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Book's Sympathy for Messianists Unites Movements in Opposition: Rabbi; Hebrew Christians Are Jews in `Funhouse Mirror'
By E.J. KESSLER
FORWARD STAFF
NEW YORK -- The mainstream Jewish community regards the "messianic Jewish" movement as a group of apostates, funded by large Christian denominations, who deceptively use Jewish rituals to entice Jews into joining their churches -- a threat. Now comes a rabbi who takes a more benign view: The movement, she says, is really nothing more than a group of Jews by birth who are erecting a hybrid Jewish-Christian identity that exposes the contradictions and "incoherence" of liberal Judaism in America - just another challenge.
The interpretation by the rabbi, Carol Harris-Shapiro, of the so-called messianic Jewish or Hebrew Christian movement is being advanced in a new book that seems likely to create a controversy in the Jewish community. Orthodoxy, Conservatism, Reform and Reconstructionism are united behind the idea that "messianic Judaism" is an aberrant faith and that those who practice it should be excluded from Jewish communal institutions.
But Rabbi Harris-Shapiro, a Reconstructionist rabbi and anthropologist, is insisting in "Messianic Judaism: A Rabbi's Journey Through Religious Change in America" (Beacon) that so-called messianic Jews are really "ourselves...in a carnival funhouse mirror," a group whose claim to Jewish authenticity is not necessarily less valid than any made by any group of modern Jews.
While some figures in American Judaism are dismissing Rabbi Harris-Shapiro's analysis as overly relativistic, her book represents the first published critique of the Jewish stance toward "Hebrew Christian" groups to come from within one of the mainstream denominations. It also is appearing as the missionary groups launch their annual summer proselytization drives.
"The book challenges American Jewish claims to authenticity...by examining this group and seeing how much of the norms they include, how `Jewish' they can be," said Rabbi Harris-Shapiro in a telephone interview. She said that many such groups "are taking on some intense [Jewish]...