Is the Jewish Messiah the National Guardian Consciousness of Israel: Is the Descendant of King David the IDF?

6:28 AM Monday.

I have started to enter into a deeper line of dialogue with the Messianic Jewish movement in America thanks to the wonderful work of MJTI and the brilliant Torah transmission of Dr. Stuart Dauermann, who just completed teaching a four-week Panim el Panim class last night. This is a conversation in which a Gentile friend of Israel ("Israel" here defined as all Jews in the state of Israel and in Diaspora throughout all time) seeks to understand and co-evolve with the Jewish meaning of the Messiah from a wide variety of perspectives, mostly derived from YouTube lectures, without privileging a minority viewpoint within the Jewish community, and at the same time without denying that some Jewish believers in Yeshua might genuinely belong to a post-missionary Messianic branch of Judaism or maybe even a mystical cross-denominational flowering of the Jewish faith.

I want to be careful here, because I am not yet convinced that Messianic Jews are authentic pre-Nicene Jewish Christians, i.e., Nazarene Jews. They might be clinging to a Protestant Nicene Christology that is too far removed from the Christology of Jewish Christianity in the first few centuries of the Common Era to be called a restored branch of Judaism. I don't necessarily think all Messianic Jews need to be ascetic vegan teetotaling Ebionites on a universal basic income, but I am looking for signs of messianic crossover between the Messianic Jewish movement, the Jewish vegetarian movement, and messianic liberal Jews who really liked Bernie Sanders when it came to defeating the oligarchy and universalizing healthcare, but not so much when it came to defending Israel from Hamas.

At any rate, my question for the Jewish community as a whole this morning is whether the Jewish Messiah in contemporary terms - in terms of a living, holistic halakha that fairly balances the secular and the religious - could be mystically understood as the national "guardian consciousness" of Israel? Could the descendant of King David be the IDF?

Now that I have thrown my idea out there, let me quickly clarify. I don't mean that this is the only valid way to think about the Jewish Messiah. I know there are many valid ways. But is it a more valid way for Jews, on the whole, to think about the Messiah than the Nicene Christian understanding of the first Advent?

And now I need to quickly clarify yet again, for Messianic Jewish and Gentile students of Rabbi Mark Kinzer. I am very interested in the possibility that Yeshua, as an exemplar of faithful service to Hashem, is incarnate in the IDF, in Magen David Adom, and in the entire guardianship esprit de corps of the Jewish people, wherever and however it manifests. I can go beyond this, of course, into a fuller discussion of the doctrine of the Incarnation, but I want to start with this basic framing.

How would Rav Kook likely think of Israeli basic law today: would he consider it a secular and hidden or unconscious form of halakha?

This is Gemini's powerful answer:

All of this is by way of introduction to the email I sent Rabbi Stuart Dauermann after last night's class. I think it makes sense to reproduce here in full:

Shalom Rabbi Stuart:

Thank you so much for your excellent MJTI PEP class and for your invitation to share a concluding paragraph [by email]. When I started taking MJTI PEP classes in the aftermath of October 7, I identified as an unbaptized Messianic Gentile, but I didn't have any lived experience with Messianic Jewish congregations. I only had a set of tentative theological convictions informed by Rabbi Mark Kinzer's writings. I also had it in mind that getting a baptism from a Messianic Jewish rabbi would be a deeper expression of teshuvah - and maybe more authentic - than a Catholic or Protestant baptism. I didn't want to thrust myself into a messianic congregation, however, because I didn't (and still don't) believe in diluting Messianic Jewish synagogues with too much Gentile self-preoccupation. MJTI PEP classes have given me exactly the right amount and quality of academic space to engage deeply with the Messianic Jewish movement without feeling like I am intruding on a synagogue service. Over time, I have come to learn that Messianic Judaism isn't considered an authentic branch of Judaism by Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Jewish rabbis. This has greatly increased my respect for the agonizing choice that Messianic Jewish rabbis are forced to make between faith in Yeshua and recognition of their rabbinates by mainstream Jewish peers. Perhaps largely because I have a Christology that is not (yet) Nicene, and because I have a political conception of the Messiah that is definitely more Jewish than Christian, I now tend to think that Messianic Judaism as a movement might need to "course correct" on two key fronts. First, I think it might be more important for Messianic Judaism to convince mainstream Jewish rabbis that it's a legitimate branch of Judaism than it is to convince mainstream Jewish rabbis that Yeshua is God Incarnate and that he proved himself the Messiah in his first Advent. Second, I think Messianic Judaism needs to more explicitly embrace Rav Kook's vegetarian vision. I don't mean that I think the movement needs to become vegetarian, but I think it will have more credibility with Jews and Gentiles alike as a messianic harbinger and catalyst if it starts to lead a bit more forcefully in this direction. These two recommendations could work hand in hand. If Messianic Judaism could engage with prominent Jewish vegetarian leaders for dialogue, an important two-way recognition between Messianic Jews and vegetarian Jews about signs of the Messianic Age could begin to open up. Along these lines, your teaching about Ezekiel 37:21-28 was riveting. My only hesitation arose in response to your emphasis on Yeshua as "the" Messiah. What happens if leaders in the Messianic Jewish movement talk about Yeshua as one of many authentic and quintessentially Jewish ways of understanding the Jewish Messianic Idea, rather than the one right or true way? Is that even missiologically possible? I don't know. Whew. Sorry to be so presumptuous and long-winded. Please understand that I am only sharing all of this because your class was such a powerful facilitator of my quest for self-understanding. I am being completely honest at the risk of offending you because I know that is how to get the best teaching from a world-class instructor!

I am sure you are incredibly busy taking feedback from all of the other students in this class, so please don't feel obliged to reply, but I do welcome any concluding thoughts you might have time to share with me.

Absolutely wonderful course. Thanks again, Rabbi Dauermann.

Kindest regards,

Jonathan

End 7:53 AM.