Kesher and Continuity: A Memoir

A few years ago, I represented the Messianic Jewish community as a guest speaker at a Navajo Christian conference. Another guest was the president of the Navajo nation, who opened with this:

Hello my friends! My name is Ben Shelly. I am of the Salt People, born for the Deer Springs Clan. My maternal grandfather’s clan is the Bitter Water Clan over by Canyon de Chelly, and my paternal grandfather’s clan is the Line of Willows People.

Then he went on to describe his wife’s clans, and where they were located on the vast Navajo terrain, saying, “We’ve been married 46 years.” He concluded, “and that’s who I am.” I was impressed with his emphasis on family connection, and later learned this was a standard Navajo greeting.

President Shelly’s lead-up to “and that’s who I am” is much closer to Scripture than the modern American way of framing identity in a hyper-individualist mode. From a Navajo perspective, as from a traditional Jewish perspective, I’m part of a people and my story makes the most sense within the context of the broader story of my people. Personal identity, of which we so often speak nowadays, is dependent on continuity with our ancestors, our history, and our tradition. Jewish continuity means recognizing, actively connecting with, and contributing to, the shared story of the Jewish people. It means real-life engagement with Jewish people, Jewish ideas, and Jewish culture. And it also means bringing others, especially one’s own children and grandchildren, into that connection as well.

I can’t trace the specifics of my story as President Shelly could. My family is made up of immigrants, who never seemed eager to remember or recount where they came from. We didn’t introduce ourselves by retelling our tribal connections, but seemed to have cut, or just forgotten, those roots. Author Hannah Nordhaus captures this sort of loss, which occurred not just in my family, but among immigrant families, or at least Jewish immigrant families, in general:

To become American is to accept a staggering loss of self — of the people we once were, in the places we once came from. It may take a generation, perhaps two. But inevitably, it transpires. The surge of conquering culture sweeps down through the generations, much as the spring floods scour the desert arroyos. Washed away, we must lay down new roots.1

Regarding my roots, I know that my mother’s father, Sam Mandel, left the place he once came from as a very young man, the Russian town of Golen, now in Poland, to arrive in America early in the 20th century. He found work in the garment industry in New York City and met and married my grandmother, Ida Schwartz, who had emigrated with her family from Galicia, in the region of Poland that was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. Sam and Ida got their start in America in New York’s Lower East Side, where they raised four children, including my mother, Gussie Mandel Resnik of blessed memory. They were later joined by a fifth child, my Aunt Mona, also of blessed memory.

We speak of my parents’ generation, the generation that went through the Great Depression and World War II, and then returned to help fuel the vast post-war boom in America, as the greatest generation.2 And they may have been, but we shouldn’t forget the greatness of their parents’ generation. For most Jewish families, this is the generation that first came to America, that struggled to gain a foothold, lived in tenements — my mother told stories of tenement life, with a family of six occupying two rooms and sharing a bathroom out on the landing with another apartment — and then had to send their children off to war.

My father, Arnold, of blessed memory, was the son of Sam Resnik, who also emigrated from Russia as a young man, and married the daughter of German Jews who’d arrived a generation before. Sam and my grandmother Nettie also had five children, four older sisters and then my father. He met my mother as he was finishing up a degree at NYU in what was then a rather esoteric course of study, electrical engineering. Gussie and Arnold married early in 1941, the year that would later witness the attack on Pearl Harbor and our entry into World War II. My father was exempt from the draft because of a disability, but worked for the Army as an instructor in radio operations. By the end of the war, my parents had joined another great migration, this time to California with its booming defense industry, economic opportunity, and sunshine.

Like President Shelly, I’m part of a people with a great legacy, but with a recent disconnection. Life in America seemed all future tense to my grandparents’ generation, and to my parents’ as well. About the past there was mostly silence, and some of the details I’ve recounted here, like Grandpa Sam’s birthplace, I learned only much later in life. I grew up surrounded by Jewish values and culture, but not much story.

Coming of age, I joined a migration of my own, into the burgeoning counter-culture of the 60s and early 70s and, in my case, out of suburban California and into a remote, mountainous corner of northern New Mexico. The counter-culture of that day can be seen as a reaction to the greatness of the greatest generation. What could we do to match overcoming the Great Depression and winning the global war against Nazism and imperialism? We couldn’t be that great so we tended to overlook their greatness, look in different directions, and drop out. On the other hand, we had an ill-formed desire to transcend their achievement of comfort and security in post-war America and come up with something deeper and more authentic. Hence, I was swept into the alternative culture of the 60s: anti-war, anti-discrimination, anti-materialism, anti-(Western) religion; pro-sex, pro-drugs, pro-alternate spirituality, pro-experimentation.

This mix opened us to all sorts of transgressions and troubles, but wasn’t all bad.
I learned a lot and matured in my years in rural New Mexico. I met lots of good people along the way, both local Hispanic folks and other drop-outs from all over the country. Most of all, I met my wife-to-be, Jane, a beautiful pioneer and trendsetter among us.

In the fall of 1971, Jane and I moved even further into the high country of northern New Mexico. There, at 8000 feet elevation, I learned how to drive a team of horses and cut timber, and sought to survive on subsistence farming. Our dear friends Andrew (Eitan) and Connie Shishkoff, a couple who shared our vision for peace and simplicity, soon joined us along with their little boy.

The following fall, Jane returned to our old commune at a lower elevation to stock up on winter supplies. Our two small sons got sick there, and Jane was stranded. Finally a friend offered to take her to a spot on Highway 44 where we often caught rides back to our part of the state. As they neared the spot, Jane asked God — whoever he was — to just get her home. She looked up and saw a made-over Greyhound bus idling by the side of the road, inscribed with the words, JESUS: ONE WAY. The Jesus people inside were from New Jersey, where they had felt directed by the Spirit to go to the mountains of New Mexico for a year to study the Bible. They had laid hands on their bus before they left, praying that anyone who came into it would accept Jesus before he or she got off. They gladly took Jane on board, along with the little boys and hundreds of pounds of winter supplies. When they began to bombard her with Bible verses, Jane felt a voice telling her to listen to what they had to say; after all, this bus ride was an answer to prayer. And so it was that Jane, always the pioneer among us, became a believer in Jesus on that ride home. Connie soon accepted Yeshua too, and she and Jane invited two young men from the bus to our cabin for dinner.

After the meal, Andrew and I sat with them while they pointed out Bible verses to us by the light of a kerosene lamp. They told us that if we would accept Jesus in our hearts, and confess the words “Jesus is Lord,” God would save us and place his Spirit within us. As these young men started talking about faith in Jesus, I found myself believing it. Like any good Jewish hippie, I looked down upon Christianity (along with Judaism, I must add), but in recent months I’d been reading the New Testament from time to time and the Bible, and Jesus above all, had begun to draw me. Now, to my great surprise, the Spirit of God opened my eyes to see him, who had been altogether foreign to me for most of my life, as Messiah, as what I had unknowingly been seeking all along.

The encounter with God was undeniable, but I could not get myself to say “Jesus is Lord.” In the polite suburban Jewish home of my childhood, the name of Jesus was simply not spoken, let alone attached to a divine title. I wanted Jesus, but my long-neglected upbringing held me back. It had not protected me from all kinds of exotic religious practices in the past, but now it kept me from saying the words that I already believed in my heart. Finally, after three days, I was able to say aloud that Jesus was my lord. But then came a surprise: My dormant Jewish identity suddenly revived. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it was important that I was Jewish, and that it was somehow a major part of the plan that God was drawing me into. As I worked on rediscovering my Jewish identity as a follower of Yeshua,
I also was beginning to re-engage with Jewish continuity, ironically discovering reconnection only after being tracked down by Yeshua.

And even though believing in Yeshua was one of the most outrageous of all the outrageous things we had done, it led to reconciliation with our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. I began to recognize how much their story was part of the big Jewish story, and how following Yeshua brought us back into that story. My parents and grandparents were not very observant or traditional, but somehow as Messiah has led me back into more observance and more tradition, I feel that I’m reconnecting with my forebears and serving them. Somehow, we Jewish hippies had returned, not only to the God of Israel, but also to the people of Israel. As a result, we often said that we felt “more Jewish than ever.” Yet, even though we had returned, our search was far from over.

Soon we moved to Albuquerque and became immersed in the Christian world there, but never felt quite at home. We soon discovered that Christians did not always feel at home with us either. Some told us that we were no longer Jewish at all, but had converted and left our old religion behind. Paradoxically, from the Jewish world, we heard a similar message: we had converted; we were no longer Jewish; belief in Jesus was completely incompatible with Judaism.

As recovering hippies, we did not view such marginalization as the end of the world. If this Jesus-Jewish identity was from God, we could handle the rejection. But we weren’t sure it was from God, or how it would actually work. During that period, Jane and I met Eliezer Urbach, an older Jew who had fled Hitler’s Europe, served in the Israeli war of independence, accepted Yeshua in the mid-50s, and eventually ended up in Denver, where he became a mentor and father-figure to many young Messianic Jews. Eliezer started visiting Albuquerque every month and soon took me under his wing. One day he said, “Russell, with one tuchas you can’t dance at two weddings. You’ll have to decide: will your children take part in the Christmas pageant, or the Chanukah play?”

The choice seemed obvious enough to me, now with four children, but how to do it was not so clear. By 1980 I had become an elder of a charismatic, pro-Israel church with a sizeable Jewish contingent. We led a Friday-night home fellowship of about two dozen, mostly Jews and intermarried couples. Some of our friends in other parts of the country were leaving the church world altogether and joining Messianic Jewish congregations, but we were not so sure about that option. After my involvement in the counter-culture, I was not eager to join another rebellion, even one taking the form of a religious movement. Besides, some of what I saw of emerging Messianic Judaism was not too inspiring, with a Jewishness that often seemed contrived or superficial. Furthermore, it raised the inevitable theological questions; for example, was it really OK to form our own congregations to strengthen Jewish identity as believers in Yeshua? At the same time, our closest friends were joining such congregations. Even Eliezer, who initially opposed the whole idea, dropped his reservations and became instrumental in founding a messianic congregation in Denver. These were the people I trusted most in the world; shouldn’t I go with them on this issue?

In the summer of 1983, things came to a head. One of our commune friends, Ed, had become involved in a messianic synagogue in Philadelphia. Tired of arguing with us about Messianic Judaism, he offered to fly Jane and me to Messiah ’83, a major conference where we could see things for ourselves. There we were re-united with Andrew and Connie Shishkoff, who had moved east to join Beth Messiah congregation in Maryland. We were thrilled to hear so many Jewish voices praising the Lord with New York accents. One night Messianic Jews from all over the world were giving their testimonies. The stories were similar: “When I came to faith in Yeshua, I thought I was the only Jew in the world who believed the way I did. Then I found some other Jewish believers and we started to get together for Erev Shabbat to pray and eat together. Before long, this grew into our messianic congregation in France (or England or Australia).” Somewhere amidst these testimonies, Jane and I looked at each other and knew: This was of God! Messianic Judaism had not been invented in Philadelphia or Chicago, but was springing up all over the world as the Ruach moved upon Jewish believers. That night we received our most powerful call from God since we had accepted Messiah. We were to give ourselves to the messianic movement.

We returned to Albuquerque with a vision to transform our home group into a messianic congregation. But first Eliezer sent me to another conference, of a new group called the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations. There I encountered the same broad vision, but with more focus on establishing congregations, building community, and connecting leaders. Our home-group-in-transition joined as an associate member, and by the next year, with help and encouragement from the Union, we qualified for full membership. Since then the vision has matured, from the early realization that it was OK to be Jewish even though we were saved and born again, to our current efforts to live out a Judaism of Messianic presence, to follow and represent Yeshua as Messiah in continuity with the Jewish community and its traditions.

Jewish continuity is a dominant theme in the UMJC, the theme of returning to God through Messiah Yeshua as well as returning to deep identification with our people. My 1983 encounter with the Union led to decades of participation in creating and sustaining a Messianic Judaism that is deeply, authentically rooted in Jewish values, perspectives, and culture; a Messianic Judaism that fosters Jewish continuity even within the discontinuity of following the controversial, often shunned, great Jewish figure, Yeshua; a movement for Yeshua within and among the Jewish people. Increasingly over the years, to this present day, we saw that the Jewish specifics were not something to deny, but to embrace.

In 1994, about ten years after we joined the Union, the organization launched Kesher, with three inaugural articles by the three original co-editors, Rich Nichol, Barney Kasdan, and Stuart Dauermann, addressing the question, “Why Bother Making Kesher?” The question is a double entendre, with Kesher referring both to the name of the new journal and to its Hebrew meaning as “connection.” In this context, it meant “connectedness to our roots and to our tradition.”3 Rabbi Nichol led out in responding to “Why Bother Making Kesher?”

Two related facts make Messianic Judaism the most important religious movement on the current world scene: first, the historical reality of Messiah Yeshua’s resurrection; second, the clear teaching of the Bible that God’s covenant with Israel continues to this very day and will continue through the full flowering of Olam Ha-Ba. . . . Simply stated, Messianic Jewish congregations exist not merely as the result of observable sociological and political forces (the Six Day War in 1967 and the hippie movement), but they exist because the Creator of the universe is a covenant-keeping God who has stated in no uncertain terms that Israel is his and that Jewish believers in Yeshua are his.4

Thirty years later, one might dispute Rabbi Nichol’s contention that Messianic Judaism is the most important religious movement on the current world scene, but his “two related facts” remain foundational: the resurrection of Messiah Yeshua and God’s covenant commitment to the people Israel. These two facts are intertwined and they compel us to remain loyal both to the covenant people Israel and to the risen Messiah of Israel, to foster, in the terminology of this article, Messianic identity in continuity with the Jewish people, Jewish values, and Jewish tradition. It’s telling that the full title of these three articles is “Generation to Generation: Why Bother Making Kesher?” with the main line of the title providing an answer to the subtitle’s question. We bothered making Kesher to help foster generational continuity.

Co-editor Barney Kasdan adds an emphasis on tradition or heritage in responding to “Why bother making kesher?” Citing 2 Thessalonians 2:13–15, he writes,

The simple fact is that it is the Scriptures themselves that encourage us to keep the connection with our heritage. When you stop to think about it, every group, congregation or club has a tradition, expressed or otherwise. Even those who claim to be strictly biblical have extra traditions if you look closely enough. It is not wrong or inappropriate when there is biblical balance. Yet of all people, those within Messianic Judaism have the greatest motivation of all to maintain kesher to our rich cultural heritage.5

Throughout the article, Rabbi Kasdan makes it clear that he is speaking of the heritage of traditional Jewish practice, which has often been seen in the Christian community as an impediment to faith. Rather, he says, “It is a personal blessing to walk in our tradition.”6

In his article, Rabbi Dauermann also adds a personal note:

I am not exactly what some would term a prime candidate to be zealous for kesher — for connectedness to our roots and to our tradition. Yet that is what I am — right down to my kishkes. As an extension of this visceral conviction, I feel that this inaugural issue of Kesher and all the issues to follow are crucial to the well-being and effectiveness of our movement, and the authentic development of our people.7 

Dauermann goes on to explain this conviction about Kesher/kesher in terms of his own family story, shared with his wife, Naomi:

Because Naomi and I are raising our children as Jews, we all experience a kind of cultural kesher with each other — a deeper than genetic connectedness. 

So why is it important that we Messianic Jews make kesher — contact, connectedness with our heritage? For me a crucial reason is so that we, and our children, and our children’s children, should not become strangers to our Jewish contemporaries, to each other, to the generations to come, and to the generations which have gone before us. As we reverently handle the same tradition as they, over the oceans and across the years we touch each other. We make kesher. This is so precious: and, I submit, this must not be lost.8 

The early issues of Kesher tended to largely, although not exclusively, focus on matters of Messianic Jewish congregational and community life and leadership. Issue 10, Winter 2000, was more theologically oriented, focusing on Ecclesiology, the study of the assembly, congregation, synagogue, or church, and included a paper from a recent UMJC Theology Forum, “Toward a Theology of Messianic Judaism,” by Mark Kinzer. This paper explores the phrase “Messianic Judaism” itself, proposing that it treats “Judaism” as a genus and “Messianic” as a species, which in turn yields several conclusions:

1. We are primarily concerned with the Jewish people, rather than establishing a movement of Gentile Ba’aley Teshuvah [Gentiles turning to Torah observance];

2. We profess a positive relationship to the Jewish people and its course through history;

3. We affirm a positive relationship to the Jewish religious tradition as it has developed throughout history;

4. We acknowledge the legitimacy of other forms of Judaism, and seek to learn from them as well as teach.9

These points, especially the first, reflect a concern that the Messianic Jewish community was drifting away from its connection with the wider Jewish community and becoming a Jewish-Gentile movement for Torah and Jewish (or Hebrew) roots.

I had been involved in editing, serving on the advisory board, and contributing articles for Kesher from its inception and I shared this concern. During this period, I also became increasingly involved in the UMJC, eventually becoming General Secretary (later renamed Executive Director) in 1999. One of my first priorities was to rekindle our founding mission of furthering “the initiation, establishment, and growth of Messianic Jewish Congregations worldwide” and keep the Union from drifting into a broader Jewish-Gentile Torah movement. As General Secretary I encouraged a multi-year discussion on what we meant by Messianic Judaism, a discussion that included Kinzer’s work on the theology of Messianic Judaism. The process culminated in 2002 with the delegate-approved statement “Defining Messianic Judaism.”10 The statement was shaped by our Theology Committee and overwhelmingly approved by the delegates but, perhaps inevitably, it stirred up controversy simply by sharpening our self-definition and clarifying our boundaries.

I wrote a commentary exploring and advocating for the statement in depth, which was distributed along with the statement itself. This stirred up sharper controversy, not only because the commentary was engaged with real-life, divisive issues in our community, but also because it was published alongside the delegate-approved statement, although it had not been submitted for delegate approval itself. Because of this controversy, the article wasn’t widely promoted within the Union itself, but it was published in the Spring 2004 issue of Kesher,11 which was still under the UMJC at that time.

My commentary, like the Defining Statement itself, reflects the same sense of kesher — Jewish connection and continuity — as the first issue of Kesher, although with different terminology. The Defining Statement says, “Jewish life is life in a concrete, historical community. Thus, Messianic Jewish groups must be fully part of the Jewish people, sharing its history and its covenantal responsibility as a people chosen by God.” Expanding on that sentence, I wrote:

Our story is not told in isolation, but within the context of a larger story. To be “fully part of the Jewish people” means that in Messianic Judaism we tell our story within the larger Jewish story, as we must do to be true to our calling as a Jewish movement for Messiah. Our share in the Jewish story is not an accident of birth. Rather it entails a “covenantal responsibility” to live as members of a people chosen by God and given in Scripture a unique set of instructions and obligations; to live in a way that contributes to the survival and destiny of the Jewish people.

We are Jewish not only in a biblical sense, then, but also in living interaction with the whole of our community and tradition, the “concrete, historical community” of which this paragraph speaks.12

Discussions on the nature of Messianic Judaism, sometimes tense, but usually fruitful, continued for the next few years. In 2005, the UMJC delegates affirmed a modestly updated version of the statement. That same year saw the publication of Mark Kinzer’s seminal work, Postmissionary Messianic Judaism [PMJ],13 which Kesher discussed in our Winter/Spring 2006 issue. I will cite Dan Juster’s response as it relates to Jewish continuity, because of his key role in founding the Union and in formulating “Defining Messianic Judaism,” as well as his continuing influence within the wider Messianic Jewish community. In agreement with PMJ, he writes,

Unless Jews who embrace Yeshua maintain their identity and connection to the Jewish community, replacement theology will still be found lurking in the background. If Yeshua-believing Jews assimilate into the larger Christian world, the Jewish people are diminished. Do some Christians and Jewish Christians unwittingly give themselves to an orientation, which if fully successful, would lead to the disappearance of the Jewish people? Jews who primarily identify with Christian churches as now constituted do not raise their children with an adequate Jewish identity. The historical evidence for this is more than overwhelming. . . .14

Juster captures some of the essentials of Jewish continuity here — “identity and connection to the Jewish community” and resistance to assimilation. He goes on to affirm Kinzer’s bilateral ecclesiology, the notion of two distinct communities, Jewish and Gentile, within the one united ekklesia. “The ekklesia of the Jewish Yeshua-believers should have their own institutions and government. Their members should also, as much as possible, be part of the larger Jewish community.”15 Juster balances his appreciation of PMJ with some concerns that continue to shape the discussion of Messianic Jewish identity and continuity to this day. I’ll reflect Juster’s concerns in my own words here: How do we maintain a sense of urgency and zeal for reaching our people for Yeshua within a positive view of normative Judaism and the Jewish community? Is a personal embrace of Yeshua as Messiah and Lord absolutely essential for gaining a share in the World-to-Come? To use Christian terminology, can Jews be saved without intentionally accepting Yeshua? If Jewish tradition and practice are so rich and profound, where exactly does faith in Yeshua come in?

Such questions continue to inspire discussion, debate, and refinement of our theology and self-understanding, which is why I’ve focused on this critical period of the early 2000s in this article. But the discussion continues, and before concluding, I will mention a few later articles that contribute to the “Kesher and Continuity” theme. By this time, the UMJC delegates had approved the transfer of Kesher to MJTI, which took over publication starting with Issue 23, Fall 2009. A few years later, Dr. John Fischer, a pioneer rabbi in our community, and the UMJC in particular, contributed to the discussion of continuity with “The Centrality of Community and History to the Messianic Jewish Narrative.”

Scripture does not portray the Messianic Jewish community as disconnected or isolated from Jewish communal life. There should be no separation of that community from the larger Jewish community. . . . All this focuses attention on the centrality of connection to the Jewish community. That connection needs to be maintained not only with the present community but also with the past community; a connection with Jewish history is part of the connection to Jewish community.16

Fischer highlights an important element to the discussion of Jewish continuity; it is a connection not only with Jewish people, culture, and tradition, but also with Jewish history. This realization leads us to ask if, and how, the Messianic Jewish community we are seeking to build will enter Jewish history and help move it forward.

The following year, 2018, after completing my term as UMJC Executive Director in 2016, I stepped in as editor-in-chief of Kesher with Issue 32, which explored “the broad impact of story, and the distinctive story we tell as a Messianic Jewish community.” 17 “Story” adds another element to our shared Jewish legacy, and it may be a more approachable term than “history,” “tradition,” or “culture.” After all, as I wrote in my initial “From the editor” introduction to this issue, “Everyone loves — and needs — a story. Through story we discover who we are and how we are to live. Men and women are formed by the stories they hear as children; societies and cultures are shaped by the stories they tell and retell over the generations.”18 In other words, in the drama of intergenerational continuity, story plays an irreplaceable role. Navajo President Shelly had mobilized the power of story as he introduced himself within the haunting landscape and bright terminology of his family network, the Deer Springs Clan. Kesher 32 includes three articles on a particular type of story, the canonical narrative, an interpretive framework that presents the complex storyline of the Bible as “a theological and narrative unity.”19

Stuart Dauermann opens his article on canonical narrative with this:

Communal narrative is indispensable and central to community formation, community identity, community survival, and community life. It is an issue that could mean everything to the future of Messianic Judaism. Indeed, I would say that our narrative deeply shapes not only what we do, and how we think: it actually shapes who we are and what we become.20

He goes on to note how Christian canonical narratives tend to marginalize or “dispensationalize” (my term) Israel’s role in the story, and continues:

I believe that Messianic Judaism must learn to see the Bible through the eyes of Israel, as fundamentally the continuing story of God’s faithful engagement with the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for the sake of the world. To paraphrase Soulen, we might say that our narrative considers how the God and Father of Yeshua the Messiah is working among the children of Jacob for the sake of all.21

Mention of “for the sake of the world” and “for the sake of all” has special relevance for intergenerational transfer, which we’ll turn to in a moment. Our younger generations display a deep concern for the human community beyond the Jewish world, and a Messianic Judaism able to thrive in the years ahead must include a universal vision as well as the particular Jewish connection we’ve been describing.

Before leaving my inaugural Issue 32, however, I want to acknowledge Paul Saal’s article on canonical narrative, which ties Israel’s priestly role “for the sake of all,” and Messiah Yeshua’s expansion of that role, into the creation account in Genesis. Saal concludes: “As Messianic Jews it will be both our theological and practical task to bring the newer revelation of the priestly role into conformity with the ongoing historical reality of the Jewish people.”22 Again, we’re pondering a task that may be especially relevant to coming Messianic Jewish generations.

I’ve given extra time to Issue 32 because its emphasis on story and narrative is so relevant to Jewish continuity, but of course the discussion of Jewish continuity (appropriately enough) continues on. Two other issues of Kesher during my editorial tenure are worthy of special mention. Issue 35 is a Festschrift (celebratory collection of writings) honoring Elliot Klayman for fifty years of service to our community in teaching, preaching, writing, advising, mentoring, mediating, adjudicating, providing executive leadership, and editing, including serving as Kesher’s editor-in-chief from 2014 to 2018. Elliot has continued to be an indispensable member of the Kesher team ever since. Issue 40 is themed “Tomorrow Together” and looks toward the future of Messianic Judaism from the perspective of three pioneering leaders whom I’ve already cited, Elliot Klayman, Rich Nichol, and Stuart Dauermann.

In glimpsing into the future, I’ll focus on an element of continuity already mentioned — intergenerational transfer. How often in Scripture, especially in the Torah, do we read promises and commandments that are to be passed on dor l’dor, generation to generation? In my interview with the panel in the previous article in this issue, I mention the pushback we sometimes get to our claim to be fully Jewish as followers of Yeshua: “Yes, but will your grandchildren be Jewish?” If we claim to be a movement for Yeshua as Messiah within Judaism, we must contribute children and grandchildren, new generations, to the line of the Jewish people. For most of my life as a leader, parent, and grandparent I have carried with me a promise from Adonai that answers this challenge:

“I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring,
and my blessing on your descendants.

They shall spring up among the grass
 like willows by flowing streams.

This one will say, ‘I am the Lord’s,’
another will call on the name of Jacob,

and another will write on his hand, ‘The Lord’s,’
and name himself by the name of Israel.” Isaiah 44:3–5 ESV

The Lord promises offspring who will take upon themselves his name and mark themselves as belonging to him, and will at the same time take the name Israel for their own.

I just spoke of “intergenerational transfer,” but I’m not happy with that term. I don’t want to think of Jewish continuity as a relay race, with my generation handing it off to the next, and so on. Rather, I want to see multigenerational continuity, a community that looks more like an extended family than a religious institution, like a family with a limited housing budget (an increasingly relevant metaphor), and with fathers, mothers, children, grandchildren, aunts and uncles and cousins all dwelling together, influencing, inspiring, motivating, and even learning from each other.

We veterans can learn from our younger family members when they remind us what life looks like to them, what it looked like to us at their age. In my early years in the New Mexico high country, I had a great need for adventure, a need to find my own way, apart from the man-made road map of ways that had already been laid out before me. As I listen to younger folks, I see they have similar needs and I affirm that. I’ll say to them directly, I affirm your sense of adventure and experimentation, your search for authentic encounter with the transcendent, and your impatience with the worn-out phrases so often bandied about. I affirm your impulse — or potential impulse — to follow closely after Messiah Yeshua, and to remain loyal to our people Israel at the same time. It took my generation a long time to realize that balance, but I see it bearing fruit, and I’m happy to see younger members of the tribe seeking to bridge the Jewish-Jesus divide with grace and energy. May they be watered by the Spirit and spring up among the grass like willows by flowing streams!

And of course I affirm the men and women of my own generation, the pioneering generation in today’s Messianic Jewish community. It’s been an honor and joy to serve alongside you at Kesher, with so many gifted writers, editors, and readers too. It’s also been an honor and a joy to contribute within the Union, and within the wider Jewish community that honors Yeshua as Messiah. May we all continue together in multigenerational community as we step into the years ahead!

Russ Resnik serves as Rabbinic Counsel of the UMJC and has taught and lectured on Messianic Jewish and biblical studies in Israel, Canada, Mexico, South America, South Africa, and Russia. He was ordained through the UMJC in 1990, and served as executive director from 1999 to 2016. Russ is the author of several books on Torah and biblical studies. He and his wife Jane have four children, eight grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter, and live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he leads Adonai Ro’i chavurah and enjoys bike-riding, hiking, and walking his dog.

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1. 1 Hannah Nordhaus, American Ghost: A Family’s Extraordinary History on the American Frontier (New York: Harper Perennial, 2016), 332.

2. 2 The phrase was popularized as the title of a 1998 book by journalist Tom Brokaw, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Generation.

3. 3 Stuart Dauermann, “Generation to Generation: Why Bother Making Kesher?” Kesher: A Journal on Messianic Judaism, Volume 1, July 1994: 16. A Journal on Messianic Judaism was soon modified to A Journal of Messianic Judaism.

4. 4 Richard C. Nichol, “Generation to Generation: Why Bother Making Kesher?” Kesher, Volume 1, July 1994: 1.

5. 5 Barney Kasdan, “Generation to Generatio0n: Why Bother Making Kesher?” Kesher, Volume 1, July 1994: 11.

6. 6 Kasdan, “Generation to Generation,” 14.

7. 7 Dauermann, “Generation to Generation,” 16.

8. 8 Dauermann, “Generation to Generation,” 17.

9. 9 Mark S. Kinzer, “Toward a Theology of Messianic Judaism,” Kesher, Issue 10, Winter 2000: 114.

10. 10 The statement was revised by the delegates in 2005 (https://www.umjc.org/defining-messianic-judaism). It’s notable that the statement was published on the back cover of Kesher, Issues 16–21.

11. 11 https://www.umjc.org/defining-messianic-judaism. This is the 2005 version; my Kesher article cites the 2002 version.

12. 12 Russ Resnik, “Defining Messianic Judaism — A Commentary,” Kesher, Volume 17, Spring 2004 (https://www.kesherjournal.com/article/defining-messianic-judaism-a-commentary/).

13. 13 Mark S. Kinzer, Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: Redefining Christian Engagement with the Jewish People (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005).

14. 14 Daniel C. Juster, “Response to Postmissionary Messianic Judaism,” Kesher, Volume 20, Winter/Spring 2006: 23–24.

15. 15 Juster, “Response,” 24.

16. 16 John Fischer, “The Centrality of Community and History to the Messianic Jewish Narrative,” Kesher, Issue 31, Summer/Fall 2017: 9–10.

17. 17 “From the editor,” Kesher, Issue 32, Winter/Spring 2018: 1.

18. 18 “From the editor,” 1.

19. 19 R. K. Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 13.

20. 20 Stuart Dauermann, “Making Israel’s Story our Own: Toward a Messianic Jewish Canonical Narrative,” Kesher, Issue 32, Winter/Spring 2018: 73.

21. 21 Dauermann, “Making Israel’s Story our Own,” 75–76.

22. 22 Paul L. Saal, “Origins and Destiny: Israel, Creation and the Messianic Jewish Canonical Narrative,” Kesher, Issue 32, Winter/Spring 2018: 124.