by Zev Chafets
THE EARLY ZIONISTS knew these Bible stories too; they learned them in the dank Hebrew schools of Poland and Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Bible was full of promises of national restoration, but the promises were two thousand years old and the pioneers were young and impatient.
They wanted a revolution, so they created one.
Some of the more assimilated Western Jewish Zionists, like Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, had been willing to consider a Jewish state in Uganda or South America. But proposals to de couple Zionism from Zion didn’t fly with the Jewish masses, so the secular nationalists made a virtue of the Bible they didn’t believe in, turning it into a recruiting tool, a nation-building myth, and—when they discovered evangelical Christians in the British Foreign Office—an argument for a Jewish national home in Palestine.
Soon enough, the biblical seducers seduced themselves. How could it be otherwise? Bible-sized events were taking place all around them. “To be a realist here, you have to believe in miracles,” David Ben-Gurion once remarked. He didn’t believe that literally, of course; he was an atheist. But he insisted that his officials and generals take Old Testament names. He compared his favorite military man, Moshe Dayan, to the biblical conqueror Joshua Bin-Nun, which flattered them both. After all, Joshua worked for Moses.
In 1971, Ben-Gurion, out of office but still a national icon, greeted a conference of fifteen hundred evangelical Christians in Jerusalem. It was a gala event, held in the recently opened national convention center. Never before had there been such a gathering of Christian Zionists in the Holy Land. Anita Bryant, the former Miss Oklahoma, sang the Israeli national anthem. Carl Henry, the editor of Christianity Today, and other luminaries of the American evangelical community preached. Their theme was that the Six-Day War, which had put Jerusalem back in Jewish hands for the first time in two millennia, was a sure sign that the Second Coming of Jesus was on the way.
Ben-Gurion himself was ambivalent about the results of the Six-Day War (particularly since he had been excluded from wartime leadership—and the reflected glory of victory—by his rival and successor, Levi Eshkol). But he couldn’t miss its potential for arousing support for Israel among Christians. Something was in the air.
The United States was being swept by a strange new book full of Christian Zionist predictions, The Late Great Planet Earth, by Hal Lindsey. “Nations would fit into a certain power pattern [based on] the most important sign of all—that is the Jew returning to the Land of Israel after thousands of years of being dispersed,” Lindsey wrote. “The Jew is the most important sign to this generation.” When Ben-Gurion died in 1973, Lindsey’s book was on a reading table in his cottage at Kibbutz Sde Boker.
BILL AND CONNIE Wilson are Lindsey fans. They see the pattern. The book of Ezekiel says that Israel will be attacked from the “uttermost parts of the north.” They take this, according to their reading of the Bible, as a reference to Russia, in league with Persia (Iran), Ethiopia, some other African countries (Egypt, Sudan), and China.
As if this weren’t enough, they think the Roman Empire is about to make a comeback. (“Remind you of the European Union?” asked Bill). It will be led by a smooth trickster. Connie read from the book of Revelation: “‘And it deceives those that dwell upon the earth by reason of the signs which it was given to it to work before the beast, saying to those that dwell upon the earth to make an image to the beast, which has the wound of the sword, and lived.’”
The beast, Connie explained, is the Antichrist, who gets his power through the dragon. The book of Revelation tells you who that is: “‘And the great dragon was cast out, the ancient serpent, he who is called Devil and Satan.’”
After the great battle, Connie said, the dragon would be defeated, Jesus would reign in Jerusalem, and the whole world would know and worship God.
“If God can do anything, why not just do it without all these beasts and devils and so forth?” I asked.
“He wants to send a message to humanity,” said Connie. “This is his plan. That’s how he has prepared it.” She sounded as certain as a climate scientist describing global warming. But, like apocalyptic climate scenarios, Armageddon is longer on prediction than actual data. Revelation is full of obscure symbolism; there’s plenty of room for creativity. Not everyone, for example, believes that saved Christians will be raptured up to the sky before the beginning of the seven-year tribulation. Some, like Pat Robertson, hold that the rapture will occur only after the tribulation, and that during it saved Christians will suffer right along with everyone else. There is also dispute over the identity of the Antichrist. Premillennialists have traditionally suspected that he will be the pope, and a few still do. During World War II, it was widely held among evangelicals that the Antichrist was Hitler, and during the cold war, Stalin. Lately Osama Bin Laden has developed a following. Revelation is nothing if not open to interpretation.
Evangelical Christians have long debated these nuances but their eschatology was of no interest to the outside world until born-agains became politically potent. Suddenly there was great liberal suspicion that George W Bush, with his “evildoers” and his inexplicable love of Israel, was unduly influenced by the Bible. At the start of the American invasion of Iraq, a BBC correspondent in Washington spoke for many in the international press corps when he asked, rhetorically, “Does the president believe that he is playing a part in the final events of Armageddon?” Similar concerns were raised twenty years earlier about Ronald Reagan.
Evangelical Christians, however, do not believe that they are called upon to play a role in making Armageddon come to pass. That’s God’s job. Nor does an American president have to be a born-again Christian to contemplate blowing up the world. The framers of the cold war policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD) weren’t religious fanatics. John F. Kennedy, who was prepared to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba, was not known for his piety. Richard Nixon, a nominal Quaker, put the United States on high nuclear alert during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the atomic age, Armageddon can come in a lot of forms.
JEWISH LIBERALS TEND to get very upset about the part they are assigned in evangelical eschatology. “The Jews die or convert,” says Gershom Gorenberg, author of the book End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. “As a Jew, I can’t feel very comfortable with the affections of somebody who looks forward to that scenario.”
Gorenberg is a fine writer and a former colleague at the Jerusalem Report, but it is unclear to me why he needs to feel “comfortable” with beliefs he considers fanciful in the first place. Either the evangelicals are right or they are wrong about the end times. If they are wrong, what difference does it make? And if it turns out they are right, Gorenberg and I and the rest of the Jews will have some ’splainin’ to do to Jesus.
STANDING IN THE sun at Armageddon thinking about the end times is thirsty business. I suggested to the Wilsons that we get a cold drink in a nearby town—a little place called Omen. We piled in the Volvo and headed up the road a mile or two.
“My goodness,” said Connie, looking at the sign as we turned into a village. “I’ve never noticed this place before. Omen!”
“He works in strange ways,” I said. Actually omen in Hebrew doesn’t have anything to do with the English word “omen,” but I let that stay my little secret. The Antichrist isn’t the only trickster on the block.
Omen’s grocery is a cramped little store run by a jovial, mustachioed fellow named Motti. He doesn’t get a lot of strangers dropping in, and he greeted us with delighted hospitality. A small TV over the checkout counter was broadcasting scenes of the evacuation of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip.
“Those poor soldiers,” said a young woman standing next to the cash register. She wore the uniform of the artillery corps. It’s illegal for soldiers to work civilian jobs; I figured she might be an off-duty relative of Motti’s. “All that equipment they’re wearing and the helmets. It’s so
hot down there.”
“You’ve got to be crazy to live in Gaza,” said a young guy in jeans who was lounging nearby, smoking a Marlboro.
“Look who’s talking,” I said. “You live five minutes from the End of the World.”
The guy smiled in rueful agreement. “End of the world” in Hebrew means “the middle of nowhere.”
“Literally,” I said. I nodded toward the Wilsons who were drinking Cokes and staring at the live feed from Gaza. “They think the world is going to come to an end at Megiddo, in a huge battle.”
“Mah attah omer?” he said, the Hebrew equivalent of “Say what?”
“It’s a Christian belief.”
“Ah, Christians,” said the young Israeli dismissively.
“Did you say at Megiddo?” said the cashier. “The kibbutz?” She appeared to be mentally calibrating the distance, which was only a couple of miles. “My boyfriend lives on that kibbutz.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Motti said. “People believe whatever they want to believe.”
The door opened and in walked three women, dressed in simple gray cloth dresses that reached the ground. Two were young—one was pregnant—and the third appeared to be in her sixties. Their skin was the color of parchment and their eyes were narrow almonds. They stood in the entrance to the store speechless, looking utterly lost.
“Bnai Menashe,” Motti said to me. “They just got here last night from Gaza.”
Bnai Menashe—purportedly the lost tribe of Manasseh—had recently been discovered in the wilds of northern India along the Burmese border. Most were still in their villages, waiting to be brought to Israel. But some were already here.
“Good afternoon,” I greeted the women in Hebrew. “Do any of you speak English?”
One of the younger women murmured “Hebrew,” in a way that made it clear she didn’t know any.
I turned to Motti. “Why were they sent here, to Omen of all places?”
Motti turned his palms up; he had no idea. “They’ll be all right here, though,” he said. “It’s a friendly place. We all started out as immigrants. Russians, Tunisians, we all get along.”
The women turned up an aisle and began looking at a display of eggs. Motti went over to help.
AS FAR AS is known, the Bnai Menashe come from a people who were Christianized by Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century. From there it was apparently a short jump to imagining themselves to be lost Hebrews. Once they started calling themselves Israelites, rumors reached Jerusalem. Rabbis who specialize in tracing vestigial Jews began showing up in their villages. Money was donated, synagogues formed, Hebrew taught, prayers introduced. Soon some of the Bnai Menashe wanted to go to Israel.
The Jewish farmers of the Gaza Strip had been short of Arab agricultural workers since the first intifada in the late 1980s. They liked the idea of cheap Jewish labor, even if it came from a biblical tribe. Right-wing Israeli politicians, concerned about the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs, got behind the idea too. Eventually the Israeli Chief Rabbinate declared that, although these tribesmen weren’t Jews, they were Jewish, eligible for expedited conversion, which under Israel’s Law of Return meant repatriation to the land of their fathers with full immigrant housing, medical, and educational benefits. A biblical tribe was born.
In the times of the Bible, the tribe of Manasseh is said to have inhabited the very area where Omen is located. I mentioned this to the soldier-cashier, but she gave me a blank look and said, “Hey, I saw them yesterday for the first time.”
Connie Wilson took pictures of the women to document her brush with the book of Ezekiel. Here were her dried bones made flesh and standing in the poultry aisle. Motti helped them sort through the eggs, placing them gingerly, one at a time, into the wire shopping basket. “Do you believe they’re really part of a lost tribe?” I asked him.
Motti smiled. “If they think they are, then they are,” he replied. “Why argue about it?” In the grocery store at the End of the World the customer is always right.
FOUR
CELL PHONE CONVERSION
Let me ask you a personal question,” the woman said in a flat Michigan accent. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line.
Finally I said, “Ah, no,” to the woman, whose name was Sue Ricksecker. She is the secretary of Emmanuel Baptist in Pontiac, the site of my teenage brush with Jesus. I had called to find out if, by any chance, the church files still contained the little personal information card I had filled out forty years ago (under the name of Rabbi Ernst Conrad) at the Hyman Appleman revival. But that moment evidently doesn’t loom as large in the institutional memory of Emmanuel Baptist as it does in mine. In any event, there was no record of it.
I thanked Sue for checking. “You’re very welcome,” she said. And then she asked me her personal question, about accepting Jesus.
“I’m Jewish,” I said, by way of explanation. This had been my mother’s standard answer to Mormon door-to-door missionaries when I was a kid. They always seemed to accept it without argument, at which point she would invite them in for lemonade and raptly watch their documentary films about how Jesus was really from upstate New York.
Sue was made of sterner stuff. “There are a lot of Jewish Christians,” she said reasonably. “Dr. Hyman Appleman was Jewish. Jesus was Jewish.”
“Yeah, but was he a Christian?”
“He was Christ,” she said. Humor isn’t necessarily the best way to communicate with church secretaries. “Can I ask you one more personal question? What would happen if you died right now? I mean right this second, if you had a heart attack and keeled right over and died.”
That’s exactly the way my father died, but Sue had no way of knowing that. Did she? “I don’t know what would happen,” I said. “When you’re dead you’re dead.”
“You’d go to hell,” said Sue sweetly. “Seriously. You. Would. Go. To. Hell. That’s not me telling you, me Sue, that’s what it says in the Bible.”
“Ah, okay. So thanks for your time and…”
“Wait! Let me ask just one more personal question. What would happen if you accepted Jesus? I mean right now, here on the phone, with me. And then you died? You’d go right to heaven. And do you know the first thing you’d see when you opened your eyes?”
“What?”
“The first thing you’d see when you opened your eyes would be Jesus’ smiling face.”
“Do you know the second thing I’d see after I opened my eyes?” I asked.
“No. What?”
“I’d see my grandfather with a Louisville slugger in his hand.”
“I’m sure your grandfather would be very happy for you,” she said solemnly, although how a socialist Jew like my grandfather would have gotten to heaven in the first place is a mystery she didn’t tackle. “Just open your heart, accept Jesus, and you’ll be saved for eternity.”
“Simple as that.”
“Simple as that.”
“Aw, I can’t do it,” I said. “Really, I appreciate the offer, but no thanks.”
“I’m going to be praying that you change your mind,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“Praying for you every day of my life.”
“That’s really nice of you.”
“I mean it. I want you to call me when you accept Jesus. I want to witness it. I can do that right on the phone. I’ve done it for others. Will you call me?”
“Sure,” I said, but I had my fingers crossed.
“I’m going to give you a number,” she said. “Please write it down.”
“What kind of number?”
“My cell phone. I want you to call me when you change your heart,” she said. “And in the meantime I’ll be praying for your salvation from now every day for the rest of my life.”
Later, when I told this story to Lisa, she shrugged.
“Now you know what it’s like to be a woman.”
“Getting hit on.”
“It’s kind of flattering in a way.”
“She’s an evangelical,” Lisa said. “She hits on everyone.”
THE NOTION THAT evangelicals are only being friendly in order to convert the Jews to Christ is second only to alarms over Armageddon in the dark imaginings of Jews. And there is a certain amount of truth to it. Evangelicals want to evangelize. And, unlike the Second Coming, winning souls isn’t something you wait around for Jesus to take care of. You’re supposed to do it yourself.
In 1996, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest evangelical denomination, called on its members to direct their “energies and resources toward the proclamation of the gospel to the Jewish people.” Three years later, the International Mission Board suggested that missionaries step up their work during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur on the (very dubious) grounds that during the High Holidays Jews are in a great state of spiritual receptivity. More recently, the SBC has been considering using messianic Jews—such as the much-despised Jews for Jesus—as missionaries.
The American Jewish community faces problems, but mass conversion to evangelical Christianity isn’t one of them. The community has been shrinking for fifty years—from about 6 million after World War II to something closer to 5 million today—despite large immigrations from Russia, Iran, South America, and Israel. But very few of the lost sheep have wandered into the evangelical flock. Secular Jews marry late and have small families. Nowadays, at least half marry non-Jews. What Jews don’t do is get born again. There are probably more ex-Jewish Buddhists than Baptists in the United States.
THE EVANGELICAL EFFORT to convert the Jews has a long history of failure in the United States. Around the turn of the twentieth century, evangelicals began setting up missions to the Jewish immigrants in the big cities. The indefatigable William E. Blackstone himself created the Chicago Committee for Hebrew Christian Work. In New York, evangelists like Arno Gaebelein, a German Lutheran who preached in Yiddish, and Herman Warszawiak, who supposedly recruited his audience by handing out free movie tickets, set up operations that met with very little success. Many Orthodox Jews regarded these missionaries (and all Christians) with loathing; the very pious among them held card parties on Christmas Eve to demonstrate their contempt. The socialists, communists, anarchists, and free-thinkers among the Jewish intelligentsia hated all religion. Meanwhile, the grassroots majority were too busy trying to make a living to involve themselves in theological debates. Community elders complained about the assimilative power of the new country but the expression America gonif (“America, the thief”) referred to the lures of secular culture—the English language, baseball, and the pork chop—not Christianity.
