They Just Don’t Get It
I am all for people not willing to compromise on tenets of their faith and that includes the belief by many Christians that all people, including Jews, should one day accept Jesus Christ as their savior. If some Jew expresses interest in becoming Christian, go ahead and try and convert them. It is painful for me to think of a Jew actively leaving their religion, but this is the way of the free world. Conversely, if a Christian expressed interest in accepting upon themselves Judaism, many rabbis would probably raise the issue of conversion and I fully support this approach. What does get me very angry is when Christians show very little respect for Jews who want to live as Jews and are looking for opportunities to convert them. For example, the following news item from a Jewish newspaper in Houston, the Jewish Herald-Voice.
A group of missionaries ran a large operation across the street from the Jewish Community Center of Houston on April 26, as 300 Jewish teens hosted a sports and arts carnival for special needs children and families at the JCC.
It gets better. (Emphasis added.)
The missionaries camp on Brays Bayou outside the JCC nearly every Sunday in the late afternoon, usually in small groups of three to five. This past Sunday, however, more than a dozen missionaries turned up, staffing overlapping shifts. The group was made up of seniors, young adults, teens and children, and English and Spanish speakers. The missionaries arrived hours earlier, and stayed longer, than previous weeks’ operations, coinciding with the time frame of the JCC’s publicized J-Serve 2009 event.
The missionaries were from a Jewish-Messianist/Jews for Jesus church which is a member of the Southern Baptist Convention, a mainstream Christian denomination by most accounts. For more on this church see here. For all of the criticism that many people have for the Catholic Church, I don’t think that anything like this is going to be coming out of your local parish, at least not the one in my neighborhood. After reading an article like this, you wonder what the uproar would be if a bunch of Jews parked in front of a center for Christian communal activity and starting trying to convince them that their faith was false and if they want the real deal they better head on over to the local synagogue. The good news, no pun intended, is that apparently this church is the exception in the Houston area.
Though greater Houston is home to several messianic groups that claim to be “synagogues,” as well as many missionary churches, only Beth Yeshua HaMashiach sends members to proselytize, on a weekly basis, in front of the JCC and in the surrounding neighborhood. The group carries out its missionary operations during peak traffic times at and around the JCC.
Not to let the Jews off the hook, the article contains an incorrect statement.
Moreover, Jewish law indicates that a Jew who converts to another religion, including Christianity, no longer is a Jew (Maimonides, Hilchot Mamrim Perek 3, Halacha 1-3; Mishnah Torah, Avodat Kochavim 2:5).
The source in Hilchot Mamrim has nothing to do with converting to another religion and the source from Hilchot Avodat Kochavim is specifically talking about conversion to an idolatrous religion and it is not clear whether in this case the Rambam considers Christianity as an idolatrous religion. For some discussion of the second source see here . Lastly, Maimonides’ opinion in Hilchot Avodat Kochavim and on heretics in general is not necessarily the normative one. See here, here, and here.
May 1st, 2009 at 3:31 pm
The thing is when you are a former Christian trying to convert to Judaism, a rabbi will ask you if you’ve looked into your religion. They’ll try to get you to go back. They don’t just jump at the chance to convert you. I doubt that Christians do the same.
May 3rd, 2009 at 4:30 pm
As a general rule, a Rabbi must discourage and turn away a potential convert at least 3 times. It’s not until that person shows intense commitment that they even begin to open the doors for conversion… and the process (if done according to Jewish law) is not an easy thing to get through.
May 3rd, 2009 at 4:43 pm
According to the Torah, any time a person or object is worshiped or considered an intermediary between us & God, it’s considered idolatry. In fact, in Judaism, we are permitted to enter into a mosque, but not a church… because Islam is not idolatry, but Christianity is.
May 6th, 2009 at 7:35 am
but what if a tenet of their faith is that they have an obligation to convert others? is it troublesome if they don’t compromise on that?
kt,
josh
May 6th, 2009 at 10:53 am
I realize that it is a tenet of their faith, but I am not sure if as a majority they understand both the religious and the social implications of that tenet. If the shoe was on the other foot, I do not think that they would be very happy about Jews trying to convert them. Modern society IMHO requires a certain degree of contrition on the part of religions in order to live peacefully with one another. In their hearts can they still pray for the conversion of the Jews and can they still help Jews who express interest to convert? Sure, and it is none of my business what they believe and how they practice at home, but I do think that the modern open society requires compromise.
May 9th, 2009 at 4:52 am
Christians convert from one form of Christianity to another, to Buddhism, to the Sikh religion, and to Islam all the time.
I have been studying the various groups that complain about stealth Jihad. Either they are Jewish, funded by Jews or mobilized by Jews.
While conversion to Judaism by Muslims was quite rare, non-Muslim groups within the Muslim world were not infrequently converted to Judaism, and there seems to be a good deal of conversion to Judaism in Central and E. Europe well into the 18th century.
Resistance to conversion seems to arise most strongly in the 19th century as Ethnic Ashkenazim developed an ethnic sense of Jewishness (Yiddishkeyt), which often did not include non-Ashkenazim and excluded Jews after conversion from participation in ethnic Jewishness.