The following is presented as a public service to those Christians who want to make sure that Jews never give Yeshua/Jesus a second thought.
- Make sure that large numbers of anti-Semites use the Christian faith, the Christian Savior, and the Christian Bible as a justification for their actions.
- Make sure Jesus is always represented as looking like a Norwegian freighter captain or a gentile movie star, never like a Jew of average appearance. Make sure that the only Jewish looking people in Bible films and sacred art are the villains, and work hard to portray all the Pharisees and Jewish leaders as hard-hearted hypocrites.
- Make sure to develop a Jesus-following faith which discards and replaces Jewish ways of life while ridiculing or denouncing as heretics those who still adhere to Jewish practices. Lose the seventh day Sabbath, forbid Jews to eat kosher, to marry other Jews. etc. If possible find a theological rationale for stigmatizing these practices.
- When Jews do come to faith in Yeshua, make sure you separate them from other Jews, and if possible, consider every step they make toward acting more like gentiles to be gratifying evidence of progress, that “they are becoming one of us.” Reward Jews who assimilate to gentile culture, stigmatize or fail to be sympathetic with those who don’t. Accuse them of "rebuilding the middle wall of partition."
- Develop a good repertoire of “Jew jokes,” and anti-Semitic phrases like “Jewing someone down,” or “a real Jewish deal.” Be sure to dismiss protests from Jewish people as being evidence that they “have no sense of humor,” that they “can’t take a joke.” Be sure to sidestep censure by saying, “I was only kidding.”
- Be sure to develop theological systems which rejoice in the fact that “we’re not under the law,” without giving much serious thought to what this really means. Especially, do what you can to spread the word that the Torah is a dead book, useful nowadays only to be something superseded by the New Testament and the coming of Christ.
- Do everything you can to explicitly and implicitly represent the Jewish people as God's ex-wife and the Church having taken their place. Jews will be sure to know that Jesus is not the Messiah as you harp on the idea of the Church being the new Israel, with ethnic Israel being cast off.
- Avoid talking about Jesus to Jewish people. The fewer Jews who believe in Jesus, the more obvious it is that claims that he is the Messiah are ridiculous.
- Cultivate a lack of awareness that when you speak disparagingly of Israeli political positions, Jewish people see this as evidence of probable latent anti-Semitism, which for most Jews is indistinguishable from anti-Zionism. By all means, take the politically correct Palestinian side, seeing issues in a black and white manner, and be sure to insist on trumpeting your views, regardless of what Jews think.
- Get behind the BDS Movement [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] which represents the Jews as the problem people in the Middle East, with the Arab peoples around them as hapless victims whose terrorist activities are easily excusable under the circumstances.
- Make sure that it becomes common knowledge that the only political and social positions which God approves are those on the right side of the spectrum. Play into the Jewish perception that believers in Jesus are all Republicans, committed to seeing all homosexuals and aborting mothers stigmatized, isolated and shamed in this life, rotting in hell the next, leaving heaven as primarily the residence of Tea Party members, members of the NRA, and a few random others.
- Don’t bother to discover that even your well-educated and worldly-wise Jewish friends have a simplistic, over-generalizing and inaccurate picture of who Christians are and what they believe. Instead, expect your Jewish friend to have a nuanced view which understands intuitively who is and is not genuinely a Christian.
- Make a practice of pontificating on matters about which Scripture is not clearly outspoken. For example, if a Jew asks you if pious Jews who did not believe in Jesus went straight from the ovens of Auschwitz to the fires of hell, be sure to state that if they didn't believe in Jesus they most surely did. Try and feel courageously faithful to God while saying this. Above all never permit yourself to say, “I don’t know,” or “that’s not my business, it’s God’s,” or, "I believe as Abraham did that the Judge of all the earth will do what is right and merciful." You can't be a faithful Christian unless you are clear on the census of perdition and of redemption.
- Be sure to let your Christianity be more about having "the right answers" than about a living relationship with God that results in a lifestyle of unselfishness, self-sacrifice, purity and respectful engagement with your fellow humans.
- Use Christian jargon and in-group language when speaking of your faith, and require Jews to learn what terms like redemption, born again, and substitutionary atonement mean. Don't bother to familiarize yourself with Jewish ways of speaking, thinking, feeling, and theologizing.
You drove backward through the alley and shined your headlights on the problems from a different angle. I appreciate the irony.
Stuart, I appreciate your spledid use of satire in this post but I confess I was anticipating more of a climactical summation. Nevertheless, this list of 15 is something we should NEVER do when demonstrating love for Israel or the Jewish people. Great stuff!
Brilliant. You should print this as a flier and leave it on car windows in church parking lots. I volunteer.
Thank you for summarizing 2000 years of history in a succinct and interesting list. Even though I understood the premise from the start it still stirred me.
Rabbi Dauermann...... you have nailed several unfortunate attitudes with a brilliantine stroke of the pen! I chuckled so hard I nearly fell off my chair! But the Truth of what you wrote soon returned! A very good read indeed!
Awesome. Bravo.