 My name is Richard. My last name is Fentridge. I'm Jewish. And I open your interpreter today for this very important presentation by Rabbi Kravitz. My name is Rabbi Ben Sion Kravitz. I'm the founder and western regional director of a Jewish organization called Jews for Judaism. This organization was founded over 18 years ago as a response to the needs of the Jewish community to evangelical Christians who target the Jewish community for conversion. Throughout the world, these evangelical Christians are very interested in bringing anyone they can into their faith, but they have shown a particular interest in trying to convert Jews. This will be part of the topic that we cover in this take. We will speak about why they're interested in converting Jews, what tactics they use, and how we can best protect ourselves from their attempts to do that. But first, I think it's important to start off with some introductory remarks about some of the concepts that the Christians speak about. First of all, the most important principle of Judaism is our belief in one God. In every Jewish prayer book, we find that the most important moment in our prayer is when we say the words, Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. It's interesting that that verse does not say that there is only one God. It says that God is one. Pointing to the fact that God is one in that there's nothing else except God. God exists above all the limitations that we find in this world that are limited to time and to space. God created time and space. So to define God as anything less than a oneness would be a limitation on God's greatness. That is one of the reasons why we differ so much from Christianity that defines God as being a Trinity, which divides God into three aspects. In fact, that concept of a Trinity really traces back to a time before Christianity when the Greeks and the Romans practiced different forms of paganism and within their beliefs they had a belief of a Trinitarian God. This is not a Jewish concept. We believe that God has a mission for the world and that is to perfect the world and make it a better place. We do this through setting a good example in our lives, by following God's will, by doing good deeds, by studying the Torah, our Jewish Bible. And we pray and we hope that this will help us to reach a time period when the world will reach a state of perfection, of goodness. That time period in Jewish tradition is called the Messianic Age, a time when the world will reach perfection and there will be a Jewish leader who will direct the world to serving God in the most perfect and holy way. That Jewish leader will be a descendant of all of the previous Jewish kings who started with King David and his son King Solomon. The term that's used to describe this great leader in the future is the Messiah. This word Messiah originates from a Hebrew word, Mosheach. The word Mosheach translates anointed. There were many people in the Bible who were anointed. All the Jewish kings were anointed, the Jewish prophets were anointed, and even the priests who served in the Jewish temple were anointed. That term represents a certain state of holiness and sanctification that that individual has. So we use that term to apply to a great leader in the future whose job it will be to direct the Jewish people and the world to serving God. It's interesting that in Judaism we have no belief that anybody worships this particular individual. No one worships the Jewish Messiah. He is a human being like everyone else, but he happens to be a very special and holy person and his mission is to help us serve God. This is very different than the Christian view. The Christian view is that the Messiah is actually a part of God. That idea of him being a part of God contradicts our view of the oneness of God that we spoke about a few minutes ago. And also the idea that the Messiah is an individual whose job is to help us reach God rather than to serve or to worship Him. These have always been the main differences between our religions. And that is the reason why in the beginning of the time of the Christian growth of their faith, Jews unanimously rejected the fact that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. What happened was the early Christian church redefined the definition of the Messiah and since it was so different than our view, it was attracted to the non-Jewish world, but it was rejected by the Jewish people. And because of that rejection we suffered tremendous persecution at the hands of the Christian world. Because the Christian missionaries are obsessed with converting Jews, they have dedicated tremendous amounts of resources and money to converting Jewish people. The main groups today that are interested in converting Jews are Christians who are part of the evangelical Christian movement. This includes several very large denominations. The two that are the largest are the Southern Baptists and the second is the Assemblies of God. These two Christian groups together have a membership of close to 30 million people. When we think about the size of those two churches, it's not difficult to understand that they are able to put together very large financial resources to further their purpose of converting the world. And specifically of converting Jews, we estimate that these two Christian groups, along with hundreds of smaller groups, spend over $250 million. Every year in their attempt to convert Jews. They helped form different specific missionary organizations that are specifically trained to approach Jewish people and to convert them. Probably the most well-known organization that does this is a Christian missionary group called Jews for Jesus. It's interesting that their name sounds very similar to the name of our organization, Jews for Judaism. That's because we created our organization as a response to this missionary organization. Many Jewish people were greatly offended by a missionary group that targeted Jews and claimed that you could be Jewish and Christian at the same time. These missionaries realized that they were having a very difficult time converting educated Jews about the beliefs of Christianity. And there's a very clear and easy reason to understand that. Jewish people who were educated, who knew not only what our Jewish Bible actually taught about God and the Messiah, could see that the teachings that were being presented by the evangelical Christians were a distortion of our teachings. Additionally, we know that Jews who have been brought up with Jewish tradition and who were educated were Jews who had experienced the warmth, the beauty, the passion, the excitement, and the fulfillment of our religion. When you have a life that's full of these wonderful experiences and our faith, then when someone else presents something else to you, you're not as attracted to it because you know that you have something meaningful in your own life. But if unfortunately an individual is a Jewish person who has not had the opportunity to be exposed to the beauty of Judaism and if they're looking for something in their life, the minute someone comes and says, look at how beautiful our religion is, people are automatically attracted to it and interested in exploring the possibility. And then if they don't really know the facts of our own faith, it's very easy to make a mistake and to fall into the trap that the evangelical Christians are setting through their presentation. That's interesting that we're mentioning a trap. That sounds like a serious plot that's being set by the Christians and it makes them sound like evil people. I think we need to clarify that these people are not necessarily bad people. These are very sincere, caring individuals. However, their zealousness to share their faith often allows them to lose perspective and sometimes present things in a way that is, in our opinion, deceptive. Some of the examples of this is we see that when the evangelical Christians saw that they were having a very difficult time converting Jews to Christianity because Jews of all backgrounds, whether they were very educated or not, understood that Judaism and Christianity were two separate and distinct religions. And therefore they knew that if they were to leave Judaism and become Christian, they would no longer be considered a Jew. That concept was the largest obstacle preventing a Jew from leaving his faith, the understanding that they might not be considered a Jew anymore. Analyzing this obstacle, the Christian evangelical movement devised a method of confusing the issue by covering it over with what we call a smoke screen. They decided that they would create a movement within Christianity that looked very Jewish but had all of the Christian beliefs. That is how the missionary movement Jews for Jesus started. It was started specifically as an attempt of the church to find a way to make Jews think that they could be Jewish and Christian at the same time. So rather than call their leaders ministers or priests, they started calling these Christian leaders rabbis. Instead of calling their center of worship a church, they chose to call that center a synagogue. Instead of saying that the person was baptized in water when they became a Christian, they adopted a Jewish term called mikvah. Mikvah is a ritual bath that has been used by Jews for purification for thousands and thousands of years. But by giving it that Jewish term rather than the English term, it helped them present their message to Jews in a way that the Jew would feel that they're really not giving up their Jewish heritage because their heritage is so important to them they don't want to truly abandon it. So the Christians developed this whole method of presenting Christianity kind of dressed up with all the garments of Judaism. It's kind of like a masquerade party like people do for different holidays like Halloween or in the Jewish world we have a holiday once a year called Purim where we are dressed up and we look like something that we really are. This is exactly what has happened with the Christian missionaries. So their whole method has been to disguise it as something that it isn't. But for uneducated Jews, it looks very attractive. Plus, it allows them to feel that they're part of the larger movements of the world, that they're part of all of Christianity. It allows them to feel that they can intermarry with non-Jewish people who are part of the Church. It allows them to socialize with large numbers of Christian youth groups and adult groups that are Christian based. So there's a tremendous attraction there. Really all of this is part of an attempt to assimilate Jews away from their faith and their heritage and draw them to another religion. Part of the theology of these Christians that causes them to be so obsessed with wanting to convert Jews is found in the writings of the Christian missionaries. They have several different reasons why they want to convert Jews more than any other ethnic group and why they create specific missionary groups called Jews for Jesus and why they will dedicate so many millions of dollars to convert us. Christian missionaries believe that when they convert a Jew, this brings Jesus one step closer to coming back. Now let's explain that. When Jesus died and did not fulfill all the requirements of the Messiah of bringing universal peace to the world to transforming the world into a perfect place where everybody loves each other, where there's no war anymore, where all the Jews live in tranquility in the land of Israel, the Christian world was faced with a horrible dilemma. If Jesus is this Jewish Messiah, how come He didn't fulfill all of the requirements that the Bible speaks about? At that point, the Church invented a concept that is not found anywhere in Jewish teachings. This concept that the Messiah will come twice. He will come once, according to Christianity, simply to die so that our sins can be forgiven and He will come a second time to bring this universal peace to the world. This idea of two comings of the Messiah is really not only not a Jewish concept, it is not a Biblical concept. First of all, we do not believe that anyone needs to die for us to get rid of our sins. We believe that we as Jews can turn directly to God and through sincere prayer coming from the depth of our heart ask God to forgive us for any transgression that we may have done either intentionally or accidentally. And God being a loving, caring and compassionate God like a father and mother that cares for their child understands our mistakes and when we sincerely ask for forgiveness we are forgiven by God. That is the beauty of our Jewish holiday Yom Kippur that at the end of it we walk away understanding that God has truly forgiven us because God truly loves us. The view of God in many forms of Christianity is a very angry God who always is looking for ways to punish us and that the only way we can get forgiveness is by accepting Jesus as the person who died for us. That is not a Jewish concept and it is not a concept found in the Jewish Bible. So when Jesus died and did not fulfill the true mission of the Jewish Messiah of bringing universal peace to the world and knowledge of God Christians needed to redefine the idea of Messiah and to explain why Jews didn't accept Him. So it came up with several explanations. The most common explanation is almost funny when you hear it and that is to say that we Jews were the most knowledgeable people about what our Bible says the most knowledgeable people the Messiah is supposed to do we are blind we can't see the truth. That's like saying that it's the American people who can't recognize whether or not United States money is counterfeit or not but people who live in China are more qualified to do it. It's ridiculous. We are the best qualified people but they had to come up with some explanation and they did that and by saying that we are blind they justified thousands of years of persecution of the Jewish people for not having accepted Jesus. In the 1940s with the founding of the State of Israel and the return of the Jewish people to their promised homeland after being exiled in Europe and in Spain and all over the world for 2,000 years when we returned to the Land of Israel the evangelical Christian population was confused they couldn't understand how the Jews who were being punished and exiled for not accepting Jesus were all of a sudden getting their land back so they rewrote history again and said that this was happening as the fulfillment of a prophecy that right before Jesus returns the Jews would get their homeland and that they felt they needed to convert more and more Jews in order to get Jesus to return and this is why they developed all of these missionary groups in addition to presenting their whole movement to look Jewish and the extent that they'll do it goes beyond just calling their place of worship a synagogue or their leader a rabbi many of these followers of these movements of Jews for Jesus and another term that they like to call themselves are messianic Jews Jews who follow the Messiah Jesus they will dress up wearing a head covering, a kippah they will wear a beard they will have fringes from the side of their pants and the Hebrew are called sisiit and if you ask them they're not doing it because they believe that they're commanded to by God as traditional Orthodox Jews believe they're doing it because they want to present themselves that they are connected to our Jewish heritage but in fact they're contradicting the most important part of our heritage which is not whether you have a beard or whether you wear a kippah it's our belief in one God and the belief that a Messiah is a human being and not part of God those beliefs have caused Jews to reject the overtures of Christianity and also to strengthen themselves in their own faith and out of our history it was always a very small number of Jews who were converted to Christianity and usually those were Jews who were threatened they were either threatened to be tortured or they were threatened that their family or themselves would be killed it's only in the last 50 to 60 years that there have been large numbers of Jews attracted to Christianity it's usually because those Jews unfortunately did not have an opportunity to understand the beauty and the knowledge and wisdom of Judaism connected to that missionaries take advantage of Jews lack of education about Jewish items now remember a person could be very educated they could have a PhD in physics or psychology but still not be very educated about their Judaism this is not telling about their intelligence it's speaking about how much exposure and opportunity they had to learn about Jewish ritual history and Bible so one of the things that missionaries will do is they will often try to quote Bible passages that most Jews are very unfamiliar with in an attempt to show the Jewish person that their own Bible speaks about the Messiah and that the only person who could fulfill these passages would be Jesus based on the story that we have let's analyze one of the most simple passages that missionaries like to quote and let's see how it has been manipulated one of the books in our Bible is called the book of Psalms this book was written by King David thousands of years ago it is a beautiful book of poetry it speaks at the beginning of King David's difficult life how he ran from his enemies who were trying to kill him and his faith and trust in God in the beginning of the book of Psalms King David using poetry describes his enemies as being like wild animals who chase him and hunt him and want to kill him this is simply a form of poetry in Psalm 22 in the 16th verse it says that dogs have surrounded me evil people have encompassed me they are at my hands and my feet like a lion this verse fits clearly with David's description of describing his enemies as being like wild animals he is saying my enemies are like dogs who surround me they are evil people who encompass me and they are attacking my hands and feet like a lion that grabs at a person's hands and feet so if you were to read this verse in a proper translation from the Hebrew original and to read it in context with all of the passages before it it would clearly fall into place and make perfect sense that this is how David describes his life and how he is running from his enemies when a missionary utilizes this passage he never shows the Jewish person the previous passages never shows them or asks them to read all of the Psalms that appeared before this particular one and also the missionary is only showing it to them in their Christian translation of our Bible remember just because scholars Christian scholars translated our Bible does not mean that they did it correctly if a person were to open up a Christian Bible to this particular verse in the book of Psalms the verse is very different instead of saying dogs have surrounded me evil people have encompassed me they are at my hands and feet like a lion the verse is translated in Christian Bibles as dogs have surrounded me evil people encompass me they pierced my hands and feet by using the word pierced what they've done here is they've translated the Hebrew word that means like a lion as pierced meaning that you've taken something sharp and you've pushed it through another object and in this case they're saying they pierced my hands and my feet they are trying to create through that translation the image of a crucified individual and if we see images at a church or in some art book of Jesus being crucified on the wooden cross the symbolism is that his hands and his feet have been pierced by nails this was a Roman form of execution that was done only by non-Jews for people that rebelled against the Roman Empire it was never a form of execution done by Jewish people we never ever used it but because so many people are familiar with the story of Jesus being crucified and having his hands and feet pierced by simply mistranslating that verse and reading it out of context the missionary's goal is to quote that to a person and have their mind seem to envision that it fits, that it's speaking about someone being crucified and now in reality that could have referred to anyone who was crucified, not specifically Jesus but because we are familiar with the story of Jesus because it's so much part of our culture and spoken about in our history books and in theology books people automatically associated that it's speaking to him so let's recap the only reason this verse even sounds like it's referring to someone being crucified or Jesus is because the verse is being read out of context and it's being read in a version that has been mistranslated and whenever a Christian missionary quotes any passage to you wherever it may come from the first impression that you will probably have is it sounds like Jesus but I want you to remember until you take the time to study that passage with someone educated who can present to you whether or not the word is translated correctly the context is what it says and what it truly means may be completely different this idea of examining things carefully is something that we learn as little children I remember when I was a little child one of the first things my parents taught me because I wanted more than anything to be able to cross the street without holding my mother's hand I think everybody remembers that moment I didn't want to hold my mother's hand I wanted to be a big boy and cross the street by myself think back in your minds what you were taught by your family about what you had to do before you crossed the street I'm sure that everybody's thinking the following words before you cross the street you need to look both ways you need to look to your right you need to look to your left even if it's late at night we're not on the street we are always careful to examine both directions to make sure we know what's coming at us as we got a little bit older and things happen to us that we sometimes get sick or we hurt ourselves we might go to a doctor and a doctor might tell us that we need an operation what were we always taught even though the doctor may have very impressive qualifications and be very educated before we accept the doctor's opinion we're always taught we should get what? we should get a second opinion another example of this is also very I'll never forget when I bought my first car I was in college I wanted a car more than anything the price of the car sounded really great and I can still remember my father's words before you buy that car take it to a mechanic someone who's knowledgeable about cars let him look at it and see if everything is really running properly the common theme in all of these three examples is that whenever we make an important decision despite how qualified the individual speaking to us may seem we need to be careful and get more than one opinion when you are approached by someone who's Christian they may be a professional missionary or they may simply be a friend of yours who believes in Christianity they are speaking from a perspective of having authority of being very knowledgeable and they sound like they're the doctor or the mechanic or the police officer telling you it's okay to cross the street we must still realize that they can make mistakes and we have to be responsible and look both ways get a second opinion we now are so fortunate that we have the internet and we have chat rooms we have ways of communicating with rabbis that allow us to ask them questions to emails to get explanations the organization Jews for Judaism is a resource for you it's a resource that you can contact and ask those questions to and get the second opinion we have a web page at JewsForJudaism.org through that web page you can get our email addresses and write us and I'm very happy to say that over the years the Jews for Judaism as the several Jewish people who are hearing impaired have taken advantage of our resources and turned to us for help some of them have actually been confused by Christian missionaries and even a few of them had been converted by Christian missionaries and although it was very difficult for their parents to get them to agree to meet with a rabbi when they did that and they saw that we were truly caring about them that we really believed in our faith that we were spiritual people they were able to listen to our perspective and use their own mind to weigh and balance the two different sides that they had heard the Christian side and the Jewish side and once they had all the facts they were able to look at the evidence and make a wise decision and in every case that I've ever had where I spoke to a Jewish person who listened to both sides they always realized that Judaism being the older religion being the first religion being the religion that bases itself on the original Hebrew text was the religion for them the religion that their ancestors struggled to keep and enabled us to perpetuate and pass on from generation to generation Jews for Judaism is not simply an organization that wants to counteract the efforts of Christian missionaries our goal is to help Jewish people discover their own heritage unfortunately when you have Christian missionaries who are actively targeting the Jewish community we need to respond to them we need to give Jewish people the tools to be able to react to these missionaries who tried to convert them but the greatest tool that we could give to any Jewish person is the feeling of pride in their heritage and more knowledge of who they are if I would have the opportunity now to share with you a short story that I think would be very meaningful for you this story goes back many years in Europe there was a young Jewish man who didn't have any wealth he lived in a small broken down house the house had broken windows the floor boards made noise when he walked and all he had inside was a little bed and a little stove one night he had a dream he dreamt that in a very far land there was a beautiful palace and there was a bridge leading to the palace and buried under the bridge was a treasure of gold and diamonds when he woke up from the dream he realized that it was just a dream so he ignored it the next night he had the same dream again and he ran to his parents to tell them about the dream and they also laughed and they said why would there be such an important valuable treasure buried under a bridge it would be in the castle, not under the bridge so he forgot about the dream again the next night he had the dream again so he decided he would go look for that treasure he left his house started searching for the great palace one day he sees a bridge leading to a palace and he runs up to it and there's a guard standing there with a gun protecting the palace so the little Jewish man says to the guard you know, I had a dream three nights in a row that buried under this bridge is a wonderful treasure of diamonds and gold let me go look if I find it I'll share it with you when he told that story to the guard the guard started laughing uncontrollably and the little Jewish man said what are you laughing about he says you can't believe in dreams for the last three nights I dreamt that in a very far away land there's an old run down house with broken windows a floor that makes noise when you walk a little bed and a stove and I dreamt that in that house under the floor there's a wealthy wealthy treasure and why would there be a treasure in such an old run down house and the Jewish man heard this story he realized that the guard was describing his home so he forgot about his dream of the treasure under the bridge and he ran home and he ripped up the floor in his own house he found a treasure this story is really a parable it teaches us a lesson that sometimes we think that the buried treasure that we're looking for can only exist near a palace but sometimes we have to realize that the buried treasure that we want is really in our own backyard it's really in our own heritage and diamonds are a good example for our heritage because although diamonds are beautiful and they're shiny and they glitter in the light when a diamond originally comes out of the ground it doesn't look very pretty it's only after you work on it and you clean it and you polish it and you cut it there's the brilliance and the value of the diamond truly glow that's the same with Judaism Judaism is like a buried treasure it's a diamond in the earth it's really inside of us and we need to work on it and we need to polish it and we need to shape it and once we put our effort in then the beauty and the brilliance of it shines and I think that's the message I'd like to leave with you Judaism is a beautiful treasure it's your treasure, it's your heritage there are so many people that care about you and teach you don't give up something that you may not know a lot about until you've given it a chance where you've looked both ways looked for the diamond, polished it and found the beauty the warmth and the holiness of Judaism and if you have that inside of you you will not only not be influenced by Christian missionaries you yourself will become a leader in the Jewish community to help many other people stay connected and with God's help we will all live to reach that time when the Jewish Messiah does come and the world is a world full of peace and harmony and when nobody hurts anyone anymore we can all live to serve God