Last week’s post about fracturing in Messianic Judaism generated a lot of heated debate, almost 70 comments at the time of this writing. We had everyone from Messianic rabbis to a Jewish anti-missionary to the head of one of the prominent Messianic organizations chiming in the comments. I received offline comments – emails and in-person discussions – from others as well.
Through all that, I think I’ve gained something. Praise to God, I think I’ve got some wisdom I didn’t have before. The thing I’ve learned can be summarized like this: zeal must be checked with pragmatism.
By pragmatism, I mean a faith favoring practical application and living-by-example over ideological “this is how it should be” faith, where often neither you nor the recipient is actually attaining that ideal.
Sounds like a religious fluff sentence, yeah? Well, it’s got real, practical meaning. I hope I can communicate this right.
An analogy through software
Forgive me for a parable that takes a brief excursion into nerdliness; I’m a software developer and nerd at heart; please bear with me.
In software engineering, we have a proverb born out of many years of experience,
“Liberal input, conservative output.”
That is to say, be tolerant and forgiving in what others give to you (input), be strict and precise in what you give to others (output).
As software engineers, a duty we have is to build software according to a spec: a document describing in detail how the software should work. We architect the code so that the software will perform perfectly according to spec.
If the spec says,
“Emails must not have a subject line with character counts > 50.”
Then we will build the software so that emails cannot have subjects with more than 50 characters.
The idealist software developer, often a novice full of youthful enthusiasm, will happily write code to enforce this rule. If a user tries to create an email with a subject longer than 50 characters, his code proudly causes the whole program to crash with a firework display of error messages:
The process will terminate, and the user loses all his work.
Users start complaining they are losing all their work.
But the idealist programmer won’t budge: “NO!”, he insists, “The spec is clear, no email subjects with more than 50 characters! You’re not working according to the spec! We cannot continue running the program when there is corrupted data in it!”
But the experienced and pragmatic programmer takes a different approach. He looks beyond just the words in the spec; he understands the spec’s rule about email subjects lengths was intended to prevent abuse of the system. He crafts his code such that he is liberal with his input; when a user creates an email with more than 50 characters in the subject line, the program won’t crash. Rather, the pragmatic programmer accepts this input, deals with it perhaps through truncating the subject line, then sends it along with the 50 character limit intact.
Liberal input, conservative output.
He prevents abuse, which was what the spec was after all along, while still having some grace when it comes to users that might not even know about the spec.
Experienced, pragmatic developers know the wisdom here, and that is why forgiveness by default is the only way for the internet itself to work. A pragmatic programmer writes,
“I tried browsing the web with “show Javascript errors” turned on, and quickly realized that the web is full of JavaScript errors. You can barely click through three links before encountering a JavaScript error of one kind or another. Often they come in pairs, triplets, sometimes dozens of them. It's nearly impossible to navigate the web with JavaScript error notification enabled.
JavaScript errors are so pervasive, in fact, that it's easy to understand why Internet Explorer [web browser] demotes them to nearly invisible status bar elements. Without this, nobody would be able to browse the web without getting notified to death. Firefox [web browser] goes even further: there's no visible UI whatsoever for any JavaScript errors on the current web page. You have to open the Tools Error Console dialog to see them.”
Exceptional faith in Messiah
Back to Messianic Judaism and its fragmentation, we have a lot of idealists here, people who shout with righteous enthusiasm, “Error! Error! You’re not following the Scriptures!” each time they encounter something that isn’t according to the Scriptures as they understand it. Having so many idealists in the Messianic movement is like browsing the web with Javascript errors turned on – it’s almost unbearable as scary error notifications pop-up in every direction.
Yes, it’s true that our religion is full of errors. You can barely navigate through a few beliefs before encountering errors of every imaginable kind. But we’re too dogmatic, too unforgiving and draconian, when it comes to other’s faith and theology. I’ve done this, I’ve torn apart Christians because they don’t understand God’s commandments in the Torah. They are pork-eating pagans who curse God’s law, they’re lost in Babylon, there’s little hope for them, I’ve said to myself. And more than once, I’ve slammed Messianics over rabbinical issues.
I’ve had the same done to me: I’ve been called a heretic more times than I care to count. “You’re not working according to the spec Bible!” I’ve been told so many times, “This is heresy! Judah is preaching heresy!” Error! Error! Error!
When this happens, people can lose their work, so to speak. It can damage the body of Messiah. They lose heart and become discouraged. Some have gone as far to completely abandon it all; maybe Evangelical Christianity will be a more welcoming home, or maybe the Chabadniks will show more love.
All this for what end? Better adherence to the spec? Sure, and that might be admirable, but we must advocate this without causing Messiah-lovers to fall.
It’s the religious equivalent of a catastrophic failure dialog.
Novice idealists in the faith produce these “error dialogs” a lot. And by “novice idealists”, I don’t mean only those who are “young in the faith”; plenty of these idealists have decades of experience in this faith, yet remain convinced they’ve got it figured out, and thus, have completely shut themselves out to engagement with others.
Novice idealists contribute greatly to the fracturing in Messianic Judaism. Yes, there are legitimate differences in theology and doctrine at times, but often of more concern is the animosity between those with different doctrines. Sometimes the animosity created is worse than the thing you’re opposing.
Everything’s not lost
Idealists aren’t all bad, thank God! They produce a lot of value in the form of zeal. To use a religious cliché, they’re often on fire for God and very zealous in their beliefs. Many of those beliefs are good and holy, whether it’s the zeal for God’s commandments, an out-loud love for Messiah, a love for God’s people, Zionism, to name some.
Like a software engineer graduate fresh out of college bringing new enthusiasm to a project, novice idealists often bring a new wave of enthusiasm and zeal for God, helping to stoke and rekindle a dwindled fire in the old pragmatists.
Messianic Judaism is full of these enthusiastic idealists. It is composed almost entirely of 2 groups that are extremely zealous:
- Jews who took an enormous risk in searching out Yeshua as Messiah of Israel, at the cost of being disowned by Jewish family members and labeled as betrayers of our ancestors, “worse than Hitler”, mourned for as if dead, etc.
- Christians who took a big chance in dropping their normal church lives and started digging for the Jewish nature of faith in the God of Israel and the holy nature of God’s commandments, often being labeled as heretics and outcasts by those in normative Christianity, told that their keeping of “that Jewish stuff” causes them to be “under the Law” and without grace.
It should be no surprise so many Messianics are idealists. We’ve made big strides to get here (or rather, God has led us across these huge boundaries), praise to the Lord, and now we’re zealous and on fire. This same zeal can make us idealists, however, as our zeal causes us to vehemently reject without hesitation beliefs we deem outside The Spec.
The answer: maturity and pragmatism
Boaz Michael from First Fruits of Zion related to me that he strives for “high personal standards without condemnation”. I think it’s a mantra that is similar to software’s “liberal input, conservative output.”
Truth be told, as much as I’m zealous for the Torah, following the spec as I see it, and talking about it all the time on this blog, I’ve got some issues. Heck, my personal standards allow for more time on the internet and TV than in the Scriptures by a ratio of 10:1, easy!
Meanwhile, as idealists often do, I’ve been whacking people over the head for not following The Spec. Sorry about that. Forgive my past un-budging, rigid ideology, fine blog readers.
My priorities need to be reordered. I’m upping my personal standards. And I’ll be more liberal with where people are at with God.
This isn’t “let people walk over your beliefs”. Taking a stand for what’s right is righteous.
This isn’t “all paths lead to the same mountain”. They don’t, and God’s way will prevail.
This isn’t “sugarcoat The Truth to make it more palatable”. Speaking in plain language what’s right takes righteous boldness.
The wisdom is this: You know what’s righteous? Then live it, and many will see and trust the Lord.
Toby Janicki relates in his Treasures in Heaven teaching,
“I look at the Master’s parable in Matthew 25 about who will sit on the right of the king, and who’s going to be on the left. And you look at that, when he’s separating the sheep and the goats, so to speak, and there’s not one mention of “you who had the right theology, you come over here”, or “you who had the correct Christology, come over here”, or “you who had the correct eschatology, come over here.”
Rather, the basis is, “Did you give food to the hungry? When I was thirsty, did you give me drink? I was a stranger, did you welcome me? I was naked, did you clothe me? I was sick, did you visit me?”
As I read that, at the end of the gospel, that is the heart of our Master coming out right there.
…
The [Chasidic] Rebbe taught his schlichim [“messengers”] to avoid arguments. Unfortunately, a lot of times, we in the Torah movement are known by just that: arguments.
I got off the phone with someone last night and was told of a split in another Messianic congregation. When I asked what it was over, they said it was a doctrinal issue.
How many times have you been involved in situations where people are arguing about things that, in the long run, don’t even matter? I don’t think the world is impressed when we argue about the calendar, about how tzitzit should be tied, and so on.
While there are times for strong rebuke, it is too often the default response, and it’s often given by the enthusiastic idealists. It makes it hard to peacefully exist in this move of God when every other person yells, “Error! Error! Error!”
Zeal is good, keep it. But practice forgiveness by default. High personal standards without condemnation. Liberal input, conservative output. Perhaps then we’ll see more maturity and cohesion in Messianic Judaism. Better yet, maybe we’ll be better servants of Messiah, regardless of doctrinal affiliation.