Question:
I was accosted at the beach today by a guy from Jews for Jesus. He offered me a New Testament in Yiddish and said that many Jews have been "saved" by accepting Jesus as the messiah. I just ignored him. Then I saw a big ad in the newspaper from the same people. My question: Can a Jew believe in Jesus?
Answer:
Of course a Jew can believe in Jesus. Just like a vegetarian can enjoy a rump steak, a peace activist can join a violent demonstration, and a dictator who preaches martyrdom can surrender himself to his enemies. As long as logic and clear thinking are suspended, anything makes sense!
I think your response to that missionary was the best one - to ignore him. Missionising is not a new phenomenon. Certain Christian sects believe that their messiah will only return when the Jews accept him. Throughout history Jews have been threatened with death, torture and expulsion if they don't convert. More recently, missionaries targeted the weak of our community - the elderly, new immigrants, and the underprivileged - in an attempt to exploit their vulnerability. All these attempts have had little or no success. Whether religious or not, Jews are reluctant to give up their Jewishness.
So they came up with a new ploy. Rather than demand conversion, they offered Jews to remain Jewish, and even "complete" their Jewishness by accepting Jesus. Thus Jews for Jesus was born.
This is a movement of non-Jews who pose as Jews by taking on Jewish names. They do usually have a token Jewish member, who is invariably either ignorant of Judaism at best or psychologically imbalanced at worst. They are a sham.
All religions are free to present their beliefs in the open market of ideas. But if they have to resort to slimy tactics like Jews for Jesus does, then they obviously have nothing to offer a thinking person.
Editor's Note: Visit Jews for Judaism for a comprehensive counter-missionary handbook.
The fact of the matter is that the man that the other Faith worships did not fulfill any of the Messianic prophecies including those in the book of Isaiah. We're supposed to have world Peace and no sicknesses or diseases and as the prophetic books say, people shall beat their swords into plowshares. The goyim also have a big misunderstanding of what Elijah the prophet is supposed to do. Elijah the prophet is supposed to announce peace. He's not supposed to announce peace and then there's still more persecution of Jews for 2,000 years. That wasn't truly Elijah the prophet coming like he will before the Messianic era. Besides them not going by the original Hebrew, there's a lot of Christian mistranslations because things change its meaning when you go away from the holy tongue which Jews have always preserved. God also says explicitly throughout the Torah the sons shall not die for the sins of the fathers and the fathers shall not die for the sins of the sons.
The clearest proof that God is not a human or anything physical is when God tells us explicitly in the book of Exodus to not worship anything in the heavens above or the Earth beneath the likeness of male or female. This is exactly what the other Faith is doing when they claim a man is God. The Torah make it clear that the fathers should not die for the sins of the sons and the sons shall not die for the sins of the fathers. Even though Jews agree that the temple sacrifices showed us we were sinful, the Jewish people always had to turn to God and repent from their sins and even non-jews had to do this. Teshuvah, which literally translates from Hebrew to repentance but the meaning according to Torah is to return to God, is something people always had to do to be forgiven. There were sacrifices such as peace offerings but the concept that one is forgiven for all their sins by a bloody murder not ordained and not commanded by God is foreign into the Hebrew scriptures.