Messianic synagogue and its history

By Rabbi Shmuel Wolkenfeld

Our congregation Or HaOlam is of a type that is called a Messianic Jewish Synagogue. We use that term because we worship the G-d of Israel and Yeshua the Messiah of Israel. Yeshua is the original name of the individual that is now called "Jesus" by many Gentiles. The apparent name change is because the name has gone through several languages. The Greek form of the name had to have an "s" at the end to be masculine in Greek. The "Y" changed into a "J" for similar reasons. When He was on earth, He was Yeshua to his parents, family, and friends.

Furthermore, in Israel 2000 years ago, all His followers were Jews. They considered themselves as Jewish, and so did their families and communities, and they continued their observance of the Torah and the traditions of our people. There is a conversation recorded in the New Testament, in about 60 C.E. (common era or A.D.), between a man named Yaakov, who was the head of the Jewish believers in Yeshua in Jerusalem, and Paul, the emissary who had taken the faith of the Jewish Messiah to the Gentiles, and just returned to Jerusalem for a visit. Yaakov said to Paul, “You see, brother, how many tens of thousands of believers there are among the Judeans, and they are all zealots for the Torah." Paul was further instructed to do certain things at our Temple so that "everyone will know that there is nothing to these rumors which they have heard about you; but that, on the contrary, you yourself stay in line and keep the Torah." [Book of Acts, chapter 22: 20 – 24] So, the first followers of the Messiah were Torah observant Jews.

Eventually, many Gentiles, Romans, Greeks, Parthians, etc., came to faith in the Jewish Messiah. These Gentile believers were not required to keep all the commands of Torah. After a while the majority of the believers in the Jewish Messiah were Gentiles, and the whole community of faith took on a non-Jewish appearance. Furthermore, about the time that many Gentiles came to faith there were two bitterly-fought rebellions by our people against Rome. These wars made the Jewish nation social outcasts in the Roman Empire. After the Bar Kokhba revolt, if a Gentile believer identified with the Jewishness of the Messiah, there was an implication they were identifying with enemies of the emperor. So, Gentile believers in the Jewish Messiah started to distance themselves from the Jewish people. In addition, some Gentile leaders in the faith came to think that the Gentile believers had replaced Israel as G-d's people. Anti-Semitism and other anti-Biblical ideas crept in from Gentile culture, and the community of faith in the Jewish Messiah became corrupted. Eventually, it became almost impossible to believe in Yeshua and identify as a Jew. The Rabbis, leaders of our own people, wouldn't allow it, and neither would the Gentile leaders of the community of the Messianic faith, who should have been our brothers in faith. So, about 300 C.E. an identifiable community of Jewish believers in the Jewish Messiah ceased to exist.

In the last 30 years there have been a great number of Jewish people becoming Messianic believers, about 200,000 in the United States. We in Messianic Jewish congregations are like those Jewish people of the first century who believed that the man Yeshua, born in the Jewish homeland of Israel, fulfilled the prophecies of the Tanakh, the Old Testament, and is the Messiah of Israel. There are 81 Messianic congregations or home study groups in Israel, and at least two thousand believers.

The Basis of Our Faith

Actually, the fact that one man was able to fulfill all the things written about him is a great mathematical proof of the existence of G-d, and the truth of the Bible. That is, most of the prophecies were completely out of Yeshua's control to fulfill, and it is a mathematical improbability of the highest order that they could have all converged on one man. Statisticians place the odds of such occurrence as one in 10157. For example, the place of his birth is named at Bethlehem [Micah 5:2]. The destruction of our Temple and of the city of Jerusalem is predicted to be shortly after his death [Daniel 9: 26]. He is described as having a forerunner who would designate himself as "a voice crying out in the wilderness" [Isaiah 40: 3]. The means of his execution is given [Ps. 22: 16] and many details of his execution are given. [Ps. 22].

There are many other prophecies about the nations surrounding Israel and of our own Jewish history that have incredible statistical improbability. All of these prophecies are what brought me, personally, to faith in Yeshua as the Jewish Messiah in 1969.

My Own Story

I grew up in a very secular, but culturally rich Jewish environment in New York City. We were members of a Conservative synagogue. I was Bar Mitzvahed at the Jamaica Jewish Center in Queens, NY. I loved being Jewish, but didn’t understand it.

When I became a teenager, I started searching for answers to the pain and problems of my own life, and the apparent impending doom on the world by ecological or atomic disaster. Judgment seemed imminent on a society that was steeped in the Cold War, the Vietnam War, racial injustice, and ecological pollution. I was part of the youth movements of the 60's and 70's. I toyed with Marxist ideology, Eastern religious ideas, philosophical meditation under the influence of psychedelic drugs, but mostly I envisioned that my answers would come from the study of the physics of the brain. I wanted to figure out the riddle of existence, and then rebuild the world. G-d used all that guilt and anxiety over the world's problems to open my heart to the witness of another young person who had come to faith. I came to Yeshua in April of 1969.

Summary of Our Relationship with G-d

To summarize our faith we believe that Yeshua, depicted in the New Covenant scriptures, is the Messiah of Israel. When an individual realizes that the Bible is true, then that individual understands that he or she has sinned against G-d, and violated G-d's commandments, and is therefore separated from the Holy One of Israel. That person realizes that he or she needs forgiveness and spiritual healing. The Yom Kippur holiday is about finding forgiveness, but our Jewish people don't experience a sense of forgiveness from G-d, because we are not following the steps given in our Bible. The Torah teaches that forgiveness in Judaism come by tshuvah, repentance or turning from our sins and guilty ways, and trusting in the Yom Kippur sacrifice.

Messianic Jews believe that forgiveness is obtained by trusting in the Messiah and his atoning death, and sincerely doing repentance of our sins before the Holy One of Israel.

This spiritual healing as a result of the Messiah's atonement is a concept taken from the Tanakh, the Jewish scriptures. For example:

“But he was wounded because of our transgressions, he was bruised because of our iniquities; his sufferings were that we might have peace; and by his injury we are healed.” [Isaiah 53: 5].

The Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin 98b and the Midrash Rabba on Ruth 2:14 interpret this scripture as applying primarily to King Messiah's suffering, not to the sufferings of Israel. Our faith centers around the promises of the prophets of Israel.

One that is most important to understanding us is in Jeremiah:

"The time is coming," declares the L-RD, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the L-RD. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more." [Jer 31: 31, 33, 34].

That is, when a person confesses his sins to G-d, and trusts that G-d will forgive him because of the atoning death of the Messiah, a wonderful experience of forgiveness follows. This new spiritual walk with HaShem effects our character and attitudes, and begins a process of radically changing the way we relate to G-d and to the people around us. We have a joyful new life, of humility, prayer, and Torah observance, as the prophets foretold.

However, we do not consider ourselves subject to all the dictums of the Talmud and the Halakhah of Rabbinic law, because we believe that the rabbis misunderstood some things about the Messiah and His Spirit. For example, I personally follow Biblical kashrut, not traditional kashrut. I abstain from pork and seafood without scales or fins. Few Messianics have two or three sets of dishes, as required by the rabbinic expansion of the command "Do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk." [Exodus 23: 19]. So, I consider myself Torah observant, while not Orthodox. We keep the holy days of the Tanakh, and have great joy in the Ruakh, the Spirit, being Jewish followers of the Jewish Messiah.

Messianic Jews and the Larger Jewish Community

Our relationship with the larger Jewish community has a few aspects. We fervently love Israel, and we work and give substantially to help accomplish its re-forestation, to abet its status in the views and actions of American legislators and United Nations resolutions, and to assist its impoverished immigrants. Our congregations in the Land proudly send their sons and daughters to serve in the Tsahal, Israeli Defense Forces. Locally we participate in Israel Independence Day celebrations, the Jewish Arts festival, and other community events. We receive varied evaluations from the Jewish community. We are sometimes viewed as traitors and imposters by those who say that it is impossible to believe in Yeshua as the Messiah and also be Jewish.

More recently, some scholarly Rabbis have lived among us, observed us, and written books. Most noteworthy of these are Carol Harris Shapiro, a Reconstructionist Rabbi, and Daniel Cohn Sherbok. Rabbi Sherbok is a professor of Judaism at a university in the United Kingdom. He concluded that Messianic Judaism should be considered as one of the branches of the Menorah of diversity among the Jewish people. May it be so, "speedily and in our days."?