Author: Steven R. Bruck

Is It Ever Too Late For Closure?

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What is “closure”, anyway?

To many people, it means resolving differences; to others, it means getting retribution. For still others, it never comes.

If you prefer to watch a video, click on this link: Watch the video.

I looked up the word and here is one definition I think makes sense:

Closure means finality; a letting go of what once was. Finding closure
implies a complete acceptance of what has happened and an honoring of
the transition away from what’s finished to something new.

In the real world, where people are looking for closure because they have been mistreated, either verbally, physically, or professionally, it seems more often than not that closure is impossible because the people involved are unavailable.

In my life, I have been mistreated by people I worked for, and it affected my career choices in a bad way, although all things work to the good for those who love the Lord and are called in accordance to his purpose (Romans 8:28), even though most of the times I was mistreated I didn’t have anything to do with God, at all.

Yet, he still took care of me: it doesn’t make sense to humans, but that’s how God rolls.

So, what is the answer to the question? It’s actually quite simple: you don’t need anyone but yourself to find closure. In fact, closure can most confidently be assured if you restrict it to just you.

You see, closure is letting go, it is resolving that it is resolved, and if you have issues with someone you know, a parent, a friend, a professional colleague, whomever…no matter how badly they treated (or mistreated) you, the only way to overcome the pain and to have closure is to make it happen within yourself.

If that person is really as bad as your think they are, then even if you had the chance to talk with them to clear the air, so to speak, what would you do if they stayed true to form? If they were unreasonable and mean when you knew them, what makes you think they will be any different now as you try to attain the closure you need to get on with your life? In truth, going to the ones you need to have closure from might just widen the gap even more!

Do you really need anyone else to find closure? No. Trying to get closure by dealing with the ones you need closure from is not the way to go.

In my book, closure is just another word for forgiveness. The only way to stop the pain of having been mistreated is to forgive the one that did it to you. And the first step in being able to do that is to remember that when you forgive someone, it doesn’t affect in any way their relationship with God- for what they did to you, God will repay (Proverbs 20:22).

The second thing to remember is that forgiveness of others affects your relationship with God because God wants us to forgive on earth as he forgives in heaven (Matthew 6:14).

The only way to be certain that you can find closure to the pain you have suffered from being mistreated is to forgive the one who mistreated you.

Here is the third thing to remember, which has really helped me in getting closure through forgiveness: to make it easier to forgive that waste of flesh who hurt you, pray for them.

I know, because I have been guilty of this, that people who cruelly lash out and hurt others do it because they are hurting even more. So much so that they cannot contain it so it is directed at others, for no other reason than the person doing the hating hates themself so much they have no control over what they do or say.

When you accept that as truth, which I know it is, then you can’t help but feel sorry for them. Yes, what they did was wrong, and (as I said) they will have to deal with God for that, but as for you, your closure can only come when you forgive that person.

It isn’t easy, it goes against the flesh (as does almost everything that is pleasing to God), but when you constantly work at it, it will get easier and easier until one day you realize the pain is gone. You can talk about the event without hurting and without getting angry.

To recap, the way to achieve closure is to forgive and the way to forgive is to take it step by step:

  1. Remember that forgiving them will make you right wth God, not them;
  2. Recognize the pain the other person must be feeling;
  3. Pray for them to make forgiving easier for you.

Remember how Yeshua prayed for those who were crucifying him and said that they didn’t know what they were doing? Well, even if you are absolutely positive that the one who hurt you did know what they were doing, so what? They will have to deal with an eternity of suffering, so whatever suffering they caused to you is really nothing compared to what they will have to go through, is it?

Closure from the evil people have done to you comes more easily when you accept that your forgiveness of them will make you right with God and you will have eternal joy, whereas (unless they change) they will suffer forever.

And if you really love the Lord, God, and are thankful for his forgiveness of your sins, then knowing that someone, anyone- even that horrible person who hurt you so badly- will have to eternally suffer hell’s fire, well…if that doesn’t make you feel sorry for them and want to pray for their repentance, then I feel sorry for you.

Thank you for being there and please share these messages with everyone you know. Subscribe to both my Youtube channel and my website, buy my books, and join my Facebook group called “Just God’s Word” (please make sure you agree to the rules when you join).

That’s it for today, so l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

Parashah V’ayra 2022 (And I appeared) Exodus 6:2 – 9

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The last time Moses talked with Pharaoh the Pharaoh decided to make the Jews maintain their quota of bricks, but did not supply the straw so they had to glean their straw all night, but still work all day making bricks.

The people weren’t too impressed with Moses at that time.

If you prefer to watch a video, click on this link: Watch the video.

Moses returns to Pharaoh, and now begins God’s judgment on Pharaoh and all the Egyptians through the wonders and miraculous acts that are still considered astounding, even today.

Moses does the staff-to-snake thing, which the Egyptian magicians duplicate, although the snake of Moses eats up the Egyptian snakes.

Next, Moses has Aaron smite the waters of the Nile and the Nile turns to blood. After a week of a bloody Nile, the frogs came out and infested the entire land, followed by the plague of gnats.

With the gnats, this is the first time the magicians were not able to duplicate the acts that God had performed, and they were convinced that Pharaoh should let the people go.

But the Pharaoh refused.

The next plague was of flies, but now something else changed- God raised the bar by having all of Egypt infested, all except the land of Goshen where God’s chosen people resided. This time Pharaoh said if Moses takes away the flies, they could go to sacrifice (but not too far away.) However, once the flies were removed Pharaoh reneged on his promise.

After the flies, God sent a plague to kill all the cattle in Egypt, to cause boils to break out all over the bodies of every person in Egypt, and then the hail that turned to fire when it hit the ground. The hail also caused all the existing crops to be destroyed.

As Egypt is being destroyed, the Jews living in Goshen are not affected by any of these plagues.

Pharaoh pleads with Moses to stop the hail and promises that the people can go worship, but as before, once the plague was ended, Pharaoh reneged on his promise to let the people go.

This is where this parashah ends.

There is so much to work with here; I mean, really? Where do I start, and how can I end?

Don’t worry- what I feel I should talk about today won’t take that long.

Have you ever heard someone say that the Old Covenant is all about punishment and violence, but the New Covenant is all about love?

I have; too many times, in fact, and I try to point out to the Christians who say this (Jews don’t say this because they don’t consider the New Covenant valid) there is no “God of the Old Covenant” verse a “God of the New Covenant” because it is the same God.

God is just and holy, and yes- he is so compassionate and loving that a human being cannot even fathom the depth of God’s love for everyone, even those who curse and reject him. And it is precisely because God is just, loving, compassionate, and holy that he MUST punish the guilty!

He makes the rules and he abides by them, even to his own chagrin when he has to harm his creation.

For instance, in today’s parashah, Exodus 9:11-22, God tells Pharaoh (through Moses) that so far he has demonstrated his power, but has not destroyed all the people so that Pharaoh might see that he is fighting a power against which he cannot win. God is, in a way, actually pleading with Pharaoh to give in to God’s demands before everything and everyone in Egypt is destroyed.

In Exodus 9:19, God even warns Pharaoh against the next plague, saying:

Therefore, send and hurry to bring indoors all your livestock and everything
else you have in the field. For hail will fall on every human being and animal
left in the field that hasn’t been brought home, and they will die.

Here God is showing his compassion for all his creation, even those who do not know him. He tells Pharaoh to save the people, and the rest of this passage tells us that the Egyptians who recognized God’s power and authority did as he told them to do, but the ones who refused to listen stayed in their fields, and they and their cattle all died.

There is a midrash in the Talmud, in Megilla 10B, which states that when the Egyptian army was drowning in the sea the angels wanted to sing songs of praise and joy, but God rebuked them, saying:

“My creations are drowning and you are singing before me?”

God doesn’t want to destroy anyone or anything, and he tells us in Ezekiel 18:23 that he doesn’t desire the death of anyone (spiritual or physical), but because God is holy and trustworthy and he said that the guilty will be punished, he has no choice but to punish them.

The truth is, if we can’t trust God’s promise to punish the wicked then we can’t trust God’s promise to forgive our sins!

That is a very uncomfortable statement, but the truth of it is undeniable- God is compassionate and loving, but because he is holy and trustworthy we can expect that he will do terrible things to those who ignore his commandments.

The only real difference between the Old and New Covenant is that Yeshua taught the deeper, more spiritual understanding of the existing commandments. The letters from Shaul, Yakov, and Yochanon were not new commandments from God, and they were certainly not meant to teach people to reject the Torah. What those letters were meant to do is to help Gentiles who now accepted Yeshua as their Messiah to slowly adjust, step-by-step, to the lifestyle God demands of us all, which he outlines in the Torah.

When you reject the Torah, you reject God. Period! That’s all she wrote! End of line! Das ist alles! Don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out!

God has no choice other than to punish those who reject him, but you do have a choice- you can obey what God says to do in the Torah, or you can listen to what your religion tells you to do, but know this for certain: if what your religion says is different from what the Torah says, that means you will be standing unprotected in the field when the hail falls.

Thank you for being here and please share these messages, subscribe to both my website and YouTube channel, join my Facebook group, Just God’s Word (please make sure you agree to the rules), and remember that I always welcome your comments.

That’s it for this week: Happy New Year and Shabbat Shalom!

Does Jesus Forgive Sins?

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Back from a week off, driving up to visit Donna’s family in Philadelphia. The drive was full of problems with traffic, taking us nearly 40% longer than it should have, but the trip, overall, was good and we enjoyed being with family.

Now back to work.

As far as the question, “Does Yeshua forgive sins?” goes, the answer seems obvious, doesn’t it?

In Matthew 9, Yeshua tells the Pharisees and Torah teachers that he has the authority to forgive sins on earth.

(Keep this in mind: he specifically said he was able to forgive sins on earth. )

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John writes in his first letter (1 John 2:2) that when we sin, Yeshua “pleads our case with the Father”, and that he (Yeshua) is the Kappurah (covering) for our sins.

How do these two opposite statements, Yeshua says he can forgive sins but John says he pleads our case with God, be reconciled? How does Yeshua go from forgiver to intercessor? C’mon, you guys- does Yeshua forgive our sins or not?

I believe the answer is that he was able to forgive sins when he was walking the earth and spreading the Good News to prove he was (and still is, of course) the Messiah.

We need to remember that in those days, a physical impairment such as deafness or blindness, paralysis, etc. was considered often to be the result of one’s sinfulness. So, healing that infirmity demonstrated not just God-given power to perform miracles, but also the authority to forgive sins.

The healing that the Messiah did was proof of his authority ON THE EARTH to forgive sins.

Let’s look at another side of this: In John 20:23, Yeshua breathes the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) on his disciples and tells them that whomever they forgive the sins of, those sins will be forgiven, and whomever they do not forgive, will not be forgiven.

This is not just giving his disciples the authority to forgive sins, but the authority to prevent forgiveness!

Now, wait a minute here! Is it really what it seems to be? Did Yeshua tell mere mortals that not only can they forgive the sins of people, but they can override God by preventing those sins from being forgiven?

Is God unable to forgive a sinner because some human being didn’t?

I really don’t have an explanation for this, but it doesn’t make sense when comparing this one statement to the entirety of the Bible (this is an exegesis system called Hermeneutics) because no one outranks God. Period! So, even though Yeshua told his disciples they could forgive sins, I believe this had to be a one-time event and to be understood as Yeshua granting them this authority specifically in order to continue the spreading of the Good News, in his place.

Even if by some chance Yeshua did grant that authority to them, it was to them- not to their descendants or people who took over their job, but just to them.

In fact, in John 20:21, just before he breathed the Ruach HaKodesh on them, he told them that just as God sent him, he is now sending them. This seems to justify my interpretation, in that it was meant for those specific people in order to continue proving that they, just as Yeshua, had God-granted authority through the Holy Spirit, and to prove the validity of the ministry.

Catholicism has stated that from the Pope down to the “greenest” Priest fresh out of Seminary school, these anointed leaders of the faith are allowed to forgive sins. I suppose their justification for that is based on the statement Yeshua makes here, in the Gospel of John. Too bad it doesn’t hold water, because it is clear from the rest of the Bible that no mere mortal is allowed to override God when it comes to forgiveness.

We have a similar issue with Yeshua’s statement that Kefa (Peter) holds the keys to the kingdom and whatever he does, the same will be done in heaven (Matthew 16:19). Again, it just doesn’t hold true to the rest of the Bible that a mere mortal can tell God what he will or will not do.

My interpretation is that the things Yeshua told Kefa he would do were not binding on God, but on people and that whatever he decided was a proper form of worship would be honored in heaven.

In other words, Yeshua told Kefa that he would be establishing the Halakah (Way to Walk) for the Believers, which we see happening later. It happened when Kefa went to the house of Cornelius and opened up the Kingdom of God to the Gentiles, as well as through his authority (with the other Elders in Jerusalem) he authorized the letter to the new Gentile Believers in Acts 15.

That delegation was specifically to Kefa and was not transferable to anyone else.

My answer to the original question of whether or not Yeshua forgives sins is that he did have that authority when he was on the earth, which was specifically given to prove he was the Messiah.

But now? No!

At that time Yeshua forgave sins but now he is the means by which our sins are forgiven. His sacrificial death replaced the need to bring an animal to the temple in Jerusalem (which no longer existed after 73 AD) and his position as Messiah is to plead our case before God, who is now the only one who can forgive sins.

As I have said many, many times: Yeshua is the Intercessor of prayer, not the Interceptor of it.

The same goes for the forgiveness of sins: Yeshua’s death is the means by which we are able to be forgiven, but he is not the one to pray to for forgiveness: that comes only from God, the Father.

Thank you for being here and please share these messages with everyone you know. Also, please subscribe to my website, my YouTube channel, and join my Facebook discussion group called “Just God’s Word”.

I have written 4 books which I believe you will also find edifying and educational, as well as even a little bit entertaining. Check them out on my website.

And lastly, remember that I always welcome your comments.

Das ist alles, so l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

Religion Has It Backwards

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Listen to the popular missionaries and attend one of the “mega-church” masses and what do you hear?

All the wonderful things that God wants to do for you.

So, nu? What’s wrong with that? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that- it is backward.

If you prefer to watch a video, click on this link: Watch the video.

Backward? What’s backward about the Lord doing wonderful things for us? Doesn’t he protect us? Didn’t he send the Messiah to save us? Doesn’t he heal? Doesn’t he work wonders? Doesn’t he do everything for us that we need?

Yes, he does, but despite what religion wants you to believe, when it comes down to who does what first, the Lord expects us to do our part before he does his part.

God made an unconditional covenant with Abraham, and when God told Isaac, that he is making the same promise that he made to his father, God said that it was because Abraham also did everything that God told him to do (Genesis 26:5).

In other words, even though the covenant was unconditional, Abraham was still obedient to God.

The covenant God made with the children of Israel through Moses is conditional: the laws and rules we are given in the Torah are required of us, and only after we do them will God do as he promises.

The truth is that although God will often do wonderful things just because he loves us, we are his children and must be obedient. God didn’t give us the Torah so that he could prove he was more important than we are, or because he likes to tell people what to do- he gave us the Torah so that we could know how to attain eternal life.

The lifestyle that God defines is the one that brings us into communion with him. The fact that no human being can live it perfectly is why he sent the Messiah, but salvation through the Messiah is NOT a “Get Out of Jail For Free” card.

In order to be blessed, we must do as God says, and he tells us so in Deuteronomy 28.

God never created a religion: he outlined a lifestyle. Religion is a man-made thing that has only one purpose, and that purpose is to give people power over other people. That is why there are so many different religions, all supposedly worshiping the same God! Once someone establishes his or her own rules for a religion, someone who wants that power for themself has to create a new set of rules, so if I am Catholic but decide I want to do things differently, I start my own sect and create a new religion.

And if I want this religion to be popular, I make it easier to follow and provide better promises of what God will do for those who do what I say he wants you to do.

It is amazing how people reject what God says so quickly, and just as quickly accept what some person tells them to do. And why is this?

If you ask me, it’s because God requires us to do something that is difficult but religion doesn’t really require anything difficult: instead, religion tells us all that God will do for us if we simply “believe”.

Be a good person, love everyone, and you will be saved forever. Your sins are forgiven if you believe in Jesus (whatever that is supposed to mean) and then you will never have to worry about damnation. Once you are saved no one can take it away and you will be forgiven automatically.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? It isn’t that hard to be a good person, especially if you get to be the one who defines what “good” means.

Yeshua said that no one is good except his father in heaven (Mark 10:18), but religion doesn’t want you to listen to him.

Yeshua observed the way to worship and live that we are instructed to do in the Torah, but religion says that after he died as the sacrifice required by the Torah, the Torah was no longer valid!

So religion says that doing what the Torah requires means you don’t have to do what the Torah requires.

Huh?

How can anyone who has a functional brain resolve that? I mean, if Yeshua did everything that is required in the Torah, and we are supposed to do as Yeshua did, then how can anyone accept rejecting what Yeshua did is doing what Yeshua did?

How many times does your religious leader, whether Christian or Jewish, preach about how you must tithe?

How many times does your religious leader, whether Christian or Jewish, tell you that God requires your obedience in order for you to be blessed?

And, how many times does your religious leader, whether Christian or Jewish, tell you all the wonderful things God will do for you without ever mentioning obedience other than being a good person and loving others?

Yes, God is love, but that’s not all he is. He is also our creator, our supreme ruler, our judge, and our executioner. His holiness demands that he punish the guilty and not disobey his own rules.

Like it or not, God may love you, may want to forgive you, and may bless you even when you sin, but when it comes down to it, if we do not do as God wants us to do, which he tells us in the Torah, then we will be punished.

God HAS to punish those who are unrepentant, and if you think simply saying “I believe in Jesus” is repentance, you will be sorely disappointed.

Following God and Yeshua is not easy- we are warned by Yeshua that to be his disciple we have to give up everything and carry our own cross (Matthew 16:24), which means salvation may be a free gift, but it isn’t easy to keep.

Religion says once saved, always saved, but the Bible doesn’t agree. What God gives us no one can take away, but we can let it go.

I have read often that religion will tell you if someone who has been “saved” becomes apostate, then they were never really saved, to begin with. That’s a load of fertilizer: religion wants you to remain loyal to the religion, not to God or the Messiah, so they tell you what you love to hear- you are OK, you are loved, God will bless you, salvation is forever, once saved always saved, yadda…yadda…yadda.

Of course, you still have to do what the religion tells you to do, which is more often than not to ignore God’s laws and do as the religion’s leadership tells you to do.

God tells you what he wants from you in the Torah, and he also tells you what he will do for you when you obey him.

Religion tells you what it says God wants you to do, and they feed you wonderful tidbits of how God will always do everything for you when you do as the religion says.

The problem is that religion says to ignore God, even within Judaism! Did you know there are sects within Judaism that regard the Talmud as scripture and obey the Rabbi before they will obey the Torah?

Being “saved” isn’t easy, it isn’t a lifetime guarantee that you will never apostatize, or that you will always be blessed no matter what you do. Salvation is free to get, hard to keep, and easy to throw away because we are sinners by nature, and being obedient to God is not what our nature wants.

If you accept what I just said, then I think you will be OK as time goes on because you understand that righteousness is not easy. I feel sorry for those who reject the idea that salvation is really very hard to keep because they will be suckered into losing it by believing they can’t.

We have the manual on how to be righteous, it’s called the Torah, and we have Yeshua and the help of the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) to lead us and save us from ourselves.

It is hard work to be righteous, and you will never make it unless you try to be obedient to God- not men, but God. If you can do that, you are on the right track.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe, share these messages, and check out my books.

I will be taking a week off for a break; everyone needs a rest, and I will see you all again next week.

Until then, l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

Parashah Veyechi 2021 (And he lived) Genesis 47:28 – 50:26

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We come to the end of this book, the first book of the Torah. Here we read of Jacob blessing his children, adopting Joseph’s two sons as his own, and making Joseph swear to have him buried with his fathers, in Canaan.

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When Jacob blessed Joseph’s sons, he gave the better blessing to the second-born, Ephraim, thereby putting Ephraim over Manasseh. Joseph tried to correct his father, assuming that due to his poor eyesight Jacob did that accidentally, but Jacob knew what he was doing.

The blessing over his 12 sons was, if you ask me, somewhat cruel in that he was not at all nice to Reuben, reminding him of the sin of sleeping with his father’s concubine, thereby losing the rights of the firstborn. Levi and Simeon were treated to a scathing blessing, as well, due to the violent and underhanded way they killed the men of Shechem (Genesis 34).

Judah is made ruler of the clan, replacing “unstable as water” Reuben, and Joseph was given the double-portion that would have been given to the firstborn.

After Jacob dies, he is embalmed and there is a large caravan that carries him back to Canaan to be buried after a week of mourning.

The brothers fear that Joseph will now, with his father dead, take vengeance on them and so they lie to him, saying that Jacob told the brothers to ask Joseph to forgive them, but Joseph states that even though they meant him harm, God was really behind the entire episode in order to send Joseph to Egypt so that he could save many lives. Joseph, instead of taking vengeance, promises to care for his brothers and their children as long as they live.

Joseph dies and is embalmed, but not until after he charges his people to remember that God will one day bring them back to the land he promised them, and when that day comes they must take his body with them, and bury him in Canaan.

Every time we come to the end of one of the books of the Torah, we say this:

חזק, חזק, וניט חזק!!

(Chazak, chazak, v’nit chazek!!)

Be strong, be strong, and let us be strengthened!!

I want to talk about how the term “Until Shiloh come” (from Jacob’s blessing of Judah) has been treated to teach Jews to reject this as a messianic prophecy. I have often, and mostly, talked about the traditional ways that Christianity has caused Jews to reject Jesus, but now I want to point out how within Judaism, we have also done this to ourselves.

There are many reasons why Jews have rejected Jesus as their Messiah, but I don’t want to go into that now. What I want to do is show how Jewish scholars, such as the commentator of this Chumash, Rabbi J. H. Hertz, C.H., who was the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire (this Chumash is the second edition from 1965) treated certain messianic passages that occur in the Book of Genesis.

At the end of each Torah book, the Chumash has a section that is titled “Additional Notes”, which is a detailed explanation of many of the aspects and events in the book that aren’t covered in the footnotes. The end of the additional notes for Genesis has a paragraph entitled, “Alleged Christological References in Scripture.”

Already you can get a “feel” for what he is going to say.

He deals with the term “Until Shiloh come” (Gen. 49:10), saying that the ancient translations ignore or reject the letter Yod in the word Shiloh (שילא) and instead interpret it as (שלא), which means “his” or could be a poetic form of the word “peace”, rendering the meaning to be “until he comes to whom the kingdom belongs”, or simply “until peace comes.” But he concludes that most believe it to mean the actual place, Shiloh, where the sanctuary was located during the times of the Judges.

This is an obvious means to an end, which is to refute the Christian understanding of this as meaning a name for the Messiah. By interpreting this passage as meaning “until the people come to Shiloh” and explaining that the tribe of Judah’s superiority (in accordance with Jacob’s blessing) didn’t occur until after the temple was built in Jerusalem, it is easy to conclude that the messianic interpretation cannot be justified.

I don’t agree with that for one obvious reason: the temple was built during Solomon’s time, but Judah’s ruling status began when David became king. If we accept the messianic interpretation, which is that Judah will rule until the Messiah comes, then things make sense since Messiah didn’t come until after the ruling tribe, Judah, lost its rulership when Rome appointed Herod as king and took away the authority of the Jewish courts to make life and death decisions.

One last thing to note, which is so biased it may upset some, but in this discussion about Shiloh, this pious and scholarly Rabbi says:

“Despite the fact that nowhere in Scripture is that term applied to the Messiah, Christian theologians assume that Shiloh is a name of the Founder of Christianity. In this sense, ‘Till Shiloh come’ is a favorite text of Christian missionaries in attempting to convert illiterate Jews or those ignorant of Scripture.”

Well, that certainly doesn’t sound very bigoted, does it?

And as scholarly as R. Hertz was, he apparently didn’t know that the Christian faith that existed then, as it does now, was mainly created by Constantine and has very little, if anything, to do with what Yeshua taught.

He then gives an example of how even some Christian theologians reject the messianic meaning and adds to his diatribe the argument over the word “virgin” in Isaiah 14 as meaning nothing more than a young woman of marriageable age, and not necessarily “virgin.”

The final attack to a messianic passage is his reference to Isaiah 53 (which, by the way, since the early 1900s is never read in a synagogue), saying this about it:

“For eighteen hundred years Christian theologians have passionately maintained that it is a Prophetic anticipation of the life of the Founder of their Faith.”

He goes on to state that an “impartial examination” of the chapter reveals that it is talking about a past historical event. However, there is no reference to what that event was. His concluding thought is that modern scholarship has shattered these arguments which Christian missionaries use against ignorant Jews.

This is the sort of treatment of Christianity that I was taught while I was growing up and attending Hebrew and religious classes at my Reform temple on Long Island. So, for those who are Gentile and raised in any of the Christian religions, maybe now you can imagine how difficult it is for a Jewish person to even think about accepting Jesus as their true Messiah. Besides the hatred of Jesus in our upbringing, rejecting him is compounded exponentially by the knowledge of the historic persecution of Jews, all in the name of Jesus!

This hatred is so great, that this Rabbi, a godly man, can’t even bring himself to write the name “Jesus”, but instead refers to him as the “Founder of their Faith”.

I am talking about this because it is so important to understand the innate hatred Jews have been taught for anything Christian, and that when trying to talk to a Jewish person about Jesus, you will never get anywhere using the name “Jesus” or quoting from the New Covenant. If you can’t relate to a Jewish person using the Old Covenant and the true and proper name for our Messiah, which is Yeshua, then you are not only wasting your time and theirs but even worse- you are adding to the existing desire to reject anything Christian, especially Jesus!

It took me some 40+ years before I accepted Yeshua as my Messiah, and that was only because I was led to a Messianic synagogue with a Jewish Rabbi who I could relate to as a Jew.

The animosity between Judaism and Christianity is real- many of you may argue against this, but if you haven’t been exposed to it from either side, you should count yourself as blessed, but naive. Without accepting that Jews are taught to reject anything Christian because Jesus was a traitor to Judaism and his followers want nothing more than to either convert Jews or kill them, then you will never be successful in helping Jewish people accept their Messiah, Yeshua.

On the Christian side of this, they have traditionally been taught to reject the Torah, and the worst thing I can think of in Christianity is the ideology called Replacement Theology. This states that because the Jewish people have rejected Jesus, they are now rejected by God as his chosen people and are doomed to damnation, claiming that the only “real” chosen people now are Born Again Christians.

Hatred and bigoted attitudes have grown over the millennia from the misinterpretations from man-made religions which have turned Jews and Christians against each other, even though both worship the same God who created them.

It’s crazy!

What people need to do, first and foremost, is read the Bible themselves. They need to study the passages, study the history, learn the cultural meaning of words and phrases used at that time and verify what they are told hermeneutically. That means when they see something in the New Covenant that has been interpreted as rejecting the Torah, if they can’t find it anywhere in the Old Covenant they will know that something isn’t right.

Rabbi Hertz said that biblical passages were being used by missionaries against ignorant people, and he was right. This happens in both Judaism and Christianity, so it is up to us, those who know the truth about the Jewish Messiah, what he taught, how he lived, and who is the real founder of this modern Christian faith, to disseminate the truth through a patient and compassionate understanding of what people have had shoved down their throats their entire lifetime.

The only way to overcome bigotry, which is founded in ignorance, is to remove the ignorance.

Thank you for being here and please share these messages with everyone you know to help this ministry grow. I welcome your comments and please make sure to subscribe to my website, to my youtube channel, buy my books and share them with others, and join my Facebook group called “Just God’s Word.”

That’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and Shabbat Shalom!