K-462 Jewish Resistance to the Gospel (2 of 2) — Art Katz

Opposition, Faith, and the Preparation of the Bride

We have an opposition that is given of God for our sake. Paul saw it. Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. Who has been his counselor? Only he could have conceived of this.

Nothing less would prepare the bride than this devastating rebuke and criticism coming from people who are ostensibly more righteous and more ethical than we. And we're going to tell them? Whose life is shot through with defect?

And whose sons are on route to divorce? Whose marriages are nothing to write home about? And all of that? Their homes are impeccable and in order. Because they're not fighting flesh against spirit. They're all flesh.

But it's well-ordered flesh and religiously respectable flesh. It's only when the battle is only joined when the spirit is born. Then there's a contest between flesh and spirit, the kind through which we move.

That while we're moving through it, we're showing our warts, our pimples, our defects, our shortcomings, or an embarrassment. But the end thereof is eternal glory. An angelic righteousness. A bride prepared for the bridegroom.

But in the process, it's not looking good. Especially to those who perceive us through natural eyes. So everything, everything is stacked against us. The just shall live by their faith. And triumph by their faith.

And what a triumph it will be to the eternal praise of his glory. Okay. So, even if they forsook me, all would have turned out well, provided they keep studying my Torah. God has created the law as an antidote against the evil inclination.

Hasidism, the Tzadik, and the Exaltation of Rabbi Schneerson

The Yetzer Hara. In Hasidism, the fusion of holiness and righteousness is complete. Sweeping over Europe in the 18th century as the most powerful Jewish revival movement of the millennium. That's the Lubavitcher Hasidim that we have today.

And there are other forms. Hasidism added a charismatic dimension to the meaning of righteousness. The spiritual leader of the Hasidic community, called Tzadik, from the root word for righteous, is seen as mediated between God and man.

Here's something being ascribed to a rabbi and a sage that we reserve only for Jesus. Purified by his righteousness, listen to this. That Tzadik is, so to speak, a conductor of divine grace and power, which can be channeled by him toward those in need of healing or help.

This is the way that Rabbi Schneerson was so exalted and raised up before this people as the seventh in the line of a family of great sages. And indeed, I've heard him speak for three hours in Yiddish with a whole auditorium at 770 Eastern Parkway in their big synagogue standing.

And there was not once the shuffle of the feet or the dropping of the pin. There was an enrapt silence as this man gave forth great wisdom and Talmudic exegesis and bringing in of many sources who was on top of everything else an engineer and a man of science.

And he's the one who led the Hasidim out from their dusty study halls out into the world and to employ technology and radio and make tapes and use modern technology to promote their cause. And to send their emissaries into the world so that a Pesach Seder can be conducted in Tibet.

They gathered 5 ,000 Jews in Tibet, Katharimandu, however that place is called, because a Hasidic Rabbi came all the way to conduct it. And what are Jews doing in places like that? They're looking for a guru.

They're looking for some kind of wisdom and understanding as a key for life that they've not found in the secular world and they've not found in the religious world. But these men are sending emissaries of the precious kind that we found in Bulgaria, Sofia.

When we visited there last, we went to the synagogue. We always go to the synagogue, don't you? I always go to the cemeteries, don't you? I'm always looking for any and every vestige of Jewish life and finding it.

We went to the synagogue. What an architectural marvel of an Eastern European model of synagogue. But occupied only in a small room with a congregation that just barely had a minion, ten. And sitting there for a half hour and observing at the back of the room and seeing one man in particular who somehow was striking, young.

And he was kind of eyeballing us, wondering who we were in the back of the room. And when we left to go out onto the street, he followed us out. Who are you? He wanted to know with typical chutzpah. Well, we told him.

And what are you doing here? And we told him. And you're Jewish? Yes. Well, I'd like to invite you to visit my synagogue, my yeshiva. I'm the Chabad rabbi. I've been sent from Israel to be the representative of the Lubavitcher Hasidim in Bulgaria, 25 years old.

And we went the next day. And some Jew in New York had provided over a million dollars for the purchase of this building. And they had completely refitted it. It had a nursery. It had a sanctuary. It had a kitchen.

It had this. It had that. It had everything. And this young man is in charge of the entire enterprise. And he had refreshments set out. And after he gave us the tour, he was so cordial, such a sweetheart.

And we sat down, we enjoyed his refreshments, we schmoozed, we chatted. And he said, you know, I didn't know what anti-Semitism was until I came to Bulgaria. No one ever opposed me as a Jew living in a Jewish land.

But I was walking down the street, he said, a few days ago. I passed the schoolyard. And when the kids saw me with my black hat and beard and my coat, they came running over and started calling me names and throwing stones at me.

I had to retreat for my life. It's the first time I've ever experienced this. I thought to myself, it will not be the last time. And so I said before we left, may I pray for you? Yes, he said. So I prayed a holy ghost prayer.

I don't know if I said it in the name of the Father. I don't know how I said it. The God of Israel, his safety, his continuance, his blessing. And it was like two brothers meeting. It was very precious.

And he's being brought to mind now as the expression of this movement. Celebrating a man as Messiah and as God. They're waiting for him to rise. And so a Brooklyn historian and rabbi has written a book that the most dangerous thing in the history of Judaism and orthodoxy is this Lubavitcher Hasidic movement who look upon a man as being Messiah and as Savior and even deity and are awaiting his resurrection.

In a word, they are subscribing to a total Christian theology. And all that has to happen to move them into the Christian camp is to exchange for Jesus and we've lost them to Judaism. This is the greatest threat ever.

So very interesting tension and things that are taking place. But that man can be celebrated. Isn't that ironic? Because he's a sage and expresses an anointing, a conductor of divine grace and power, which can be channeled by him toward those in need of healing or help.

Even the word channel is suspicious and has occultic overtones. And in fact, when you invest yourself in these convictions and open yourself to this kind of belief and expectation, it's not long before a disposition to occultism becomes a demonic stronghold.

And so deliverance of an ultimate kind is going to be required by people who have been mesmerized to follow this kind of a man and to subscribe to these views. Never a mention of the Jew or the significance or the future or the relationship to the church.

That if you brought back something of this perspective to that environment, they were thinking off the wall as if he's been Judaized, which is often a suspicion that's leveled against those who take up these concerns.

The Church’s Neglect of Israel and the Restoration of the Key

But I said that I believe that the whole lamentable condition of the church by and large can be found in its avoidance of this subject. The absence of this subject condemns the church to a shallow equivalent of God's intention.

Because the issue of the Jew is the issue of the faith, the issue of the word, the issue of the Holy Spirit, the issue of obedience, the issue of fellowship, the issue of worship, the issue of prayer.

Everything is affected and touched and brought into its intended significance when this key is again inserted. So you can believe that everything that the devil can do to oppose the restoration of this key, he will.

And another danger from the other side is, as a brother brought up, what about the messianic congregations that are inspired by the synagogue example and think to emulate it as being a witness to Jews.

That's another very interesting and significant question. Interesting that Jews themselves are not impressed with that kind of performance because they see it for what it is rightly, an affectation, an external kind of a cultural thing that is winsome and attractive but not authentic.

So these are all remarkable questions. Someone has asked the difference between our perspective of the word faith and the way the word faith is understood rabbinically and Jewishly, which is a real question in itself.

You can believe that they have a very different perspective, more of a system of articles of belief rather than a mode of being. So that one can attain by study rather than receive as gift by God's grace lest any man boast.

That's what Paul tells us in Ephesians. Faith is a gift. It's the grace of God lest any man boast. It's not our attainment. It's the faith of the Son of God, which is more than just a hope against hope of believing.

It's an apprehension of the character of God that cannot be violated. It's the knowledge of God, a confidence and trust predicated on a spirit-given understanding of God's infallible character. See, that's more than principles.

God forbid that it should ever become principles for us who would be on Judaic ground. Well, as I shared with my dear sister, she raised some questions for me. This study is so complex that there are now in universities in many places, whole departments of Judaic studies.

This is worth whole attention. You can get a PhD in Judaic studies and not begin to exhaust the varieties of things that are so inclusive in this. So we're just touching some elementary considerations.

And even though there are many varieties of Judaism, especially liberal conservative reform, orthodox conservative reform, there are varieties even within orthodoxy. So we want to get at the heart of what is the distinctive, the essential of the rabbinical content of Judaism that we need to recognize and face.

Rabbinic Rationalism and the Authority of Study

Continuing on, the Talmudic statements that common sense or human needs would dictate fundamental laws of righteousness, if they had not already been revealed in the Torah, encouraged Jewish philosophers through the centuries to corroborate revealed laws of righteousness by independent rational inquiry.

There's a tremendous emphasis on study, as we've already seen, which is the issue of mind. And so when you read of the sketches of orthodox life in Eastern Europe, they're always looking for the bright students who give encouragement that they might themselves become masters and sages.

Men like Maimonides were the founder of Kabbalism. Luria, men who have remarkable minds. And I can't help but suspect aided and abetted by the powers of darkness. Because if you move in that direction, there are supernatural powers only too happy to encourage you further and give you insights and brilliance and understandings of a kind that fascinates you more deeply in the realm of intellect, which is to say the realm of flesh, which is antithetical to spirit.

So here they're even acknowledging, that's the beauty of this, as we're hearing out of the horse's mouth. These are Jews writing for Jews, stating what they understand to be the truth of their Judaism, that common sense would dictate fundamental laws of righteousness.

Well, what did we understand yesterday? Righteousness is not only of God, it is God. His ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts are our thoughts. Righteousness cannot be prescribed. You can't have a fixed dictum of how you will act in given situations.

Because there are things that will arise for which past experience cannot help you. And that you need the guidance of the Holy Spirit. So when we read about Paul in Galatians, he's saying that the leading of God by the Spirit is God's answer to a system of precepts and dictums predicated on ethics or understanding of men.

But it requires a relationship with the God who is the Spirit. So there are two directions. If you seek to develop your mind through study and rational deduction, it's hostile and antithetical to the Spirit.

The Spirit requires poverty. Blessed are the poor or the meek. And Spirit, these are the ones that will become rich in God. What does it say? God gives to the poor, makes the poor rich in faith. But the poor, not just in terms of finance, poor in terms of any thought that you have in yourself that you can acquire a knowledge of a predicated system of conduct on principles that you elucidate or that others have that you adopt.

There's a poverty. You need to be poor and recognize that without God I can do nothing. I walk into walls. I cannot know what to do in any given situation. What might have been right yesterday is wrong today.

There are intricacies and depths of things that only God knows and needs to communicate. And that answers the question even of how to witness the Jews. Are we going to do it by a system? Are we going to take the four spiritual laws and now add a fifth spiritual law and that will do it for them?

How do you speak to people like this? How was I spoken to? That saved me out of most vehement atheism, anti-Christianity, anti-Christ mentality was not by a guy quoting a scripture. It was by Holy Ghost directed words that pierced my heart asunder.

So the issue of the Holy Spirit versus the issue of the human mind is the issue in sum between our faith and that which is at the heart of Judaism. Ironically, that's why we were chosen people to begin with.

Not because we were the greatest but because we were the least. We were people four centuries in slavery. We were a bunch of dum-dums who wanted leeks and garlics more than the righteousness of God. And we continually failed Him and were a source of unbelievable aggravation, made our golden calves and railed against God and against His Moses.

And yet God persists in His love and covenant faithfulness and yet to bring such a people to a place where they will be exalted above all nations. We were chosen in foolishness and weakness. So for us to take this direction and to celebrate it, make it a way of substitute righteousness, is a remarkable paradox.

Maimonides, Intellectual Brilliance, and Spiritual Pride

So he's talking about rationalism and the encouragement to Jewish philosophers to corroborate law of righteousness by independent rational inquiry. Thus many evil thinkers, and he gives the name of one, Moses Maimonides, who is the Rambam, R-A-M-B-A-M, if you come across a reference like that.

That's a, they take the first letter of a long name and they make a, somebody help me, an acronym from the first letter and it becomes Rambam, but it's Maimonides. So these names are so central to Judaism that they don't use the longer names, they use the acronyms, but you know who they're referring to.

He gave the Mishnah Torah and brought about by his own brilliance, the taking of the whole corpus of Biblical and Talmudic and Rabbinical law and established it as a system. What to do with eating, with diet, what to do with the observation of feast days, what to do with the issues of marriage, with child rearing, with justice, with law.

It was systematized in the brilliance of one man's mind, formative giant in Judaism, because these men were exceptionally brilliant. And you see that Jewish brilliance today. And I believe, as I'm suggesting, that the enemy even supplies a quotient of the wiles of his own brilliance to those who choose to go in this direction, who love to be applauded and distinguished by their brilliance.

I just brought the copy of the forward newspaper. It's out on the table somewhere. And one of the articles was brilliant. And then he gave a little italics that the author is a medical doctor, but he has also a PhD in linguistics.

And on top of that, he made studies in this independent field. And he's only 35. You know, this is beyond human ability. Well, it may well be that the same kind of demonic assistance is given to those in the faith who have become superstars charismatically and have a wonderful ability to perform or even to express miracles and so on, because they've made an unconscious covenant with the evil one for fame and for celebrity and for the applause of the many.

There's a, what's that famous book by that German poet who said, like more like Faust. Faust made a contract with the devil. He loved the young girl and he was beyond an age when she should have been a legitimate object of his desire.

His covenant with the devil was, if you give me youth and attractiveness and ability so as to win this girl, I'll give you my soul. More than we can suspect, you can unconsciously make covenants like this with powers of darkness through your lust for ambition and for celebrity and for recognition and for fame.

You cannot believe how beguiling and seductive fame is, particularly if you come out of a Jewish community that has men of such distinction. How will you be known? How will you be recognized? And when you read the biography of Norman Paul Horowitz, as I have, you see that this is his conscious quest from his earliest youth on, is what direction can I take?

What form of study can I enter that I can obtain a distinction of recognition above my brethren for my brilliance? That's why the faith is predicated on humiliation, on humility, on being poverty stricken, being poor, abject, having no confidence in oneself, which of course to the Jew is an abhorrent mentality.

That's sick. And when a young brother received the Lord, and I drove him from Brooklyn to Venezuela years ago, who was getting married this month at the age of 50, something like that, his parents brought him to a psychiatrist.

Our son has so changed, he's no longer ambitious. Something is grievously wrong with him. He's lost his mind. Because he's lost his ambition to become distinguished. At the cross, another wisdom was being demonstrated for those who were the proponents of the worldly wisdom, who railed against him and said, come down off the cross, we'll believe you.

You know, if you want to be believed, demonstrate something to which we could subscribe. But don't hang there as some limp and pathetic victim that is being wrangled up to death before our eyes. So there you see the contradictions of two wisdoms.

And of course, because he did not come down, and could not and would not, his wisdom has triumphed and broke the power of their wisdom, but to which they still subscribe even in its beggarly elements.

That's why Paul uses exactly that phrase. How is it that having believed that, you're going back to the beggarly elements of Sabbaths and of seasons and of times and of observations as if that constitutes your righteousness.

Don't go back to the beggarly, worldly elements that were introduced at the cross. The greater wisdom was demonstrated by the Lord himself in a humiliation of suffering unto death. That's why a Rabbi Schneerson is much more to be celebrated than in Jesus.

Because he had all the marbles. He could hold an audience spellbound for three hours in Yiddish by such an ability to draw from Maimonides and from the masters and from Talmudic sources, from the Bible and even from secular sources and weave together statements of such kind that left the people hanging on the ropes.

This was a master, a seventh generation master. What else should a man be but one whose brilliance commends him, his mind and his study. How did he come to that? So when we went to the same synagogue and what were they doing?

They were studying Rabbi Schneerson's commentary on that portion of the Torah that was appropriate to that Shabbat. And I mean study of a kind where they hardly looked up if I had wings or a halo or a tusk that they would hardly have to describe.

There were four or five guys and they had these sheets in their hands and what do you think it was? I've never seen that intensity in any Christian Bible study. Pouring over not only Rabbi Schneerson's last statement on that portion Torah but all of his previous statements throughout his whole rabbinical tenure have been recorded, transcribed and are now available for study having the same validity of Scripture itself.

See what I mean? No wonder that study is a lifelong practice and as I told my dear brother Ach after coffee earned that this Rabbi Blumenthal took me to his yeshiva the greatest in North America and it was awesome.

Three thousand students. We walked through that place. Vast study halls. A lecture is only a periodic thing. Classrooms as we know. I said well how long is the program? You know like four years? Like universities?

He looked at me like oh you're so naive cats. When are you going to grow up? There's no time limit. There's no such thing as graduation. Don't you know he said that study is a lifetime's practice? I'm an adult.

I didn't know. I only thought that you go for four years and you get a certificate or a diploma and that you can make a better living. He says these men are not here to make a better living or to receive a certificate.

They're here for study of Torah and the Talmud and it's lifelong. They have given up vocations to be here. They're not here to obtain a vocation. You guys go to your secular institutions so you can graduate and make a better living.

These guys are forsaking a better living to be students and they're being subsisted and helped by wealthy Jewish businessmen because it's a mitzvah and a blessing to help a Torah bocha a student who's studying Torah.

And so, how do they do it? They're at tables one on one intensely going over a text and drawing it out to its last syllable. It's a whole other mode of being and I'm jealous in the intensity that they exhibit and the sacrifice.

We need to know these things. Okay. So here's an emphasis on rationalism rational inquiry. Medieval thinkers have borrowed concepts from Platonic and Aristotelian thought respectively. So they were encouraged and drew from Greek sources and incorporated that in their Judaistic understanding and found ways to incorporate these great pagan thinkers in a way that was compatible with their rabbinical understanding.

Human Action, Divine Holiness, and Psalm 22

So one of the great German Jewish philosophers Hermann Cohen who took this direction interprets his view to mean that the Lord becomes the Holy God through action which man has to accomplish. It's not because he's holy in himself but man's conduct determines God's status.

Man sanctifies God by his study and by his rectitude his righteous behavior. Thus the ultimate object of all man's righteous acts is to sanctify God. Not to honor God as we would say but to establish God's sanctity by man's righteous acts.

Man determines God by his conduct. So for example when I had discussed with my Rabbi Blumenthal I thought I got him now. I'll show him in Psalm 22 where someone is pierced and wounded in his hands and in his feet and that his clothing is dambled for in his death seven centuries before the event that speaks so unmistakably of the crucifixion of Jesus and is corroborated in Zechariah the prophet the Hebrew prophet that when he comes we shall see him whom we have pierced and I got him now only to find out that when I opened those texts he says no Art you dum-dum that's not what it says in Hebrew.

I said what do you mean? In Hebrew it's not pierced it means that the lion is something or this or that and what I'll read to you from the second portion on the Torah I didn't know it but there's such a thing as Mishnaic Hebrew which is a use of the language that is not the literal Hebrew that is presently employed but a certain use of the language for rabbinical purposes that reads these words differently and you know that Hebrew for the longest time did not have vowel markings it just has the consonants and you understand whether it means ah or oh or eh or er depending on the context it's only more recently with the Masoretic text that the vowel markings were given so that the words were more clearly identified but you know you can take the same consonants and the word that means pierced can mean lion.

And if you want to avoid the word pierced because it is too evidently Christological you will endorse the interpretation of lion as being the rabbinical consensus and that will stand as unchallengeable as law itself which is exactly what they have done and that's how they avoid what to us are the apparent scriptures that testify of Jesus.

When Luther debated with rabbis he was himself a professor of Old Testament that was fluent in Hebrew. He was astonished that in the avoidance of what was to him the clear messianic implications of the Hebrew text that it was so deviously misconstrued and seen and stated in so other way that it was nothing less than blasphemy.

And he thought that this now, this blasphemous rejection of the evident meaning of the word of Christ if it comes into the church will not only discredit the reformation but possibly invalidate it. So he saw Judaism as much a threat to the faith as the Turks or Catholicism itself and therefore that gave rise to his heated castigation of the Jews to destroy their Talmud and their synagogues because they were the bastions of anti-Christ conviction and that many Christians were now seeking out rabbis to learn Hebrew but through them, they're not only learning Hebrew they're receiving Jewish prejudice against the Lord and that might controvert even their Christian faith.

So all of this is part of the unhappy history that Hitler seized upon and utilized for the very thing that Luther spoke that the synagogue could be destroyed the Talmud's burned and men themselves burned.

So just dwell on this, one of the great modern day Jewish philosophers Herman Cohen deriving his view from Plato and Aristotle and reconciling Greek thought with rabbinical understanding came to the place where the holiness of God is not the issue of God but the issue of man through action which man accomplishes.

Thus the ultimate object of all man's righteous acts is to sanctify God. It's not it's the exact reverse of our own faith. We are sanctified by God, here God is sanctified by man. So at every point in particular their perspective is completely at odds with our own.

You could not find two systems more altogether opposed than Judaism and Evangelical faith, even talking about the holocaust and judgment I won't even go into this, it's too time consuming. One can still make a strong case for a law of moral causality in history and that the cause of righteousness is upheld by a system of retribution that is rooted in the moral sensitivities of man.

So yes there is God's justice, but the issue of that is not God but man, man's moral sensitivity decides even the way in which history is vindicated so as if there is something intrinsic in man, a moral sensitivity which though it's guarded this is especially pronounced in Jews as contrasted with the Goyim.

There's especially a unique faculty in the Yiddish soul, in the nefesh, so that when I gave to one of these years ago Hasidic men we came, oh it's a whole story of how we came to their place in New Jersey where I was then living in a blizzard where I was waiting for two brothers to come from Kansas City their plane was delayed till midnight because of severe blizzard and a little boy with side curls came up to me and said mister, can you tell me how I can get to Livingston, I forgot what city it was in New Jersey, I said there's the there's the limousine service I think that they drive there, I came back five minutes he says they're closed down, no vehicles running, would you take me?

I said are you willing that a Meshumet should take you? Meshumet is a traitor he said a nice man like you? We took him my friends arrived, we took him. I had an old Volvo and the windshield wipers had not been working.

I turned them on and they worked and we came in this blinding snowstorm to this place in New Jersey. It was the one night of the month, they were up all night celebrating Torah and they had schnapps on the table because you drink you're high spirited it's the very opposite of poor, be not drunk with wine where in is excess but be drunk in the Holy Spirit not having the Holy Spirit.

They were drinking the hard stuff and really celebrating and we came in like gangbusters, boom in two minutes we were into it rock stock and barrel and this young convert to orthodoxy out of the Jesus movement who had a red he was red haired with an afro which was the fashion at that time woke the rabbi up and said there's a Meshumet here speaking about Jesus, and the rabbi said get rid of him so he got rid of me but before I left I gave him a copy of Venezuela and so days went by, I didn't hear anything.

Also I get a phone call from this dear man, Aaron calls me by my Hebrew name yes, this is Ephraim. Ephraim, is that you I said? You sound so sweet, the last time that we had anything to say you were just choked up and spitting out and getting rid of me.

I read your book Aaron and you have a Yiddish and Meshuma your soul is a special quality and ingredient a moral sensitivity that the goyim lack ironically there is an implicit unspoken kind of racial superiority that if you press a Jew deeply enough he will acknowledge as being true so that means a contempt for the lesser orders of mankind where we can be benevolent to them and help them but we don't expect them to celebrate Shabbat or to understand God or have a righteousness predicated on moral precepts for them the Noahite lords are enough, avoid strangled meat don't drink blood, don't fornicate keep your nose clean, but we don't expect more from you, after all you are only a Gentile.

You see why they have to be converted, and why we Jewish believers as I mentioned either in another class or earlier here had to be dealt with by the Lord and shown that we were still carrying the germ of an anti-Christian anti-Gentile prejudice.

We were now ministers and even in our ministries in subtle ways, we were not only inserting the word of the Lord as the sword of the Lord but twisting it at the hilt just to zap them unconsciously, we had to be divested of something that was historic and an enmity ages old against the Goyim.

You should have heard my mother talk about the Goyim, them them, the enemy the dum-dums, those who spend their money recklessly and this is what your mother will say to you, as a Jewish kid and you misspend your 15 cent allowance and you blow it at one time with a Nathan's hot dog and a drink because Moses saves and Jesus saves, but Moses invests as the wise crack and my mother would say, you and your Goyish cup, you're just like them instead of being prudent and economical and saving, you blow it all at one time, you're like them.

That's what they do, they drink, they fornicate, they don't save they're them. So that compels everything that issues out of a history of a church that has given a false statement of the Lord and too often conducts itself unrighteously and is not sanctified and is Christian in name only, if at that but to the Jew, that's the statement of an error for following a magician and a sorcerer all the cards are stacked against us.

The Torah as a System of Gentile Hope

So he ends his essay given the Torah with its numerous commandments and prohibitions Israel is afforded adequate resources with which to resist the corruption of evil and how all the nations of the world are to be united in the Torah way of life whether by Israel's teaching mission or by another divine intervention remains part of the Messianic mystery.

So the hope of the world is the Jew and the teaching that he will communicate to the dum-dum Gentile world that is walking into walls and misspending their substance fornicating like jackrabbits drinking and acting unrighteously and justifying it in the name of Christ.

So he ends on that note that if there is to be hope for the world, it will come through Torah teaching by Jews who can bring what is uniquely their own heritage because though they are religious they are eminently rationalists and the rational mind and thought prevails over every such consideration they are offended by the supernatural if it cannot be rationally understood.

So is the rational mind celebrated as ultimate idolatry which they don't understand and see. And if you'll excuse this if you heard this before, my first revelation that came to me as shock while I was being trained as a missionary to the Jews, it was the beginning of the Jews for Jesus phenomenon and one of their schools called our mission and asked for some representative to come and to explain how Jews could believe in Jesus and I was the one who was sent and I came into this yeshiva high school for orthodox Jews and shared and answered the questions of the students, it was a precious time and of course I became engaged in debate with their teacher who had a van dyke beard a yarmulke, he was the epitome of the righteous, ethical moral, orthodox Jew.

And we were going at it and the bell rang, we had spilled out into the hallway, the kids left and all of a sudden I blinked and I said, excuse me I said, do you believe that God parted the Red Sea that Israel should go over as on dry ground.

And all of a sudden the guy just choked and spluttered and went silent as if I had splashed him with a bucket of cold water and finally when he found his voice he said I believe it was a confluence of the tides.

I said what about Isaac and the miraculous birth when Abraham was whose body was old and had a barren wife. That was just that he gave a rational explanation for every supernatural thing given in Old Testament Scripture because miracle itself and a God who intervenes supernaturally is an offense against the liberal and rational mind that even the Messiah has been converted into messianic age that will come not by the advent of someone sent from heaven but something raised up from earth that is moral and ethical and righteous according to the use of mind and study and law and that will bring in justice and equity in the earth.

And liberal Judaism which is the rejection of the supernatural had its origins of all places in Germany because it took its cue and its inspiration from German rationalism who were offended by the Christian New Testament and voided the supernatural references in it.

So Jesus is only a moral teacher, the miracles ascribed to him are only legend and we're looking for the historical Jesus and not the legendary one because the scriptures were, the New Testament descriptions are not valid they are not faithful historic transcripts they are well-meaning intentions by polemicists seeking to make an argument for Jesus against a hostile Jewish environment that cannot be corroborated as true, this is German rationalism, this is the birth of the higher criticism and that the scriptures must be subject to the same kind of critical literary analysis that you bring to any text, there's no such thing as sacrosanct word of God, it's man and we need to see what of it is valid and what of it is imagined and what is legendary, Jews living in that Germany took their cue and brought that same mentality into the Judaism which gave rise to repressive reform Judaism that subsequently came to America and to all the world.