Jew to believe in God, according to this rabbi, but it is impossible
for a Jew to be a good Jew and believe that Jesus is the Messiah.
Does no one else see the illogic in that? I have also gone up
against Alan Dershowitz, to whom I responded in an editorial
column this past week. Alan Dershowitz wrote his book, The
Vanishing American Jew, and I will suggest that if you follow the
logic of that book, Judaism itself will vanish, and quickly. You see,
Alan Dershowitz believes in Judaism, but he does not believe in
God. He wants to be rather generous in his book, so he says those
Jews who need God ought to be able to have Him, but those of
us who do not need God should not be too much troubled by
those Jews who do need God.
Thus, you see the great tragedy in all of this. This is a great
tragedy and misunderstanding among evangelical Christians as it
is in secular America. The misunderstanding is that the majority
of Jews and secular Americans today are not following biblical
Judaism and are rejecting Jesus the Messiah. The reality is that
they are not practicing biblical Judaism. I want to say that is why
Acts 13 is so important as a methodology for Jewish evangelism.
We have to go back and tell the Jews their own story, remind
the Jews of their own history, let them hear again the patriarchs,
let them hear again the prophets, and then they will have a
foundation for understanding.
Alan Dershowitz quotes Woody Allen in his book and it is a
haunting quote. Woody Allen is an agnostic Jew who wants to
maintain the ethnic identity of Judaism. Yet, in his book, he says
his own son, who is also an agnostic Jew, married a liberal and
more or less agnostic Roman Catholic. With this in mind, he said,
“So you know what that marriage is like…it is one endless debate
about what religion to raise their children not to believe in.” The
plausibility of that is the horror of that. The fact that it was found
plausible enough to be humorous both by Woody Allen, then by
Alan Dershowitz and now even by us, demonstrates the horror
of this. There is a spiritual vacuum of incalculable size. There is a
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