Jewish columnist David Klinghoffer's book, Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History, is reviewed in the Chicago Sun Times by Mark Oppenheimer. He writes:
The most salient reason Jews didn't believe Jesus was the messiah, Klinghoffer persuasively argues, is that the Hebrew Bible, in books like Ezekiel, makes it quite clear what the reign of the messiah will look like -- and Jesus has accomplished nothing of the kind. There has been no ingathering of the exiles, no eternal peace, no rebuilding of the Temple -- none of the things the messiah was supposed to bring. And no interpretive trickery by Christians can get around that fact.
Klinghoffer's principal appeal is not to the intellect but the gut. He has the courage to say what many Jews silently believe: This whole Christian thing just doesn't make much sense. It doesn't feel like the messiah has come; it's unlikely God would ever become human; and, above all, we like our religion and see no good reason to abandon it.
The book's major weakness, though, is that in summing up all the reasons that Jews reject Jesus, Klinghoffer fails to include the most important reasons of all: simple and profound faith, emotions like loyalty, love, nostalgia and guilt, and cherished cultural traditions like Passover Seders and latkes at Hanukkah time. Klinghoffer's intellectual pugnacity leads him to miss these far homelier reasons that Jews don't choose apostasy. [Mark Oppenheimer is the author of Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America.]
Of course he fails to note that while the whole thing "just doesn't make much sense" to Jews today, the original Christians were Jews, the Apostles were Jews, and that there were also many pharisees who became believers. Apparently it made sense to them then, but after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, a reinterpretation of Judaism was in order.
Judaism simply was never the same after Jesus, and went in two opposing directions, one Christian, the other the Judaism of the Talmud. The dispute remains over biblical interpretation and the identity of Jesus, just as it was in the first century.
And will Judaism, if ever a Temple is rebuilt, even then look like the Book of Ezekiel, or follow the teachings strictly of the Book of Leviticus?
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