The MJTI Rabbinical School is inaugurating an annual Summer Seminar to bring together our rabbinical students and advanced graduate students to study together. Several months ago, as I was putting together the schedule for this summer, I realized that the Seminar is taking place just before the Ninth of Av.

The Ninth of Av (called Tisha b’Av in Hebrew) is an annual Jewish fast day to commemorate and mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem. The Temples were destroyed about 656 years apart, but on the same day of the Hebrew calendar, the Ninth of Av. Other calamities that have befallen the Jewish people over the centuries are mourned on the same day. And beyond the calamities is the exile of the Jewish people. Even now, with Israel established, most Jews live elsewhere. This is yet another cause for mourning.

The Messianic Jewish Theological Institute was formed to develop and educate rabbis and other leaders for the Messianic Jewish movement. This is our first and most important mandate. As Director of the School of Jewish Studies, my emphasis is on the educational side of that equation. But what exactly is a Messianic Jewish rabbi? Is he or she sort of Jewish pastor, whose main job is to preach, counsel, comfort, and exhort a congregation? While it’s true that many rabbis lead congregations, the core definition and main role of rabbi lies elsewhere. I want to focus on a single sentence taken from the “Definition of a Messianic Jewish Rabbi” of the Messianic Jewish Rabbinical Council (see http://ourrabbis.org). The work of a Messianic Jewish Rabbi is: To expound and apply Torah as fulfilled in and mediated through the person, teaching, and work of Yeshua.

Understood in a Jewish context, “Torah” means more than the first five books of the Bible. It also relates to the Scripture and tradition that arise from those books and have guided and shaped the Jewish people for millennia. The Messianic Jewish rabbi does not speak as an outsider who has merely studied the Torah academically, but as an insider, a member of the trans-generational Jewish people who has learned and lived the Torah.

Rabbi Chanina said: “I have learned . . . from my students most of all.” (Babylonian Talmud Ta’anit 7a)

I am extremely grateful for the quality and vibrancy of the men and women I teach at the MJTI School of Jewish Studies. I like to talk about them because they are examples of men and women who are gripped by the hunger to study Jewishly and to be more effective in serving the body of Messiah.

When I teach online, most of my students start out as strangers to me. Fortunately, our graduate courses are all seminars (maximum twelve students), and the uniqueness of each student starts to come across right away. I would like to introduce one of these students. In order to preserve her privacy, I’ll call her “Marcela.”

Marcela was born, raised, and lives in Brazil. She is an MD, with Medical Residence in General Surgery and Dermatology. She is also a published poet. Marcela has Sefardic Jewish heritage, with ancestors from Portugal, Spain, and Turkey. At some point in the distant past, the family became Christians. But, to this day, many in her extended family maintain Jewish practices inherited from their Sephardic past.

I recently returned from a three-week stay in Jerusalem.  MJTI held its first Master’s level course at our new center in the city, and I helped to lead the course.

Our topic was Jerusalem itself—past, present, and future.

For thousands of years, Jerusalem has been the geographic center of the world for the Jewish and Christian imagination. With the shift from twentieth-century conflicts of political ideology to twenty-first-century conflicts of religion, the city now also occupies a central role on the stage of world affairs.

However, it has not always been so. With the exception of a few brilliant eras of power and prosperity, Jerusalem has largely been a backwater town—taking a backseat to Damascus, Samaria, Caesarea, and— more recently—Tel Aviv. Remote from the major trade routes and lacking in natural resources or agricultural capacity, Jerusalem had little to recommend it.

For the majority of Jews in the Messianic Jewish movement, just as for the majority of Jews outside our movement, whatever religious behaviors we grew up with were random and spotty, souvenirs—vestiges of a time when those behaviors and values were part of an integrated way of life, when the question, “Why do we do this?” would have received an answer integrating that behavior with the warp and weave of Jewish life. But in our experience, such explanations were lacking, and the religious rituals or behaviors of our families of origin were, for the most part, the insubstantial echoes and imprints left by realities far more solid, now long gone.

When people from such homes come to faith in Messiah and seek to adapt their family-of-origin experience into the service of Yeshua, is it any wonder that the identities we form seem out of balance or dysfunctional? Is it not true that many Jews have abandoned Jewish life due to a combined lack of knowledge and failure of will? And if so, what kind of Messianic Judaism shall we build out of such people? Consider my Reacculturation Principle:

Because ambivalence and uncertainty as to personal/communal identity is widespread among Jewish Yeshua- believers, we must craft and pursue an informed process of courageously reclaiming Jewish life and identity from the vantage point of allegiance to our Messiah. Only in this way can we adequately rediscover and reinforce our core identity as Jews, a necessary precondition to a solid Messianic Jewish identity. I term this process “reacculturation.”

In recent times, Messianic Jews are increasingly choosing to live in accord with Jewish tradition. Some onlookers, conditioned to imagine that all tradition is dead tradition, disapprove of this trend. Others, from more tradition-honoring societies, such as Asian Christians, have no problem understanding that it is appropriate that Jews live in the time-honored ways handed down from their ancestors, hence, tradition.

Without a doubt, MJTI is a “tradition-friendly” institution. A moment’s thought reveals that God has used the Jewish traditional way of life as a means to preserve Jewish community continuity despite two millennia of dispersion interlaced with persecution and with pressures to assimilate, both overt and covert.

Each generation deals with tradition differently. In every Jewish family, and in every generation, there are those who carry the ball of tradition, those who pass it on to the next generation, those who drop the ball, and those who pick it up.

Hanukkah is here! This Festival of Lights is so bright, it is sure to make the cooler winter nights warm and full of joy. Throughout Israel, giant hanukkiyot (plural for hanukkiyah, the 9 branched candelabrum that we light during the festival) are in all the city squares, on the corners of streets, in the center of Army bases, and on the roof of the Knesset (parliament).

One of my favorite places to go to see the lighting is the Western Wall—Kotel. There, at the foot of the Wall, is a large hanukkiyah. Jews from all walks of life gather for the lighting, including many Jews who do not look outwardly observant. This festival has an appeal and an ease with which seemingly non-observant Jews can connect with Jewish life without the requirements and restrictions that we find in the Torah-mandated festivals.