Messianic Judaism

I just want to start this blog entry by saying that I am not prejudice and I am not against anyone. I truly believe that you cannot tell someone that they are wrong for what they believe (except for terrorists); but that it is perfectly okay to disagree with someone’s belief. While I do not agree with Messianic Judaism, I will not ever tell a Messianic Jew or anyone else that they are wrong for what they believe.

In my opinion I do not consider Messianic Jews to be real Jews. While I respect what they believe I cannot and will not consider someone Jewish who believes that Jesus is the messiah. While there are not many noticeable differences between Messianic Jews and other Jews the one the truly separates them is ,Jesus. The first Messianic Jew that I met was a girl who went to my school. At first glance I thought that she was an Orthodox Jew. She dressed modestly, kept kosher, observed Shabbat and spoke Hebrew quite well. But as I got to know her I started to observe little difference such as reference to the Old Testament instead of the Torah, and the way that she prayed was more like church gospel music than what I had learned to believe was a traditional Friday night service and she didn’t know some of the famous Jewish melodies that all of my other Jewish friends knew, and the mention of Jesus.

Then I went to her synagogue and in a very subtle way her parents implied that she was a more “complete Jew” than I was because they believe that Jesus is the messiah. At first I thought this strange and sort of ignored it but then it continued to come up when we would talk about Judaism and religion that Jesus was the messiah. One day I asked her how can she be Jewish and believe in Jesus. She told me that she was a messianic Jew. As I got to learn more about messianic Judaism I realized that maybe these Jews are trying to have the best of both the Christian world and the Jewish world.

While I will not say that they are wrong for what they believe, I don’t agree with it. Messianic Jews clearly don’t fit in with the more mainstream movements of Judaism. In religious school I remember learning about the Conservative movement, the Orthodox movement, the Reconstructionist movement, Chabad, Aish and Lubovitch Jews, but I never was told about Messianic Jews.

I have always been told that Jews don’t believe in Jesus as the messiah and that it is an anti-Jewish belief so how can this group of people say that they are Jews when they believe in something that is clearly not Jewish?