I have a lot of respect for Natan Sharansky. I place him with Anwar Saddat and Mother Teresa as three of the grandist reflectors of the Love of Jesus in the last half of the 20th century. He has quite a conversion story from Athieism to faith and a love for God and has wrote some very wise insights. He has had a simple faith trying to on the one hand encourage faith in God on the other hand trying to be sensitive to the non-believers. Unlike a lot of religious right wingers, Sharansky tends to be more moderate. He has also been very consillery and accepting and respectful with Christians. I would like to know more of his perspective in his words. (Also may I highly recommend his book "Fear No Evil")
Israel also tends to be a magnet for mentally unballanced people who believe that God raised them up to convert the Jews to Jesus, and some can be very imposeing in their zeal. Could this be the issue he is dealing with?
Unlike the Messanic Jews, the group known as Jews for Jesus see their mission in life as to make Jews into good pork eating sunday keepers.
What conserns me about the Israel laws is that they tend to focus specifically on Christians, and that people doing the same type of things with the New Age and Eastern religions are not covered by those laws.
There are ways of working with the laws. Conversion to Christianity is a big issue in Judiasm. Just like when a Seventh-day Adventist joins another religion, we feel we lost them. So the Jews see conversion to Christianity as loosing them. They see Hitler having tryed to distroy the Jews by killing them, and see some Christians trying to destroy the Jews by converting them... either way, it has the same goal, to distroy the Jews.
Interestingly, the issue is not so much on Jesus as it is Christianity. There are Jews who believe that Jesus in the Messiah, and have accepted him in their lives, but have not accepted Christianity. There has been no problem with this. About half the attendies at the Tel Avi Church in Israel every Sabbath are Jews, who refuse to join the church because they refuse to become Christians. But they love the Lord and they love our message.
In our early missionary work in Europe, we did not know how to make Christians out of people who did not have a Christian background. We did not know how to witness to the Jews. So what we did was offer the European Jews a Jewish version of Adventism. In the 1930's or 40's the General conference put a stop to that practice. Some of these Seventh-day Adventist Jews were still alive in the early and mid 1980's (they were in their 90's) They considered themselves Seventh-day Adventists, but never considered themselves Christians.
With working with Jews, we have four options:
1. The traditional convert them to Christianity.
2. Offer them a Messanic Judiasm version... they become Christians, but still respect their culture.
3. To return to the policy of our early missionaries and offer the Jews a Jewish version of Adventism.
4. The typical Jew has tremendous amounts of truth that they are not aware of. Teach them the Biblical books they have accepted, and encourage them to develope a relationship with the God of the Bible. There is a tremendous amount of work there, we can witness with out getting into the controvercial books and topics.
When I was as the Seminary, one of the doctoral students had been the Conference President in Isael. The Benton Harbor synogogue had one rabbi go to a new assignment and it was going to be a month or two before the new rabbi could come. The synogogue contacted the former Israeli Conference president to give their Sabbath sermons until the new Rabbi could arrive. I wish that our churches would have that relationship with the Synogogues. I wish that if a Rabbi were to wake up Sabbath morning with a sore throat that he would call the Adventist Pastor and ask for him to send someone over to preach.
If we were to do this, we would not have to worry about the Israeli laws.
