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Encountering World Religions: Living with Judaism · Centrally Speaking

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Centrally speaking, if the centric point of the church is in the city, it is pretty interesting in the Christian media, in particular, in the direction of the Christian worldview, in a strict with less than secular culture, in the spirit of the church's family, we take the perspective of the middle way, which is in agreement with the historic Christian Church.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Dr.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: Drake Williams, Minister of Listen and Theology of the Church.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: The website is www.cncfamily.org.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: Today we're speaking about encountering world religions, living with Judaism.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: And this is the second part of our series on encountering world religions.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: So for the podcast, centrally speaking.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: Increasingly, uh Christians are being uh confronted with uh other religions inside the country and then just from their own personal experience.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: In this next year, uh 30 to 35 percent of Americans will travel outside of the country and experience uh those who are following uh a different religion, at least if we don't go outside of the country uh this year, 76% of Americans will travel outside of uh America in their lifetime.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: And this has led to a number of things, such as uh the questioning of Christian distinctives.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: So, what makes Christianity different uh from other religions and what do other religions really have to say and what are they communicating?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's an especially important topic with the wars that are taking place, uh, such as the one in Ukraine, as well as the recent one with uh Israel, Hamas, and Gaza.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: So it's important to understand what the other religion is, to be conversant with it, and then also how to live with those from other religious persuasions and be consistent.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: And to that end, we have uh Reverend Roger Rombold, who is joining us today.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Roger has been director of Hebrew Christian Fellowship for over 35 years.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: He's been in the pastoral ministry for 17.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: He's a graduate of Grace Theological Seminary.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: He's married with three sons, eight grandchildren, and he's traveled to uh Israel 40 to 50 times and left five tours in Israel.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: So, Roger, we're very glad to have you be a part of this podcast and look forward to uh interviewing you about uh living with Judaism.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the show.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you, Dr.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Drake, and it's an honor to be with you and to discuss this subject.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Looking forward to it.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: And uh just trying now to help our listeners uh put uh Judaism in context uh with where we are in Philadelphia.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: How many followers of uh Judaism are there in the region of Philadelphia?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Dr.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: Drake, interestingly, Philadelphia is the fourth largest center of Jewish population uh in the United States, following uh New York City, which of course is at the top, with uh around 2.1 million Jewish people living in New York City.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then second would be uh the greater Los Angeles area with about three-quarters of a million uh Jewish people, and then Southern Florida, greater uh Miami region, and in that area, and that would be around 650,000 Jewish people, and then number four in Jewish population in the United States would actually be Philadelphia.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: And the approximate number of Jewish people living in the Greater Philadelphia metropolitan area that would include the city and outlying suburbs would be about 323,000.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: So about 323,000 Jewish people living in the greater Philadelphia area.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: Not a small population then at all.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: How many how many synagogues or religious buildings, uh, Jewish religious buildings are in this area?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's a very interesting question because the uh the Jewish presence in in Philadelphia goes all the way back to the 18th century.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And actually uh the earliest uh Jewish synagogues, synagogues in Philadelphia date to the early to mid-1700s.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: And uh apparently from that time until today, presently, there is a log of a total of 695 synagogues that at some point in time were in operation in the Philadelphia area.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: 695 identifiable synagogues, congregations between uh that period of time in the early 18th century to the present day.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the fact is that the great majority of those uh have either merged, where you have numerous synagogues that have merged into one synagogue because of demographic changes or for other reasons.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so what we're looking at today is uh the actual number of synagogues uh that that has been listed is 82.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: So right now, at this present time, if we were to go down the list, we probably could list 82 synagogues once again in the city itself, that is in the city of Philadelphia, as well as in outlying suburbs.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you have any statistics on this of uh Jewish schools or um uh universities in the area, but uh this is this is not a small religious community that's uh that's here in Philadelphia.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't have those statistics, but of course, um you're absolutely right.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: There are numerous Jewish educational institutions, uh civic organizations, Jewish community centers, which are actually a very big thing.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh many of the neighborhoods in Philadelphia actually have a JCC, a Jewish community center, which is not actually a synagogue, but it is, as the name would imply, a community center, uh, which offers all kinds of services and opportunities for Jewish people, educational opportunities, quite frankly, recreational opportunities and lots of things.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, there's a very, a very vibrant Jewish presence in Philadelphia.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: As we're trying to get to our minds around uh living with Judaism and understanding Judaism, uh let's talk about uh uh how old uh Judaism is and uh where it came from.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, in true uh rabbinical and Jewish style, I would have to say that's a very interesting question uh because there are there are many different angles uh to take in in answering that question.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: How old is Judaism?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Where did it come from?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Part of it is the question of are we talking about Judaism as a religion?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Are we talking about Judaism as an ethnicity and where those two merge and where those two might differ?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, ethnically speaking, of course, Jewish people um are those who have descended from one of the 12 tribes of Israel, uh sons of uh Jacob.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we can actually go all the way back to the patriarchal period, and we can say ethnic Judaism goes all the way back to the patriarchal period.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we're talking around in rough terms, 2000 BC.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's 5,000 years plus.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, uh, because of uh of Abraham's um, shall we say, conversion to monotheism and what flowed out of that uh from his family, Isaac and Jacob, and then Jacob's descendants, there is a religious strain.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, that's where the Bible comes in, and we understand the development of biblical Judaism that grew out of ethnic Judaism from technically the patriarchal period through Jacob and the sons of Jacob.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so biblical Judaism is one thing, and of course, the Old Testament scriptures record the development of biblical Judaism, but we realize that uh at the end of the Old Testament period, around 400 BC, with the book of Malachi, there actually is a uh a 400-year period of silence before there are any scriptures that are based on the Old Testament scriptures.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so the age of the patriarchs, the age of the monarchy in Israel, the age of the prophetic ministry of the numerous Old Testament prophets came to an end in 400 BC.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Now, of course, that period of silence wasn't really a period of silence because there were Jewish people, Jewish leaders, if you will, the rabbis who had much to say during that period of time.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so we would probably say that rabbinical Judaism took center stage during that period, that 400-year uh silent period.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so suddenly there is a movement from strictly biblical Judaism to rabbinical Judaism, where it's not just a case of what the Old Testament scriptures tell us about Judaism, but what the Jewish religious leaders, the rabbis, had to say about Judaism.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, as I said, it's a it's an interesting question with a lot of different angles.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: We have to, I think, distinguish definitely between ethnic Judaism, religious Judaism, biblical Judaism, and rabbinical Judaism.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: That makes it a little complicated, doesn't it?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: A bit, yes, yes.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned uh several sacred sacred writings or writings of value, but are there certain books uh within Judaism that are of the highest sacred value?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, very much so.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and for us as as Christians, uh, we understand that the authoritative books uh we would maintain are the books inspired by the Holy Spirit.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And essentially we're talking about uh the two testaments.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: I might say that our Jewish friends would rather that we not refer to what we call the Old Testament.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: They'd rather that we refer to it simply as the Older Testament, because the Old Testament, as we use that term, sort of implies that um that somehow or another that is obsolete and not relevant, and the New Testament is the better of the two.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: That can be a bit offensive to them.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: So uh so we, of course, think in terms of the Older Testament, the 39 books of the Old Testament in our Protestant viewpoint, and the New Testament, the 27 books of the New Testament, and we consider that to be essentially our scriptures, our authoritative books.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: When it comes to Judaism, and and now again, I'm I'm speaking specifically of rabbinical Judaism, the authoritative books are not just the books of the Older Testament, and that would be the only testament that they would consider to be authoritative, not the New Testament, but they add to that other books that uh in many ways are have equal weight in authority.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: And if I could just kind of talk about the development of those those important books, we know, of course, uh, as we go back to the, we'll use our term, the Old Testament, as we go back to the Old Testament, there is the record, of course, early on in the Old Testament, of God uh through Moses on Mount Sinai, giving to the Jewish people after they left Egypt uh following 400 years of slavery there, that God through Moses on Mount Sinai gave to the Jewish people the books of the law.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: And those would be the five books, the Pentateuch, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the books of Moses.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where the essence of Jewish law is found.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's the Torah.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the Torah is, of course, the ultimate authority in the Jewish viewpoint.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: But then, in addition to those five books, we have another 34 books, and those would be the books uh of uh the writings and the books of the prophets, in addition to the books of the law, and together that forms the Tanakh.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that's an acronym that embraces all 39 books of the Old Testament, and that would be what we would consider the Old Testament extremely authoritative for the Jewish people.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so far, we're in agreement with that.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: We as Christians who hold the Old Testament to be the inspired word of God.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: However, we have to understand that uh the Old Testament closes uh around 400 BC, and then what follows is 400 silent years.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: As I said earlier, they weren't really silent because during that period of time, the religious leaders of the Jewish people were discussing what they had up to that point, specifically the Torah and the Tanakh, and they were talking a lot about it among themselves.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: They were debating about it.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, there was apparently the idea that there was a lot of oral law that had been given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai that was not recorded in the in the books of Moses, the Torah.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so that oral law and the discussion actually went on for 600 years, from 400 to BC to 200 AD.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then around 200 AD, along came a man named Judah the Prince.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: He was a rabbi, one of the sages of the Jewish people, and he decided it would be a good idea to put down in writing everything that that had been developed over the years in this oral tradition of commentary on the law and the Old Testament.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that was known as the Mishnah, the Mishnah.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that collection that was recorded in 200 AD is considered a very important part of Jewish religious books.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then to make things even more interesting, for the next 300 years, again, the Jewish leaders, the rabbis, were not only considering the written commentary that Judah the Prince had developed, but they had their own thoughts and their own conversation and their own discussion for another 300 years.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then around 500 AD, that would be 300 years after the Mishnah was developed, around 500 A.D., two rabbis, Rabbi Ravena and Rabbi Ashi, decided that they would record the discussion that had taken place over 300 years among the rabbis.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: And out of that came another religious book called the Gemara.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: And those two books put together, the Mishnah and the Gemara, form essentially one book that we know as the Talmud.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the Talmud is the compilation then of what had been put into writing between 200 AD and 500 A.D.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now, as you can imagine, that's a lot of religious debate and discussion.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: The result is that the Talmud, as we have it today, actually has 63 volumes to it.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in essence, the Talmud, practically speaking, has superseded the Old Testament scriptures, that is, the Torah and the rest of the Tanakh, in terms of focus in the Jewish religious community.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: If one were to ask what would be the most important sacred book or books to the Jewish people, it would have to be said that most likely it's the Talmud.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the Talmud technically is all about the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament, but it has layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of human opinion and discussion and consideration among the rabbis for that long period of time.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then if we want to add just a little bit more to it, there's another compilation of material that is called the Midrash.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the Midrash uh actually started uh to be recorded around the third century AD and all the way through the Middle Ages.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that is a compilation of sermons that rabbis, homiletical material that the rabbis gave during that period of time.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost a collection of uh of sermons over the years.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: And you put all that together, and that is what is considered to be the sacred books of Judaism.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: If I can bring them back to the previous categories that you gave for Judaism, uh ethnic Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism, biblical Judaism, when you talk about all these different books, these are the books of rabbinic Judaism, correct?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: That is correct.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yes, of course.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh anything that goes beyond the recorded material that we know as the Old Testament, beyond that, it would be rabbinical Judaism commentary, absolutely.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: But if there are other brands of Judaism, are all these books seen as being of value or authoritative?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I would say definitely so, because uh when we consider uh there are different branches of Judaism, of course.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: I might say that here in the United States, the three main branches of Judaism, and they kind of span the spectrum from the very conservative form of Judaism to a much more liberal form of Judaism.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so those three main branches, might I say that the one that's kind of in the middle, that is sort of, you know, middle Judaism, and that would be the conservative branch of Judaism.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is where it gets confusing because conservative Judaism is not the most conservative branch of Judaism.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's the central branch of Judaism, conservative Judaism.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: To the right of that would be Orthodox Judaism.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that, of course, is the more conservative branch of Judaism than conservative Judaism.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then to the left of conservative branch would be Reform Judaism.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: So you have, and that's a little bit more liberal, a little bit looser, and you have those three.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now there are extremes to the right and the left of both of those.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: So to the right of Orthodox Judaism would be ultra-Orthodox Judaism or Hasidic Judaism.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: To the left of Reformed Judaism would be some pretty far-out forms of Judaism, such as Reconstructionists.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: But in answer to your question, all of those branches of Judaism consider the writings of rabbinical Judaism to have value for study.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so you'll hear regularly the quotation of what Rabbi so-and-so said in the Talmud.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, at some period of time when this particular portion of the Old Testament was being discussed, this is what Rabbi so-and-so had to say about it.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is what Rabbi so, and in some cases, these branches of Judaism love to dig out of the Talmud a quotation that supports their particular viewpoint for their branch of Judaism.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: One text that you didn't include here was the Old Testament Apocrypha.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if these branches of Judaism would uh vere something like uh Sirach or uh Wisdom of Solomon or First and Second Maccabees.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, that's a very good question.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: And and the answer is that while Jewish people, and I'm talking specifically about the religious leaders, the rabbis, while they would acknowledge the existence of those books, sometimes they're called the Deutero-Canonical books, as they have found their way into, for example, the Roman Catholic Bible.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not just those seven that are the Deutero-Canonical books that are in the Catholic Bible.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: There are other apocryphal books.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: When you ask for a list of the apocryphal books, you're talking essentially about the material that developed during that 400-year period of silence, the intertestamental period between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: And Jewish people are very much aware of those writings, but they do not consider them to be in any way as authoritative as the Tanakh, the Old Testament, and everything that grows out of that in terms of the Talmud.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: They would say those books are valuable.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost a bunch of legends and myths, that sort of thing.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a sense in which that actually demonstrates the culture and what was going on during that 400-year period of time and shortly into what we now know as uh the period of the Common Era or A.D.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: So they would say those books are interesting.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: I might say that among those Deuterodanonical books are the books uh first and second Maccabees.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a very, very important period in Jewish history.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: It is the Halbonian period, the the uprising of the uh of the Maccabees against uh the Syro-Phoenician government that was existing at that time.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and that's important history.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, it's given us the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: So those books are interesting to read in terms of history, but they do not consider them to be authoritative.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Very interesting.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: Let's try and now get back to overlaps that Judaism and Christianity have.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: How significant is the correspondence that uh Christians have with the Jewish faith and Jewish tradition?
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what I would say is that that that's very significant.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it is the overlap between the two is very significant.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: And we would just start out by saying that New Testament Christianity, as it is expounded by the Apostle Paul and other writers of the New Testament, has its roots in biblical Judaism, in Old Testament.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Judaism, not so much in rabbinical Judaism.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we can talk more about that in a little while.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: But so the overlap is extremely important.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: I would refer to first of all to uh something that the Apostle Paul says in this very important treatise that we find really in the book of Romans, uh, in a three-chapter section, and that's Romans 9 through 11, where the Apostle Paul even addresses this whole issue of the overlap between Old Testament biblical Judaism and New Testament Christianity.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: And in Romans chapter 9, verses 4 and 5, Paul is talking about what we as Christians have received that has come to us through the Jewish people in Old Testament Judaism.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: What Paul says in Romans 9, 4, and 5 is this regarding the Israelites, to them pertained the adoption.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now we understand that God adopted them to have a special relationship with him and the glory.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: They were the privileged people who saw the glory of God, especially as they moved through the wilderness, the Shekinah glory cloud, the covenants, the various promises that God made to Israel, the giving of the law, the Ten Commandments, if you will.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: To us Christians, I think we would say the Ten Commandments are pretty important.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so we've gotten those through what was given to Israel and the Jewish people, recorded in the book of Exodus and then on into Leviticus and Deuteronomy of the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, the promises, the many promises that God has made to Israel in the Old Testament, we by extension love to claim for ourselves and legitimately can claim those promises for ourselves, even though they were made first and foremost to Israel.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then it goes on to say in verse 5 of Romans 9, whose are the fathers?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's the Jewish people have the patriarchs.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: They are the fathers.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: But now let's think about this.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: The stories that we Christians love to tell our children, David and Goliath, Daniel and the Lion's Den, I could go on and on.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Those wonderful stories that we tell, they actually are stories that come from the Old Testament and the history of the Jewish people.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: But the most important one that Paul mentions in verse 5 is this regarding the Jewish people, of whom, as concerning the flesh, Christ came.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: So Jesus was a Jew.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, we owe a great debt to the Jewish people.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: And our faith is solidly rooted in Judaism.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it even goes on from there because we understand that in that same treatise that the Apostle Paul gives in Romans 9 through 11, in uh Romans 9, 11, and beginning specifically verse 16, he talks about us Gentiles, Gentile Christians, as being a wild olive branch that has been grafted into the natural olive branch, which is the Jewish people.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: So we have a symbiotic relationship with Old Testament biblical Judaism.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: And frankly, understanding Old Testament Biblical Judaism gives us, as New Testament Gentile Christians specifically, a much greater understanding of the New Testament scriptures.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, one of the beauties of having Jewish believers as part of our congregations here is the perspective that they can give us of their own religious practices before they came to faith in Jesus.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that enlightens our understanding of a lot of the passages of the New Testament.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: So this distinguishes uh Judaism from some of the other uh world religions uh that uh we'll be discussing on this uh podcast series, such as Hinduism, Islam, and others, uh, because uh Christianity is so embedded in Judaism.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's very well put.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that's exactly right.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: But there's a difference between Judaism and Christianity, and obviously we're not all the same of the same faith.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: What is the most significant difference between Judaism and Christianity as you see it?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a very important question, Dr.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: Drake, uh, that we we really need to understand uh about the Jewish people and and how they have been led by their religious leaders.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: And again, quite frankly, at this point, once again, the distinction between Old Testament biblical Judaism and rabbinical Judaism that kind of piled on top of it over the centuries, that distinction is very important.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Once again, I turn to what Paul writes in Romans that section 9 through 11.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: And just a couple of verses there.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Romans 10, verse 1, Paul begins by saying, and remember, Paul was Jewish to the max.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: Could I say that?
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: He refers to himself as being a Hebrew of the Hebrews.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: It can absolutely be said that he himself was a rabbi before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus and became a follower and a server of Jesus.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: But Romans 10:1, Paul says, Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel, his own people, he's talking about, is that they might be saved.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so what's the problem with his own people that they're not saved?
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes on to say, I bear them, he's referring to his own people.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: Now let's remember that already at this point there had been several centuries of rabbinical Judaism that had been developing.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, I bear them witness, his own people, as they were led and instructed by their religious leaders, that they have a zeal for God.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good thing.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really good thing.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: But he goes on to say, but not according to knowledge.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: So they're zealous, many of them in their religion.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: And if we know anything about, especially Orthodox Judaism, ultra-orthodox Judaism, they are zealous.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: But then he says, but not according to knowledge.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're missing something.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: So what are they missing?
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: What is the difference between, shall we say, rabbinical Judaism and New Testament Christianity?
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: He says, For they, being ignorant of God's righteousness and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: They're trying to develop their own righteousness, and it's not working.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: What is true righteousness?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Verse 4, Romans 10, Christ, the Messiah, Yeshua, Jesus, and his work is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: The distinction between Judaism today and true biblical New Testament Christianity is the difference between righteousness by works and trying to earn God's approval and understanding that we cannot do that, that we have to believe in Jesus as the one who is the fulfillment of the law and who came to provide righteousness for ourselves that we can't develop for ourselves.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so the distinction takes another form, and that is Judaism today, the focus is not on the future, not on the question of what do I have to do to be saved and to know that sometime in the future I'm going to enjoy heaven and eternal life with God.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: The rabbis consistently teach their people today.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: Don't think about that.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: Think about the present and what you can do to make the present better.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, there's an even term for that uh in Jewishness today.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's called takun olam.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: Takun olam.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's Hebrew, but literally we might translate it as to fix the world.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so the focus of Judaism today is make the world a better place.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: In many ways, it's almost a humanistic point of view.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Don't worry about what God's going to say to you when you die.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: Worry about the question of are you working to make the world a better place today?
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that's admirable in many ways.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: But unfortunately, Paul says that's not ultimately what is going to cause us to be accepted by God.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_02: Wondering if uh he might comment on Christians and the rising tide of anti-Semitism.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: We live in a time where there's been a lot of uh negative things said about uh Jewish people that seems to coincide with the October 7th attacks and uh the war that took place between Israel and Hamas.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: With the closeness that Christianity has to Judaism, how concerned should a Christian be about the rising tide of anti-Semitism?
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm glad you brought that up, Dr.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: Drake.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, you're absolutely correct that uh the the anti-Semitism has always existed.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: It has taken ugly forms throughout the centuries, so many ways.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: The pogroms uh in Russia, under czarist Russia, of course, uh the one that we think of first and foremost is the Holocaust under uh the Nazi regime, Adolf Hitler, certainly extreme anti-Semitism.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: Hitler's goal, remember, was to make Europe Jew-free, which means the annihilation of every Jew in Europe, which was about 13 million Jews at the time in Europe, and he was on his way to being successful with the slaughter of six million of them.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: So anti-Semitism has been around for a long time.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's reared its ugly head throughout the centuries.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: However, you are absolutely correct that since October 7th of 2023, and the response of the state of Israel to what happened on October 7th, the slaughter of 1,500 people by Hamas as they uh tore into the southern part of Israel, Israel's response to that and world reaction to all of that, the outcome has been just an uptick in anti-Semitism that that is most disturbing and alarming.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: Indeed, we as Christians should be concerned about that.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, we should be concerned, I think, about any demonstration of an attempt to vilify, quite frankly, even exterminate any group of people, whether we're talking about the Jews or any other group of people, and we know there are other places in the world where this kind of thing is going on, where a group of people is being focused upon, and the attempt is to get rid of them or to at least hold them down.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we, as Christians following the teaching of Jesus and the example of Jesus, we should stand up for anyone.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, the Jewish people, because they have experienced this kind of persecution themselves, anti-Semitism, if you will, throughout their long, long history, have consistently themselves been more concerned about other groups of people who are being persecuted and who are experiencing some kind of ethnic cleansing or things of that nature.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: I remember very well being a child of the 60s myself, not really a child, I was a teenager then.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: I remember that in the civil rights movement to try to bring the African-American population of our country, position of equality in this country rather than discrimination, that some of the most outspoken and active participants in the civil rights movement were actually Jewish people, including the Freedom Riders and some of them who lost their lives for that, uh, because of their own concern about any kind of persecution or discrimination.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I think as Christians in general, we should be concerned about that.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: And certainly today, the number of uh of acts of terrorism against Jewish people in our own country and other forms of anti-Semitism around the world, we should speak up against that.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: I I think again that there's an interesting portion of scripture where Jesus, uh, we read about it in Matthew chapter 25, and of course it's in this section of scripture we know as the Olivet Discourse.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: And there's this interesting little passage where it talks about when the Son of Man comes in in his glory, and he gathers in front of him, that's Jesus, of course, he gathers in front of him the nations, the nations.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: The Greek word there is ethne.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: It gives us the word ethnic or ethnic groups, if you will.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus gathers, and another place in Matthew, Matthew chapter 6, the Sermon on the Mount, in many English translations, that term is translated the Gentiles.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so the idea is that Jesus gathers the Gentiles, the people from the nations in front of him, and he judges them.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: And he puts uh one group on his right hand and they're the sheep, and then he puts another group on his left hand and they're the goats.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what makes the difference between the sheep, the good guys, and the goats, the bad guys?
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the difference is how they have treated the underprivileged.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so you have this dialogue where Jesus says to the good guys, the sheep on his right, enter into uh the rewards that I have for you, because when I was hungry, you fed me, when I was thirsty, you gave me to drink, when I was a stranger, you took me in, when I was naked, you clothed me, when I was sick, you cared for me, when I was in prison, you came to me.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, their response is, Lord, we don't remember doing any of those things to you.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: What does Jesus say?
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: If you did those things to the least of these, my brethren, you've done these things to me.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what many people miss is that little statement where Jesus says, Inasmuch as you have done any of these things to the least of these, my brethren, who are the brethren of Jesus, humanly speaking?
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: He's Jewish.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: So he's talking about Jewish brothers and sisters.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus says, Whatever you do to them, it is as if you're showing your love for me by what you're doing to them.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: For us as Christians, we should take those passages seriously, I believe, and we should indeed be concerned about anti-Semitism.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_02: So I would take this in a more, let's say, uh practical direction now, as uh many of us are living beside uh those uh who are Jewish or who attend uh synagogues.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: And let's just say one of us is invited over to a home one night.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: How should a Christian behave in a Jewish home?
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: And if there's an opportunity to speak about uh religion, how would we go ahead and and do that in a tactful and sensible way?
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Once again, great question.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think the most important thing is to be sensitive.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's a lot of value if we have a Jewish friend, neighbor, relative, coworker with whom we're going to have an involvement visiting in their home or whatever, to try to know as much ahead of time as we possibly can about where they're coming from in terms of their culture, their religious practice.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: It very well may be that uh if we're visiting in their home, it might be over one of the Jewish special days, one of the Jewish holidays.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: Extremely helpful to know a little bit about what that's about.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think, and we have learned, that it's good to just go with an idea of I want to learn about you and what you do.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I know maybe I could say I know a little bit about this, but tell me more about what your practice of Judaism is all about.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think the idea of just saying, I'm not here to tell you, I'm here to hear you and to learn about you.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: And finding common points as well in response to that is important.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: We have found that over the years, just one of the most important things is to say to Jewish people, you know I'm a Gentile, you know I'm a Gentile Christian, but I want to tell you that I am so thankful for the Jewish people because I have, for example, the New Testament, which means so much to me, was written by Jewish writers, except for one, uh two books of the New Testament.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I wouldn't have my New Testament if it were not for Jewish people.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: Frankly, I wouldn't have Jesus if it were not for Jewish people, because Jesus is Jewish.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's revolutionary for many Jewish people to even know and be reminded, at least if they already knew it, that Jesus is Jewish.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: And to demonstrate that respect and then to say maybe just kind of look for some common points from there, I think that's the best way to go about it.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: Perhaps let's say asking about holidays, Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, or what is life like in the synagogue?
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: Are there any uh particular things that you're learning from Jewish writings like the Talmud?
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: All appropriate questions.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's it's significant that you and I are having this discussion right now uh during a very special period of time for the Jewish people.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: It began with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, that is the beginning of the civil new year.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: That was September 11th, and then moving up to 10 days later, uh Yom Kippur, which actually will be uh starting at sundown on this coming Sunday night.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: A very important 10-day period of time.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: And even to ask a Jewish person, so are you going to synagogue for Yom Kippur?
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, are you fasting for Yom Kippur?
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: Just to know a little bit about that and to say uh, and honestly, to even ask, so what kind of special foods do you guys eat during this period?
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that can be an interesting uh uh opening line for an important question and dialogue.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_02: Dialogue, listening, understanding, trying to interact with, trying to be friends with, right?
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: And respect and respect at all times.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, we thank you very much for uh answering some questions uh for us today, uh Roger, about uh living with Judaism.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh certainly we wish you uh very best in your work with uh Hebrew Christian Fellowship.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a privilege and an honor to chat with you.