Friday, April 22, 2005 | 9:59 a.m.
When Las Vegas resident Richard Hill breaks the afikoman, the middle loaf of the matzah bread baked for his congregation's Passover seder on Saturday night, he says he will be remembering two historical events in his Jewish heritage.
How the Jews escaped slavery in Egypt and how he and other Messianic believers escaped slavery to sin with Jesus' atoning death.
As a Jew who believes in Jesus, or Yeshua in the Hebrew, Hill sees Beth Yeshua Messianic Congregation's community seder at the Orleans Saturday night as an opportunity to tell other Jews about how the Passover festival prophecies Jesus' death and to teach Christians more about their Jewish heritage.
The other two Messianic congregations in town, Lev HaShem and Beth Elohenu, are hosting similar open house Passover seders for the same purpose, leaders said.
Jews need to accept Yeshua to be complete, said Hill, who has a master's degree in theology and refers to himself as a messianic pastor. Christians are likewise blessed by acknowledging the Jewishness of their faith.
It's that evangelical focus, however, that often creates tension between Messianic Jews and others in Judaism, Jewish Studies professor Carol-Harris Shapiro said. A Reconstructionist rabbi who teachings at Gratz College in Philadelphia, Harris-Shapiro was one of the first scholars to study the movement in her 1999 book, "Hey, It's Messianic Judaism."
Messianic Jews are often ostracized by other Jews and even misunderstood by Christians because Messianic Jews accept Christ as their savior without fully converting to Christianity, Harris-Shapiro said. They want to continue in their Jewish customs and festivals while accepting theological doctrine that all other branches of Judaism find blasphemous. Messianic Jews then reinterpret Judaism in light of Jesus as the Messiah and try to teach that reinterpretation to other Jews.
"It's very annoying," Harris-Shapiro said. "It's almost like a case of identify theft. It's like when someone takes your credit card and tries to use it to their own advantage."
The annoyance is magnified by the way Messianic Jews often try to present their faith as a completion of Judaism and not a conversion to another religion, Harris-Shapiro and local Rabbi Sanford Akselrad of Congregation Ner Tamid said.
"The controversy is that they pretend to be something they are not," Akselrad said. "In my mind that's the crux of it. You don't have Buddhists for Jesus, you don't have Muslims for Jesus, but you have Jews for Jesus.
"They have stepped outside the boundaries of Judaism and come into another religion, Christianity. They are not completed Jews as they like to say, they are Christians."
The way Messianic Jews celebrate Passover and other Jewish festivals are the most suspect of all, both Harris-Shapiro and Akselrad said.
It's one thing for a Christian to reinterpret the Passover festival in light of his or her belief in Jesus, but Messianic Jews claim that that reinterpretation is God's ultimate interpretation for that event, Akselrad said.
That's offensive to Jews, who do not believe that Jesus was, in any way, the Passover Lamb that Messianic Jews and Christians claim he was, Akselrad said.
"The wine doesn't represent Jesus' blood, the stripping of the Matzah doesn't represent his torture," Akselrad said. "They take all of our Jewish symbols and give them Christian messages. That's not a Jewish seder at all."
Hill, along with Ira Weinstein of Beth Elohenu and Shmuel Oppenheim of Lev HaShem, agree that they do take a "Jesus slant" to all of the Jewish festivals. But they say they don't do it to deceive anyone or to misrepresent Judaism; they say the do it because they truly believe that each festival points to a prophecy Jesus has fulfilled or will fulfill.
The three independent Messianic congregations, with a total of maybe 150 members between them, operate in relative obscurity amid the valley's some 80,000 Jews, and most of their members are "gentile" Christians who enjoy the Jewish worship style.
Many are of mixed Christian and Jewish backgrounds, like Hill, but some, like Weinstein and Oppenheim, were raised Jewish. Jews who accept Jesus often go through painful separations for their families.
All three groups, however, make preaching their beliefs to others central to their ministries, the leaders said. They believe that their message should be preached first to the Jews, then to the rest of the world.
Beth Yeshua is affiliated with CJF Ministries in San Antonio (formerly Christian Jew Foundation), which was started in 1948 by a former Orthodox Jew.
CJF is not as "pushy" as the infamous, Baptist-funded Jews for Jesus, group, but they do have the same scope, Hill said. He and his congregants often pass out tracts to students at UNLV, but they do so in a low-key manner.
"If people want to talk, we are willing to talk," Hill said. "If they want to walk on by, that's fine. I believe in freedom of choice."
Jews believe that God will bring them a messiah, Harris-Shapiro said, but they do not believe that the historical Jesus of Nazareth was that messiah because he did not fulfill the prophecies to restore Israel's kingdom and bring about world peace. The Messianic and Christian teachings that the messiah was God in the flesh and that he was one part of a three-natured God is also against Jewish teaching, Harris-Shapiro said.
"There is very little in Judaism that a Christian cannot accept, but you cannot be in the Jewish faith and say Jesus is my messiah and Jesus is my God," Akselrad said. "You've come into another religion.
But Messianic Jews say that accepting Jesus as the promised Jewish messiah is a completion of Judaism and a fulfillment of a spiritual need.
"Whether you are Jewish or gentile you become spiritually complete," Hill said. "You are new person, that's where the term born-again comes from."
The idea that a Jewish persom must lose his Judaism if he accepts the Jewish messiah is laughable to Messianic Jews, Hill, Weinstein and Oppenheim said, but they say its a huge misconception about their faith.
"I think Christianity is at fault for that," Weinstein said. "There are these unwritten rules, that if you believe in Jesus Christ you must become a Christian. But you can remain a Jew if you want to.
"I'm a Jewish guy who believes in the messiah. And that's a stumbling block for some."
Messianic congregations, like the branches of Judaism, differ in their observance of the Tanakh, or Old Testament, laws, such as the specific regulations for keeping Shabbat (the Sabbath) or eating a kosher diet, leaders said.
Beth Elohenu is almost orthodox in its observance, Lev HaShem is a little bit more liberal and Beth Yeshua gives its congregants the individual freedom to decide the level of their observance.
Messianic Jews prefer the Jewish festivals over Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter because they see themselves as Jewish, all three men said. They also prefer Stars of David to crosses and reject all icons.
Messianic Jews sometimes run into tension with Christians because of their insistence on maintaining the Jewish customs, the congregational leaders said.
"There are Christian people who feel that once you accept Jesus into your life that it is no longer necessary to have a Jewish identity or observance of Torah," Oppenheim said.
Some Christians also believe that they have replaced Jews as God's chosen people, Hill said, which Messianic Jews disagree with. Jews remain God's chosen people, but God has "grafted" Christians into the same family tree, said Hill, quoting from the Apostle Paul in his letter ot the Romans.
Remembrance of past persecution also can sometimes separate Christians and Messianic Jews, the congressional leaders said. Most Messianic Jews wince at the word "Christ" because so often it was followed by "killer" and directed at them before they accepted Yeshua, said Hill, whose Jewish grandparents emmigrated from Germany in 1931.
Hill's grandparents stopped practicing their faith because of the discrimination in the United States, and he subsequently grew up Episcopalian before rediscovering his Jewish roots after college.
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