that was odd

[cellio]

Several years ago, I wrote an article for an SCA newsletter on how to build a yurt (aka ger), the Mongolian round semi-portable structure. I and some friends built one for camping in at Pennsic, so I wrote down what I did and shared it. Every now and then I get random questions and/or thanks from people who've found the article.

The most recent message is from someone who said he does "Roman and Bible reenactment" and had just built a yurt. (Unknown: what a yurt has to do with either.) Its first use was to be for his sukkah. He closed with "Shalom in Jesus".

Um, ok. A Christian? A "Jew for Jesus"? A re-enactor whose re-enactment extends to holidays?

I wrote back to thank him for the message and answer a question. And just to be helpful, I pointed out a couple halachic issues he might consider in using a yurt for Sukkot. I did not translate the Hebrew for terms that a Jew or a scholar would likely know. I didn't really expect to hear from him again.

He wrote back, citing a tertiary (at best) source for alternate interpretations. He also gave a cite for a round, domed sukkah in Amsterdam in 1722. This doesn't match up with anything either of us is trying to recreate, of course, but it sounds interesting. (Not interesting enough to go out and chase, though. It's a curiosity to me, nothing more.) He didn't say what they used for the roof cover or how it was attached.

He also described himself as Jewish, messianic, and a karaite. I didn't know there were still karaites out there. I'm not certain what the combination of messianic and karaite means, but I'm not going to ask him.

Karaites were a "sect", for lack of a better term, that accepted the written law but none of the oral law. They spent Shabbat in the cold and dark because they interpreted "kindle no fire" as "have no fire" rather than "light it in advance". It sounds like it must have been miserable. I thought they all died out several hundred years ago. Maybe this is a "neo-karaite" in the sense that we have "neo-pagans" who aren't tied to the original pagans?

Comments

[fiannaharpar.livejournal.com]

I had seen the WWJD thing that you're referring to, and *love* it.

I ran into the Jews for Jesus Downtown a few years ago, and they were unable to tell me the difference between their movement and Christianity. The bulk of their arguement was, "we believe that Jesus is the Christ, but we're Jews." Nothing actually intelligent, just various repetitions of that phrase in response to any actual probing questions.

It stunned me that *anyone* would join that movement, then again, i'm confused by the Christian Fundamentalist movement as well.

[cellio]

There are a lot of Jews out there who think it's important to "be Jews", but they don't practice and either they don't believe or they've never gotten around to thinking about it. J4J targets this group in an effort to convert them to Christianity while assuring them that they're still Jews. J4J services have a lot of the trappings of Jewish services -- they use an ark and something that fills the role of a Torah scroll (I don't know what's on it -- gospels?), and they've adapted some of the liturgy, and of course many of the symbols like the magen david (star of David) and stuff like that. I imagine that there's a fair bit of Hebrew. The idea is to make the Jew feel at home in a synagogue like the one he grew up attending. It is fraud to the core and it preys mostly on the uneducated, with a secondary market in immigrant Jews whose English isn't so good yet. Honest Christians seeking converts are one thing; deceptive ones are quite another.

Jews for Judaism is one response to this. You can find Jews for Jesus at the predictable URL. It's been a while since I've perused either site.