Selling our Birth-rite for 30 Pieces of Silver
It’s been 70 years since the Holocaust. We commemorate it every year with heartfelt ceremonies. Meanwhile, in Israel, of the approximately 190,000 souls still with us, souls who lived through horrors few us can bear to hear, 50,000 live in poverty. Abas and Imas, Sabas and Savtas are living in poverty, in Israel, the Promised Land. Too many of these incredible people fear for their last days, in Israel, in the Promised Land, the land of milk and honey. It is estimated that 13,000 of our most beloved die each year.
Last year MK Yifat Kariv (Yesh Atid), chairwoman of the Lobby for Holocaust Survivors, said. “The State of Israel is obligated to assist Holocaust survivors and their spouses still living among us and enable them to live with dignity and welfare.”
The State of Israel and Am Yisrael.
There is a beautiful home in Haifa for our people who lived through the Holocaust. Founded by Shimon Sabag, it’s funded by the charity organization called Yad Ezer le-Khaver (“A helping hand for a friend”); providing apartments and facilities for about 100 residents.
One would think that we, Am Yisrael, living in the land of our ancestors and in the diaspora would fight to care for our own. But we didn’t and we don’t. Approximately 40% of the funding comes from private donors and Yad Ezer L’Haver funds, and the Israeli government also contributes subsidies. But 60%of the funding comes from the German chapter of the Christian organization ICEJ, the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem.
Perhaps it is their way of paying penance for the horrors inflicted on our people by the Nazis and then most of Europe. “Christian Zionists regard the establishment of Israel as fulfilling Biblical prophecy and feel that they as Christians have a duty to support the Jewish state.”
What does that mean, exactly: fulfilling Biblical prophecy?
For thousands of years the Christians believed in Replacement Theology. Simply put, God broke the covenant with the Jewish people-hence the Old Testament, and made a new one, the New Testament, with Christians, the followers of Jesus their Messiah. The Jews refused to accept the idea that we were replaced, that our only salvation lay in accepting Jesus as the messiah. On top of that we were accused of killing Jesus-killing god. And that opened the floodgates to the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people which reached its ultimate expression in the military-industrial extermination that began with the Germans.
Today, many Christians have turned away from that theology and embraced Fulfillment Theology. It is a different way of reaching out to the Jewish people that eschews the 2000 years of anti-Semitic attacks against us.
It is a theology based on the return of the Jews to the biblical land of Israel.
“Plainly stated, the modern-day restoration of Israel is destined to birth the world into the Messianic Age in fulfillment of the Davidic covenant. In this regard, Israel is promised a physical restoration to the Land in unbelief and then a spiritual restoration to God and His Messiah in the last days (see e.g., Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 36).
”This means that the Jewish people, as natural Israel still have a redemptive role to fulfill for the benefit of the world. “We need to understand and identify the out-workings of this redemptive process and to pray that it be hastened in our day. In the meantime, this demands that we show respect for natural Israel as still elect of God, even in their unbelief (Romans 11:1, 11, 29)”
Am Yisrael, we have a purpose, a “redemptive role,” to bring forward the Biblical fulfillment of millions of Christians around the world-the return of Jesus Christ their Messiah.
This has been clearly expressed on the words of Calev Myers of the Jerusalem Institute of Justice, closely affiliated with ICEJ.
“We believe the day is coming, friends, when Jesus once again will reveal himself to Israel, to the Jewish people.”
In Jerusalem in 1996 the Third International Christian Zionist Congress issued this proclamation:
God the Father, Almighty, chose the ancient nation and people of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to reveal His plan of redemption for the world. They remain elect of God, and without the Jewish nation His redemptive purposes for the world will not be completed.
Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah and has promised to return to Jerusalem, to Israel and to the world.
It is reprehensible that generations of Jewish peoples have been killed and persecuted in the name of our Lord, and we challenge the Church to repent of any sins of commission or omission against them.
The modern Ingathering of the Jewish People to Eretz Israel and the rebirth of the nation of Israel are in fulfillment of biblical prophecies, as written in both Old and New Testaments.
Christian believers are instructed by Scripture to acknowledge the Hebraic roots of their faith and to actively assist and participate in the plan of God for the Ingathering of the Jewish People and the Restoration of the nation of Israel in our day.
Put another way “Abraham’s Covenant is God’s decision to save the world (Galatians 3:8) but Moses’ Covenant is God’s decision to teach the world that it needs to be saved! (Romans 3:20) Moses empowers Abraham! That is, the world must be convicted of sin (Moses) before it can be saved from it (Jesus). The Apostle John put it this way…”For the Law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:17)”
These are the people into whose hands we have delivered our elderly. The elders who suffered at the hands of Christians are now being cared for by Christians who want to love us to death. They don’t love us for our intrinsic value as Jews, as children of God, the people chosen to reveal His ethic into the world. No, they love us, care for us, serve us because they need us to come to Israel, to live in Israel and take back the Biblical borders to fulfill their desire their beliefs, and their prophecies, which don’t include the Jewish people as Jews. Which will turn the Biblical Land of Israel, the Jewish Homeland into a Christian state ready to embrace their Messiah.
There was a time when perhaps we could say: “I didn’t know that these people were so generous because they were using us.” I can tell you that I didn’t. It came as a terrible shock. But that time is over, Am Yisrael. That time of blindness, whether accidental or willful must end. Or we will go out not with the bang of mass murder but with a whimper because we forgot Tzedaka v Chesed, Charity and Loving-kindness-for our own people.
We will have forgotten Rav Hillel’s admonition.
To paraphrase: If we are not for ourselves…
This is the Shonda of Am Yisrael.