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Notes -
A very close friend of mine is a Messianic Jew - the only one I’ve personally known. She was born in Israel to an Israeli Jewish mother and an American Christian father. Her mother died of a brain aneurysm when she was an infant and she was raised in America entirely by her father, who soon remarried to a Christian woman and had three more children with no Jewish ancestry.
For my friend, her relationship with Judaism and Christianity is theological on the surface, but at root I think it’s fair to say that it’s an attempt to navigate the agonizing complexities of her own ancestry and her connection to a mother whom she never knew. When she was growing up, her family would honor Jewish holidays - probably somewhat half-heartedly, and as an act of indulgence toward her - as well as Christian holidays. I don’t have any insight into their theological understanding of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity; I’m neither a Christian nor a Jew, so I have no opinion on it either. For this family it seems more like their way of grappling with the presence of a half-Jewish daughter and sister unfortunate enough to exist as a living link to a woman who is now dead.
On the one hand, my friend certainly serves as an illustration of some of the perils of mixed marriages; children of these marriages, even under the best of circumstances, are forced to be “torn between both worlds”, to say nothing of the more material problems they face, such as the potentially fatal issues they have with receiving organ donations. On the other hand, I’ve always found her embrace of a syncretic reconciliation of her two ancestrally-received traditions somewhat touching. If she were to ever attempt to move back to Israel, which she has talked longingly about doing multiple times, she would probably suffer a lot of shunning and social penalties for being a Messianic Jew - especially because all the guys she’s ever dated have been Christian and she would presumably be bringing a gentile spouse in tow with her. I don’t begrudge the Jews their hostility toward “Jews For Jesus”, especially ones within Israel itself; it is good and right for them to oppose what they appropriately see as a subversive fifth column trying to corrode their particular identity and lead future generations into the waiting arms of homogenizing Christianity. I just happen to have a soft spot for Messianic Jews due to my very positive personal relationship with one of them.
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