Until recently, the American Jewish community’s welcome or rejection of support for Israel from many Evangelical Christians seemed an abstract national matter.
Yet, last Saturday, the First Assembly of God church in Kenosha hosted a “Bless Israel Day” that was attended by 200 to 300 people, according to its organizers, who express impassioned support for Israel.
And the organizers sought, and received, support and encouragement for the event from members of the Wisconsin Jewish community, including an announcement of the day in one local synagogue.
Rabbi Gideon Goldenholz, spiritual leader of Beth El Ner Tamid Synagogue, allowed synagogue president Dr. David Gutterman to announce the Bless Israel Day during Sabbath services — not to encourage members to attend, but to have them tell “friends and neighbors who might be interested in going,” Goldenholz said.
“I’m not against anybody supporting Israel, whatever their background or motivation,” Goldenholz said. “Right now, Israel is being attacked on all sides, and there is so much anti-Israel sentiment. Any kind of friend Israel does have is good.”
According to Bless Israel Day co-chair Carole Thompsen, leader of the small Milwaukee-Racine-Kenosha chapter of Bridges for Peace, a pro-Israel Christian organization headquartered in Jerusalem: “We have a real desire to bring to people’s attention the need to be involved with Israel, not only to know the situation but to support Israel in any way they can.”
To Rev. Duane Bradley Sr., volunteer staff pastor at the church and co-chair of the event, “The Scriptures are plain” in saying that “we have an obligation to bless Israel.”
In fact, Bradley and his wife Ruth go even further to embrace some Jewish worship practices. Ruth had a bat mitzvah ceremony at a “Messianic Jewish” congregation in Illinois “a few years ago,” she said. “Our faith is built on yours,” said Ruth. “I’ve always loved the Jewish form of worship” and “it is a good thing to incorporate it and use it as we can.”
Hung up on theories?
Jon Sadof, a Milwaukee businessman who has been active in the Jewish community, has spoken in Evangelical churches about Israel. Like Goldenholz, he welcomes their support.
“There are probably 70 million fundamentalist Christians in America,” Sadof said. “That’s a lot of votes and power in Congress.” (The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, in its “Resolution on Evangelical-Jewish Relations” approved earlier this year, cites a figure of around 60 million “Evangelical Christians.”) Moreover, “I strongly suspect that much of America’s support for Israel comes from this strong, supportive group,” said Sadof.
Rabbi David Fine, spiritual leader of Lake Park Synagogue, contended that “Israel is in a lot of need of support and needs to take support from wherever it comes.” Fine said he told Bradley “I appreciate and support” what he was doing with the Bless Israel Day.
Yet Rabbi Dena Feingold, spiritual leader of Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha, disagrees. She has “always been uncomfortable with Evangelical support for Israel” and thinks the Jewish community should “stay away from these people,” she said.
Part of her discomfort has to do with tenets of Evangelical theology. The Evangelicals are not a monolithic movement; they have different denominations under different names (Pentecostal, Evangelical, Baptist) with different teachings.
Some of these movements follow a doctrine called “dispensationalism.” It predicts that at the end of days, all Jews will be gathered into the Holy Land and a world war will break out in which millions of Jews will be killed, after which Jesus will return to earth and all survivors of the war will convert to Christianity.
Among people who believe this, “if there’s love for Israel and Jews, it’s motivated by a basic underlying non-acceptance of us for who we are,” said Feingold. “I’d rather not have friends who don’t respect the integrity of my religion for what it is and don’t respect my beliefs as legitimate in and of themselves.”
But others find such issues irrelevant. “Those beliefs are real for them, not for me,” said Fine. It is more important to be pragmatic and accept assistance that will “lead to a strong Israel and stronger Jewish people” and “not get hung up on theories,” he said.
Not just Tel Aviv
A second concern is the Evangelicals’ tendency to advocate hard-line positions, that Israel and the U.S. should not allow creation of a Palestinian state and that Israel should never give up any of the territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War. Opinion polls tend to show that about half of all Israelis and about two-thirds of American Jews disagree with this stance.
David Lerman, president of the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Peace Now, said he felt troubled by this kind of “blind support of Israel without understanding the deep complexity of the issues,” such as the probability that Arabs will outnumber Jews if Israel keeps those territories. “For the Jewish community to rely on that kind of support is problematic,” he said, emphasizing that this is his personal opinion, not that of APN.
But to Jews who support the hard-line stance, the Evangelical Christian agreement on this issue is a problem “for the leftists, not for us,” said Sadof. “Unlike most Jews, [Evangelical Christians] read the Bible. They know clearly what God said. God didn’t just give us Tel Aviv, but also Jenin and Jericho and the whole Judea and Samaria area.”
A third issue involves whether cooperating with Evangelicals opens the Jewish community to missionizing efforts. Feingold and Paula Simon, executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, expressed concern about this, particularly about the possibility of Evangelicals using what Simon called “deceptive means.”
Sadof admitted that he has encountered “people who are very dishonest in their approach to Jews, saying they are pro-Israel but in fact their bottom line is conversion.” However, “for every one of those I’ve met, I’ve met 100 at least with no intent of converting Jews, who want to work with Jews to promote Israel politically and economically and to teach Christians about the Jewish roots of Christianity.”
Bradley and Thompsen denied that they were seeking converts. “That’s not what we’re trying to put across,” said Bradley. “Our purpose is unconditional love.”
Finally, the Evangelicals also tend to favor a socially conservative domestic agenda for the U.S. This puts them often at odds with most of the mainstream American Jewish community.
That makes Jewish community relations workers like Simon and Harriet McKinney, executive director of the American Jewish Committee’s Milwaukee chapter, cautious. Because they seek to build coalitions with all kinds of groups on different issues, they don’t want to reject totally the prospect of doing this with Evangelicals.
“The difficulty in working with Evangelical Christians is to separate out support for Israel from domestic issues on which we don’t agree,” said Simon.
McKinney said she was “very willing” to share pro-Israel information and ideas with the Bless Israel Day organizers. “On the other hand, one needs to be particularly thoughtful about organized relationships with the Evangelical community” and to decide when and how to cooperate with them on a “case-by-case” basis, she said.
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