Glenn Beck has been under attack recently. No, not from the liberal or progressive or radical left forces in America. By Jews. Jews in Israel such as Moshe Feiglin who believes Beck is engaged in “a very gentle and heartwarming type of modern crusade” and Jews in America, from the extremist progressive edge of anti-Zionism, who think he has engaged in “insensitive exploitation of the Holocaust and Nazism to smear his opponents”.
He has been attacked not so much because of his conservative political stance on issues of politics but because of his increasing and heightening interest in helping Israel save itself. He has joined many other powerful, influential and even charismatic personalities who have decided to make Israel, its security and destiny, one of their main agenda fundamentals not only of their political support but financial support as well. And their theological self-identification, too.
Jews have always been wary of Christians. Deservedly so. Christians, being Christians, proselytize. That is what they do. They consider a man to be a divinity and want others to join in. And they can get overenthusiastic about it and worse, instead of waiting for God, they seek to hurry their version of the redemption era and try to subvert Jews from their own beliefs and convert them. I, myself, was 17 when I met my first test up in the Catskills of New York but I never found it too difficult to debate and disprove the rhetoric cast my way.
One of the main organizations involved in assuring that Jewish souls are not snatched in Jewish Israel, administered by very capable and committed persons, many known personally to me, is JewishIsrael (JI). In an a- typical posting at their site, they do manage to pass on a slightly conciliatory message even while stepping back from their usual Beck-bashing in publishing this:
it is vital to separate out Beck''s two dimensions -- discarding, in a Jewish context, the "antagonistic", i.e. Beck''s possible missionary track behind the "Restoring Courage" event, yet taking Beck''s protagonist side: the "take back America" model regarding ending injustice, and use it in developing a model capable of attacking and dismantling the cancerous leftist, elitist tentacles which tie down Jewish Israel
That paradigm of Jewish-Christian cooperation is, after all, what has been the purpose of the many cooperative initiatives that JI has been in the forefront of attacking and attempting to undo. To be fair, JI does note a caveat there reading “opinions, editorials, writings and news published on this site do not necessarily reflect the opinions of JewishIsrael”. But I think they have been caught up in the enthusiasm needed to maintain an anti-proselytizing and anti-Messianic Judaism counter-attack. Disappointingly, there have been victims of JI, persons that are genuinely Christian Zionist who are careful to instruct their programs’ participants in the proper decorum needed so that a joint enterprise that furthers the goals of Jewish nationalism. After all, we cannot expect Christians not to be Christians but we also know that for over three centuries, the process of Jewish national redemption has benefited from Christian Zionists such as Lord Shaftesbury, Oliphant, Danby and others. Moreover, we do know that Rabbinic figures, such as Menachem Mendel of Shklov, were not afraid of Christian missionaries in the 1820s.
It’s time balance, rational thinking and sense be reintroduced into this matrix.