5) According to God and His Torah, it's not enough to be "born Jewish." You must receive Messiah and accept His sacrifice on your behalf to be redeemed.
This was about the most amazing thing I discovered when I started to seriously study Torah. Before then, I thought: "This Jesus is fine for the goyim. He taught them about God and got them to stop worshipping stupid idols. But I'm a Jew! My people stopped praying to statues while these people's ancestors were still living in mud huts! I am a descendant of Abraham. I have an ironclad covenant with the Creator of the Universe. The contract can't be rescinded. And I have the circumcision to prove it!"
The security of being in an irreversible, eternal relationship with God because of the covenant with Abraham is a comforting thought for a Jew. For many of us, it is at the core of our Jewish identity.
Unfortunately, even the most cursory examination of Torah quickly reveals that it's an absolute falsehood.
Remember the story of Jacob and Esau? They were Isaac's twin sons. That means they were both circumsized grandsons of Abraham. Grandsons! If there were such a thing as Hanukah back then, Abraham would have given them Hanukah gelt.Well, Torah tells us that Esau was very hungry one day. His brother Jacob had some stew. What ended up happening was that Esua sold his birthright for that one lousy meal. Now, here is my question: Was Esau Jewish? Were his children Jewish? Did any of his descendants inherit the covenant promises made to his grandfather Abraham?
The answer, of course, is a resounding "No!" For Esau, being a circumsized bloodline descendant of Abraham ended up counting for exactly nothing. He made a bad decision -- a decision, by the way, about the inheritance of his father's estate that apparently had nothing to do with "deciding" whether or not to be Jewish -- and as a result lost his rights to the Abrahamic covenant. To put it another way, according to Torah, half of Abraham's descendants through Isaac are non-Jews.
Let's skip ahead a few hundred years. Remember the children of Israel after the Exodus from Egypt? They, too, were promised a great blessing from God: the Land of Israel itself. But did they get it? No. God allowed them to perish in the wilderness because of their disobedience and rebellion.
Now consider the fate of the ten "lost" tribes of Israel. According to Torah, they were scattered among the people of Assyria because of their incessant backsliding and idolatry. So today there are millions of bloodline descendants of Abraham walking the earth who aren't Jews at all. They're Islamic Iraqis and Syrians and who-know-what-elses. To again put it in rough numerical terms, over 80% of Abraham's descendants through Jacob are non-Jews -- circumsized or not!
Esau, the Jews in the desert, and the lost tribes are only three examples of what Torah tells us about being a Jew. To truly be one of God's "chosen people," it's clearly not enough to just have a Jewish mother and/or a Jewish father. In fact, Torah declares time and again that being a circumsized bloodline descendant of Abraham doesn't guarantee you anything. It provides you with a wonderful and important ethnic identity, but it doesn't assure you of blessings from God or His great salvation.
What Torah does tell us clearly is that to be in the proper relationship with the Almighty -- whether you're Jewish or not -- you must actively bind yourself into the covenant that God has made with all of His people. The Jewish scriptures say that you must personally receive Him into your heart (Jeremiah 31:31-33), honor His Son (Psalm 2 :12), and acknowledge that it is only through the Messiah's sacrifice of Himself that you can be redeemed of sin and reconciled to Adonai (Isaiah 53).
