← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Petr
Thread ID: 16617 | Posts: 14 | Started: 2005-02-06
2005-02-06 14:54 | User Profile
[B][COLOR=Indigo]You know, it would be neat if Whites could also discuss their demographic problems in this sort of public manner...[/COLOR][/B]
[url]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-1458929,00.html[/url]
[B]The Sunday Times Magazine
February 06, 2005 Talking Point[/B]
[SIZE=4]For richer, for kosher[/SIZE]
[B][I]Britain's Jewish population is in decline — because young singles are marrying out. But will they ever return to the faith? David Rowan meets the matchmakers who are desperate to bring them back to the fold[/I][/B]
As Devorah Simon sees it, it is pure chance that she happens to be marrying a fellow Jew tonight. Black-hatted rabbis are streaming into Finchley synagogue in north London; a kosher caterer unloads challah bread. Tall plants are manoeuvred to separate the men's dance area from the women's. While Deborah — as she was then known — was growing up in a secular Jewish home in Putney, southwest London, this is certainly not how she imagined her wedding day. [B]Dating a series of eligible non-Jews, she assumed she would assimilate as thoroughly as had most of her cousins — one had married a Hindu, another had moved to a Scottish Buddhist retreat, and a third had a girlfriend who was black. [/B]
"The family philosophy was that if we made ourselves like non-Jews, we'd be accepted more," Devorah said, a few days before the traditional Orthodox ceremony. "We'd moved so far away, my father didn't even know what gefilte fish was."
Devorah, formerly a headhunter in the City, knew how easy it would have been to marry out of a faith she barely acknowledged. Instead, she has chosen a strictly Orthodox religious life, emigrating to Israel with a rabbinical scholar she met through a modern-day matchmaker. To the hardline Jewish groups battling against assimilation, Devorah's "return" marks a proud victory against the forces of modernity. In truth, it is a rare exception to a trend that is giving Britain's Jewish leaders serious reason to kvetch.
Intermarriage is on the rise. Unless that changes, community leaders fear, Anglo-Jewry could be imperilling its future. It is now 11 years since the chief rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, warned that "the Jewish people, having survived for thousands of years in the most adverse circumstances, including the Holocaust, is today threatened by intermarriage and assimilation". Sacks's warning prompted a range of cultural and educational initiatives designed to instil Jewish pride in young singles. Yet the intermarriage graph kept climbing, with around half of British Jews marrying "out".
There is an entire seam of Jewish humour feeding off the anxiety that surrounds intermarriage. In one old joke, a father of three sons becomes increasingly distraught after the first declares he is marrying a Catholic, then the second says he plans to marry a Hindu. Finally, it is the third son's turn. "Dad, I'm in love with this fantastic woman called Goldberg," the young man says. "Goldberg?" the father answers, a relieved grin spreading across his face. "Yes," says the son proudly. "I'd love you to meet Whoopi..."
Lately, the subject has prompted little humour within Anglo-Jewry's representative bodies. [B]According to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, only a third of Jews of marriageable age are getting married in synagogues. Partly, of course, this reflects the general decline in religious ceremonial. But Professor Barry Kosmin, the director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, estimates from his studies that today's intermarriage rate has risen to about 50%. [/B]
The impact is already being felt on the next generation. [B]Between 1990 and 1999, the Board of Deputies reported, births notified to Jewish institutions fell by a quarter, from 3,300 to 2,500. [/B] An even starker warning has come from the demographer Sergio Della Pergola of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. [B]Fifty years ago, around 450,000 people in Britain identified as Jews. The figure is now nearer 300,000. [/B] The fall is not just related to intermarriage: emigration and a wider lack of faith have played their part. Yet if these trends continue, Della Pergola has written, "the UK's Jewish population will decline to 240,000 in 2020, 180,000 in 2050, and 140,000 in 2080".
"It's a crisis," says Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt, the joint UK executive director of Aish HaTorah, one of the Orthodox groups most aggressively campaigning against assimilation. "For every Jew that comes back, I expect 50 are moving away. The strictly Orthodox will remain — those couples I know have an average of seven or eight kids. But the rest — the more liberal and secular branches of Judaism — they will die out."
Once Rosenblatt starts to point fingers, it becomes clear how far Anglo-Jewry's branches are divided over a response to assimilation. At his home in north London (his nearby office was destroyed last summer in a suspected anti-semitic arson attack; nobody has been caught), the rabbi blames rising intermarriage squarely on the Reform and Liberal synagogues, which have reinterpreted traditional Orthodox values for the modern world. "Up to 150, 200 years ago, you had no secular Jews," he says. "I don't know when the rot started, but the Enlightenment brought in this concept of humanism, telling Jews they could live secular lives. The floodgates opened. And all these hitherto-Orthodox kids just ran."
Today, Rosenblatt sees it as his mission to bring them back home. Aish HaTorah (literally "Fire of the Torah") targets secular 18- to 30-year-old Jewish singles who might otherwise be lost to the faith. Through heavily subsidised holidays to Israel or South Africa, and "cool" social events such as speed-dating nights, it presents a friendly, often sexy face designed to attract Jews who might not meet other Jews. Once the ice is broken, its approachable, usually clean-shaven rabbis will invite newcomers to Friday-night sabbath dinners or lectures on Jewish thought. Ultimately, Aish wants them to lead Orthodox religious lives and find an equally religiously committed spouse. You would not know it from its posters, which are big on images of celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, but Aish is at war with secular life. Those it rescues are known as baalei tshuva ("masters of return" but also, tellingly, "repentant sinners").
Aish has its critics. At the Coffee Cup cafe in Hampstead on a Saturday night, a favourite hangout of the north London "becks" — the secular, fashion-aware young Jews more at home clubbing than in synagogues — it stands accused of pulling families apart. "Aish has got a really bad name," says 17-year-old Flo Stein, an A-level student from Finchley. "Everyone knows them as brainwashers. One friend who got involved with them was always having arguments with his parents. His mum felt they were making him go against the family." "We're constantly being accused of brainwashing," Shaul Rosenblatt responds. "All we're doing is presenting information and letting people make a decision."
Aish played its part in Devorah Simon's "return" journey, which is why Rabbi Rosenblatt and some of his colleagues are in Finchley synagogue tonight to celebrate her marriage to Jake Greenberg, an American whose own journey took him similarly from secular life to full-time rabbinical study. As Devorah tells it, she was barely aware of her Jewish heritage and could easily have gone the other way. "We had the Christmas tree and stockings with our names on," she says. "I never had Jewish boyfriends or girlfriends." Her great-great-grandfather had helped found the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John's Wood, but Devorah's only remaining link was a visit during the annual high holy days.
It was a young rabbi at Edinburgh University, where she was studying history of art, who encouraged Devorah to revisit her faith. She went on to spend two years at an Aish-run seminary in Jerusalem. Becoming Orthodox has brought a new set of daily rules for Devorah, from rejecting her parents' non-kosher food to refusing to drive there on the sabbath. "My family has made a difficult journey, but when they see you as a happy, confident member of society, they take it with dignity," she says. Her mother, Doreen, accepts that the rigid rules can cause tensions: "The kosher thing can push you apart, but Devorah's always been good when she visits and she brings her own meals in tubs."
At the wedding, a few guests also seem bemused at the couple's new rule book. Wry jokes are whispered; remarks are made about the wigs (called sheitels) that the married Orthodox women wear to avoid the "immodesty" of displaying their real hair. Some guests nudge and point when, between courses, 30 black-hatted and bearded men leave their seats to sway by the doors in prayer. The North Circular Road might be rumbling impatiently outside, but here we could be in 18th-century Warsaw.
Devorah can still laugh at the logical somersaults the rabbis sometimes turn when interpreting the religious laws. "There's this joke about a new rule being announced forbidding Jews to smoke," she says. "One day the Liberal, Reform and United [Orthodox] rabbis are outside their shuls [synagogues] enjoying a cigarette. The press get very excited, and ask the rabbis why, despite the rule, they are still smoking. 'Oh, that law's irrelevant,' the Liberal rabbi replies. 'In the modern world, it's important to be seen joining in.' The Reform rabbi answers, 'Well, ideally we believe that you shouldn't be smoking, but we're looking for a way to integrate the rule into our everyday lives.' Then it's the Orthodox rabbi's turn. 'Yes, I was smoking,' he shrugs. 'But it's okay, I sold my lungs to a goy...'"
At the devout end of Golders Green Road, it soon becomes clear who carries the blame in this polarised community. "The Reform Jews just see this as a numbers game," says Menachem in Tasti Pizza, as he wraps another falafel sandwich. "The Reform would love to wave a magic wand and get everyone in China to become Jewish, so they could claim an extra billion. But that's not how we see it. If you're not keeping Shabbat, not keeping kosher, how are you still being Jewish?"
A few doors away, the Jewish Learning Exchange (JLE) is trying to resolve Menachem's concerns. If groups such as Aish are spiking secular Jews' curiosity about their faith, the JLE is there to provide the religious context intended to keep them in. It takes the message out to City law firms, medical schools, St John's Wood mansions — anywhere it might reach those lapsed Jews who shun the shuls. "Knowledge is the greatest armoury we have to stop intermarriage," explains its director, Rabbi Danny Kirsch. "We're on our last chance with the post-Thatcher generation who work long hours. If you're in the office until 9pm, probably not a Jewish environment, that's where you're likely to meet your partner."
But it is not just religious knowledge that returning Jews gain from the JLE. Thanks to an extraordinary network of voluntary matchmakers affiliated to it, they may also come away with a pre-screened wedding partner. Joanne Dove, an effervescent 42-year-old mother of seven, is a shadchan, one of the matchmakers who devote hours each day to arranging matrimonial blind dates, or shidduchs. Officially, Dove works at the JLE organising its women's classes. But she spends a lot of time e-mailing and texting to pair up Jewish singles like Devorah and Jake. In fact, this being a global business, it was a South African shadchan who arranged Devorah and Jake's blind date.
But Dove is as well connected as any, and counts Devorah among her confidantes. At their wedding, Dove indicates which couples around the room have benefited from her personal touch. "She's a barrister, who we got together with a South African chap we'd been trying to marry for nine years," she says. "That boy is something big in the City, and I've found someone for him. And this one over here, he's a very nice doctor I've set up on a shidduch later this week."
Like the dozens of other women she liaises with, Joanne Dove gives her time freely out of hesed, the commandment to act out of loving kindness. Still, it can be expensive setting up dates via text message and cold-calling singles on their mobiles. So when Dove does make a marriage — two or three times a year — she encourages the couple to donate at least ã250 to help with the phone bills.
These volunteer matchmakers need no special qualifications beyond infinite patience and a spare 20 or 30 hours a week. "We're working as much to stop people marrying out as to help Orthodox kids get married," Dove says. "So we listen, set up meetings, then serve as a go-between. We might send them to meet at the Landmark hotel in Marylebone, the Grove in Watford, or to the zoo if the sun's shining."
The zoo might seem a bizarrely unromantic venue, but these "get to know you" meetings are not about romance — and certainly not about physical contact.
A successful match, she says, comes down not to physical attraction (although that can help) but to "whether you can see that person as the parent of your children". Dove, who refuses to shake my hand because I am male, insists that a couple meet three times before saying no, as she thinks initial visual impressions can stand in the way. Because in today's world, singles, especially the men, are just too demanding. "I've got so many single girls," Dove sighs. "Girls with personality who are intelligent, have got degrees. But the Jewish man wants the perfect everything — he wants her looking like Claudia Schiffer, going out working, making him chocolate mousse and potato kugel. No wonder they say finding your partner is as difficult as splitting the Red Sea."
Typical of those Dove has helped are two vivacious sisters from Stanmore, northwest London. Caroline Cohen, 24, is a successful singer and actress who understudied the lead role in the West End production of My Fair Lady; her sister, Louise Leach, 27, had a promising pop career and sang on ITV's Popstars. Both have now been helped back in to Orthodox Judaism by Aish and the JLE. As Dove sees it, at one stage they could have easily "gone the other way" with non-Jewish partners.
Nowadays, Caroline mainly performs for all-women audiences, such as a recent ladies-only party at Dove's house. And whereas once Caroline would have dated non-Jews, Dove is now working to find her a suitably religious husband. "I'd happily go on a blind date if Joanne screened them first," Caroline says. "She's very good at knowing who'll be compatible on your journey through life. Joanne's really intuitive."
Dove has also been a mentor to Caroline's sister, Louise, who abandoned her pop career three years ago. The following year she married a Jewish primary-school teacher who had also been brought back to the faith. They are raising their 11-month-old daughter in a strictly Orthodox home. "Louise has married in by some miracle, considering how secular she was," Dove says with pride. Louise does seem to appreciate how close she came: "I see a lot of people marrying out, and the parents are broken-hearted. But it's harder when you're brought up in a non-Orthodox home."
The traditional Jewish home, with family life at its heart, remains the Orthodox community's best hope in the battle against assimilation. That explains why Dove, when interviewing marriageable singles, always tries to discover how far they are prepared to assume the traditional family roles. Jewish comedians might enjoy mocking the domineering family matriarch who wields the ultimate domestic power: the mother who, when told her son is to play the husband in the junior-school play, orders him to "go back and demand a speaking part!"; the grandmother who begs God to save her drowning grandson at the beach, only to look heavenwards on the boy's safe return and scream "He had a hat!" But for all the send-ups, the strong mother figure remains a key figure in ensuring Jewish continuity.
Beside Joanne Dove marches an army of equally dedicated marriage brokers. In a spotless semidetached house off Golders Green Road, a kitchen telephone rings through to an answering machine for the second time in 15 minutes. "Oh, I do apologise," says Tova Shapiro, a small, fresh-faced young woman wearing a flawless wig. "That's just the 24-hour shidduch line."
Inquiries are arriving from all over the world, and Shapiro is meeting so many new singles — around 10 a week — that she has designed a questionnaire to save time. Do you have any converts in your family? Would you want a TV in your home (something many Orthodox frown upon)? Is it important that your partner has studied in a yeshiva (religious seminary)?
Shapiro has yet to make her first successful marriage. But the many other local shadchanim, to whom she chats regularly, continue to inspire her. There are even a few men — such as the businessman Desmond Hertzberg, 55, who, specialising in older singles, claims a success rate of eight marriages "and no divorces, which is what matters". "I'll bring together someone Liberal and someone Orthodox if it feels right," he says, adding that when he does make a good match, he finds it helpful to lend the newly married couple some of his 2,000 Jewish cookery books. "It's the satisfaction of seeing someone happy. I've just met this gorgeous Moroccan girl — 24, unbelievable blue eyes. I'll be speaking about her later to a dentist I know. I'll tell him," he adds with a grin, "that if he doesn't meet her by the end of the week, he'll get his legs broken."
But mostly the shadchanim are women like Linda Sireling, a 51-year-old mother of five in the process of transferring her 400 active prospects from index cards to a Palm hand-held computer. "I've got tall girls, short boys, intellectual girls, boys who work in the dry cleaners..." Sireling says. "I've just texted a girl in Tesco to see if she was available. Look, she's just replied: 'Why, who have you got for me?'
"There is something of Fiddler on the Roof about it: 'Have I got a boy for you!'" Sireling says, smiling, "but we package it better: 'He's gone to a nice yeshiva,' or 'The family's very involved in the synagogue.' And if a girl isn't nice-looking, you help her. I told one I didn't want her going out without make-up. Yentl, that's what we're doing."
There are also practical requirements. Many of the matchmakers want their singles to be pre-screened for genetic disorders through a religious organisation called Dor Yesharim. The results are kept secret, but prospective partners may check whether any genetic incompatibility would make a marriage unwise.
After 15 years as a shadchan, Linda Sireling is specialising in the more religious end of the market, and says it's the baalei tshuva who are the hardest to satisfy. "The modern boys who watch TV want a girl out of Friends, and the girls want Brad Pitt. That's what we're fighting against."
÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷
Not all sectors of the community share Aish HaTorah's view that intermarriage is a "crisis". Edgar Bronfman, the president of the World Jewish Congress, condemns the fight against intermarriage as racist and doomed. "The whole concept of Jewish peoplehood, and the lines being pure, begins to sound a little like Nazism, meaning racism," he told the Jewish Chronicle last autumn. "We have a choice. We can make an attempt to double the amount of Jews [by welcoming mixed marriages and encouraging children to be raised Jewish] or we can irritate everybody who's intermarried, and lose them all."
For Jonathan Romain, the Reform rabbi of Maidenhead synagogue, it's a question to be grappled with daily. Rabbi Romain has reached out to his congregants' non-Jewish partners, welcoming them to services, and converting around 250 each year. This inclusive approach, which has made Romain something of a spokesman for a tolerant, multi-faith society, has brought him hate mail and accusations that he is "destroying Judaism single-handedly".
"The Orthodox say that I'm encouraging intermarriage, but I can't legislate for whom people fall in love with," he says after a convivial Friday-night service, much of it (unlike the Orthodox equivalent) in English.
After tonight's service, Romain has an appointment with one such couple. The man, a marketing executive, is 28 and comes from an Orthodox Jewish family; his 24-year-old girlfriend, in PR, has a Catholic mother and Protestant father. Until this relationship, born out of student politics, she had never met a Jew. "So how can I help?" Romain asks in his private office. "I've just started considering conversion," the woman says, "and hope you could tell me a little more." (Both partners declined to be named.)
"Well, as you may know, Judaism is not a missionary faith out to grab numbers," Romain begins. "But you're welcome to attend our fortnightly conversion class together, then see how you feel. In a couple of months you may say it isn't for you. Or you might say, yes, this is great. It doesn't matter two hoots what you decide. But while the Orthodox are hostile if you're a convert, we try to be helpful." The Orthodox, he says, will not recognise a Reform conversion.
If she does wish to convert, he says, the young woman will have to learn some Hebrew, then attend a simple interview, "which everybody passes". After the couple leaves, Romain confides that, yes, he thinks this marriage will result in another Jewish home. "She clearly had an empathy, and liked what she saw," he says. "A few years ago it would have been, 'It's her or us.' But the parents' attitudes have changed, as have the rabbis'. Not too long ago, I'd have been encouraged to put the phone down on them."
Still, isn't Romain ignoring Menachem's worry, at the Golders Green takeaway, that diluting the community is a flawed survival strategy for Anglo-Jewry? "If I didn't get involved, they'd get married anyway in a register office," the rabbi replies patiently. "This way, they will have Jewish children and his parents will have Jewish grandchildren. These people in Golders Green just have to understand. I have so many people come to me and say, 'Rabbi, we're in love, and it's the best thing that's ever happened to me.' Who am I to say, 'No, it's not'?"
But Devorah Simon, now Greenberg, remains unconvinced. "Yes, falling in love might be the best thing for them emotionally," she says from her new home near Jerusalem. "But spiritually it's a tragedy. It's all about keeping our Jewish lineage, bringing up Jewish children. And you just can't do that by marrying out."
2005-02-06 15:33 | User Profile
I'm always skeptical of these stories. Most of the married Jews I've met were married to... other Jews. :rolleyes:
2005-02-06 15:44 | User Profile
No offense mmartins, but that is [B]anecdotal evidence[/B] par excellence. What area are you living in?
Petr
2005-02-06 16:35 | User Profile
I was in college in Britain back in the 90s, and most of the folks I knew there have since gotten married...
Jews tend to date "out", but when it comes to marriage they're boringly predictable
2005-02-06 16:40 | User Profile
What about this statistic:
[I]"Between 1990 and 1999, the Board of Deputies reported, births notified to Jewish institutions fell by a quarter, from 3,300 to 2,500."[/I]
2005-02-06 22:14 | User Profile
Google returns a long list of articles in which Jews fret about intermarriage and assimilation. Check out this passage from one website, and think how it would be perceived if we substitute "white" for "Jew":
Intermarriage has created a silent holocaust in this generation. Jewish re-identification and re-education will uncover the deepest treasures in oneââ¬â¢s life. Intermarrying may have become fashionable, but it is still wrong and destructive. Judaism, its practices and faith have always been the source of our survival. Holocaust memories alone have not been enough to keep us together as a people. Jewish family life can be a source of pride, joy, and daily inspiration. Jewish education is the key to survival. Assimilation is an illusion to escape from who we are, but it only brings more problems. Survival depends on our efforts to accept and become who we really are. Interfaith marriages have one of the highest divorce rates. Genealogy and family history were always guarded in order to keep our people together.
The Jewish actor Charles Grodin used to have a TV talk show on MSNBC. On one show, he assembled a collection of prominant Jews (including former New York mayor Ed Koch) for a discussion of the future of American Judiasm. (As if this were a topic of general interest, suitable for broadcast on a national network.) They filled the entire half-hour with anguished denunciations of intermarriage, assimilation, and the upcoming Promise Keepers (Christian) rally in Washington.
I wonder if Jewish intermarriage really matters now, at least in America. Our traditional culture has already been supplanted by something more to the liking of our cultural elites. We're now a country (no longer a nation) of materialistic sybarites. Maybe we're all Jewish now.
2005-02-06 22:43 | User Profile
Tizzard,
There certainly are a number of gentiles in America who have embraced "Jewish values". The people on neocon talk radio are prime examples.
2005-02-06 22:50 | User Profile
[I][B] - "There certainly are a number of gentiles in America who have embraced "Jewish values"." [/B] [/I]
The question is, would those "Jewish values" remain in them (at least as strong), if the actual Jews would disappear and could no longer mentor and show example to them?
Petr
2005-02-10 09:43 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr]What about this statistic:
[I]"Between 1990 and 1999, the Board of Deputies reported, births notified to Jewish institutions fell by a quarter, from 3,300 to 2,500."[/I][/QUOTE] Just a thought
Jews have always been reluctant to permit themselves to be numbered and tagged, and such paranoid tendencies are likely to have intensified in recent years, particularly among European Jews
So it's possible British Jews are simply keeping a lower profile than they were a decade ago
2005-02-10 11:15 | User Profile
If anything, English Jews grew bolder and more open about their identity during the 1990s - even this ridiculously over-hyped "new anti-Semitism" did not get started until 2000 and the new Palestinian intifada.
Also, this figure is talking about births notified to [B]Jewish[/B] institutions - would they be afraid to tell their fellow Jews about their Jewishness?
Just applying little common sense.
Petr
2005-02-10 15:20 | User Profile
[QUOTE]Intermarriage has created a silent holocaust in this generation. Holocaust memories alone have not been enough to keep us together as a people. [/QUOTE] I wonder what a yeshiva school English-grammar class must be like.
"Zvi, try to [I]not [/I] use the word 'holocaust' in a sentence."
And doesn't "Holocaust memories" sound like what photo albums are called in Jerusalem?
[QUOTE]What about this statistic: "Between 1990 and 1999, the Board of Deputies reported, births notified to Jewish institutions fell by a quarter, from 3,300 to 2,500."[/QUOTE] I've been hearing variations of this one for years now. That must be why every Jew wants Eretz Yisroel to stretch from the Nile to the Euphrates: so the 12 of them who'll be left by then can have plenty of leg-room.
[QUOTE]According to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, only a third of Jews of marriageable age are getting married in synagogues. Partly, of course, this reflects the general decline in religious ceremonial. But Professor Barry Kosmin, the director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, estimates from his studies that today's intermarriage rate has risen to about 50%. [/QUOTE] You can set your watch by these people. If a Jew had managed to follow Peary, Amundsen and/or Santa Claus to the North Pole, today there'd be a Holocaust Memorial Igloo, a Board of Deputies of Frozen Jews and a whole lot of blubber brokers speculating in whale-tallow futures up there.
[QUOTE]I wonder if Jewish intermarriage really matters now, at least in America. Our traditional culture has already been supplanted by something more to the liking of our cultural elites. We're now a country (no longer a nation) of materialistic sybarites. Maybe we're all Jewish now.[/QUOTE] Bingo! America is, in many ways, a [I]sotto-voce [/I] Jewish theocracy these days.
2005-02-10 19:34 | User Profile
[QUOTE]Yet the intermarriage graph kept climbing, with around half of British Jews marrying "out".[/QUOTE]
What? No source? The figure is probably 15-20%, as in the US.
2005-02-10 19:38 | User Profile
[B][I] - "The figure is probably 15-20%, as in the US."[/I][/B]
What is[B] your [/B] source for this extraordinary claim?
They do mention their source, though:
[COLOR=DarkRed][B]"Professor Barry Kosmin, the director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, estimates from his studies that today's intermarriage rate has risen to about 50%."[/B][/COLOR]
Petr
2005-02-10 22:46 | User Profile
[font=Arial Narrow][size=3]I[font=Fixedsys] have noticed that many of the posts that are appearing on this board is extremely anti-semitic. [/font][/size][/font]
[font=Fixedsys]And yet many quote the Bible, that was all written by Jews.[/font]
[font=Fixedsys]The Holy and Annoited One, Yeshua (Jesus) Ha MaShiach is a Jew, with Jewish parents.[/font]
[font=Fixedsys]It does not make sense to me at all and does not seem reasonable nor rational.[/font]
[font=Fixedsys]Also, there is no way to really conclude who is actually Jewish and who isnt.[/font]
[font=Fixedsys]This is what Paul says on the subject:[/font] [font=Fixedsys][size=3]Titus 3:9[/size] But [/font][font=Fixedsys]avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless. [/font]
[font=Fixedsys]Remember Yeshua is the Law (the Torah) made flesh and He did not come to do away with the Law, but to complete it, not change it.[/font]
[font=Fixedsys]God does not change. [/font] [font=Fixedsys][/font] [font=Fixedsys]So therefore neither has his words, his commands, his feasts or his food laws changed.[/font] [font=Fixedsys][/font] [font=Fixedsys][/font]