Jonathan S Tobin

It was the sort of unforced error that was the last thing the Trump administration needed in a week during which its liberal critics have been trying to place blame for the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue on the president.

Vice President Mike Pence was scheduled to appear at Republican campaign rally in Michigan. After Saturday’s horrific attack on the Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha Synagogue that left 11 Jewish worshipers dead, the vice president’s office asked that the local organizers also invite a rabbi to offer a prayer remembering the victims. But while that request showed sensitivity to a national tragedy, what followed came back to bite the veep in a big way.

The problem was that as far as the Jewish community is concerned, Loren Jacobs — the “rabbi” who was asked to speak at the rally — isn’t Jewish.

Jacobs was there representing the very-Jewish sounding Congregation Shema Yisrael in suburban Detroit. But when he spoke in condemnation of the anti-Semitic attack, he did so by invoking the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God and Father of my Lord and Savior Yeshua, Jesus the Messiah, and my God and Father, too.”

Far from being a representative of the Jewish community, Jacobs is a Christian, albeit the pastor of a Messianic Jewish church that bills itself on its website as being “the same thing” as Christianity, but “expressed within the Jewish heritage.”

But while many Christians may see this as somehow being a variant of Judaism, Jews see it very differently. In a world in which Jews are bitterly divided along denominational, ideological and political lines, the one thing almost of them agrees on is that anyone who believes in the divinity of Jesus is not a Jew.

More to the point, most Jews see “Messianic” sects that bill themselves as being either a form of Judaism or rooted in Jewish traditions as a standing insult, if not a threat, to their faith and identity.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS — Jewish News Syndicate.  His opinion columns appear there on a daily basis. He is also a contributing writer for National Review, a conservative magazine of opinion and ideas, a columnist for the New York Post, a contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Haaretz, a columnist for the New York Jewish Week, a contributor to the Gatestone Institute and to the Israeli magazine, MiDA.