Plucking the Eagle's Wings

Healing the Breach Between the Jews and Gentiles

teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (Mathew 28:19). Christians carry out the great commission by sharing the message of the Gospel to win souls to Christ. Over the past few years, an increasing number of Jews have accepted Jesus (Yeshua) as their Messiah. According to rabbinical Judaism, a Jew ceases to be a Jew upon converting to Christianity. If Jews become atheists, Hindus or Buddhists, they retain their Jewish identity. However, upon becoming a Christian, Rabbis teach that a Jew renounces his or her Hebrew identity. So Christianity is considered to be a threat to Jewish identity. The act of converting from Judaism to Christianity is the highest insult to many religious and non-religious Jews. Throughout Roman Church history, Jews were persecuted, and the teachings of the Jewish Talmud and the teachings of the Christian church concerning Jesus' identity conflicted. Some Jews persecuted Christians in the first century, but many Roman Christians persecuted Jews for over 1,400 years. So, to many Jews, becoming a Christian is equivalent to becoming an enemy of the Hebrew people. In America, it would be comparable to a child who was raised in the Baptist denomination telling his or her parents, "I have become a Muslim." The third reason concerns the Holocaust and the death of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Holocaust survivors often tell of seeing Nazi soldiers brandishing crosses and telling the Jews that they were avenging them for the blood of Jesus. Oddly enough, it was a Jew from Nazareth named Yeshua (Jesus) who predicted that the Jews "would be hated above all nations for His name's sake" (Matthew 24:9). The Christian church in Germany did not take a strong enough stand against Hitler; therefore, Christians are often blamed for instigating, or at least not stopping, the Holocaust. The truth is that Hitler hated real Christians who loved Jews as much as he hated Jews themselves. Also, people such as Oskar Schindler and Corrie Ten Boom were noted Gentiles who cared more about the Jews than about their own personal security. Many Christians during that time protected Jews as much as possible. The combination of distrust from the past and fear of conversion to Christianity causes many Jews to be apprehensive about associating with or trusting those who profess Christianity. If a Jew becomes a believer, some within the Jewish community consider this person to be a traitor. I have spoken to many Jewish friends and tried to empathize with 173