Mission Implausible
Klein, Yossi
MISSION IMPLAUSIBLE Our contributing editor in Israel talks to Christians who have moved there— for ideological reasons. Should we be unnerved by their good intentions? YOSSI KLEIN The Son...
...He quotes the Bible in a raspy Missouri voice: "Thou shalt come from the farthest ends of the north...
...Now we have that missing piece...
...Above an Italian restaurant on Jaffa Road, in a cubicle office that can barely contain even a desk, Shmuel Golding assembles dossiers on Christian missionaries...
...Some, like Jay and Meridel, roam the Diaspora, unexpected aliyah emissaries to endangered Jewish communities...
...massed on crusades to induce Jesus' return by offering him a cleansed Jerusalem...
...And thou shalt come up against my people of Israel as a cloud to cover the land...
...The Rawlings wandered the Diaspora for seven years...
...They ignore the poor recordings of Palmach songs hissing from mounted loudspeakers...
...Shmuel Golding was once a gospel faith healer, a halfhour a week on British TV, "cripples throwing away crutches, the whole business...
...And what is the messianic era if not a reconciling of opposites, the jarring of accepted modes and the opening of unimagined, even frightful, possibility...
...The marchers are divided into rigid categories: military, ideological, residential, even commercial, extracting from Israeli life every possible group identity, every bit of collective strength...
...Who would have believed they could make such inroads into Israeli life...
...And was it coincidence when Jay's fully booked tour opened for Meridel with a last-minute cancellation...
...They have an 'in' here that ten years ago would have been inconceivable...
...Rabbi Golding hands me samples of missionary literature, including one glossy pamphlet offering the testimonies of six rabbis, with names like Justin Thurgood Schwartz, who have accepted Jesus...
...The dirigibles are being built, says Elmer, in underground factories in Russia...
...Once returned to Israel, the Jewish people will then be reconciled with their spurned messiah...
...At the airport, she received an unexpected call from a friend wishing her bon voyage...
...People here may not know what to make of us now...
...From its very beginning, Christianity has been at war with its apocalyptics, who insisted on history as the prime spiritual arena...
...Time asserting itself over the cyclical patterns of history: shaking the inertia imposed by generations and assuming its own momentum, a sudden quickening, spinning toward and overtaking the light...
...Do you really believe you are safe anywhere else...
...Why is it different now...
...How does such a person come to base his life on the certainty that this is the time foretold by the Prophets...
...The gentile world is divided into two groups: "hunters," who aim to destroy the Jews, and "fishers," who seek to draw God's people from alien waters into the safe port of the Land of Israel...
...And then, the pace of his speech quickening, his quiet tone deepening, Johann Luckoff becomes a man finally given proof that the good he knew within himself isn't doomed to confinement, is as tangible a power as the opposing forces that seem to animate the world...
...He didn't get very far...
...Israel, Meridel says, is the only decent society left in the West...
...It is precisely Israel's isolation that impels the Christian Embassy, seeing in the resurrection of the Jewish State the first stage of messianic rebirth, and in its isolation the long-awaited sign that the process has entered its final stage...
...marched in rhythmic processions and drew their own blood with spiked whips, each flagellant a mini-Christ signalling the remote Messiah with his mirror image...
...The Jews won't want to get here fast enough...
...we keep Passover instead of Easter...
...The energy at the Embassy resembles a party headquarters in the weeks before an election, elation at approaching victory contained by awareness of constricting time...
...parachutists in clay red boots and cherry berets and youth movement kids wearing the laced blue workshirts of Zionism's happier days clog its narrow twists and sudden wide spaces...
...and "Atlanta Tomechet b'Yisrael," big men with red faces wearing string ties and tengallon hats with signs saying "Cowboys Pray for Israel," European children in medieval costumes of round rimless caps and silver glittering capes and gold-tipped slippers that curl at the toes, thousands of Evangelicals waving "Shalom," shaking the hands of spectators and assuring them "God is with Israel," the Israelis responding with cheers as though greeting the pilots of Berlin Airlift, the world converging on Jerusalem in love, the strangeness of the spectacle displaced by joy, gratitude, relief for the miracle of Christian love...
...Forget those dirigibles...
...But this I know: God is cornering the Jewish people for Himself...
...Now he is Rabbi Golding, red beard wild against a sober black suit...
...Each dirigible will hold up to 5,000 soldiers...
...History, a formless inheritance of pain, was abandoned by Christianity to the Jews...
...It happened in the Holocaust...
...In the 1930s, after reading Henry Ford's edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he became convinced that the Jews were masterminding an international communist plot...
...I'm not a prophet and it's dangerous to be too literal about these things, but we've definitely entered a new era...
...And what will happen when the Jews still cling to their stubborn ways...
...they meant the Jews...
...I'm telling you, great times are coming," he says, laughing, his mouth wide open, revealing a set of toothless gums...
...It is that someone will declare himself the resurrected Yoshke, and be wildly accepted by the Evangelicals...
...But that part of the process is in Jesus' hands alone...
...Contingents from development towns and from kibbutzim, keeping safe distance from one another, are followed by Dan Hotel workers in identical baseball caps, Bank Leumi clerks in crisp white pants and combat boots, Paz attendants in green and red uniforms the color of their gas stations...
...just now, when the nightmare imagination has in its most fertile time rediscovered the Demon Jew, and those who have scarcely heard of Jews can recite the detailed crimes of the Zionists, not only anti-Semitism without Jews but without even the memory of Jews...
...He is, he says with a giddy laugh that is the vocal equivalent of his jovial red face, uniquely qualified for the job...
...It shall be in the latter days...
...incapacitated by the isolation of Israel, which was supposed to usurp the Jewish ghetto...
...Israel may seem isolated and despised now," he says...
...Jaffa Road is closed to traffic...
...We live like Jews...
...Russia...
...Their power is gone...
...It was, after all, only a baby...
...But the Christian masses rejected the notion of schizoid man living out opposite realities on the physical and spiritual planes, and millenarian movements repeatedly arose against the Church, attempting to give flesh to the spiritual Israel...
...Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian apocalyptics watched the ascendancy of kings to the thrones of Europe, hoping that Jesus had this time chosen not a powerless Jewish body but a royal incarnation in which to impose the changes he had not previously managed...
...Can we trust the friendship of those whose theology depends on our acceptance of Jesus...
...Then, I'm afraid, we'll see the return of the same old Christians we always knew...
...And you know how they did it...
...Jay and Meridel Rawlings are "fishers...
...The absorption centers around the country are full of missionaries," he says to me...
...When Israel refuses to accept the light...
...We'll probably be growing vegetables on our window sills...
...Jay and Meridel, then in their late 20s, were called to their Jewish mission in 1969, the year the Utopian counterculture turned apocalyptic...
...Then we'll see what kind of friends the Jewish people really has...
...Applying kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, he gradually healed himself...
...The Lord is doing something new in the world, Jay says, and His focus is on Israel...
...They took the first part of Ruth's statement to Naomi, 'Your God will be my God,' but forgot about the second part...
...An occasional Israeli flag flies from a balcony, but there are no banners, no brave proclamations...
...Just as it is written...
...Still, I prefer to end with other questions: If these Christians acknowledge the spiritual legitimacy of . post-New Testament Judaism, and I base their own religious expression on Jewish experience, is that not grounds for dialogue, or at least further inquiry...
...With each thwarted expectation, the millenarians—though implicit Judaizers, acknowledging the Jewish idea of a this-worldly redemption— turned in vengeance against the Jews, murderers of messianic hope...
...The crowds lining the streets don't cheer the marchers...
...Studying the Bible with new eyes, Elmer discovered that when the Prophets spoke of the chosen people funneling God's blessings to the world, they didn't mean the spiritual Israel...
...Johann Luckoff thinks a while, and then says quietly, "The Bible speaks of wars and rumors of wars as an indication of messianic times, but one can hardly claim those conditions to be unique today...
...Coincidence...
...just now, when the world's spotlight turns on us and we don't know why, when we blame ourselves, each other, for Israel's isolation, when we recoil from the image the mirror throws back in our faces...
...Are the most fervent allies of the Jewish people its worst enemies...
...Psalms Sukkot, the annual Jerusalem March...
...We are the catalysts...
...When the Spirit moves them and the Divine philanthropist comes through with plane tickets, Jay and Meridel leave their Jerusalem home ("baruch hashem" bumper stickers on the kitchen walls and a huge banner draped in the living room on which multi-colored cloth figures bearing Torah scrolls in outstretched arms, feet dancing off the ground, leap up a winding mountain toward the rebuilt Temple), and travel to Ecuador, Zimbabwe, China, fishing for Jews...
...We're here because we want to help God's people!' And meanwhile they're biding their time...
...Of course not...
...What we're saying to the Jews now is: 'Your people will be my people.' Whatever happens to Israel, will happen to us...
...Jay patiently explains that, yes, we are goyim who have fallen in love with the Jew Jesus, but we haven't come today to speak to you of the Messiah...
...Elmer and his wife, Chris, recently moved to Jerusalem...
...Ten years ago, my roommate at Hebrew University was a missionary...
...This is a beautiful country...
...An international fast for Anatoly Shcharansky...
...He prefers not to say the word "Jesus," calling him, instead, "Yoshke...
...To other Christians, they are dangerous Judaizers...
...white robe, a tallit over his head...
...He seems like the kind of man one occasionally finds in positions of power: decent, stumbling to the top without intrigue, a halfsmile that is not wry but an awkward jab at intimacy...
...Perhaps it was possible to so misunderstand the Jewish people because it moved through history surrounded by Evil, ferreting out God's enemies and drawing their wrath onto itself...
...world dominion, south, south, toward Jerusalem— I sit with Rev...
...That would have never happened to us in Israel," Jay says...
...I don't know when, or how...
...Now is your time, the time of the Jews...
...Suddenly, the seemingly random events of history formed an almost absurdly obvious pattern: Why did Spain decline as a world power just when it expelled the Jews...
...Just now, at the end of this century of betrayal, when every belief Jews proclaimed has turned to dust in our mouths, God the protector, Marx the equalizer, Kultur the humanizer, and when even the final belief, Zion the comforter, seems to have betrayed...
...There is, after all, a long record of Christian messianic delusion, vain apocalyptics attempting to stun history with their unexceptional misery...
...Have they, too, been taken in, as desperate for a kind goyishe word as any liberal Jew...
...Luring Evil to a fatal exposure...
...Jay and Meridel enter a rabbi's office...
...The dirigibles are rising...
...Missionaries...
...The Jews, however, are bewildered by having to justify Zionism, which once legitimated their own standing in the world...
...The Jews, in turn, would interpret each new Christian persecution as messianic birthpangs...
...A thoughtful man, who doesn't stymie every question with a quote from Scripture...
...Talmud Sanhedrin Arise, take mercy on Zion, for it is time to comfort her, because the set time is come...
...They come here, Jews for Jesus, some of them outright goyim, and pretend to be new immigrants...
...It's nothing new," I say...
...a "Buy Israel" campaign...
...We lost a baby girl in Canada because of carelessness at the hospital...
...the "fishers" are simply instructed to help the Jews get back home, physically positioned for spritual renewal...
...You tell me where in Scripture it says anything about Easter...
...She did...
...timelessness belonged to the Church...
...It's all gonna be just fine," he says, and looks at me with eyes set deep in their sockets, unwavering, clear blue, inviting me to glimpse the heavens...
...Elmer stopped eating and dropped to 115 pounds...
...The Bible also speaks of the appearance of false messiahs as a sign, but again, we've had them throughout history...
...The government supports them, and so does the rabbinical establishment...
...It's a scandal...
...We call ourselves Christians only because Jews won't accept us yet," Meridel says...
...And then, from around a narrow bend and into a sudden widening of the road, steps a young man in a long Yossi Klein is a moment contributing editor whose articles from Israel appear frequently in these pages...
...Scripture says that Jerusalem shall be trodden down until the time of the Gentiles is fulfilled...
...Each of his life's incarnations has utterly uprooted the one before it...
...If Israel ever loses a war, I'll shut my Bible and never preach again...
...his nails and hair stopped growing as though he were already dead...
...Except that this time, they'll be even more bitter against us...
...And came to this realization: If the Mosaic laws were valid, then perhaps the Church had misread the Old Testament, distorted into metaphor what was meant to be literal...
...Elmer has always understood the centrality of the Jews in history, though he had at one time confused the exact nature of their role...
...And as though a lid has been pried loose, the street erupts, foams with silk white banners of transparent angels and the gold-embroidered words "Comfort ye, comfort ye My people," flutes and cymbals and tambourines, a chorus of trumpets heralding women waving giant palm branches, and then dozens, hundreds of smiling faces pouring from the narrow twist of the road, African men in zebra-striped robes wearing around their necks Stars of David entwined with crosses, Oriental women with rice paper hands outstretched as if pleading or blessing, robust women in red-white-and-blue top hats jerking in neon movements signs that read "Texas Loves...
...united Jerusalem, center of Israel's isolation, the only capital city in the world without foreign embassies, is joylessly celebrating itself, clinging to the ritual...
...Why did Britain lose its empire after it betrayed the Zionist return...
...In the lobby of the Christian Embassy hangs a gold-fringed silk banner on which are sewn in tight rows the miniature flags of all nations...
...The most recent was his essay, "The State of Our Dreams" (January-February 1982...
...The rabbi looks at Jay's perfectly proportioned features, at Meridel's unwavering smile, and begins screaming, "Goyim\ Missionaries...
...But we feel Jewish...
...In the center, surrounded by empty space, is the flag of Israel, as though separated from the others by a force field...
...he says, laughing, as I conjure the sky past our window black with flotillas, the enemies of Israel converging in one last thrust as we collapse into political and religious and ethnic squabbles, the world watching as the Jews finally get what they deserve...
...Isn't the alliance of messianic expectation that has developed between Jewish and Christian fundaI mentalists itself perhaps a messianic sign...
...to Jews, closet missionaries...
...But the Jews don't want to come here," says Meridel...
...And what of those Jews like Menachem Begin who pride themselves on their realpolitik savvy, and who have championed an Evangelical alliance...
...Jewish history, and especially its most recent turns, has become the focus of their vision...
...Heaven descending, hell ascending...
...The "fishers" walk a theological tightrope...
...The otherwise lethargic crowds hoot, shout, curse Reagan and his West Bank plan...
...And human life means something in Israel...
...We love you...
...it may be a while yet...
...They can't rule Jerusalem anymore...
...Because the one sign in biblical prophesy missing until our time was the return of the Jews to Israel...
...A women in Holland has stockpiled canned goods and prepared 30 cots in her attic as temporary shelter for Jews fleeing to Israel...
...These are the days men yearned for and feared...
...I'll tell you what's new...
...There weren't many of us, but we were there...
...YOSSI KLEIN The Son of David will not come until Israel will have neither supporter nor helper...
...Sure it's going to be hard here," says Meridel...
...He denounced the conspirators from his pulpit, organized an anti-Semitic rally and became involved with the right-wing fringe...
...Why are Germany and Poland today nuclear ground zero...
...Protected...
...Israel is perfectly safe...
...Johann Luckoff is director of the Christian Embassy...
...And the key to the process is the Jews...
...Praying in the woods near his Ontario home Jay heard a small voice in his ear—"a fearful stepping out of reality until you realize it's the voice of a friend"—telling him to pack up and go to Jerusalem...
...As we have all along suspected: Bait...
...The scenario has been repeated in some 90 countries...
...Then doctors discovered cancer in his stomach...
...Earth shuddering from the approaching purge of Evil, which, dissatisfied with temporary victories, seeks in this century the final dominion...
...The "fishers" are mobilizing...
...In the coming persecutions, Bible believers are going to be singled out right along with the Jews...
...Waiting for the chance to begin their spiritual final solution...
...What Christians called the End Time, and Jews, with their attention to detail, the End of Days...
...Who cares about a baby when you abort them by the millions...
...When the Rawlings sold their possessions and paid their debts, they remained with enough money to book Jay alone on a round-the-world tour...
...But we're not budging...
...when Meridel explained her situation, the friend immediately wired her the money...
...Too many questions linger...
...But when the crunch comes, and everyone else deserts them, the Jews will know who their real friends are...
...Jay: "The Church made one major theological mistake...
...Swelling in the bowels of the earth, gaseous, heaving upward, pressing against the ground's thin surface until'it cracks, open...
...His face is pale, wide: a face from a cold flat land...
...the only trace of his last existence is a recurring inability to voice the gutteral "ch," as though something were caught in the back of his throat...
...when our entire history has been inverted, our morality dismissed as posturing, our survival sorcery, our martyrdom myth...
...For the first time since the nearly simultaneous crucifixion of Jesus and the destruction of the Second Temple, believing Christians and Jews are drawn to the same historical signs: a convergence of messianic expectation...
...They respect the Bible here, which is more than you can say for anywhere else...
...Some are preparing to physically transport Jews home...
...Elmer turned to the Bible, and found the Law...
...But we are witnessing the culmination of the greatest love affair in history: the transcendent God becoming immanent in the affairs of a flesh-and-blood people...
...Just as Elmer healed himself of cancer and anti-Semitism, so will a terminally ill world turn in its last hope to the Jews...
...The Diaspora is ending, and with it, the exile of man...
...A Maariv worker moves from child to child, collecting the flags...
...Until, summoned by his dying father, Golding was told that he was really a Jew from Kiev, who as a child was saved at Babi Yar and shipped to England and raised as a Christian...
...Meridel asked herself, "Do you have enough faith, Meridel, to wrap the baby in a blanket, go with Jay to the airport and wait for God to send you a ticket...
...What kind of alliance can we form with rightwing Christians...
...Every so often, one of their ads, thick-bordered and dense with text from the Prophets, appears in the Jerusalem Post, words of consolation to Israel running in a long and narrow box alongside the news of world and regional disintegration, like commentary down the side of a talmudic page...
...Perhaps that was why so many failed to see that the Jews were not the poison but the antidote...
...Dirigibles...
...From its headquarters in an Arab villa which once housed the Chilean Embassy emerges the kind of Zionist campaign anti-Semites imagine being masterminded in the soporific offices of the Jewish establishment...
...Don't you think you and your community belong there...
...The absorption centers aren't full of anyone," I say...
...A man in England has readied boats to ferry Jews from Russian ports, anticipating the prophesy of an expulsion of Jews from the north that will dwarf the Exodus from Egypt...
...For who, after all, are more traditionally incompatible than Jewish and Christian fundamentalists...
...In the distance, the lit stone walls of the Old City, their turrets like teeth, set to grind down all who come against them...
...The great confrontation...
...A group of children, whose parents are employees of the daily newspaper, Maariv, march up Jaffa Road, waving small paper American flags...
...He blows a Yemenite shofar, long and curling like a giant corkscrew...
...Or do they believe Jews can hope for no better friends than those who love us not for who we are but for what they imagine we will someday become, who intend to destroy the essence of our existence...
...It is 1982, not 1967...
...when he drank water, it regurgitated green...
...a "ring of prayer" spanning every time zone, so that at any given moment a group of Christians somewhere in the world is praying for Israel: an all-purpose Jewish resource center, no time to waste in bureaucratic distinctions between one Jewish cause and another, between the political and the spiritual, both of which are converging on the Jews...
...says Rabbi Golding...
...just now, of all the times in history, when we are most in need of their message and least inclined to believe it, appear among us Christians, Fundamentalists, people for whom the word goy was coined, to tell us that we are at the center not only of the world's enmity but of its hope, to remind us, as though they were mediums through which our ancestors speak, that our chosenness was no delusion, and that they owe their faith, their very souls, to us, and that they have come now to atone, to comfort, to strengthen, to offer us spiritual reparations— But the story cannot conclude here...
...You don't worry about a thing," Elmer insists, grabbing my arm...
...The Gentiles have had it...
...But now, Christian apocalyptics are turning to the Jews, not in frustration but in hope...
...and from there to travel the Diaspora and help God's people come home, alternately enticing them with the vision of ingathering and warning of the consequences should they delay God's plan...
...The push and pull of the ingathering: Jews fleeing a wave of anti-Semitism unprecedented in scope, at the same time drawn to the relative intactness of Israeli society...
...The Christian Embassy, focus of an international network of pro-Israel Christians, was founded in 1980, immediately following the Knesset's passage of the Jerusalem Law and the resultant exodus to Tel Aviv of those embassies still functioning in the capital...
...Murderers...
...and into the light, the accumulated power of Evil embodied in the bloated orbs, black and leatheryskinned, filling the air and eclipsing the sun, the dirigibles leaving the cold north country and plodding south, toward the Middle East, oil fields...
...The entire plan hinges on Israel, the seeming irrelevance of its daily life the criss-crossing lines of the world's palm...
...Believe me, I know their game...
...Elmer found the answer in Genesis: "And I will bless those who bless thee, and curse those who curse thee...
...In 1976, they settled in Jerusalem, Jay directing a pro-Zionist Christian film, Meridel writing a book of their travels, called Fishers and Hunters...
...And though Elmer watches for signs of the global purge, Evil like a hidden growth lured into the glare over Jerusalem, directly in the line of Divine fire, it is to the time beyond that he is really focused, a time when human beings will no longer be betrayed by their own bodies and by the lies that force their minds to hate...
...Now...
...The Rawlings believe they are part of a new people God is creating among the gentiles, a "fisher people," whose task is solidarity with the Jews in their time of ingathering...
...And how serious is a Jewish-Christian alliance that embraces the fundamentalists of both religions...
...In the most unethical, sneaky way possible: by playing on our isolation, taking advantage of our craving for friends...
...I'll make this prediction," says Jay...
...God is ingathering the scattered sparks back to its source of power, preparing Jerusalem to illumine the world...
...Begin even speaks at their gatherings...
...It's not so impossible in the current hysteria...
...Elmer Josephson in a candle-lit restaurant in the penthouse of a building that is the highest point of the city, thrust on a finger into the night sky of Jerusalem...
...The cancer spread to his bowels, kidneys...
...And so a dialectic was created, Christian apocalypticism inadvertently spawning its Jewish counterpart, the two religions locked in a pattern of mutually exclusive interpretations of history...
...Golding suddenly understood his most persistent nightmare: he is on a bus packed with children, their faces squeezed hysterically against the windows, watching their naked parents outside collapse into ditches...
...As the world crumbles, Israel will shine...
...Do you know my greatest fear...
Vol. 8 • May 1983 • No. 5
