Book Review: King of the Jews

King of the Jews by D. Thomas Lancaster

When I was a child, I asked my parents if there was "any more to the Bible". Somehow, although I couldn't put my finger on what I wanted, it seemed like the story was not complete. At the time my parents gave me a stock answer, along the lines of "the canon of scripture is set". I felt that something was missing- and today I would say I was looking for some historical context. What else was going on while Yeshua was calming the wind and waves of Galilee? What kinds of people crowded around Him to hear him speak and ask for healing?

In this book, Thomas Lancaster explores that context; not just the physical setting but the cultural, theological, and Rabbinic context of His life and teaching. In my dear Baptist upbringing, I had always been taught that Yeshua's teachings were utterly novel, that He came to start a new religion and those foolish Jews just didn't really understand Him very well. Here we learn quite the opposite- Yeshua sometimes alluded to parables and teachings which had originated from other rabbis, He never desired a divorce between His followers and Judaism, and His Jewish contemporaries understood Him oh so very well... and we are the ones with some bizarre notions.

The book consists of nineteen articles originally from Torah Club #4, and many of them were reprinted in messiah magazine. (They were my favorite feature and I am excited to see them all reprinted in one book.) They cover topics from Yeshua's birth to His death, His parables and miracles, John the Baptist's ministry, and such things as apocryphal gospels and Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Lancaster helps us shed the blinders of thousands of years of a Greek mindset. He references the Talmud and other ancient Jewish writings to illustrate how Yeshua's contemporaries understood Him, and how He fit in that culture... and how we can better understand His teachings and follow Him.

Here is a quote from the Introduction:

The Church's sacred writings-the Gospels and Epistles left behind by those earliest believers-testify to the absolute Jewishness of the man and the original faith. The evidence remains within the books of the New Testament like an ancient, hidden code... The code could also be described as a paradigm of thought and interpretation. The paradigm is late second-Temple Judaism. Therefore, our best resource for interpretation is Jewish literature that was written in the same paradigm. For example, it is hard to correctly interpret the parables of Jesus in isolation, but when the reader compares the parables of Jesus with the hundreds of similar rabbinic parables preserved in ancient Jewish literature, he suddenly has a contextual matrix from which to draw understanding.

View from Jerusalem #3

Continuation of a series, received in an email, from a friend in Israel:

"As I begin another "View from Jerusalem", the situation here remains the same: muddled. Iranian President Ahmadinejad said recently, "Israel is destined for destruction and it will disappear soon." Former Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is saying repeatedly, "This is 1938 and Iran is Germany." As then-Prime Minister Golda Meir said decades ago, "The Arabs want us dead. We want to live. It is hard to find a compromise between those two positions."
The General Security Services (Shin Bet) people think Israel should undertake a large-scale military operation in Gaza. On Saturday the UN voted to oppose any Israeli military response in Gaza, as if the UN General Assembly runs Israel’s Cabinet and Defense Ministry. Are "innocent civilians" who voluntarily show up to serve as human shields (to prevent the IAF from bombing a legitimate military target in Gaza) actually "innocent civilians" as the western press depicts them, or are they part of the terrorist army? They know when they volunteer that Israel won’t bomb "civilians". When IDF forces are being fired on by snipers hiding in a mosque, is it legitimate for the soldiers under attack to shoot back at the mosque? The terrorists in the mosque know before they shoot that the Israelis won’t shoot back. Israel’s spies on the ground say that Iran has just tested a nuclear fuse, but the CIA’s scientific snooping devices tell us it didn’t happen. Do we trust Israel’s spies or the CIA’s machines? And even if Iran did test a nuclear fuse, what is the world in general (and Israel in particular) willing to do about it? "‘Tis a puzzlement."

According to Arutz 7 (israelnationalnews.com), there were ten Kassam rockets fired from Gaza toward Sderot over the weekend, and Sderot suffered its fourth major casualty in four days. It’s a small town. This situation is not acceptable. No other country would tolerate such a situation. In 2004, 159 Kassam rockets were fired from Gaza toward the Sderot region. In 2005, there were 306 rockets fired. So far in 2006, there have been 1,004 Kassam rockets fired on Sderot, and the year isn’t over yet. Do you see this in the western media? After a Jewish billionaire privately took a thousand Sderot school kids (+ or -) and their families to Eilat where they could be safe and the kids could play outside, then the government suddenly arranged a lot of Sderot school field trips to Tel Aviv so that the remaining kids wouldn’t be in Sderot’s dangerous schools during the school day. But these same kids live in unprotected homes at night. Sderot is inside the original Israeli borders of 1949. It is not a "settlement" in the "disputed territories". Why does this go on and on?

The last speaker to address our tour group was Daniel Taub, Director of the General Law Division of Israel’s Foreign Ministry. Taub is a graduate of Oxford, London, and Harvard. He closed our conference by asking, "Why can’t the Palestinians take all of the incitement against Jews out of their school textbooks? They have nothing to replace it! Their whole identity as Palestinians is based on hating Israel, killing Jews, and being martyrs. They have no positive national identity."

Americans can fondly remember Paul Revere without hating and killing the British today. Canadians can remember the ultimate victory of the British army over the French army, yet French civil law is still observed in Quebec and the French language is one of the official languages of Canada. In contrast, the deep-rooted hatred of Jews so carefully nurtured in the Palestinians’ souls will not disappear with the creation of the nation of Palestine (God forbid). This is a spiritual war, not just an emotional, nationalistic conflict.

The incentive for continued Palestinian terrorism is strong and logical. When there is a terrorist attack, the Israelis close the border and ordinary Palestinians cannot go to their employment within Israel. At this point the Palestinians are suffering and angry. Their anger is toward the Iraelis who closed the border, not toward the terrorists who caused the border closure. This response has been pre-programmed since nursery school. They perceive the terrorists as their soldiers in their fight against the Israelis. Thus the more terrorist attacks there are, the more often the borders are closed, the more grass-roots support there is for the terrorists. The Israelis have no good options, but terrorism must be stopped. How?

When Arafat turned down the best offer ever in 1990, Israel was left with an empty tool box. She had already given over major responsibilities, power, and weapons to the PLO in return for unfulfilled promises. What more could be offered? Nothing. Israel has run out of offers on any grand scale. The only deterrent to terrorism that actually works is a security fence like the one around Gaza, but even that cannot stop the launching of rockets.

Within Israel’s citizenry there are the intellectual, scientific, and engineering resources to stay ahead of the pack militarily. But what is this constant warfare doing to the Israeli people? Brig.-Gen. Nehemia Dagan was eloquent on this point. He served in the IDF for 32 years with experience as a combat-pilot and combat-helicopter-pilot. He was a combat pilot in all the Israeli wars from 1959 through 1995. Now his son is an IAF pilot too, and he’s heartbroken.

Gen. Dagan said (and I was quoting him exactly as fast as I could write), "My concern is what happens to us. My son was my prince when he was ages 15 and 16. Then he was 18 and he became a small soldier. His officers were 19 or 19 ½ years old. He risks his life, and he may kill civilians. What does this do to my son, my prince? We may defeat Hizbullah, but do we lose our sons? What are we doing to our sons and to all of Israeli society?"

His son, his prince, now thinks it’s ok to kill civilians! They talked about this in Sderot. His son said, "They send Kassams on civilians! So why not kill their civilians!" As the General put it, "This comes from sour. We are a unique People of the Book. We have moral values. If we kill civilians, it’s what it does to us!"

View from Jerusalem #2

Continuation of a series, received in the email, from a friend in Israel:

"Six days ago, my tour group ate pizza for lunch in Sderot, an Israeli town not far (not far enough!) from Gaza. That was Sunday. A local rabbi spoke to us about his town as we ate. Three days later one woman in Sderot was killed by a Kassam rocket launched from Gaza as she crossed a downtown street. One woman? Lots of people die in the Middle East every day. But my goodness, what a wild emotional storm engulfed Israel for the next two days!

Hers was a particularly gruesome death. Warheads packed with nuts, bolts, screws, and nails make the explosion something like walking into a blender. Her photo was published: she was beautiful! Then we were told how many hours it took the Zaka team to remove all bits of flesh from the sidewalk, street, and surrounding buildings. The devout Jewish volunteers of Zaka respectfully collect and bury all body parts and pieces, even for this Muslim woman. She had crossed the street quickly while her Jewish husband lingered behind. He saw it from across the street. It doesn’t matter that she was Muslim. She was an Israeli citizen living in an Israeli town! When two Arab Members of the Knesset tried to attend her funeral, they were driven away by the outraged citizens of Sderot.

In 1943, the 7,000 Jews of Denmark escaped to neutral Sweden overnight, just hours before the Nazi soldiers tried to round them up and send them to death camps. Writing about that escape, a Danish Jew said this: "Many Jews feel like the winegrowers on the slopes of the Vesuvius (volcano). As long as it only smokes, you can live with the danger. Once the lava is pouring out of the crater, it is often too late to run for safety. The tragedy was that most of those who feared the future and wanted to escape had nowhere to escape to." That was 63 years ago. When Canada was asked at that time how many Jewish refugees it would take, a government official infamously replied, "None is too many."

Today there is one Jewish nation in the world, only one, and it has successfully defended itself for 59 years, since the UN vote in 1947 that created a Jewish state. Under the concept of Partition, the Arabs were also offered a nation of their own within the God-given land of Israel, but they turned it down, expecting they could get more land through war. Thus six decades later a Muslim woman living in Israel is killed by a Muslim rocket. She wasn’t Jewish, but she was Israeli. Then the UN General Assembly voted that Israel must not try to stop the rocket attacks from Gaza! Why not? How long must this go on? Self defense is a basic human right!

When the alert sounds in Sderot, there are usually 15 seconds between the alert and the actual crash of the rocket. That’s how long people have to get to a bomb shelter. On Wed., however, they had only 4 seconds to protect themselves due to poor visibility and fog. Only about three classrooms per school have been reinforced for added protection. The idea is that the children in other classes can run to the protected rooms — in 4 seconds?! So most classes try to cram into the few protected classrooms all day and very little learning is going on. The Education Ministry is sending psychologists to Sderot’s schools while the UN votes that Israel must not go into Gaza to stop the rocket launches.

A Jewish billionaire with a practical mind and a large pocketbook set up tent cities in the south last summer when northern Israelis were fleeing from Hizbullah’s Katyusha rockets in July and August. Now he has rented hotel rooms in Eilat, at the southern tip of Israel on the Red Sea, and has sent chartered buses to take a thousand kids and their families out of Sderot. The tension and fear have simply become too great to bear, especially for kids. The Israeli government is irate at the billionaire’s interference. His private initiative makes the government look totally incompetent. He did not coordinate his move with the government. How could he? The Prime Minister and a lot of cabinet members were in Los Angeles for a major meeting of influential American Jewish leaders. It was suggested publicly that the PM ought to call a cabinet meeting immediately — in California!

So how does the Israel public feel about its government? Last summer’s prelude to a massive international war has not been forgotten. Just hours before the woman died in Sderot, a poll was released. Only 15% support the Defense Minister, while 17% support the military Chief of Staff. The current head of military intelligence is another likely to resign. Also, 53% think the Prime Minister should resign or call new elections. A Maj.-Gen. who was head of the National Security Council says that rank-and-file soldiers have lost respect for their Chief of Staff.

Then the Muslim woman died in Sderot while the PM was in Los Angeles with much of his cabinet. MKs from the governing coalition began noisily attacking their own government: "This is governmental wantonness and abandonment of human life." Another government MK said, "What happened in Sderot this morning is just an additional reminder of what the residents experience every morning and every day. When those metal pieces fly in the air, they kill and maim and they have power." A recently-retired head of military intelligence says that stability is not foreseen in the Palestinian Authority, Al-Qaeda is working hard to rise, and Iran must be stopped. There are increasing threats against Israel from an increasingly radicalized Islamic Middle East, and there is no political solution, says he. Potential wars with the Lebanese Hizbullah and Hamas in Gaza (simultaneously?) are of deep concern throughout the nation.

Dr. Ra’anan Gissin, Ph.D. from Syracuse, was the speaker at our tour group’s opening banquet. He used to be Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s strategic consultant, media advisor, and spokesman. He began by talking about Kruger Park in South Africa. It was established to preserve endangered species. With fences and security, without fear of predators, the endangered species can proliferate. Dr. Gissin says that Israel is the same size as Kruger Park. This is the natural habitat of the Jewish people. Never mind that the world court in The Hague attempted to try Israel for the crime of building a security fence. Israel is the Kruger Park of the Jewish people. This endangered species has a right to live and proliferate. Dr. Gissin added that "western democracies are also endangered species. They just don’t know it yet. Then Ahmadinejad will erase the entire map!"

Should the world be so concerned about the accidental deaths of civilians as Israel defends herself? During World War II, the Allies’ B25s killed 67 innocent civilian scientists when they destroyed the heavy water plant so that Nazis wouldn’t get nukes. And Israel has never done to the Palestinians what the U.S. did to its own Japanese-American citizens during World War II. War is war. To be or not to be is the question. Israel can only lose one war. That’s it.

Today, in a politically-correct world, the peaceniks try to turn each battlefield into a crime scene. Is this a war or a court case? In the midst of this, the media take over all branches of the government: they judge and execute, they spin and influence the executive branch, and they shape legislation. The new era of media warfare has different rules of war and different weapons. Since Vietnam, photos are the main weapons. The single most important photo at the end of the war wins the war.

A week after he spoke to us, Dr. Gissin expressed some related thoughts at the Bar Ilan conference on The Media and the Middle East (edited from Ron Cantrell’s report). As PM Sharon’s strategic advisor, Dr. Gissin recognized that the nature of war changed when journalists and camera teams became embedded with troops in Iraq. When our public has a real-time view of front line battles, so does the enemy. Troop movements and positions are visible. Missile aiming can be corrected by watching on TV where previous missiles landed. Arabic TV crews are everywhere, filming from our side for the benefit of the enemy.

In another change to the realities of warfare, computer programs like Adobe Photoshop can create different "facts" by doubling the smoke from an explosion, for example. This falsifying of images is called "fauxtography". Hundreds of photos and videos were doctored by theoretically-objective journalists in the recent Hizbullah war. Expert photographer-bloggers exposed many of the staged photos and lies, but proof of manipulation always comes too late. It’s the initial few seconds of public viewing that create the emotional response against Israel’s supposed excesses. Hizbullah wins and Israel is demonized no matter what the facts are. (I learned about this after the Kfar Qana "massacre" where children’s dead bodies were imported from a previous TV presentation several days earlier. The same man carries out each little covered body, carefully changing his costume each time before emerging from the rubble with another new "victim". There was a 7-hour time gap between the Israeli bombing at midnight and the "discovery" of the "massacre" when the journalists arrived — by invitation? -- after daylight. Google for Kfar Qana or fauxtography or look it up on LittleGreenFootballs.com and Utube.)

Israel actually won the recent war with Hizbullah militarily but lost it via the media. Watch for the effect when "war" is called "a military operation", suitable for a war crimes trial because it’s not really an all-out war. Notice that "terrorism" may be called "sectarian violence", making it somehow more acceptable, like the Irish "troubles". Was the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center a "trouble" or a "war"?

As Dr. Gissin told us at our opening banquet, Israel needs to prepare its TV tactics and strategy, a real TV blitz, before the next shooting war begins. Hizbullah spent $15 million on TV resources out of a $100 million budget. That’s 15% of the war budget on TV. When Nasrallah spoke quietly on TV, he appeared to be a leader, on the scene, in charge. He spoke firmly and authoritatively from a hidden bunker deep underground, but he did not appear to be a quaking, fearful man in a "snake hole", like Saddam Hussein. TV did that for Nasrallah.

Dr. Gissin said that Israel is like a small surfboard living on top of a tsunami. Here Israel is building a nation on its surfboard: schools, agricultural exports, industry, research and development. In 1922 the League of Nations made the Balfour Declaration ("a Jewish homeland") the basis of the British Mandate to govern "Palestine". Would the UN General Assembly accept the Balfour Declaration today? No, the UN General Assembly just voted 156 - 7 that Israel must not stop the launching of Kassam rockets from Gaza. Yet the UN Charter says explicitly that nations have a right to self-defense. Is Israel something less than "a nation"?

Dr. Gissin is a powerful, passionate speaker. Next time I write, I’ll try to quickly summarize several speakers and comment on some of my favorite things, like the UAVs. We saw a lot of tanks and some helicopters, but the UAVs are the "dream machine".

Shabbat shalom (a peaceful Sabbath) from Jerusalem!
JM"

"Blessed be the LORD my strength, who teaches my hands to war, and my fingers to fight." Psalm 144:1

And just who fights with their fingers? If indeed the pen is mightier than the sword, the finger warriors are those banging them on computer keyboards all over the world in the present war of words. This is not a clash of cultures; it is a religious war to the death. quote from Ron Cantrell

View From Jerusalem

I received this email from a friend who is presently touring Israel. I am always trying to keep my ear to the ground about what is happening there, and especially from personal contacts. We hear nothing from the western media about the events and attitudes described in this email, except the botched Israeli attack. Let us always remember Israel in prayer, and pray for the peace of Jerusalem.


Greetings from Jerusalem!

I've just spent a week on an unusual tour of Israel with many thought-provoking speeches by major Israeli leaders and with many fascinating experiences. I could write a brief synopsis of the tour, but that wouldn't tell you much. Instead, I intend to write a series of emails, each with its own focus. Today I will tell you about the Arab Member of the Knesset who spoke to us. This gets to the root of the current Arab-Israeli war and why Israel has to defend herself.

Today (Wed. Nov. 15th) a 57-year-old woman was killed by a Kassam rocket in the Israeli town of Sderot. In addition, one of the rockets landed near the personal home of Defense Minister Amir Peretz where a 24-year-old security guard assigned to the Defense Minister's residence lost both his legs from the shrapnel. Parents rushed to schools, half of which are still insufficiently protected against Kassam rockets, and removed their children. The city announced the cancellation of classes. Last night three Kassams were fired from Gaza, and today there were eight. Various Israeli leaders were already calling for a major military operation in Gaza. Now the Defense Minister will be inclined to do something bigger.

A week ago, the Israeli army intended to knock out a Kassam missile launcher because the Arabs of Gaza were launching Kassam rockets at Israeli towns, as usual. Israel's aiming and firing mechanism malfunctioned and some civilians in Gaza were inadvertently killed. If you believe the Arabs and the media, those ruthless, bloodthirsty Israelis did it on purpose. But this was an Israeli response to hostile rocket-launching, and why were the Arabs launching rockets at Israel anyway? If you go back a year, you recall that some 9,000 Jews were driven from their homes in Gush Katif (Gaza) by the Israeli government and the Israeli army. That evacuation gave all of Gaza to the Arabs (i.e. the Palestinian Authority, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, etc.). Are the Arabs happy with this? No. It's not enough. They want all of Israel, with all Jews "driven into the sea". So they continue to launch rockets at the Israeli towns of Sderot and Ashkelon day after day without pause. The Arabs launch Kassams, and the Israelis try to wipe out the launchers. When anybody dies, it's always Israel's fault.

The following tour-event was bizarre. Read on to see what happened in the Knesset (parliament) later. But first to the tour experience. The civilians in Gaza were accidentally killed on Wednesday. Two days later we heard a speech by an Arab Member of the Knesset who spoke directly, personally, to our tour group. [Yes, Arab-Israelis are Israeli citizens, and they have elected ten members to the 120-member Knesset.] Dr. Hana Swaid kept his voice soft and unemotional. He has been a professor of urban planning at the Israeli Technion in Haifa. He was the mayor of his village for ten years. He played the role of a civilized elected government official. He never once mentioned the civilian deaths in Gaza on Wednesday! That didn't fit his role, the image he was projecting to us at that time. His performance was all PR spin.

Dr. Swaid talked about urban planning, infrastructure, poverty, unemployment. See? These Arabs are rational and well-educated. Then he said that the majority of Arabs want to be fully integrated as Israeli citizens -- but with their own culture, of course. That sounds politically-correct. Yet I wondered whether the Muslim culture could be or should be "integrated" into the historical, ethnic, linguistic, religious mixture that makes the Jewish people unique. If Muslims are integrated as he suggested, does Israel cease to be a Jewish nation? A Jewish nation cannot be "multicultural" by definition -- unless you mean mixing non-observant Jews with the ultra-orthodox. Next he quietly, unemotionally complained about one political party in Israel's governing coalition. It wants a "mono-ethnic state", a Jewish nation. It's a "racist" party, and this concept is "apartheid", Dr. Swaid compared that party's leading MK to neo-Nazi Jorg Haider in Austria and right-wing politician Lapin in France. That sounded inflammatory, no matter how quietly he said it. When it was question time, his answer to one question focused on the 1967 borders as "the only possible solution". He was then speaking as a Palestinian, not as an Israeli MK. Palestinians want all of the Jordanian land Israel acquired when Jordan attacked Israel in the Six Day War. He meant the pre-war borders of May 1967, not the actual borders that have existed for nearly 40 years. These issues are at the heart of the current war. Israel is a Jewish nation, and it can never return to the indefensible 1949 (May 1967) borders.

Three days after that, in the Knesset, MK Hana Swaid touched off a verbal storm over the civilian deaths in Gaza which he didn't mention to us. This gives you the flavor of Israel's governing body with its democratically-elected ten Arab members. [English spellings of Hebrew and Arabic names are "flexible" and phonetic.] This account is from Arutz 7:

Deputy Defense Minister Sneh (Labor) evoked a storm of protest from Arab MKs by saying, "If we kill civilians, we accept blame, but when you kill civilians, you take credit; it's a cultural thing."
Yesterday's stormy Knesset session began when Arab MK Honeh Soueid (Hadash) (i.e. Hana Swaid) delivered a speech harshly condemning Israel for what he constantly called the "massacre and slaughter" of 20 Arabs in Beit Hanoun last week. The incident occurred when IDF artillery fire designed to thwart ongoing Kassam rocket firing in Gaza accidentally hit a residential building.

Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh then took the stand, beginning by thanking MK Soueid "for bringing up the issue so that I can straighten out the story accurately." Excerpts from the session:

Soueid: People were killed and you want to be accurate...?

Sneh: You think that if you interrupt me, I won't say what I want to say? ... I can promise you one thing: You won't like 90% of what I have to say... Why did we start the military offensive in Beit Hanoun? To protect the citizens of Israel, to attack those who fire Kassams and who store up war material to use it against us. This was the objective; there is nothing more legitimate than that.

Arab MK Muhammed Barakeh: Little children [who were killed] are terrorists?! [screaming wildly] It's a shame and a disgrace! [continues to scream out at Sneh]

MK Moshe Sharoni [Pensioners Party]: You just want to get your picture in Al Jazeera.

Barakeh: Shut your mouth, stupid!

[more screaming, Barakeh is finally ordered to leave by Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik]

Barakeh to Sharoni: Shut your mouth!

Sharoni [in Arabic, apparently a bit taken aback by Barakeh's furious hostility]: Out! Out!

[This exchange is repeated several times, until finally Barakeh is taken out, while continuing to yell]

Speaker Itzik [with a sigh]: Then they talk about the 'image of the Knesset' and that we 'have to come towards...' You heard [that exchange], MK Gal'on [of the radical left-wing Meretz party]?

MK Gal'on: I didn't see you 'come towards' when Barakeh was talking...

Itzik: Oh, really? OK, OK... Deputy Minister Sneh, please continue.

[Arab MK Ahmed Tibi starts screaming...]

Deputy Minister Sneh resumes speaking: "On Nov. 7, from an orchard on the outskirts of Beit Hanoun, rockets were fired towards Ashkelon. On the next morning, we received warning that it would happen again, and therefore two artillery volleys were fired [by the IDF] to that spot. As a result of a technical fault in the second volley, tens of innocent people were hit. We see this as a grave issue, a catastrophe, and a failure. I assume that those who fired the rocket on Ashkelon, if they would have hit dozens of innocent people, they would have seen it as a success.

MK Tibi screams: You're just clearing yourself! [unintelligible]

Sneh: No, no, Tibi - that's the difference of our cultures; that's the whole thing; that's the difference in our values.

[Tibi and other Arab MKs start yelling wildly]

Sneh: I promised you that you wouldn't like what I had to say. ... You cannot evade the point that when we hit civilians, we see it as a failure, but those who shoot at us see it as a success; that's the difference, you cannot evade that! [more screaming] I came to speak here in order to respond [to the charges of slaughter] and there is a limit to what we are willing to hear. [Tibi and others keep screaming]

Sneh: ...After the extent of the catastrophe became known, we enacted a series of urgent humanitarian measures. The worst of the injured were taken to hospitals in Israel, and even though it was a battle zone, we allowed in trucks of medical supplies, we opened the Rafah crossing, and we did whatever possible to alleviate the unjustified suffering of these people.

Tibi: And then these Palestinians didn't even say thank you, what nerve of them!

Sneh: We didn't expect a thank you; we did what we thought we had to do.

[more interruptions]

Sneh: We didn't expect a thank you, I don't think we even deserved it. I think that we were responsible militarily, and we did what we had to do.

[Tibi continues screaming, Speaker Itzik threatens to remove him]

Sneh: Now that I have said what I wanted to say regarding military responsibility, I will discuss the moral responsibility. [raising his voice] Those who turned Gaza into a launching ground of Kassam rockets against a civilian populace are responsible for those who were killed. Last September, we left Gaza, and we didn't leave a single thing - not a house or even a guard booth. What justification is there for what you are doing?! [Quiet] Why are the Rafah and Karni crossings half-closed?! Because the people sent by the terror organizations always want to blow up these places, the arteries that provide life to Gaza! They build a 600-meter tunnel - what are they thinking when they dig them?! Who will benefit if they blow up the Karni Crossing and Israelis and Palestinians are killed? And then later they'll complain that there's no milk or flour... What are they thinking? [quiet] Who destroyed Erez [Industrial Zone], where 5,000 Palestinians worked and made a living? Who destroyed it? The terrorists!

Tibi: And that's why you fire at Beit Hanoun?

Sneh: We fire at Beit Hanoun, Tibi, because they turned it into a base of rockets and missiles against Ashkelon and Sderot. There is no country in the world that would tolerate such a thing! Take this account to Islamic Jihad and to Hamas, and tell them this - give your ethical speeches to them, not to us.

When the debate finally ended, though the Arab MKs favored a formal Knesset debate on the Beit Hanoun incident at a future date, the Knesset voted to accept Sneh's proposal to remove it from the agenda.

Israel always has to defend herself against all of the surrounding Muslim nations. She has to defend herself against the UN and the EU, and sometimes against the American government. Then some days she has to defend herself against her own governing Knesset. Most of the tour experiences focus on "how" Israel defends herself, but this presents a little taste of "why" such defense is necessary. Shalom!
JM

Messianic Archive Page

This website, the Messianic Archive Page, has a catalogue of Messianic books and articles written in the 19th and early 20th century by Messianic Jews, mainly rabbis. They are quite fascinating to read. All of them can be downloaded in pdf format.

A book on a similar subject, which is available at Beth Shechinah, is entitled, "What the Rabbis Know About the Messiah". This book looks at rabbinic writings regarding the Messiah.

Book Review: A Way in the Wilderness

A Way in the Wilderness: Essays in Messianic Jewish Thought

This book is a collection of essays by various authors on a wide variety of subjects within Messianic Judaism. As you read this book, prepare to have paradigms turned on their heads. Fresh perspectives fill these pages, even for veterans of the movement. This book is great for inquirers of both Jewish and Christian backgrounds and includes a glossary of terms in the back of the book. Besides the 18 essays written in English, two have been written in Hebrew... for those of you who can take that leap! Here are a few summaries of some essays:

I.E.S. יע"ס by Henry Einspruch
This is a short biography of an influential Hebrew translator from the 19th century. He translated the New Testament into Hebrew, besides works of such writers as Shakespeare and Milton.

The Bible - An Historical Document by William Katin
This essay briefly discusses archaeological evidence supporting the biblical accounts of Genesis, particularly focusing on Abraham's life. He also writes about the reliability of the documentation of the New Testament.

How Long? by Max Isaac Reich
This writer describes the confusion and heartache of the prophets and psalmists as they sought to follow God in a difficult and contrary world, and how this relates to our own struggles.
"(Jesus') cross is the key to all mystery. Strange that it should be so, for to the natural mind it is utter darkness and the greatest mystery of all, even defeat and disaster, the triumph of hate, the victory of evil over good. But to faith, it is full of light, the highest peak of love, patience, meekness, unselfishness, renunciation. It is the defeat of the powers of darkness. It is the laying of the sure foundation on which the hopes of humanity can rest and the universal reign of God be established."

Kidush Hashem by Agnes Waldstein
"Kidush Hashem" is "Hallowed be thy Name", translated into Hebrew. This writer explores the implications of this phrase in the Lord's Prayer when understood from a Hebraic perspective.

Blessed be Egypt? by Daniel Fuchs
Perhaps the title says it all. Just to whet your curiosity, I may say that he interprets a prophecy from Isaiah that most people (including Messianic believers!) just gloss over. And yes, it involves a blessing on Egypt, of all things.

Did the Jews Kill Christ? by Henry Einspruch
This essay examines the culpability of the various groups involved in Jesus' condemnation and death. The author cites passages from the Talmud regarding the sentiment towards the high priesthood of the time, and towards Jesus himself. He exposes the moral vacuity of laying blame.

This book is available at Beth Shechinah