WHAT ABOUT The JEW's?









The Jews




The Jews

Jew is a name given to the Southern kingdom of Judah after the tribes were separated in 931 BC.

At that time Rehoboam Solomon’s son had become King of all the tribe, however the northern tribes rebelled against their hard and dictatorial ruler.

The northern tribes separated and set up their own kingdom, establishing their name as Israel and their capital city as Samaria.

Rehoboam maintained the city of Jerusalem as his capital and since Jerusalem was within the boundaries of Benjamin, they joined the Tribe of Judah so Judah from this time became enlarged to include Benjamin and part but not all of the tribe of Levi.

After this separation there becomes a new word into the scriptures that does not previously appear, the word Jew. The word Jew is only used to refer in the Old Testament Scriptures to the southern tribe of Judah and is never used to describe the people of the northern tribes making up Israel. We see a case recorded in the Bible (King James Version of Bible, 2 Kings 16:5-7)where the people of Israel went to the King of Syria and ask for help fighting against the Jews.

The Jews.

For nearly 4,000 years, amid all civilizations and countries, under all conditions of governments, there has existed a distinct people, with laws, habits and customs distinctly their own. The History of the House of Judah, the Jewish people is with out parallel in human history. They were oppressed, down trodden, carried captive to other lands and scattered among the nations. Attempts of total extermination have been made upon them but like the fabled phoenix, they have risen from the ashes of their dispersions and now appear again upon the pages of history.

They are remarkable in the first place for their antiquity. They, like no other nation, can trace their lineage by reliable history. They had literature before most nations had letters. A literature, the Torah, is more wisely diffused than the literature of any other people. The existence of the nation of Israel today is an undisputed testimony of the Bible. God himself has preserved the Jewish race. God also has great work for them to do.

The Jews were raised up to affirm and teach that there is but one God, and to be the writers, preservers and transmitters of the Holy Scriptures. The Jews took special care to preserve the Torah and keep it from being tampered with, and if it had not been for them, these words of scripture would have been lost long ago.

The Jewish Race was raised up so that God through them might give the world a Savior. Who was Jesus? A Jew. How carefully his ancestry has been preserved in the scriptures from Adam to Christ's birth in Bethlehem.

The Jewish Race was raised up that they might save the world from moral decay. Jesus said, "Salvation is to the Jews". He meant more than the fact that through them should come the Savior of the World. The salvation of the nations and the preservation of the human race on the earth depends on the preservation and the continuance of the Jews as a race.

Jesus Christ, a Jew, when he began to preach the gospel of the Kingdom, chose twelve Jews to be his disciples.

In the beginning the church was strictly Jewish, then, the Gentiles were grafted in to the church. In Romans 11:17, Paul does not say that the olive branches (The Gentiles) were grafted in to replace the natural branches (The Jews). Instead he states that the olive branches were grafted among the natural branches. When God finally restores His last day church to even more glory, than that of the early church, the Jew will once again have the liberty to observe his feasts and ordinances, and the Gentiles will have the liberty to disregard the law of Moses.

Neither Jew nor Gentile should be cut off from the root (Jesus) and source of blessing that comes upon us all from the seed of Abraham. In these last days it is becoming evident to the Church that Christ will again manifest the wonderful word of the cross that made both Jews and Gentiles to be one growing church where both will have the liberty of worshiping and being a part of future temple worship in Jerusalem.


THE JEW

author unknown

Scattered by God's avenging hand, Afflicted and forlorn, Sad wanderers from their pleasant land, Do Judah's children mourn: And e'en in Christian countries, few Breathe thoughts of pity for the Jew.

Yet, listen, Gentile, do you love the Bible's precious page? Then let your heart with kindness move To Israel's heritage; Who traced those lines of love for you? - Each sacred writer was a Jew.

And then as years and ages passed, And nations rose and fell, Though clouds of darkness oft were cast O'er captive Israel, The oracles of God for you Were kept in safety by the Jew.

And when the great Messiah came For guilty man to bleed, He did not take an angel's name, No - born of Abraham's seed - Y'shua Jesus, who gave His life for you, The gentle Saviour was a Jew.

And though His own received Him not, And turned in pride away, Whence is the Gentile's happier lot? Are you more just than they? No; God in pity turned to you - Have you no pity for the Jew?

Go, then, and bend the knee to pray For Israel's ancient race; Ask the dear Saviour every day To call them by His grace; Go, for a debt of love is due From Christian Gentiles to the Jew.

The triple helix: What it all means
By RABBI NATHAN LAUFER













The Haggada is a retelling of the Book of Exodus from the first seven verses, when Jewish People descend into the land of Egypt, to the final five verses, when God's Presence descends to dwell among the Jewish People. Along the way we experience incredible growth at the outset, followed by the bitterness of enslavement and infanticide, followed by God's wondrous miracles in Egypt and at the Sea, and concluding with God's speaking to us at Sinai, coming to dwell with us in the Tabernacle, and promising to ultimately bring us to and join us in our permanent home in the Land of Israel. This story is the master story of our people. It is the spiritual pilgrimage that we lead, and through which the Jewish People journey, on Passover night.
But our master story is not just a story of our biblical past that we retell and re-experience in the present. This story is also a metaphor of our people's journey throughout history and of our own individual life's journey. In the Maggid section of the Seder, the Haggada uses the expression "in each and every generation" only two times: once concerning the historical experience of the Jewish people and once concerning each individual's personal life experience. Regarding the historical experience of the Jewish People, the Haggada tells us:
This promise [of redemption] has sustained our ancestors and us. For not only one enemy has risen against us to annihilate us, rather in each and every generation men rise against us to annihilate us. But the Holy One, blessed be God, saves us from their hand.
Regarding our own individual life experience, the Haggada states:
In each and every generation it is a person's duty to regard him or herself as though he or she personally had come out of Egypt.... It was not only our ancestors whom the Holy One redeemed from slavery; we, too, were redeemed with them, as it is written: "God took us out from there so that God might take us to the land that God had sworn to our ancestors."
Together, these two paragraphs are telling us that the biblical story of our ancestors' Exodus from Egypt has a valuable lesson to teach both each and every generation of Jews and each and every individual human being. The first message is sobering: that our paths and our journeys, no matter how successful at the start, no matter how well planned or prepared, can often take detours into dangerous, uncharted, and unanticipated territory. Any of us may wake up one day and find ourselves in a totally transformed environment where we suddenly experience oppressive bondage and an urgent threat to our own or our family's/people's very existence. Evil is a reality that can erupt without a moment's notice. That has been the recurring experience of the Jewish People throughout our existence, and that is the existential human condition of each and every human being since time immemorial.
What keeps our people and each of us sane in such a potentially dangerous and absurd world is our relationship with God and with our master story of redemption. Our trust that God oversees a just world, that over the course of generations--if not in any single given lifetime--the wicked get their just desert and the righteous receive their deserved reward, keeps us going even when the reality around us seems to shout otherwise.
If the Haggada's first message is sobering, its second message is inspiring: reliving our ancestors' biblical experience, as we do each and every year at the Seder, reminds us that despite the evil all around us, redemption too can come in the blink of an eye. Even when the odds seem stacked against us, our situation can undergo a radical change for the better. The world is not only dark; it is also full of light. God's promises to God's people of ultimate redemption and our internalization of our people's remarkable story of the Exodus instill in us the hope and the courage to go forward even when chaos and darkness seem poised to engulf us.

Those who have suffered a terrifying experience in their own life or in the lives of their community and have survived to tell the tale and live a vital and vibrant life again have led a personal version of the Passover journey. Those of our ancestors, like my own parents, who lost their families during the period of the Holocaust and yet survived and came to the shores of America to raise families and build meaningful new lives as American Jews, have traveled the Passover road from slavery to freedom; those of us from the New York or Washington, D.C., area who were directly affected by the events of September 11, 2001, or who witnessed the tragic events in Israel of the past several years, and who have resolutely chosen to continue to live their lives to the fullest have retold in their own souls the essence of the Passover story; and others, who have had to fight a battle against a life-threatening disease and have been fortunate enough to be given a second lease on life, or who have had to overcome personal tragedies or deep, interpersonal disappointments to begin life anew, know in their very flesh and blood of this journey from oppression to redemption that the Seder teaches us.
The Jewish People's journey from slavery and oppression to freedom and redemption is the journey we are all destined to travel in one way or another in our lives on this planet. Like our biblical ancestors, we too often struggle to free ourselves from those physical, relational, or psychological forces that try to enslave and hurt us, to defeat them so they no longer constitute a threat to us or to our loved ones, and then seek to find the type of personal meaning, interpersonal relationship, and permanence of place that our people call redemption. The biblical story, our people's story, and our own personal stories are one story--the story of "slavery to freedom, grief to joy... darkness to light, and oppression to redemption." Together, they form a chut hameshulash, a "triple helix," which King Solomon teaches us "does not easily unravel" (Eccles. 4:12). May our stories and journeys bring hope for our generation and meaning for the generations that preceded us, and light the path for the generations that follow, until the final redemption of God's people and God's world.n




Updated Apr. 12, 2006 15:31
The exodus enigma
By STEPHEN ROSENBERG

It is impossible to get away from the Exodus. It is folk history at its finest. Thanks to the Exodus the 12 sons of Jacob mutated into 13 tribes. Thanks to the Exodus the Israelites transformed themselves from a crowd of slaves into a rowdy tribal nation. Thanks to the Exodus, they trusted their leader enough to plunge blindly into the sea to escape the Egyptian chariots. And thanks to the Exodus they perceived their Maker and accepted His Commandments.
Without the Exodus there would be no Jewish nation and no set of laws for them to live by. Without the Exodus there would be no generation of bonding in the Desert, and without the Exodus there could be no entry into the Promised Land. Above all, we need the Exodus on Seder night, the first night of Pessah, when we should try to consider ourselves as having taken part in it.
But how do we do that? "Mnemo-history" - or the history of folk-memory - is what we record to establish our past. It is all we have to rely on for many ancient events, but it is worth checking to see if there is any other evidence to substantiate it.
That the Jews came out of Egypt is pretty clear from the Bible account itself. It tells us that the Jordan Valley was as fertile as the garden of Egypt, so the listeners must have known the Egyptian Delta.
It tells us that the spies entered Hebron, which was seven years older than Zoan in Egypt, so they must have been familiar with Zoan rather than with Hebron. Their leader tells them to make the Ark, whose pattern was shown to him by God, but the artifacts all followed Egyptian lines, the movable Tent, the golden Ark, the Cherubim and the bread-table, they all derived from Egyptian models.
And they were told that Canaan is watered by rain, not by the foot-operated irrigation common to Egypt. That the Israelites were in Egypt is clear, but when did they come out of there? The Torah comes straight to the point. The prophecy to Abraham says they were to stay for 400 years, while after the event it tells us it was 430 years, not a major problem. But the rabbis limit the period to 210 years, claiming that the 400 years started from the birth of Isaac.
WHY MAINTAIN this fiction against the word of the Torah? Because it tells us there were only four generations from Levi to Moses, via Kehoth and Amram, which makes it hard to stretch each generation out to a 100 years. Furthermore the Torah tells us the Israelites built the cities of Pithom and Ramesses. That is difficult as it has them working in Egypt sometime in the reign of the great Ramesses II, who ruled for 70 years from 1280 BCE.
On the other hand, after they wandered for 40 years, Joshua claims they entered Canaan by trumpeting down the defenses of Jericho, whose walls were last destroyed in about 1560 BCE, according to the buried pottery.
What do the Egyptian records tell us? Four Pharaohs claim that they drove out hated foreigners from their land. The first one was Kamose, who only reigned for two years, and he started to expel the hated Hyksos (the Semitic "kings of foreign lands") in about 1570 BCE. His brother Ahmose, who reigned after him for some 25 years, claims to have finished the job. That would fit nicely with expelling the Israelites with the Hyksos, as the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius says, and their coming to Jericho and destroying its walls a few years later.
ANOTHER PHARAOH, the bearded Queen Hatshepsut, tells us that she also expelled hated foreigners, about 100 years later, and that would be about 1480 BCE. Another expulsion was claimed again a few years later by her nephew-successor Thutmosis III. His dating does not work with Jericho, but it does work with the rabbis‚ 210 years, as then the Jews would have entered Egypt about 1660 BCE, which is the time that the Semitic Hyksos invaded Egypt. Then however it does not work with the city of Ramesses, which could only have been so named in the time of the Ramesside dynasty in the 13th Century BCE. That could of course work with the Torah timing of about 400 years, as the Israelites would then have entered Egypt in about 1650 with the Hyksos, and left after building Ramesses City in about 1250 BCE.
That last date also works with another Egyptian record, that of Merenptah, successor to Ramesses II, who claims that he invaded Canaan and destroyed Israel in about 1200 BCE. But then it does not work with the walls of Jericho. And it does not work for the rabbis, who have to believe that Solomon built the Temple 480 years after the Exodus. Seeing that the Temple was built around 950, that little marker puts the Exodus at about 1430 BCE, which does not work with anything, except perhaps an expulsion under Queen Hatshepsut.
WE SEEM to be going round in circles and one thing is clear, we cannot square any one set of records with any others, and contradictions are inherent in the Torah and the rabbinic interpretations themselves. So where does that leave our powerful "mnemo-history?"
That is a question that we must try and address, for how else can we consider ourselves to have been part of the Exodus? Earlier generations did not have the bother of knowing the Egyptian records. They were happy to rely on the assurances of the rabbis and their confidence in the history of folk-memory, but can we just sit back and accept their historical ignorance?
The importance of "mnemo-history" is that, in the absence of anything more specific, we need it to explain our past. For our own peace of mind, we should not reject it but should attempt to refine it to our present-day consciences. If in itself it does not make sense, we ourselves still have to make sense of it.
No doubt there are several ways of doing that, and some will still pretend to rely on the rabbis, but I would like to present another possible scenario.
If we look carefully at the description of the wanderings in Sinai, we see that every incident is a minor miracle. It starts in Egypt with the ten plagues, each a miracle in itself, in spite of many attempts to find a rational explanation.
As we come to the Wilderness, the waters part for the Israelites and then close again over the Egyptians. The people are protected by a pillar of cloud by day that turns to a pillar of fire at night. There are two or three million people on the trek and they have no bread, or not until the manna falls every morning, though not so on the Sabbath. There is no water for them until it spurts out of the rock. There is no meat until there is a glut of quails.
While the people lack even the basic amenities, the most beautiful shrine and the richest priestly clothes are crafted out of the finest materials. Surely it is all an imaginative description, exactly as "mnemo-history" would and should be.
Let us accept that and then apply our folk-memory history to the problem of the dates.
WE CANNOT reconcile all the differing dates, thus it suggests that we are reading a kaleidoscopic amalgamation of many events, again a feature of "mnemo-history." The folk mind wants to remember many different events and put them together into one coherent, if miraculous, whole. As it does so it combines many memories and many numbers, in the process postulating miraculous explanations and inflated totals.
My proposal is that this miraculous account of the Exodus is describing a series of events that took place over more than 300 years, when Semitic foreigners, including the Jews, left Egypt in wave after wave. Some came and went with the Hyksos, and destroyed Jericho on their way back. Some were expelled by Queen Hatshepsut and 480 years later helped to build Solomon's Temple. Some came after the Hyksos and were forced to build Pithom and Ramesses, and then left in haste to get to Canaan before Merenptah could claim to have destroyed Israel in their land. And some perhaps never left at all and stayed on to tell the tale from an Egyptian point of view, with an Egyptian slant to the agriculture of Canaan and an Egyptian description of the Mishkan.
One question still looms large. Which set of caravans was led by Moses and which group received the Ten Commandments? That I cannot say but, for my own sake on Pessah night, I really do believe it was the caravan that I was on.