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The Black Hebrew Israelites or Jews Who are Gods chosen people? · Health and Healing Dealing with Trauma and Addictions

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hey guys, once again it's your man Mike D.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Have a little interesting article that I've read here recently, and I wanted to share that with you all today.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's in reference to what some folks call a sect, others call a movement, others refer to as a religious group, and some say they are a cult.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Black Hebrew Israelites.
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  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about it.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Black Hebrew Israelites movement has a complex history in the United States, with sects and branches splintered into dozens of branches over theological and leadership disputes.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: The movement, which is now best known for its confrontational brand of street preaching in urban areas, ideates back to the nineteenth century.
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  SPEAKER_00: What unites most black Israelites is the belief that they are the true descendants of the biblical Jews.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some sects within the movement disdain modern white Jews.
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  SPEAKER_00: Black Hebrew lights claim to be from the twelve tribes of Israel who will one day be given dominion by God to rule over the earth.
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  SPEAKER_00: They believe that Jewish people are fake Jews, imposters who will be supplanted by them in the future.
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  SPEAKER_00: They also believe that God will make whites who these groups consider spawn of the devil into their slaves, forced into eternal servitude.
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  SPEAKER_00: While not all black Hebrew Israelites have these characteristics, all of the groups that lists as hate groups do.
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  SPEAKER_00: If the Hebrew Israelites consider themselves true Jews of Scripture, God's chosen people, how can anyone disclaim that?
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  SPEAKER_00: More importantly, if the current Jews of the day claim they are true Jews, God's chosen people, who's to say they are or aren't?
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  SPEAKER_00: As mentioned, if some of the Hebrew Israelite groups or sects are considered hate groups, why aren't the KKK considered a hate group?
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  SPEAKER_00: Or some of the other groups that clearly are hate groups and terrorist groups labeled as such.
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  SPEAKER_00: In reading Exodus chapter three of the Bible, we're reading about the Jews or the Israelite or both.
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  SPEAKER_00: The purpose is to teach us the necessity, the method, and the results of God's purpose in redemption, or his redempted plan.
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  SPEAKER_00: Israel's bondage, deliverance, and their relation to God is the subject matter.
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  SPEAKER_00: The principal things contained in Exodus are the accomplishment of God's promises made to Abraham concerning the increase of his seed, the rigorous treatment of the Israelites and their sufferings in Egypt, the Lord's emancipating them from bondage, and the ordinances of the tabernacles worship appointed in the wilderness.
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  SPEAKER_00: Throughout the whole there is a figure of representation of the passages of the people of God out of spiritual Egypt through the wilderness of this world to victorious Canaan and the various things which they must meet in their journey.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so God sends Moses to Pharaoh with a warning.
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  SPEAKER_00: Let my people go.
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  SPEAKER_00: A Jew is a member of a Jewish people, an ethno-religious group which shared ancient ancestry, history, culture, and religion, or Judaism, tracing back to the Israelites of the ancient Levant.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jewish identity is determined by being born to a Jewish mother or through conversion.
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  SPEAKER_00: They are a diverse worldwide people connected by sharing traditions, often including Hebrew, rather than just religious practice.
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  SPEAKER_00: So then what is an Israelite?
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  SPEAKER_00: An Israelite is a descendant of the biblical patriarchs, Jacob, renamed Israel, who formed the twelve ancient Hebrew tribes.
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  SPEAKER_00: They are the foundational people of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
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  SPEAKER_00: Historically, this term refers to the ancient people, while in modern usage it is largely synonymous with Hebrew or Jew.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Black Hebrew Israelites, African American religion community in Israel, the members of which consider themselves to be the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.
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  SPEAKER_00: Black Hebrew Israelites hold religious beliefs that differ from those of the modern Jewish communities in Israel.
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  SPEAKER_00: Black Hebrew Israelites permit polygamy and forbid birth control.
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  SPEAKER_00: Leaders decide who were married and whether marriage annulments will be permitted, and they perform wedding ceremonies.
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  SPEAKER_00: Black Hebrew Israelites are vegans avoiding the consumption of meat, dairy, eggs, and sugar.
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  SPEAKER_00: Members adopt Hebrew names to replace names they believe could be derived from slavery.
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  SPEAKER_00: Most black Hebrew Israelites live in Daimona, Israel, with the first ones arriving in that country in nineteen sixty-nine.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sybar Modern Daimona was established in nineteen fifty five as a residential center for the workers of the Dead Sea work at Sidam, twenty nine miles east by the road.
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  SPEAKER_00: The site was picked largely because of elevation about 1,900 feet above sea level and some 3,300 feet above the present level of the Dead Sea and consequent cool nights.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the 1970s, the population of Daimona had greatly increased or exceeded the planner of about 5,000.
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  SPEAKER_00: In addition to the employees of the Dead Sea work, many of whom later moved to Arad, several miles closer to Saddam.
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  SPEAKER_00: It houses the workers for the prosphate mines at Oran, 14 miles south.
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  SPEAKER_00: Domona has textile mills and porcelain articles, are all also manufactured there.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nearby is the Nagav Nuclear Research Center, which includes a research reactor and facilities for nuclear waste disposal at its site.
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  SPEAKER_00: Domona is connected to the National Railway Grid by line from Bersheba, Incorporated 1969.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the population is about 32,000 people in 2008.
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  SPEAKER_00: In 2019, about 34,500.
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  SPEAKER_00: The group began in Chicago in 1967 under the leadership of Ben Amin Ben Israel, an African American whose birth name was Ben Carter.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ben Israel appointed 30 disciples, and in 1967 he moved the group to Liberia before embarking for their final destination to Israel.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Black Hebrew Israelite claimed the Jewish heritage provoked substantial debate in Israel.
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  SPEAKER_00: Israeli law offers citizens for all Jews throughout the world, but the black Hebrew Israelites could produce no evidence to substantiate their Jewish heritage.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sybar.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Israeli law, the legal practices and institutions of modern Israel in ancient times when the people of Israel lived in their homeland, they created their own law, the law of the Torah and the law of the Mishnah and the Telmud.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then came the separation of land and people for more than eighteen hundred years.
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  SPEAKER_00: The law left the land together with those who had created it, and the land acquired other laws, changing from time to time with the change of consecutive conquerors.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Jews took their law with them wherever they went, continued to develop it and submitted it to wherever their communities enjoyed any measure of autonomy.
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  SPEAKER_00: When the Jews thus eventually returned to their ancient land in the twentieth century, they brought back with them a dual legal heritage, that of the historic Jewish law and that of the laws of the country in which they had been living.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so after much investigation, the chief rabbinate of Israel thus decided that the Black Hebrew Israelites were not really Jewish and were not entitled to citizenship.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Black Hebrew Israelites entered Israel with temporary visas, which were periodically renewed while the government considered their claims to citizenship.
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  SPEAKER_00: They were allowed to live, work, and receive health care in Israel and were even given loans so they could meet their basic needs.
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  SPEAKER_00: However, their non citizen status did not provide the free education for their children, tax exemptions, and loans for permanent settlement that were available to Jewish immigrants.
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  SPEAKER_00: Throughout the seventies and eighties, the Israeli government did not take steps to deport the black Hebrew Israelites, but neither did it offer them citizenship, which led to a heated discussion in the country.
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  SPEAKER_00: The black Hebrew Israelites could obtain full citizenship by formally converting to Judaism, but they refused.
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  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the black Hebrew Israelite population of Demona grew aid by birthrights among the group and by additional members entering Israel.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some black Hebrew Israelites, frustrated by their lack of citizenship, denounced Israel and adopted anti-Semitic rhetoric, arguing that the white Jews were frauds and that the Black Hebrew Israelites were the only true Jewish descendants.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cyber.
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  SPEAKER_00: Antisemitism, hostility toward a discrimination against the Jews.
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  SPEAKER_00: The term anti-Semitism was coined in 1879 by a German agitator, Wilhelm Maher, to designate the anti-Jewish campaigns underway in Central Europe at that time.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nazi anti-Semitism, which culminated in the Holocaust, had a racist dimension that it targeted Jews because of their supposed biological characteristics.
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  SPEAKER_00: Even those who had themselves converted to other religions or whose parents were converts.
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  SPEAKER_00: This variety of anti-Jewish racism dates only to the emergence of so-called scientific racism in the nineteenth century and is different in nature from earlier anti-Jewish prejudices.
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  SPEAKER_00: We'll come back and talk about that in a few.
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  SPEAKER_00: Critics in Israel labeled the black Hebrew Israelites a cult, a charge the group adamantly denied and argued for their expulsion.
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  SPEAKER_00: However, proposals for their deportation met with hunger strikes in Demona and objections from supporters in the United States.
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  SPEAKER_00: The United States Congress and African American leadership in the United States argued in favor of the Black Hebrew Israelites' continued residence in Israel and sent funds, including subsidies provided by Congress, to establish a school for the Black Hebrew Israelites children.
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  SPEAKER_00: In 1990, the Black Hebrew Israelites and the Israeli Ministry of the Interior reached an agreement.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Black Hebrew Israelites would be granted tourist status for one year until they were accorded temporary residency status.
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  SPEAKER_00: Temporary resident status would be reviewed five years in 1995 and reviewed periodically thereafter.
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  SPEAKER_00: Status as temporary residents made the black Hebrew Israelites eligible for financial support from the Israeli government.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Israeli government later also agreed to build a permanent organic farming village for the group in the Negev region of Israel.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Black Hebrew Israelites continue to live and work in Israel, earning money through farming, their well-known choir, sowing, and a vegan food factory and restaurants.
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  SPEAKER_00: According to Exodus chapter three, let my people go, who is God referring to?
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, they both make claims to be the chosen people.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Bible's not real clear about the chosen people.
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  SPEAKER_00: So who are the chosen people?
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  SPEAKER_00: The Jewish people, as expressed in the idea that they have been chosen by God as his special people, the term implies that the Jewish people have been chosen by God to worship only Him and to fulfill the mission of proclaiming His truth among all nations of the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: This idea is a recurring theme in Jewish liturgy and is expressed in many passages of Scripture.
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  SPEAKER_00: For example, for you are a people holy to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people of his own possession, out of all of the nations that are on the face of the earth.
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  SPEAKER_00: Deuteronomy 14 and 2.
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  SPEAKER_00: The term chosen people is a free translation for the biblical terms or treasured people, and Nahula, which is Greek for heritage people.
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  SPEAKER_00: The idea of chosen people has had a profound and lasting effect on the Jews because it imparted a special significance to their relationship with God.
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  SPEAKER_00: It implied a covenant between God and the people of Israel, whereby Israel was to be faithful to God and obey his commandments.
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  SPEAKER_00: And God in turn was to protect and bless his faithful people.
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  SPEAKER_00: Being chosen brought to Israel not more privileges, but rather special obligations to carry out the will of God.
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  SPEAKER_00: Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people, and walk in all the way that I have commanded you, that it may be well with you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah seven twenty three.
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  SPEAKER_00: Being God's chosen people carried with it a great spiritual responsibility and implied more demanding standards and the necessity to develop a spiritual vigor worthy of those whom God had selected to persevere and transmit his revelation to all of the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Old Testament contains variant traditions of to when God selected Israel to be his chosen people.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some passages imply the covenant was made when God led them out of Egypt, whereas others state that God had already chosen Israel at the time of Abraham and other patriarchs.
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  SPEAKER_00: Critical analysis of the Old Testament has revealed a long and complex evolution of this doctrine in the history of ancient Israel.
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  SPEAKER_00: The notion evidently originated in the basic concept of Israel's early nationalistic religion that Yahweh was Israel's one and only national God and that in turn Israel was God's people and his alone.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the new concept of the world unity and of God as a universal deity that later arose in Israel during the eighth century BC conflicted with this, since God as the deity of Israel alone was obviously contradictory to the new conception of him as the creator of the universe and the God of all humanity.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the following centuries, a slow and gradual harmonization of these two conflicting principles occurred, beginning with the prophet Amos and continuing through the period of the Babylonian exile until the chosen people doctrine emerged from the synthesis in its fullest form of the utterances of the prophet Isaiah.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Exodus period gave rise to the belief, as stated by Jeremiah, that it was Yahweh's avowed purpose to eventually restore Israel to national independence and that all other nations were doomed to destruction for not recognizing Yahweh as God.
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  SPEAKER_00: After this had happened, as stated by Ezekiel, a renewed Israel purged of its sins would be restored to its homeland and would exist thereafter in the supreme nation on earth.
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  SPEAKER_00: Near the end of the Babylonian excile, Isaiah brought the doctrine to the climax of its evolution.
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  SPEAKER_00: This prophet emphatically denied the existence of all gods except Yahweh.
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  SPEAKER_00: He asserted that the events of history and the destinies of all nations were shaped toward the fulfillment of God's purposes and that this purpose was ultimately to unite all humanity as one people in their acknowledgement of God Himself.
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  SPEAKER_00: Israel was to be God's instrument to accomplish this great revelation and would serve as the messenger and witness of God's reality and law to all other nations on the earth.
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  SPEAKER_00: The people of Israel would exemplify and teach God's statutes to the rest of humanity and would thus help bring the entire human race to salvation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Israel would be the savior of humanity and the national embodiment of the Messiah, even if this meant suffering for Israel in the performance of its divinely appointed mission.
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  SPEAKER_00: In this way, the Jewish people's perilous historical situation was intrinsically linked to their sense of religion mission and spiritual destiny.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the concept of the chosen people came to form perhaps the strongest link in the Jewish group's identity.
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  SPEAKER_00: After Isaiah, the idea of the chosen people underwent little change, all sufficient as it already was in reconciling Jewish nationalism with belief in the universal deity.
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  SPEAKER_00: The eternal nature of the Jewish people's covenant with God formed a bulwark of the rabbinic community response to the new religion of Christianity, which claimed that its believers were now the elect of God and constituted to true Israel.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because Jews believed that the Jewish people's covenant with God was for all time.
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  SPEAKER_00: Christianity's challenge was bound to appear obviously invalid to Jews.
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  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, the Jews interpreted their sufferings upon the loss of their homeland and throughout all the peregrinations of the diaspora as both consequent and partial fulfillment of the covenant.
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  SPEAKER_00: They believed their dispersion and the persecution to be in part due to their sinful and failure to keep God's commands, and they view their suffering as manifestations of his love.
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  SPEAKER_00: For faithfully enduring God's chastisement, they would eventually regain his favor.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Jews interpreted their very persecution as the sign that God had indeed chosen them to carry out his purpose.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Modern Judaism has toned down the historic exaltation of the Jewish people above others in the liturgy, has retained the concept of the chosen people, stressing the prophetic idea of Judaism's world mission.
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  SPEAKER_00: The concept that the Jewish people are a consecrated brotherhood destined to be purified by suffering toward the carrying out of some yet unknown mission remains fundamental to Judaism in the 20th century.
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  SPEAKER_00: It has continued to reinforce the Jewish moral, self-discipline, and religious devotion in face of the Holocaust and other destructive impacts on the world's jewelry in the modern era.
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  SPEAKER_00: All right, guys, just a little bit of history there as it relates to Jews, Israelites, and the black Hebrew Israelite.
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  SPEAKER_00: What say you?
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  SPEAKER_00: God bless you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Take care.