(I meant to write this up yesterday at lunch… and today at lunch… but life got away from me)
Yesterday, I had reason to go onto the Air Force base. As I’m walking across the quad, what do I see but a portable sukkah. The Jewish group on base had set up a sukkah for those service and civilian personnel to be able to observe the holiday of Sukkot. This is something I truly admire about the services. For the most part (yes, there are some exceptions) they take what is the law and follow it. The services respect freedom of religion, and that’s great.
I thought about this when I read about the behavior of some Christian groups in Israel. Groups like Daystar and TBN have set up offices in Jerusalem and are actively attempting to convert Jews to Christianity through the ruse of “Messianic Judaism” (a variant of the better named “Jews for Jesus”). This is on top of the article I read a few days ago about Christian TV, which is beaming anti-Muslim and “convert to Christianity” messages into the Middle East.
I’m sorry folks, but this is doing it wrong.
One of the things I appreciate about Judaism is that there is no active missionary effort. Judaism accepts that there may be multiple paths to God (and in fact, all it asks of other paths is a common set of guidelines, not conversion to Judaism). I think that the folks that subscribe to the notion that one must convert to their religion in order to be saved are creating a lot of the problems that the world has seen (cough, crusades, cough, inquisition) or is seeing today.
Just my 2c.
