Introduction

Shalom! My name is Yaacov – Jacob, and someone directed you here because you are Jewish and they were interested in speaking to you about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism.

I know Jewish people are revolted by Jews who believe in Jesus, so you can rest assured my mother is a Gentile Roman Catholic. She doesn't believe what I believe, but I am not halachaly Jewish. My wife and children, however, are.

Now I grew up in the New York area and I was sent both to a Roman Catholic school and the Jewish community center. I had brit milah, plus I was sprinkled as a baby. By the time I became a teenager I was an agnostic. By the time I became a teenager I didn’t know what I believed, I just know what I didn’t. But I had an open mind. Now I always had a sense of identity with Israel and the Jewish people, but I was not halachaly Jewish and I rejected Roman Catholicism as something idolatrous and corrupt. So I'm speaking to you as a Jewish person, and I'd like you to understand why I as a Christian am philo-Semitic, why I support Israel and the Jewish people, but this inevitably leads to the question, why did I bring up my Jewish children to believe that Jesus is a Jew who had a Jewish message taught in a Jewish way for Jewish people?

If you want to look at what’s revolting about Christendom, its ugly history of idolatry and anti-Semitism, I’m with you, my Jewish friend, 100%. They took a Jewish faith and they turned it into a Hellenistic – a Greek, even a Pagan faith; they took a Jewish Messiah and turned Him into a goy; they took a Jewish rabbi and made Him an icon of anti-Semitic sentiment. What they did is not rational and it was completely out of harmony with who He was and what He taught. We have to draw a distinction between the Jewish Jesus and the Jesus of Western Christendom.

The Jewish Jesus was called Rabbi Yeshua bar Josef m’Netseret. His name was not “Jesus Christ”, his name was Rabbi Yeshua bar Josef m’Netseret. He said, “I came for the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. (Mt. 15:24) You may be surprised to know that every writer of the New Testament was a Jew. The only exception would have been one physician who was a Gentile convert to Judaism who wrote one book; all the rest were Jewish including Rabbi Shaul of Tarses who was from the rabbinic school of the Hillel, a disciple of Rabbi Gemaliel, a classmate of Anglios, a classmate of Johanan ben Zaccai. In Judaism, if you're familiar with and been to Yeshiva, you perhaps know.

And so I’m left with this dilemma: I was brought up with what I was told is Christianity, but reading the New Testament I found out it was not Christianity. And there was a Judaism that I was told was the same Judaism as Moses and the prophets. So the same as I read the B’rit Hadasha – the New Testament, and I discovered that Roman Catholicism (and most of Protestantism) was not what Jesus taught, I needed to do the same thing with the Tanak, the Hebrew Scriptures. It says in Proverbs three times that an unequal balance is an abomination to Hashem. (Prov. 11:1; 20:10; 20;23) So in the same way that I discovered that Christianity had mutated into something very different than it was originally, much the same happened to Judaism.

I was shocked to discover that in the Tanak there was no such thing as a “rabbi”. He’s called “Moshe Rabbeinu”, but there was no rabbis. There were “Levim” – “Levites”, priests. And in the New Testament there were no priests! It’s something they’d invented. There were “presbyters” – elders, but there were no priests. Christ was a priest; every Christian was supposed to be a priest, not a separate priesthood. So there were no priests in the New Testament and no rabbis in the Old. I began to understand why a Jewish man, Karl Marx, said religion was a con. But I looked further and I came up with questions, questions that I asked myself, and questions I would like to ask you.

Reject Jesus

Here's a question I would like to ask you: There are two reasons most Jewish people I know – neighbors, friends, family – two reasons most I know reject any idea of Jesus being the Jewish Messiah. Those reasons are always “anti-Semitism” and “Why, if He was the Messiah, did He not bring in worldwide peace?” Therefore He could not be the Messiah. Let's begin with the most sensitive of issues, anti-Semitism.

I had an uncle who was in a German camp. He was a prisoner of war. The Nazis were going to kill Him. He was rescued by the Russians at the last moment as my wife's father was rescued by the Russians at the last moment as he was against the wall about to be shot. The Germans were trying to kill as many Jews as they could before they evacuated, before the retreat in the face of the oncoming invasion. My wife is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Most of her family were murdered. And, of course, they were murdered in the name of Jesus Christ. The remaining orthodox church, the Roman Catholic Church and most of the Lutheran church in Germany collaborated with the Nazis. Hitler quoted Luther at length. It was not just Catholics, it was Protestants. How can I believe that the person in whose name one Inquisition after another, one pogrom after another, and ultimately the Holocaust should be even considered as a possible candidate to be the Jewish Messiah, when in His name nothing but genocidal extermination and persecution has come to Israel and the Jews? That’s the question I asked myself, but this is the question I would like to ask you.

If you were to read the Tanak, “Yirmayah Ha’nabiy” – Jeremiah the Prophet was arrested and thrown into a cistern. (Jer. 38:6) He pointed people to the Law, the Torah. He warned them of impending doom and judgment and God’s anger with them because of idolatry and immorality. And like most of the other prophets he was persecuted. But he was not persecuted in the name of Ba’al; he was not persecuted in the name of Molech. Most of the Hebrew prophets who were persecuted or murdered by their own people were murdered in the name of Yahweh and Moses. They were accused of speaking against the Torah and Moses when they said that God’s judgment was going to come upon Jerusalem.

I recall several years ago when an Orthodox Jew wearing a yarmulke drew a pistol in north Tel Aviv and fired bullets directly into the back of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. He did this in the name of Judaism; he did this in the name of the Torah; he did this in the name of Yahweh; he did this in the name of Moses – “Moshe Rabbeinu”. An Orthodox Jew assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, gunned him down, murdered his own prime minister in the name of Moses and Judaism. Can I reject Moses and Judaism because somebody assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in his name? Can I reject Moses and Judaism because the prophets were persecuted and killed in their name?

Simon bar Kokhba came and was extolled as a hero. He was proclaimed to be the Messiah by Rabbi Akiva in the name of Moses and the Prophets. The Israeli general and archeologist, the first chief of staff of the Israeli military Ya’alon said something different. He described bar Kokhba as something of a brute tyrant who once kicked a 90-year-old rabbi in the head and killed him; a warlord, someone who’d been power-hungry. Some saw him that way, but Rabbi Akiva said he was the Messiah. And in the name of Moses and Judaism, Rabbi Akiva promised the Jewish people he was the Messiah and would bring them deliverance. At the battle of Betar, the worst holocaust in proportionate terms that has ever happened to Israel took place, (something in proportionate terms as bad as the Holocaust of the 1930’s and 40’s) only it happened in their own land. Because Rabbi Akiva proclaimed bar Kokhba to be the Messiah in the name of Moses and Judaism, can I reject Moses and Judaism? No, Rabbi Akiva did not bring peace to Israel and establish worldwide peace through his Messiah bar Kochba. Bar Kochba did not establish worldwide peace and bring peace to Israel even though in the name of Moses and Judaism they said he would.

If you’ve studied Judaism you know about Shabbetai. Most rabbis in major areas of Europe and North Africa, most in major areas and many others in a variety of areas, said he was the Messiah, but he was not a Messiah. In the end he led the people into what can best be described as something debaucherous and grossly disappointing. Yet it was in the name of Moses and the Prophets that the rabbis proclaimed Shabbetai Zevi to be the Messiah. Can I reject Moses and Judaism because the rabbis misled the Jewish people into following Shabbetai Zevi in the name of Moses and Judaism?

Two generations later the rabbis did it again and they said Jacob Frank was the Messiah on a wide scale. But Jacob Frank was not the Messiah, yet in the name of Moses and Judaism the rabbis said he was. And some very bad things happened to the Jewish people. There’ve been many people who the rabbis have said is the Messiah right up to the present age, and they always proclaimed them to be the Messiah in the name of Moses and Judaism. Murder and atrocity was committed in the name of Moses and Judaism. Genocidal persecution of the Jews resulted as a direct result of Rabbi Akiva’s action perpetrated in the name of Moses and Judaism.

On what basis can I reject Moses and Judaism because of what was done in the name of Moses? I cannot reject Moses and Judaism because of what was done in the name of Moses. I have to accept or reject Moses on the basis of what Moses said and did, not on the basis of what others said and did in his name. The issue is not what was done in the name of Moses, the issue is Moses. So then my question to you is, “On what basis can I reject Yeshua – Rabbi Yeshua bar Jozef m’Netseret, whom the Gentiles call 'Jesus of Nazareth' – on what basis can I dismiss Him and reject Him?" On the basis of what was done in His name to the Jewish people and to others? The issue is not what was done and said in His name by others, the issue is what did He say and do? The issue is not what Jesus is said to have said, the issue is not what others did generations and centuries after His public ministry in Israel, the issue is not what others said and did in His name. The issue is not that, the issue is He Himself.

I considered Moses apart from what was done in his name. Now you don't think of it, but goys – Gentiles will say much the same thing about you that you think about them. They have these myths of conspiracy theories and Jewish bankers and Jewish merchants and Jews trying to take over the medical profession and the academic institutions, making Jews the scapegoats for most of man’s faults and problems when in fact we all know there are both good Jews and bad Jews the same as there’s good Gentiles and bad Gentiles. But it’s easy just to say, “Oh, the Jews!”, and it’s just as easy to say, “Oh, the Christians!” No real Jew would commit murder in the name of Judaism; no real Jew would persecute their own prophets in the name of Judaism; no real Christian would commit murder in the name of Christianity. no real Christians would murder God's own chosen people, the Jews, in the name of a Jewish faith. Christianity is a Jewish faith.

How can you reject Jesus on the basis of what was done in His name unless you reject Moses on the same grounds? I don't reject Moses for those reasons, it wouldn't be fair to Moses and it wouldn't be fair to myself. The issue is was Moses right? I hope you won’t reject Jesus on those grounds. It wouldn't be fair to Him and it wouldn't be fair to you. The issue is, “Was Yeshua right?” Not the Gentile “Jesus”, not the Catholic or Protestant “Jesus”, but the Jewish Jesus: Was He right?

By the 2nd Century the Jewish historian Max Dimont tells us that 25% of the Jews in Jerusalem believed he was the Messiah. The only reason Gentiles believe in Him is because Jews believed it first. The only reason there’s a New Testament is that Jews wrote it. Both those calling themselves Jews and those calling themselves Christians are the products of revisionism, a rewritten distortion of history. There is nothing Gentile about Jesus or His message except that He loves Gentiles and wanted to save them and wanted them to believe in the Jewish God and the Jewish way of salvation. That is all. “la’or goyim” – “a light to the Gentiles”. (Is. 42:6).

That's my first question, my dear Jewish friend, how can you reject Jesus because of what was done in His name when the same things were done in the name of Moses and Judaism?

Worldwide Peace

But there’s another question I’d like to ask you. That question is, “If Jesus was the Messiah, why didn’t He bring in worldwide peace?” Why was there a Holocaust? Why were there Inquisitions and pogroms? Why is there starvation in Africa? Why is the environment being destroyed?

Why has the world become systematically worse with everybody in it and so commonly the Jews getting the worst of the worst? How could He be the Messiah? Why didn’t He bring in worldwide peace? Where is the Messianic redemption? It’s ridiculous to believe He’s the Messiah, the world wouldn’t be the way it is. Things have only gotten worse for us. How can you believe in Him? That’s the question.

Let’s turn – not to any Christian source, not to any Gentile source, not to any human source – let’s turn to the word of God, the Hebrew prophet Daniel 9, “Daniye’l Hanawbe”. In Daniel 9 we read verses 26 and 27…

Hamashiach hitzarek lavo v’l’moot lifneh hahorban shel ha beit ha migdash ha shenit.

The Messiah would have to come and be cut off – be killed, before the destruction of the Second Temple. "But that’s your Christian interpretation”. No, I’m not looking at Christian interpretations; that’s what the text says, and try reading Sanhedrin 96 to 98b. Why do the rabbis say there’s a curse on reading Daniel 9? For the time of the Messiah’s coming is foretold in it. And as we read, the Sanhedrin wept, “Oy! Oy! The Messiah has come? No, the temple is destroyed and He’s not come! Woe unto us!” God cannot break His word. The ancient sages understood this was about the Messiah. He had to come and die. “Wars and desolations are determined to the end”. (Dan. 9:26)

In Judaism the rabbis go to the greatest lengths to try to reconcile two irreconcilable pictures of the Messiah, “HaMashiach ben Yosef” and “HaMashiach ben David”, “the Messiah the Son of Joseph” and “the Messiah the Son of David”. The “Conquering King” and the “Suffering Servant” we call “ben Ephraim”. Some rabbis said one will resurrect the other. It’s two Messiahs. Is it two Messiah’s or one Messiah with two comings? Daniel was right; it was one Messiah with two comings. He was shown the future. This is what Moses spoke of, this is how it will happen: He will come, He will be cut off, He will be killed. “Wars and desolations are determined until the end”, then He will come again.

In His first coming He comes as the Suffering Servant in the character of Jozef from the B’reshit, the book of Genesis, as you think of Joseph in the book of Genesis:

His own Jewish brothers rejected him, but the goys accepted him.

He went from a place of condemnation to a place of exaltation in a single day as did Rabbi Yeshua.

Yosef was betrayed by his brother Yehuda for 20 pieces of silver as Jesus was betrayed by Yehuda – Judas for 30 pieces of silver.

Joseph’s brothers did not recognize him at the first coming, they thought he was a goy, an Egyptian. And so Jesus’ brothers recognize Him at the second coming. They think He’s a goy, He’s for the Christians. Hollywood gave Him blond hair and blue eyes, but He did not have blond hair and blue eyes.

My question is this: If the Hebrew prophet who was given the clearest picture of what the future would be like, if he was given the most accurate detail of how the Messianic redemption would come to Israel and enter the world, if he said the Messiah would come and be cut off and wars and desolations would be determined to the end, how can you say Jesus was not the Messiah because there’s wars and desolations? It’s supposed to have happened.

Think of Moses the first time he tried to save his people – they rejected him; it was the second time they accepted him as with Joseph. The first time they rejected him, the second time they accepted him. Why should the Messiah be any different? The Hebrew scriptures do not say He will bring in worldwide peace, it says He will come and bring an opponent; it says He will come and be cut off; it says wars and desolations will be determined until the end – then He will come and bring in worldwide peace. In His first coming He came to pay the price for the sin that prevents the peace from coming. In His return he will bring the peace. Shalom alkot Yisra’el.

I don't understand the argument. How can you say He's not the Messiah because He didn't bring in worldwide peace but was killed when that's exactly what Daniel said the Messiah was supposed to do? Why don’t the rabbis tell you this? I'm afraid you’ll have to ask them, I’m not a rabbi, but I know what their ancient rabbis said, “Don't read Daniel 9, there’s a curse if you do”. What are they afraid of? Can you really believe that God would have put something in His Word that He didn’t want you to understand? Why would He put it there?

There was a rabbi who hated Christians because he had known nothing but persecution in Eastern Europe. His family had been terribly persecuted. His name was Rabbi Leopold Cohen. Only once in his life did he ever see a New Testament and he picked it up and threw it against the wall in violent anger because of the pogroms his people had experienced in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. In desperation to flee the anti-Semitism he arrived in New York City and there he began to study and study and study. He always studied Torah and he always studied Talmud. He studied Mishnah, he read the Midrashim. Be he decided instead of studying rabbinic commentary on the Prophets he would study the Prophets. And when he came to Daniel 9 he had questions he could not answer. So he went to the Talmudic literature, he went to the tractates like Sanhedrin, and he discovered what I discovered: The Messiah had to come and die before the Second Temple would be destroyed before 70 A.D.

That's my question. If Rabbi Yeshua – Jesus only did what the Messiah was prophesied as going to have to do, how can you reject on the basis of having fulfilled the prophecy? You can reject somebody on the basis of having not fulfilled the prophecy, but how can you logically, rationally as a Jew before God reject Him on the basis of fulfilling what He was supposed to?

Anti-Semitism

Now another question: if “Yasha’yah Hanavi” – Isaiah the prophet in chapter 11 said…

The nations will resort to the root of Jesse…

…the “sores Yisay”..

…the peoples…

…the “ammim”.

The rabbis have always said the “Sores Yisay” is the Messiah. Jews and Christians, their scholars have always agreed: “the nations”, “the Gentiles”. “the peoples” will come to the “Root of Jesse”.

I look at an anti-Semitic world. I look at a world where becoming a Christian in Saudi Arabia somebody is beheaded or hung. A world where in Sudan nearly 2-1/2 million Christians have already been killed and more facing the prospect of death. Yet Gentiles of so-called Christian nations remain almost silent, no one calling for a boycott on Saudi Arabia oil or an academic boycott on the many nations that persecute Christians: Islamic countries. But when the one nation in the Middle East that protects the rights of Arab Christians, Israel, the one nation that protects the rights of Arab Christians defends themselves from this same militant Islam that murders Christians, everybody wants to condemn Israel. It's not logical, it’s not rational. Israel is treating most Christians (apart from Jewish ones), apart from Jewish believers in Jesus, they treat most Christians better than Christians treated them, except in the United States and, to a degree, in Britain. Most nations have never given Jews the kind of freedom that Israel gives to Christians. It’s not rational that they hate Israel; it's not rational-behaving people who receive three quarters of the Nobel prizes for the advancement of science, chemistry, physics, and especially biomedical sciences that have saved countless lives. Why would you hate these people? It’s not rational.

All over the world there’s anti-Semitism. Even people saying they’re Christian, there’s anti-Semitism. Although all four Gospels make it clear that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate – the Roman government has legal responsibility for His death – and although Jesus said, “I lay My life down, nobody takes it from Me”, (Jn. 10:18) and although Christians believe that God said He was going to put the Messiah to death as an atonement for sin, although Jesus never blamed anybody for His death, and although the apostles said it was the Roman government together with the Sanhedrin but it was not the Jewish people, although blaming the death of the Jesus on the Jews is directly contrary to history and to the teaching of the New Testament, they’re still saying the Jews killed Jesus. It’s not rational. No, this anti-Semitism is not rational, but there’s something even more irrational.

“We hate you, Jew! You’re a kike! You’re a yid! You’re a sheenie! Get out of here! We hate you! You’re no good! We don’t want you in our land and to go to your own land you have no right there either! You have no right to exist! But we’re going to worship your God.” We hate you but we love your Messiah; we’re going to follow your Messiah; Why will Eskimos worship a Jewish God? Why will Pygmies worship a Jewish God? Why will Scandinavians worship a Jewish God? It makes no sense. If you hate these people, why do you worship their God? Because “the nations will resort to the root of Jesse”.

My question, might dear Jewish friend, is you and I both hate anti-Semitism but you and I are at a loss to explain it or at least intellectually. We can come up with some explanations but the entire history of it coming back to the same thing again and again? It’s not logical. But if you hate somebody, why would you follow one of them? Why would you believe their books and worship their God? There’s only One, One, and One alone who could make people worship the God of a nation and race they otherwise hate.

Now I’m not saying true Christians – born-again Christians, real evangelicals – I’m not saying that they hate the Jewish people. If you look at the countries with a high evangelical population you'll find even in the Holocaust it was countries like Holland and so forth, in Denmark, that protected the Jews. It was mainly the Catholic and nominal Protestant countries that persecuted them.

The American Jewish Congress, the American College of Rabbis, knows very well the backbone of Jewish support for Israel in America is not the Jewish community, there's only 6 million in North America at most. It is the evangelical Christians who are pro-Zionist. Most of them. Not all Christians are anti-Semitic. You see, the same as there are people who will hate you because you are a Jew, claiming to be Christian, there are other Christians who will love you because you are a Jew. They will say, “How can we worship a Jewish God and believe in a Jewish Messiah and read a Jewish book and stake our eternal destiny, our faith on it and hate these people who gave it to us?” They’re not all irrational, but you shouldn’t be irrational either.

Many people calling themselves Christians are behaving irrationally. They’re worshiping a Jewish God and believing in a Jewish Messiah while hating Jews. It’s irrational. But don’t you be an irrational Jew. It’s a rational question that deserves a rational answer. If He is not the Messiah who would make the Gentiles worship your God, who is? Why else do they worship your God if He is not the one who God said would make them do it?

Which Rabbi

OK, another question - also from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah (“Yasha’yah Hanavi”), Isaiah 52 and 53. He said, “Kullanu k'tson tainu…” (Is. 53:6)

All of us like sheep have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way;

In the Middle Ages, a rabbi from France called Rashi said that this was about the Jewish people suffering for the Gentile nations, of vicarious atonement. It wasn’t about the Messiah, it was a about the Jews themselves.

Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, And like a root out of parched ground; He has no stately form or majesty That we should look upon Him, Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him. He was despised and forsaken of men, A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; And like one from whom men hide their face He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely our griefs He Himself bore, And our sorrows He carried; Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, Smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was pierced through…

…as in crucified…

…for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way; But the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all To fall on Him.

The rabbis say this is about the suffering Jewish people since Rashi. What is it that the Targum Johannan and the ancient rabbis before Rashi say it was about? The Messiah. Why did Rabbi Avraham Farisel say this looks like Jesus? Before Rashi they didn’t say that. This was included by Eliezer Ha Kalir in the synagogue liturgy for Yom Kippur. This one whom God would smite would become an atonement for sin – a “korban”, a human sacrifice.

Yet to this the rabbis object. Judaism says the “akada” is against human sacrifice; it was an abomination. Why would God have somebody sacrifice a human when He said it was evil? In the akada God told Abraham, “Don’t sacrifice your son”, and Christians would, of course, say it was because He was going to sacrifice His. The rabbis say human sacrifice is anti-Jewish. I agree that human sacrifice to other gods is demonic; however, the same Rashi who said this is about the Jewish people said it is a human sacrifice! He said it is a human sacrifice! He said it’s the Jews suffering vicariously for the Gentile nations. We can’t have it both ways.

Either Judaism does allow humans to suffer vicariously for the sins of others or it doesn't. Rashi and those who believe Jesus to be the Messiah agree it does. How can you say God does not allow you a human sacrifice for sin on behalf of someone else when the Jewish interpretation itself says it is?

The question is, who was suffering? Was it Israel or was it the Messiah? Well, Isaiah repeatedly castigated Israel for its sin; this servant of the Lord was innocent. He had done no wrong, Isaiah says. He’d done no wrong at all.

He was cut off out of the land of the living For the transgression of my people, for whom the stroke was due…”

The Gentiles were not God’s people at that time. He was cut off for the sake of Israel’s sin. He came to the Gentiles afterwards. How could it be Israel when Israel had sin? In a broad sense it resembles Israel, but this was a sinless servant. The question is not who was right, the Christians or Rashi, the question is who was right, Rashi or the earlier rabbis who said it was the Messiah. It is the Messiah. It’s not a question of who's right, the Christians or Rashi, it’s a question of which rabbi do you believe? That is my question.

How could it be the Jewish people primarily if they had sin? How could it be the Jewish people suffering for the sins of the Gentiles when they had sin? This was a sinless servant. And how can you say that God would not let one die for the sin of another when Judaism itself says the direct contrary?

The Final Question

But I have a final question. I’m going to read from the Hebrew prophet Zechariah 12…

The burden of the word of the Lord concerning Israel. Thus declares the Lord who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth, and forms the spirit of man within him,

“Behold, I am going to make Jerusalem a cup that causes reeling to all the peoples around; and when the siege is against Jerusalem, it will also be against Judah. It will come about in that day that I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples; all who lift it will be severely injured. And all the nations of the earth will be gathered against it.

The issue is Jerusalem, the final status of Jerusalem. Not the West Bank, not the Gaza strip, not the Golan Heights, Jerusalem is the issue. “All the nations” will come against it.

When the Chinese massacred between 7-8,000 students witnessed by over 1 billion people on television in Tiananmen Square, how many UN resolutions were passed condemning China? None.

When the Moslems massacred 2.3 million black Christians in Sudan – Islamic militias, how many UN resolutions, how many Security Council resolutions, how many calls for boycotts on Sudan? None.

How many UN resolutions passed against Israel? How many Security Council resolutions passing? 50% of all resolutions in the General Assembly and more than 50% in the Security Council. Go ahead, kill a couple of million blacks. Who cares? They’re poor, they’re black and they have no oil. Who went to the Gaza Strip to get people to stop shooting Katyusha rockets and killing your children? The world wants to condemn you.

It makes no sense, but how will this end? Zechariah tells us in this chapter in verse 9…

“And in that day I will set about to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced…

…crucified…

…and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son…

Who said so? Jacob Prasch? No. Try Rabbi Moshe Elshick. Read what the sages said about this and who it was. They’ll look upon Him pierced and mourn as one mourns for an only son. The one we rejected, the one whose name we spit at, the one we curse is the one who’s come to save us? Yes, He is coming to save you. That is my question.

If He is the one who fulfilled these prophecies, if He had to come and die already, if He was the atonement for your sin, if He’s the one coming to save Israel, and if He’s the one who has already come to save you, do you want to be saved? How can anybody call this rejecting Judaism? That is my question. How can rejecting a Jewish Messiah who taught a Jewish thing in a Jewish way to Jewish people and made non-Jews believe in a Jewish God and read a Jewish book and believe a Jewish book, how can anybody call that “non-Jewish”. “anti-Jewish”. or departing from Judaism? It may be a departure from what people did to Judaism, it may be a departure from the Judaism responsible for the assassination of Rabin, it may be a departure from the Judaism that proclaimed bar Kochba from being the Messiah, but it is not a departure from the Judaism of your fathers. of the patriarchs, or of Moses and the Prophets.

My Jewish friend, return from sin. You made teshuva, you asked the God of your fathers to forgive your sin that Yeshua paid for in His death. In His resurrection He rose to give you eternal life.

Yes, He did raise. Who said so? Jacob Prasch? No, try reading The Resurrection of Jesus by Rabbi Pinchas Lapide, Orthodox professor of Hebrew University. Try reading Rabbi David Flusser, Orthodox professor, Hebrew University. From a Jewish perspective the resurrection of Jesus is irrefutable. The idea that a Messiah would come and die and then raise again, that’s what the Chabad say about Schneerson, only Schneerson didn’t raise from the dead, the rabbis say he raised from the dead.

Jesus came and He would die at Pesach and after dying at Pesach He rose from the dead. His rabbis didn’t like Him but said He did miracles as no other rabbi. His disciples did miracles in His name including raising others from the dead. Coming to die at Pesach, raising from the dead doing miracles, His disciples doing miracles, and then ascending to heaven from the Mount of Olives. From where do I quote? The Gospels? No, I quote from the avida zerah. That was not written by Jews who believed in Jesus, that was written by rabbis who were against Jews believing in Jesus. When your fathers will admit these things it’s one thing, when your opponents say it’s true it’s something else. Is He the Messiah? Yes, He is. It’s your decision.