PROGRAM SUMMARY

New Radio Title: 032_Bless Israel_I58_v08

Content: 2011 ORU Symposium with RYE

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Program Note: Westar is featuring this discussion by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein at Oral Roberts University in 2011 and a Symposium on Christian-Jewish Relations.

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032_Bless Israel_I58_v08

Transcript, Edits

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Today… on “Bless Israel with Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein.”

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TEASER CLIP (See Page 7)

“I think I know what Jesus felt like in that trial because in 1938 as I was trying to leave Czechoslovakia and go to Israel and the Nazis had taken over, these Nazi soldiers began to choke me and make sport of me because I was Jewish.” And they said, “Cry out, I am a Jewish pig.” He kept calling that. He said, “I thought they were going to kill me.”

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ANNOUNCER OPEN (Dry)

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And welcome to our broadcast today here on “Bless Israel with Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein.”

When people of different races, religions and backgrounds work “together,” mutual respect, love and cooperation takes place.

This is what the psalmist meant when he wrote in Psalm 133 verse 1, “How good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity.”

That verse has been the theme of Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein ever since he founded The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews more than 30 years ago.

His mission is to bring Christians and Jews together and to build bridges of love, understanding and cooperation between the two faith communities.

Here at The Fellowship, we celebrate the historical bond and unity between Jews and Christians. We all share the same love for God, the Bible, and Israel. And together we work tirelessly to fulfill God’s purposes.

Today on our program, we’re going to feature a special discussion with Rabbi Eckstein as he shared with the students and faculty at Oral Roberts University at a Symposium on Jewish-Christian relations.

Rabbi Eckstein talked about how Christians and Jews should work together in love, fellowship and unity, as God had intended.

And we begin with an opening prayer from Dr. Brad Young, Professor of Biblical Literature at ORU.

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John Swails: Father, we thank you for your kindness and goodness. We thank you that you’ve allowed us to see this present time. We thank you, Lord for the things that you’re doing in and through this visit by the rabbi. We commit into your keeping, into the keeping of your faithful Holy Spirit, all the things that transpire in Jesus name, Amen.

I don't know if this represents consensus or at least my understanding, we were thinking we would continue putting the outlines that the rabbi laid out in chapel. So for those of you who are here, you can recall that, but what he was talking about was 3 points.

Number 1; a point of restoration. Number 2; emphasizing love especially the love that is critical, crucial to the Christian message, and 3, Israel.

We thought we would continue along those lines, and I guess from my point of view, the message for us is emphasizing that central issue of love to Christians and he’s coming in from a Jewish perspective to bring a special focus and perspective on that. For that I am grateful. To make us better Christians, now that’s something your mothers would agree with, definitely, but the point is extremely well taken.

Rabbi, you’ve made this presentation to a number of Christian audiences, have you found it ever to be not received well?

Yechiel: Sometimes God anoints me if I could be so brazen more than at other times depends on how jet lagged I am, but you’re right. Everything that I said is basic and it’s something that you can’t disagree with on the human or on the spiritual level. The need to bring shalom between Christians and Jews after 2,000 years of separation, anyone who believes in the God of Israel and the bible knows instinctively that’s what God wants.

He wants to see his children, all his children getting along and then second, the need to love one another. Here you have 2 faiths and 2 faith communities for whom the concept of loving one another is at the core, the very center of their beliefs and yet you have 2,000 years where it wasn’t implemented.

Something is wrong with our understanding of the concept of love. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the Christian martyrs during the holocaust talked about cheap grace, and I think there’s a tendency for us, and I say us in both communities to say we love you and not to fully mean it, to say it from our lips but not necessarily from our heart.

If we say it from our heart and from our lips, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it will flow into our actions. I believe the New Testament says, “Not all who call upon me Lord, Lord shall enter the kingdom of God but he who does the will of its father.” So, I think that historically there was a disconnect between what we say in our mouth and what we feel in our hearts.

What does it mean when we say or we believe that we are to love one another? That’s why I thought that story of the rabbi and the student was so compelling because here’s a rabbi who sees his student saying to him, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

It’s coming from the mouth. It’s coming from the heart but then he questions him a little bit. He digs a little deeper. He kicks the tires as we say and he says, “Do you really love me?” “Yes, I really love you.” “I walk up in pain. Do you know where I hurt?” The student says, “I don't know where you hurt but I love you dearly, rabbi.” Finally, the rabbi says but how can you say you love me when you don’t know where I hurt when you don’t know what brings me pain?”

So there’s too much of a propensity to love one another as an idea. Real people are harder to love than the idea of people. That’s what God calls us to do, and that’s what for 2,000 years didn’t happen. That’s where it’s got to start, and it’s got to start with each of us not just with the Jewish people, it’s got to start in relationships between husbands and wives, between parents and kids, to not just say I love you, but I love you means I will care for you. That’s where the rubber hits the road, to love them, provide for them and to care for them.

We’re not always easy to love. The bible describes us as a stiff necked community of people. My point is I believe that it’s time after these thousands of years of us talking the talk to walk the walk for such a time as this. We say it. It’s simple, it seems so simple, just love one another.

The essence of it is number one, to love one another for the people they are. God’s spirit is in each person that we have in the Jewish tradition the idea that when you meet someone, you’re not just meeting that person. You’re meeting God’s presence in the world as embodied in that person. You’re having a relationship with God as you’re having a relationship with that person, to love one another unconditionally.

It means not loving Jews in the expectation that … and fill in the rest of the sentence. It means not loving, in this case, Jews or Israel in the hope that they will see it our way that they will convert, that they will withdraw from the West Bank, whatever it is to love them. It’s unconditional love that’s required of us. That’s why I brought it as an example, Corrie ten Boom because that is unconditional love.

That’s what we’re called upon. Unconditional love towards one another, the real people that they are, and not a cheap grace, cheap love as Bonhoeffer talked about and the final aspect was to love one another. Again, this isn’t just vis-à-vis Christians and Jews, its vis-à-vis husband and wife and parents and children. It’s to love one another not as the way you want to love them. That’s selfish love. To love them the way they want and need to be loved, that’s unconditional love and that’s what we’re all called upon to do.

Brad: Really appreciated the verse that you quoted from the psalms. Be hold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers and sisters to love together in unity, in faith. When I was thinking of that first point you made that, we have 2000 years of history that there’s a need to change it, there’s a need to understand it.

Probably a lot of Christians have forgotten some of those pages of history, we have to recognize because of the hurts, because of what transpired, probably our Jewish brothers and sisters in their communities have these things memorized. I had the privilege of studying at Hebrew University and of sitting at the feet of some great Jewish scholars.

As you were talking about need for us to understand, I remember a story that my teacher told, he grew up in Czechoslovakia and was not a particularly religious Jew, but when Hitler invaded and they took over the Sudetenland, he was very afraid. He thought, “I must escape.” One day in our classes, he was teaching, rabbi on the trial of Jesus.

Now this is interesting, I think for us as Christians. He’s teaching on the trial of Jesus and he said, “I think I know what Jesus felt like in that trial because in 1938 as I was trying to leave Czechoslovakia and go to Israel and the Nazis had taken over, these Nazi soldiers began to choke me and make sport of me because I was Jewish.” He says, “I was more of a secular Jew.” They said, “Cry out, I am a Jewish pig.” He kept calling that. He said, “I thought they were going to kill me.”

Then they let him go and he made it to Israel. After the Holocaust, he went back to Europe unlike everybody had different responses to the Holocaust. He says, “If my people can survive this, God is real.” He became a repentant Jew.

I thought about that experience many times when I think about the history of the Jewish Christian relationship because sometimes as Christians, we mainly look at Jewish people, maybe as objects of conversion or maybe we say we love Israel, we stand with Israel but we don’t really have that unconditional love, we understand historically.

I think one of the first things we’re being challenged to do is to understand the history. Certainly the Nazis were not Christians. We could go back to maybe the crusades. We could go back to maybe a friend of mine who was at a yard sale here in Tulsa, Oklahoma who’s from the Jewish community and when someone found out that he was Jewish, they said, “Why did you kill Jesus?” Probably every Jewish friend I’ve ever had and discussed with, there’s some place, somewhere along the line that some Christian makes some statement like that. How do we change our understanding historically?

I think it’s through relationships to have an orthodox rabbi. I mean this is a major transition in the history of the Jewish Christian relation when we have an orthodox rabbi come to ORU, a school based on scripture, bible believing, spirit-filled community and say “Let’s come to reconciliation. Let’s love one another.” And as we go to the second point of unconditional love we’re saying we learn from each other. We can really love and respect one another. And Israel is important to Christians today. Christians have lived in Israel. We have churches. There’s places that we go. When we go the Holy Land, we discover this people that is not just the Jewish people, the Jews but this is a family of Jesus our Lord.

The background of all of scripture. It’s so exciting, I think if we just look at Romans 9, 10, and 11 that very special relationship that the apostle, Paul taught us that we have to nurture the roots, the tree, the branch that we’ve been engrafted into this olive tree Israel. And as a Christian theologian and educator bible, scholar in this area for many years, I’m very sensitive to the fact that sometimes in our Christian theology, maybe we weren’t Nazis but there were elements of Christian teachings that were used by the Nazis or used by other to persecute Jewish people.

I don’t want to occupy this because I’m here to sit at the feet of Rabbi Eckstein, but one other rabbi that I think we got to remember here today, he said if you are offering your gift on the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift on the altar. Go be reconciled. I think this is a foundation for why it’s so important for us as Christians today because our teacher, Jesus, taught us that reconciliation is important.

It’s not reconciliation on our terms but as my wife tells me sometimes, “You’ve got to love me the way I need to be loved. What does it look like to you that you really love me?” I think the same way when we talk about the relationship between communities, we’re saying for Jewish people to say I know that you really care because you know where I hurt, what a powerful story.