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.”

Many Christians and Messianic Jews struggle with the traditional teaching of the Christian Church regarding the Tri-unity of God. How can God be both singular and threefold? Does this teaching not violate both commonsense and the absolute monotheism of the Torah, the Prophets, and Jewish tradition?

I do not intend to answer these questions in this short column. Instead, I would like to examine the assumption that the Torah and the Prophets teach an “absolute monotheism.”

The God spoken of in the Torah and the Prophets is ininite in knowledge, power, and presence, invisible and without form. According to Psalm 145:3, the greatness of Hashem is “unsearchable.” As Solomon consecrates the Jerusalem temple, he acknowledges that heaven itself is too small to contain the presence of the Holy One. Hashem’s only limits are those that are self-imposed or intrinsic to Hashem’s character.

Nevertheless, this same God assumes a human form and appears to Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and others. The people of Israel hear this God speak in human words at Sinai. They encounter Hashem not as an ininite, hidden, and unknowable power, but as a self-revealing God who speaks, acts, and feels.

In the second half of the twentieth century, many Jews and Christians began to understand their relationship to one another in a radically new way. Previously each had looked at the other’s faith as a kind of heresy, a false teaching incompatible with the truth upheld in one’s own tradition. Now theologians from both sides looked for ways to combat the heritage of mutual enmity and contempt.

Some propounded an attractive new perspective called dual-covenant theology. According to this view, God had established distinct covenantal bonds with the Jewish people and the Christian Church, and had called each to follow its own separate path through history. Jews and Christians should respect one another’s faith, and recognize that each had an equally valid connection to God and mission in the world.

While dual-covenant theology improved the overall climate of Jewish-Christian relations, it could not win the adherence of Jews and Christians who were deeply rooted in their faith traditions. Spiritually-grounded Jews could not view God’s covenant with Israel as anything but the center of history and of God’s dealings with all creation. There was another covenant —but it was the universal covenant with Noah, under which all humanity lived, and it did not elevate its participants to the unique status enjoyed by the descendants of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah.