2.2.2 Interaction with the Supernatural
The initial spiritual experience of a leader or founder appears decisive for the further course of the congregation that will gather around him. One leader became a Messianic Jew, eight years after immigration, while living in a kibbutz (15/96). Another became a Messianic Jew already abroad, before immigration, already in the early seventies (26/97). Ecclesiastical-charismatic congregations seem to start with an individual's conversion. Still, several years may pass between such personal supernatural interaction and the formal founding of a congregation. „Conversions” testified were not conversions to Christianity, but to „Yeshua” as Jewish Messiah and to Jewishness. Charismatic experience, as many conversions, can be understood as a mystical encounter with the supernatural (Buber 1921), in the charismatic case with the Holy Spirit, Ruah HaKodesh. It can appear as a typical and ancient Jewish experience.
The issue of the Holy Spirit, it is not such a questionable subject. Because, our Old Testament, from the very first chapter of Genesis, through the prophets, they are all talking about the working and the presence of the Holy Spirit. Of course, most Jews, I would not say all, but I think many Jews, who have come to faith, they have a very real experience with the Holy Spirit, to one degree or another (26/97).
The testified and displayed intensity and form of supernatural encounters vary and cause discussion and tension between individuals and groups of the movement. However real and particular a supernatural experience may be to the individual, believers usually heard of Jesus first from other humans, from family members or through media.
Still others claim, and find belief, that from the outset no human interfered with them, that they only had a direct encounter with the supernatural. Only then Christians or Messianic Jews appeared on the scene and left their traces. Founders of this type of group can come from Jewish religious observant homes, but „left religious Judaism completely”. Being brought up so religiously, such rejection cannot possibly pass without results, feelings of guilt. An informant told me about such a case.
One day, as he turned home from work and began to consider his condition of unbelief in God and the negativity of his life, He began to realise, there was something at the heart, that was wrong with his life. Just as he began to consider these things, ... the Holy Spirit began to fill the room. He experienced this presence that he never experienced in his entire life and became stronger and stronger and it was the love of God and the Holy Spirit. Then he began to weep, and then he heard the voice of God that was talking to him, in the inside, not in his ears. Nevertheless, it was like a very clear voice. The Lord said to him: I am the God of your fathers, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I know everything about your life and I love you. As he was experiencing this holy, pure love, in a moment of time he had a revelation that this love would come into our world but would be rejected and crucified. Then on the spot, he got the name of Jesus in Hebrew, Yeshua. I do not even think he knew it by then (26/97).
While he could have employed such supernatural interaction as internal social-structural legitimation and source or power, the individual finds himself alone with his experience, without a community to accept revelation as legitimation for power. From the outset, the supernatural encounter did not lead to missionary activity. Instead, it became a subjectively experienced valid Jewish „teshuva”, „a return to God” (Donin 1972: 313). As such it raised the wish to „return” to Israel, to participate in „a fulfilment of history, faith and law” (Donin 1972: 18). The motive for this life-changing step was „a love for Jesus, that I knew that nothing else mattered except to follow him”. Historical Israeli sites triggered ecstasy (26/97, Werfel 1981: 40, 553), further supernatural interaction revealed new details about the meaning of Jesus' suffering and death for the individual and all the Jewish people (26/97, Werfel 1981: 554). A corresponding dedication was the response and an understanding of a spiritual task in and for Israel slowly emerged.
The ministry has not been the most important thing to me. God has given it to us and over the years it has grown, but it is really not the most important thing, it is not even something that we ran after, or sought after. In the first years that we lived in Israel, we did not even know about ministry and all these things. The first period of our life was really, really just developing a relationship with the Lord. All these new things were fascinating. It was like a honeymoon with Jesus. It was the foundation (26/97).
Once Jesus was experienced and accepted as personal Messiah, the individual continued experiencing him, first as personal redeemer and then also as potential redeemer for all of Israel (Saperstein 1992: 4, Miskotte 1976: 65). After initial revelatory experiences, the mode of religious construction shifted increasingly to an explanatory approach. The study of the Old and New Testament prevailed. The education, consumed as youth in a „Yeshiva or Hebrew Day School for the elementary and secondary education” (Donin 1972: 130), now became the initial framework to understand the New Testament. It helped even to „immediately” recognize it as „the truth” (26/97).
Yet, the encounter with Jesus and intensive study of the Bible rendered a different Jew than Donin ever wanted. In this exploratory phase, encounters with evangelicals occurred. A job in a Protestant order in Israel, which respected the Jewishness of the believer in Jesus and did not at all attempt to convert him to culturally visible Christianity, enabled the healing of wounds slain by the holocaust, and inspired an „Imitatio Christi” (Braun n. d., Schmidt 1960: 263). This intensive encounter with a Protestant order infused a desire for a particular quality of spirituality and community. Already Sobel was surprised by such traces (Sobel 1974: 33). Not numbers of converts count, but exercised love and communal unity. The quality of relationship between the already existing believers becomes the issue. In the extension of its achievement, „great things”, more conversion, are expected to happen, nearly, by themselves.
We really believe, that until the Holy Spirit is poured out over Israel, the church in Israel, we will not have a major break through in this country. ... Our main part is to seek the Lord in prayer and worship and to prepare a vessel to come into (26/97).
This view explains a certain passivity that parallels the role of contemplation within a religious order. Also, this view parallels Hasidic views, according to which humans may not take into their own hands what must be left to supernatural intervention (Buber 1978). That way, Hasidism can perceive the mere existence of Israel as state as sin. Yet none of my respondents ever went that far. I found no indication of such view with any Messianic Jewish group or individual. To them, the supernatural seems sovereign enough to employ human achievements for the founding of congregations.
Yet other groups of type ℶ (beth) appeared much more active towards the outside, due to different perceptions about the supernatural. They referred to „the great commission” (Matthew 28:16-20 NIV) and other biblical passages to pass on the good News. According they developed strategies and activities to win new members for their groups (15/96, 15/97, 22/97). 20Interestingly, no interviewee referred to evangelization as a means to hasten the coming of the Messiah. Literature very rarely does so (Stern 1991a: 47, 58). If evangelization would be more outspokenly presented as a means to hasten „the second coming of Christ”, it would be justified to interpreted this motive in Droogers' terms as an exploitative mode of supernatural construction (Droogers 1993). )