the Gentiles about Israel. And if we understand that humility, then we can actually come to the table with whatever disagreements we may have and try to find God’s heart in it all.

I love it. I love what you’re saying.

Alright, well that’s all for today.

No, what you’re saying, it really gets to the of things, which is that God has set up a system where the most fundamental trait that we have to have in order to have human relationships, relationship with God, in order to be good servants, in order to be honest and in order to have real courage, is humility. Courage comes from humility. Because if I’m really listening to God, if I’m not stuck in my way of thinking or in inherited doctrines that I am holding fast to, and I’m not paying attention to what God is doing, if I’m really listening to God, then that obedience sets in. And the ultimate expression of obedience in human interactions is when I’m focused on the

Other,

I’m focused on you. So if God has set it up this way, and the communication has been such that to you as a Gentile, your work is to suppress your boastfulness, to listen to what Paul said, don’t get boastful. And you’re supposed to bless Israel and you’re supposed to help out, and you’re supposed to see God through what he’s doing with his chosen people, even though you’re not one of them. And that that’s a tough pill to swallow.

Yeah, it’s a humbling thing.

And for Jews to look at Jews and say, listen, you’re going to suffer. It’s going to be rough. And the story’s not even about you, and your whole mission is to help the nations of the world and help everyone else see God. And that’s why you’re bearing this burden and suffering all these centuries. So if everyone is told to focus on the other, so that same dynamic in a healthy marriage, if everyone’s focused on the other, you got a healthier marriage. So the same is true in our relationship as Jews and

Christians. If

I’m focused on how can I help the nations of the world draw closer to the God of Israel, and your focus is, how can I help Israel fulfill their own mission, then we’re going to have a healthier relationship down the road.

You could actually look at the whole Bible this way as being the purpose of it. What is the first command in the Bible? Be fruitful and multiply. Men and women come together. So God performs this crazy, cruel social experiment and takes these two completely different beings, men and women, and forces them to live together. I mean, that’s the very foundation of the Bible. Before we get into anything else, it’s be fruitful and multiply and forcing men and women to learn how to live with the other and to recognize that they’re not complete and that the other one has something that they don’t have, and learn how to manage that together. You could say that that really is the entire Bible and this whole Jew gentile tension that we have through the rest of history. It’s only fulfilled when we’re in that tension and engaging with one another.

Yeah, totally.

Because if we don’t, and there are long stretches where essentially Jews had to withdraw and create their own little ghettos. Sometimes it was forced the ghetto. Sometimes we created our own ghettos. That’s not the world as it’s meant to be. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

But it’s tough to wake people up to this. You have the challenges on the Christian side that we’ve talked about, and also on the Jewish side. There’s been, when you spend 2000 years just trying to survive and resist all kinds of efforts to change, you

Assimilating.

So the ultimate measuring stick for Judaism about whether something is a risk or something is a good thing to do is does it contribute or detract from Jewish survival? The whole goal is just to pass the baton of survival to the next generation so they could keep it going. And you circle the wagons and you resist influence from the outside

World.

And you live that way for, I dunno, 2000 years or so. It’s easy to forget that you have a universal mission.

But that’s why the circumstances of today are so critical for this conversation because now Jews are beginning to understand that in order for us to survive, we have to turn to the one group of people who actually want to be together with us. Sort of like men and women by nature. They don’t want to have anything to do with each other. Why would I? That’s hard. But there’s a certain existential loneliness and biological need that force them together to have that relationship. Well, October 7th and what’s happening in the world right now is forcing us together. And so I don’t see that as a negative. Men and woman wouldn’t come together if they didn’t have to. So it’s the same thing. The fact that we’re being driven together this way and the way the world is turning and shaping out to be, I think is part of God’s plan. And we may very well be on the cusp, but therefore of this new golden era. Now, when I say golden era, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be all easy.

Yeah. Lack of persecution,

Right? It will be a covenant and conflict. Conflict. There will be plenty of conflict, but it is being forced. And if we believe that God runs history, this is part of God’s plan that we must confront this relationship.

I want to ask you a question. In the younger generation of Christians, and I say this from traveling to many Christian college campuses and visiting many churches across America and also paying attention in media, younger Christians are less interested in the relationship with Israel than their parents or generation. And that shows up in polling. They’re not necessarily anti-Israel, although that’s also growing a little bit, maybe influenced by mainstream media, but the largest growth is in the ambivalent group, that it’s just not part of their lives.

And

That seems to indicate that things are going in the wrong direction in terms of this relationship. What do you attribute that drop off in? Again, most, let’s say pro-Israel Christians or Christians who are favorable to Jews are older now. It’s not taking hold so well in the younger generation.

Yeah. Well, I think the older generation had a biblical worldview. I think my grandparents’ generation, it was just kind of taken for granted that we lived according to biblical values, whether it was the family unit, the husband, wife staying together, the waiting to be married, to have children. That was all kind of biblically based. I think when you started getting the younger generations, the biblical worldview started to slowly evaporate.

I’m saying even among devout Christians, Christians who are

Among Christians, you see this trend towards evangelical. And there’s the saying in the Christian world, like Evangelic fish, it’s very loose and just it’s all about grace and only God can judge me. I can do whatever I want. And so it was a slow kind of slide into kind of just ambivalence. And then the millennial generation is what I see as being the most antagonistic towards Israel. They’ve kind of swapped out the biblical worldview for the political worldview. And I think that worldview is a little bit more based on who is the victim and the underdog. And so for most of history, Israel is kind of the underdog. The Jewish people were the underdog, and now it’s kind of switched. And now Israel is the oppressor and we want to fight for the underdog, generation Z. The youngest generation now think I agree with you, is almost apathetic towards it or a blank slate towards it. Yeah.

I don’t find they’re not as antagonist hostile.

No,

But it’s not part of the way they think about Christianity.

No. When I talk to people my age, thirties, I’m going into a room that is an antagonistic towards Israel. Israel is the oppressor, colonizers. When I go into a room of high schoolers and middle schoolers, I mention Israel and they’re like, remind me where this is. Again, we talked about Israel and their questions were like, what kind of food do they eat there? Not interested in the biblical foundation, not interested necessarily even in the politics. I think they’re kind of moving away from the hard and left of the political world. And I actually see it as yes, it’s a negative decline, but I think it’s an opportunity because they’re kind of a blank slate. It’s the post biblical world is, I don’t know, tell me what to believe. I’m searching because kind of rejecting everything at this point. And I think we have an opportunity to reintroduce the God of the Bible and write what is God’s heart. And it’s kind of a more open handed,

This is something that the Jewish community is not aware of because Jews look at tv, they look at media and they see people in Columbia and Harvard who are antisemites and so on, and they think that that represents the next generation. But they’re really looking at the problem incorrectly because that really essentially exempts us from doing anything. What do you do with people like that? It’s like they’re drones, they’re not, they’re robots.

You

Can’t talk to people like that. But the truth is this younger generation we can talk to. And so we have to think through what does that look like? And do we have any role in that or is that purely people like you?

Well, I think it’s the first time America has been in this situation where there is a post biblical world and a post biblical world view. And I think everything, there’s pros and cons, but I think one of the pros is you’ll see the younger generation values, vulnerability, transparency, being able to hold your hands open. I don’t have all the answers because I think the older generations, even though we could say they were right or the wrong, they were staunch and they were beliefs. And I think there’s a little bit of a rejection of I don’t have all the answers and I don’t think you have all the answers. I want to be open. And that scares the church. Like, no, you can’t be open, then you’ll be open to the world. When I think true people of faith say you can be open because if you’re really open then you’ll find the truth. And so I think it is just, this

Gets back to humility issue.

I think what I’ve heard in this conversation is two big topics, humility and relationship and the relationship side of needing one another. Again, it goes back to the male female, we need one another. We talked a little bit at breakfast about Acts 15 and Acts 15. It was so funny. I was talking to, I won’t name the university, Christian University, big Christian University, and they were doing a bible study and he said, yeah, we’re going through the book of Acts. And I said, what chapter are you on? He said, acts 18. And I said, what did they talk about at Acts 15? Because Acts 15 is the council of Jerusalem. This is the whole meeting about a bunch of Jewish people getting together to say, what do we do with Gentiles? And I’m like, I’d love to hear what this university said. He goes, lemme check.
Lemme go back through my notes. And I’m like, oh, this is, I’m assuming it’s replaced meteorology, but who knows? And he goes, acts 14, acts 16. Yeah, we skipped it. What? I was like, you skipped it. I thought you were going through the book of Acts. And he was like, I guess we just skipped it. So they didn’t talk about the book of Acts, which again is shocking, but I understand it because if you don’t understand the gentile relationship, what do you do with the book of Acts 15? Acts 15 is we talked about a bunch of Jewish followers of Jesus who are asking one question, what do we do with the Gentiles? And I always have to remind people, there’s basically two parties that are both Jewish and one is advocating that they need to be circumcised, obey Torah. And the other is saying, no, I think God’s doing something different.
He’s keeping them gentile and keeping us Jews. But I understand the perspective that says, no, they need to be circumcised and obey Torah. They’re pagans that are coming from wild traditions and orgies and blood drinking ceremonies. And they’re not just going to fall in line with us. We’ve been doing this for 6,000 years. We need to tell them the rules. So they get together. They have this very Jewish discussion. I’m sure there’s lots of arguing and disagreeing in it. And yet Peter and Paul and Barnabas and James and all these people, and they come to this agreement of it feels good to the Holy Spirit and to us, right, to the Gentiles. They only need to do these four things. And the four things blow Christian’s minds. If you ask any Christians, what are the four things that Gentiles aren’t supposed to do? 90% of Christians would not tell you the four things, which is pretty interesting.
It’s like we only had four, we didn’t even have 10. And three of them have to do with food. The food that’s been dedicated to idols, food that has blood and food that was strangled. Strangled, and then sexual morality. And we’re like, well, that’s a good one. We like the sexual immorality one. We’ll keep that one, but we’ll ask Christians, why those four? Would that be your top four list? If you were a bunch of people just now trying to follow the God of Israel, give ’em your top four list. I’d be like 10 commandments. Number one, that’s one. And if you try to understand why those four, I think the only thing that makes sense is don’t do these four things that are going to keep you from having a relationship with the Jewish community. If you don’t have relationship with them, you’re never going to survive this walk.

I mean, there’s a much simpler answer for why those four

Tell me.

Because at the same time period, let’s remember the apostles live in the early tell Mdic time. Some of them come from those same schools. Paul is a student of Rabbi Galeel,

Who

Is one of the most influential figures in the early Talmudic era. Any Jewish student is very familiar with Rabbi Gamliel. So these guys were all raised in a Jewish learning environment at that same time period. And there’s a reason why it was around in that time period and shortly before, it was the first time there was any interaction with Gentiles and the Torah, because the Torah was first translated into Greek not long before that.

Yeah, 200 years

Before that. No one even knew about the Torah other than Jews. And you now have, because of the way the Greek and Roman empires where you have Gentiles living among the Jews

Who

Are studying this stuff. And the question of what does Judaism want from people who aren’t Jewish, who arrive at faith in the God of Israel, let’s forget about Christianity for a second. But prior to Jesus, like, okay, non-Jews, they’re going to study Torah. They’re going to connect to the God of Israel. Like, God, what does that mean? What does that mean for their lives going? This wasn’t just a debate in the Council of Jerusalem with these students of Jesus. This was also going on among the rabbis. And the rabbis conclude that there’s seven things that Gentiles have to do, but three of them don’t make sense in the context of Acts 15,

Is this a no hide laws?

Yeah, that’s what they’re called. But that’s just because Noah is the father of all humans.

So it’s just, it’s are similar ancestry.

Yeah. It’s just like for all people, what’s the minimum baseline that everyone has to adhere to? So the three that aren’t in this list of four are the obligation of non-Jewish societies to have a legal system. And that wouldn’t make sense for individuals. In Acts 15, they’re talking, you’re going to tell some individual living in Ephesus, you have to set up a court system. So there’s a setting up of a court system of having just a just legal system,

Justice,

Not committing murder, which those societies already forbade murder. Even those pagan societies murder was illegal. So there’s no reason at the Council of Jerusalem for them to include that one. And the third one that’s in there is not to blaspheme God. Now it’s obvious that people are accepting faith in God, that they know that they’re not allowed to blaspheme. So those were obvious ones that in the Council of Jerusalem, they wouldn’t have mentioned. The other things that are mentioned, they’re all fit into the seven Noha laws. So from a Jewish perspective, when I first read Acts 15

Made sense

To you, I was like, oh, that’s what they’re doing. They came to the same again, but that also makes sense. They didn’t make this stuff up. They were raised in Jewish schools and they knew that these are the basic things that we want from Gentiles. So it’s like, and that’s what, there’s no explanation given there. Notice in Acts 15, they don’t explain why they chose them. Okay, these are the things

It was obvious,

Because those are the things. If they’re going to be Gentiles and they have to follow the laws, fine. These are the laws.

Yeah. I wonder how many things you as Orthodox Jews read, the New Testament say, oh, it’s obvious. And we’re like, you had to go through hoops

To get, we could have a whole separate podcast. There are stories in the New Testament that are cut and paste out of the Talmud with slight differences.

Oh, totally. Oh yeah. There’s a great book written by a Messianic Jewish rabbi that we have relationship with. And it was Jesus said, nothing new. And it’s this whole idea of we think we as Gentiles tend to think that Jesus was this radical teacher who was just blowing people’s mind. Oh, like

His parables.

And in some ways you can establish truth there. We’re still talking about his words thousands of years later. But so many of his principles and stories were just common stories, maybe with slight twists, maybe with little cliffhangers. But he was doing very rabbinic teaching, and they called him Rabbi.

So Dr. Brad Young’s written a number of books about this. He was a professor for many years at Oral Roberts University, nice Oklahoma Boy, who then studied in Jerusalem and is fluent in Hebrew. And he wrote a number of books, sourcing Jesus’s teachings in rabbinic rabbinic tradition. Wrote a book about the parables of Jesus. Very interesting

Stuff. Well, I’m getting the sign that we got to wrap up, but we didn’t nearly cover what we could have. So we are going to sign you guys up for a part two next time you’re in town. But thank you for just having this conversation, for allowing all of our listeners to oversee this conversation happen. And I hope that what it does is it encourages relationship and encourages humility. Again, those are the two themes that I drew out of this. And I’m sure there’s many. But if we can truly humble ourselves, receive the humbling we’re supposed to get from reading scripture, and then this emphasis on coming together and knowing we might not figure it all out, and that there’s something that you have that God wants me to have, and there’s something that I have that God wants you to have, and we come together and that’s when we get the fuller picture

Of

What God is doing. I want to give you just a few minutes to talk about your books. Love for people to have these resources available in their hands if you want to talk real quick.

Sure. So after October 7th, I spent several months diving into the Bible to try to grapple with what was God doing and trying to understand what we’re going through right now. And so the result is the war against the Bible, Ishmael, Esau, and Israel at the end times. And I think it’s getting out there, and both Jews and Christians are reading this book, and I think that’s what I’m probably most proud of.

Yeah, that’s good. Write a

Book that everybody might read.

And

My only hope is that not only will they read it, but maybe they’ll talk to each other about it.

Yeah, that’s really good. And we got these two books here. So these are two books that I recently wrote. One this one’s called Verses for Zion, and it’s written kind of like a devotional where there are short teachings. Each one is a single verse out of the Bible. And I dig into the Hebrew and I dig into the exact syntax. I talked before about reading the Bible carefully. There’s a tradition of how Jews study scripture that is very, shall we say, nitpicky or our rabbinic way of seeing things. When we parse a verse, there’s insights that come out of the text that Christians who are almost always reading in a translation miss. So it’s a series of, I think 80 some odd short

Teachings,

A couple versus long, sorry, each one’s a couple pages long. And so you can kind of use it as a daily devotional, it’s called Versus for Zion. And then there’s a book called The Weekly Word, and these are essays on the weekly tow proportion. Every year Jews go through the five books of Moses. And we have a weekly tow proportion starts in Genesis, the first Shabbat, the first Saturday after the Feast of Tabernacles. And then it concludes on the last day, the Feast of Tabernacles. The following year we go through the whole five books of Moses. So these are essays on the weekly Torah portion with a Christian audience in mind. The weekly word,

Can I do the Israel 3, 6, 5 Bible as if I’m a part of?

Yeah. And you can get these books and his book at. If you go to Israel 360 five.com, go to the store page,

Israel, 3 6 5 store.com,

Israel three five store.com. There you go. And you’ll find all these books there

And more. It’s beautiful. And then lastly, we have the Israel Bible. I like how I’m making the pitch, probably the biggest one. But yeah, actually Thule is the one that gave me my copy, and you can tell more that I think the heart was, there was no Bible commentary that was specific about the land of Israel. And so there’s lots of commentary about how this was interpreted regarding the land and the exile. And it’s written in both Hebrew and English, so that if you want to, as Tule said, practice your Hebrew and

Also charts and maps. It is a good study Bible,

But on every single chapter of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, it weaves together what’s happening today because most of these commentaries were written before the state of Israel.

That’s a great point.

So that’s a very big part of it, bringing the Bible to life and showing how it’s happening before our eyes.

That’s so good. Well, again, thank you guys for spending time. I hope this will not be the last time on the podcast together or separately. Hope you guys have a good rest of your trip and we will see you soon.

Thank you. Thanks for having us.