Dr. Brown Dialogues with Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Pesach Wolicki

The following program is recorded content created by Truth Network. Calling 866-34-TRUTH. That's 866-34-TRUTH.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks friends for joining us on Thoroughly Jewish Thursday on the Line of Fire. I'm delighted to have a guest coming our way from Israel today, Rabbi Pesach Walicki. I became especially familiar with his work as I was looking at some writings about the new anti-Semitism that's rising and found some of his insights to be tremendous. Saw that he was involved in Jewish-Christian relations and then we intersected on a couple of other planes and have been wanting to connect.

We finally got beyond email to talk by video conference online last night midnight my time or 11 my time 5 a.m. his time. We got ready to say hey let's do a whole show today. So if you have a question for Rabbi Walicki it's possible it's possible that we'll have time for some questions. 866-34-TRUTH. But there's so much that we want to talk about honestly, candidly, that I think you're gonna find really helpful and constructive.

So be sure to share this broadcast with your friends. Let me give you a quick intro. Part of Rabbi Walicki's lengthy biography, he serves as executive director of Oratorra Stone Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation. He also works as academic consultant lecturer for the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a leading voice for the growing Jewish-Christian relationship. He is a frequent contributor on American Family Radio's Middle East Report. He hosts the shoulder-to-shoulder podcast with Pastor Doug Reed and is author of the book Cup of Salvation, a devotional study of Psalms 113 through 118.

Rabbi Walicki lives with his wife Kate and their eight children in Beit Shemesh in Israel. Rabbi Walicki, welcome to the line of fire. Thank you, thank you Dr. Brown. It's an honor and a pleasure to join you and I agree with you. You know for a long time we were kind of corresponding by email and meaning to get together and I'm so happy we're finally doing this.

Yes, thrilled to do it. So just to make things clear, you're an Orthodox rabbi, you're not a Christian who loves the Jewish people, you're not a Messianic Jewish rabbi, you're an Orthodox rabbi. Just tell us a little bit more about your Orthodox upbringing and background. Sure, I'm an Orthodox rabbi and you know my upbringing was really in the Orthodox Jewish bubble.

I mean my father is an Orthodox rabbi as well. I grew up in Montreal in Canada where my dad was a was the rabbi of a fairly large synagogue, I mean large by Jewish standards in Montreal and in my upbringing pretty much everyone I interacted with was an Orthodox Jew. Other than, and I'm not even, I didn't even really interact with non-Orthodox Jews. I mean I grew up really in an Orthodox Jewish community, I went to an Orthodox Jewish school, that's where my friends were, my summer camp, my extracurricular activities growing up as a kid, I mean everything was pretty much Orthodox Jews. Other than occasional teachers that I had in school who were not Jewish, those were the only people who were not Jewish that I ever even met. So I grew up in Montreal, I then went to high school, similar situation Orthodox Yeshiva High School which is really an immersive Jewish high school in Toronto and then I went to Israel, I kind of went the normal Orthodox Jewish circles, the usual rite of passages after high school to go off to Israel to study in a Yeshiva which is like, how do we describe Yeshiva, it's not exactly the same as a seminary but where we study you know Talmudic studies, Torah studies full time. My parents had already moved to Israel at that point, they moved to Israel when I was in my teens and then I came back to Canada, went to college at York University and that's where for the first time I really started having relationships with people who were not Jewish and I mean, you want me to go through the whole story of my life? No, we got the bona fides there, so I just wanted people to understand how you grew up, you even led a Yeshiva for years, so you're just immersed day and night, rabbinic tradition, rabbinic study, so how does a rabbi like you end up being a major proponent for deepening understanding between Jews and Christians?

That's a great question, you know, before 2015 when I left my career in Jewish education where I was a Rosh Yeshiva which is like a dean of a Yeshiva where basically our focus and it was a really academic style Yeshiva, the heavy focus on building skills in ancient Aramaic and study of Talmud with all the commentaries, that's all we did all day and that's really what I was known for in the Jewish educational world, I was known for certain teaching methods that I developed in terms of teaching Talmud and the commentaries, not very exciting as a guest speaker anywhere outside of a very limited audience and when I left that and went full force into full-time Jewish-Christian relations, you know, flying off the evangelical churches to speak there, many people in the Jewish community, many of my friends said to me like what's this, like you're leaving Jewish education and now you're doing this and I said to them, I said the only people who are not at all surprised by what I'm doing are my wife and all my students all the years that I was teaching in Yeshiva because I talked about the importance of this relationship all the time, the students who I had in my Yeshiva over the more than a decade that we had the Yeshiva, my students who some of them are now rabbis and teachers in their own right, they weren't surprised at all, they knew that this was a direction I was going in and many of them hold this same theology as central to their understanding of Judaism really, because really this, for me the importance of the Jewish-Christian relationship speaks to the definition of Judaism, now where does it come from? Let me, I'll give you that story. Are you interested? You want to hear it? Of course, if I'm not interrupting, keep going.

It starts before. Go for it. So earlier on, I've got a bit of an interesting history, I spent a few years as a political activist, I'm still very interested and very involved with politics, you mentioned that I'm a regular contributor on John Riley's Middle East report, which is not really, I mean, I always throw in some Bible stuff and some theology because I think that that stuff, you know, we need to involve our biblical viewpoint in our political views, we have to, but I've always been involved in politics and when I was in college I was very involved in pro-Israel activism and more importantly in Canada at the time, fighting anti-Semitism, we had issues with neo-Nazis on my campus and I was a bit of a student leader on my campus in terms of activism, I didn't go to class very much. And then after college, I became a full-time Jewish activist, I worked for Rabbi Avi Weiss in New York, I don't know, have you heard of him? Of course. So I was his right-hand man for a year doing a lot of different Jewish activism, combating the Nation of Islam, anti-Semitism, and we went out, do you remember that he had a protest out in Auschwitz where the Catholic Church had built a convent in Auschwitz?

Yes, of course, absolutely. So I was part of that protest. So I was very involved in Jewish political activism, really defending the Jewish people against anti-Semitism and such things, and then I moved to Israel in 1994 and assumed the leadership of an organization called the International Coalition for Missing Israeli Soldiers, and this was a nonprofit, it was a lobby group basically, an activist lobby group that was started by the families of Israeli MIAs, who had been taken prisoner and had gone missing, they'd been taken by terrorist groups in the various skirmishes in Lebanon during the 80s, and their whereabouts were unknown, we knew the terrorist groups held them, and I took over that organization and we had rallies and lobbying, had a lot of interesting experiences, met a lot of famous politicians, which wasn't really such, it's not all it's cracked up to be, but I was very involved in that cause and we were always looking for supporters who would help us promote the issue of the missing Israeli soldiers. At the time it was the beginning of the Oslo peace process in the Clinton administration where they were negotiating with Yasser Arafat and the Israeli government, and at the time the right wing in Israel didn't want there to be any negotiations at all, and the left wing in Israel didn't want anything getting in the way of the negotiations, and our cause, the left wing didn't like it because it was in the way of the negotiations, and the right wing didn't like it because they didn't want us talking to anybody, and we wanted the Israeli government to demand information or the return of these soldiers, and around that time in the early to mid 90s there were some Christian Zionist organizations that were operating in Jerusalem, the International Christian Embassy, Bridges for Peace, there were a number of Christian organizations in Jerusalem, and back then it wasn't like today where there's a lot of cooperation and interaction between these Christian groups and Jews. Back then there was virtually no interaction between the Jewish community and these Christian groups, and a number of these Christian activists from these organizations reached out to our organization at the time and said, hey we'd like to help you, your cause is a humanitarian cause, it doesn't, it's not right wing or left wing, which was exactly our problem, but it's not right wing or left wing, we want to help you, and we really care about these boys, and at the time I was like, Christians? I don't want anything to do with Christians, why would I want to talk to Christians?

All I've heard is that they just want to convert me, and they're all just, I don't want anything to do with Christians, and I spoke to my father. My father, as I mentioned, is a rabbi, he's a prominent Orthodox rabbi, and I remember I went to talk to him and he was like, well, he was kind of suspicious, and I said, look, you know, I'm going to go spend some time with them, I'm going to go see what this is all about, and he's like, okay, be careful, you know, because that's really, people have to, you know, Christians have to understand that that was definitely the attitude in the Jewish community, and still is today in many parts of the Jewish community, and so I started, we started doing some events together, and they were, and they were promoting our cause, and I went to the states and attended some events with some of these organizations. Christian Zionism was very small at the time compared to what it is today as a movement, and the more I spent time with these people, the more I said to myself, this is not what I expected.

I found, you know, their faith and the piety and the sincerity in everything that they, that these Christians did to be refreshing and to be something that was inspiring, and I started, it started making me think about the role of Christianity in the world from a Jewish perspective. Now let me also add in that I was always kind of a scholarly kid. I'm not saying that as a, you know, to brag, but I was always involved in Talmud study, even all these years I was a political activist, I would spend half the day studying, studying Torah, studying Talmud, studying Jewish sources. I was kind of a rabbi.

I had all the makings of a future rabbi except that I had no intention at the time of going to rabbinical school. I just grew up that way. I don't know if your listeners understand.

You're growing up in an Orthodoxy rabbinic family. Hang on, if I just get you to hold that thought right there. We got a break. We come back. Let's find out about how your Jewish studies prepared you for this interaction with Christians. Then I think our listeners and viewers will be interested to know how it is that you found out about me. And then look, we're going to dig. We're going to, we're going to press each other on a few questions here.

So everybody stay, stay right here. We'll be right back with Rabbi Pesach Maliki. Welcome, friends, to our 30 Jewish Thursday broadcast on the line of fire as I speak with Rabbi Pesach Maliki, who is the voice for the growing Jewish-Christian relationship, relationship's executive director of Oratoro Stone Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation. So Rabbi Maliki, I know you can get into great depth here, but the short story of how your intensive Talmudic studies and studies of Bible prepared you for now relating more deeply with Christians. You're meeting them. You're interacting with them. You're outside of the Orthodox bubble. You're finding them to be sincere people, people of faith, not just trying to set you up to proselytize you that they generally do care.

They're Christian Zionists because they love Israel and the Jewish people. So how is it that things you were studying though now tie in with, I would think it would go in the other direction. That would be your normal assumption.

How does it go in this direction? Well, well, that's interesting because around the time that all this was going on, you know, like I said, I would always, no matter what I was doing, whatever job I had, I always spent a few hours a day studying, studying, you know, our Jewish texts. And it was during that time, it must have been 1995 or something, and I was studying the works of Maimonides one day in the middle of all this. And I came across a passage in the works of Maimonides. Now Maimonides, people understand who he was.

He was, he's, it's no exaggeration and it's not even, you can't even call it an opinion. I think every traditional Jew would agree with this. He's the most influential, the most consequential Jewish theologian and legal scholar, the most important rabbi since the destruction of the Second Temple till today. I mean, he's the most, he's the most influential rabbinic thinker.

That doesn't mean that we, that we follow him in everything or that we accept all his opinions. He's kind of the equivalent of Augustine. He lived in the 12th century. And I was reading, I was reading the works of Maimonides and Maimonides very famously was very harsh on Christianity. He lived in, again, he lived in the 12th century. The only Christianity that he, that was, that was pretty much visible to him was like medieval Catholicism. And he, he did not view it positively.

He viewed it as a form of idolatry. But at the same time in his writings, he writes explicitly that the purpose of Christianity is to pave the path for the ultimate coming of the Messiah and to lead the entire world to worship one God together. And then he quotes the verse from Zephaniah chapter three, that all the nations will come together to call on the name of the Lord and to serve him shoulder to shoulder. And, and he explains then, he then goes on to explain that the way this works, I remember I was sitting reading this, I was in Jerusalem, I was sitting in a study hall. During the, you know, at the end of the workday, I would go study and I was reading this passage in Maimonides, and he speaks about how at the end times, these, these Christians will, because they've been exposed to the Bible, because they know the Bible, and they know the God of Israel, they know all the stories, they know all, they know all the content of the Bible, that will lay the groundwork for them to be with us at the end times. It's basically what he says, and that, and really that's what the redemption of the world is all about.

It's everyone serving the God of Israel together. And so I was reading this and I said, okay, wait a second, I've got about, I've got about 800 years, eight or 900 years on Maimonides. Let's fast forward. Where am I right now? I'm in the land of Israel. I'm one of millions of Jews who have been ingathered the prophecies of Deuteronomy chapter 30, that the people of Israel, even if we're scattered to the ends of the heavens, will come back to our land and take possession of it and become more numerous and more prosperous than our ancestors. And those words are written in the future tense in the Bible, but today they are fact.

They have happened. And here I am in the long, as in the beginnings of that long awaited redemption of Israel. And here are these Christians who love the God of Israel and they know every word of the Bible and they're devoted to the God of Israel. And when Zachariah writes about how multitudes among the nations are going to stream to Jerusalem at the time of the ingathering to worship the God of Israel, to seek the God of Israel in Jerusalem, I'm like, wait a second. If I'm one of the people, if I'm a Jew who's fulfilling Deuteronomy 30 by being ingathered, there's no doubt in my mind that these Christians are fulfilling Zachariah and Zephaniah and Isaiah as members of the nations or Psalms, which speaks of all the nations praising God for the kindnesses that have been done to the people of Israel. Now, I don't think my great grandparents who were being chased around by Nazis in Europe could foresee a situation where multitudes among the nations were praising the God of Israel for being so good to the Jews.

But these people are doing it. And during that, as one of the political events I went to, I flew to Washington DC in 1995 for the first gathering of the leaders of Christian Zionist organizations. It was called Voices United for Israel. It took place in DC.

There were probably about 100 people there maxed. And it was led by the Christian Israel Public Affairs Committee, which I don't think exists anymore. The guy by the name of Richard Hellman, Dick Hellman.

Do you ever know Dick Hellman? He ran this lobby, this Christian lobby for Israel, which I guess became obsolete after Christians United for Israel and all the other things that are going on. But back then it was a small conference. And Frank Gaffney spoke there. And there was all these different political people who spoke. And in the middle of the whole thing, in between two political briefings, and I was there just to push the issue of the missing Israeli soldiers. In between two of these security or political briefings, Dick Hellman gets up and he says, I'd like everyone to please stand up and we'd like to pray. And he says a prayer for Israel. And at the end of the prayer, he then leads everyone in saying Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. And I'm just like about the faint.

And I'm sitting there thinking wait a second. The most important commentary on the Bible for Jews, bar none, is Rashi. Rashi was a rabbi who lived in the 11th century. And he wrote a commentary that is still studied daily by Jews. He's the most famous commentary on the Torah. That verse, Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one, is the most famous verse in the Torah for Jews. Rashi's commentary on that verse says as follows. Moses said to Israel, Hear O Israel, he's speaking to them 3,300 and something years ago, he says, Hear O Israel, right now the Lord is our God and the nations do not know him. But in the future, the Lord is one. He will be the one God over all. In other words, what Rashi's commentary on this verse, his understanding of the verse, Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one, is not that it's a statement of faith, or not only a statement of faith, but that it's a statement of mission. It's a statement of the trajectory. What is the goal of Judaism? What is the goal of the people of Israel?

What's the game we're playing? And I'm sitting there thinking, hold on a second. Rashi writes that in the Middle Ages in France, around the time of the Crusades, Rashi even lived through a couple of the Crusades. And I'm sitting here in a room filled with Christians who are praising the God of Israel. I'm like, wait a second. So knowing these sources, knowing Maimonides, knowing Rashi, the whole education that I received combined with my interactions with these Christians and with the work that I was doing to make me realize that there is something very important that I still think now 25 years or 30 years later or so, I don't know how many years later it is anymore, 28 years later, that is still just beginning in my opinion.

Yeah, and I'm looking at the very passage of Maimonides you mentioned, and yes, hostile to Christianity, hostile to Jesus and the destruction that he believes he brought into the world and differing with Islam as well, but saying that God's thoughts are not our thoughts, and that even Maimonides believed that God would use Christianity to prepare the world for this concept of Messiah, King Messiah, and so we would worship God together. So we agreed, friends, don't think that either Rabbi Wallicki or I are going to be uncomfortable. We agreed that we get to press each other with a couple of questions, and we'll get to do that in the second half of the broadcast, but hey, just take about a minute and let folks know how you first encountered me.

Oh, wow, yeah. So I had heard your name. I didn't know much about you. All I heard was that you were some Jew who believed in Jesus, and that's the kind of thing that kind of freaks Jews out. I had heard about you, but I was doing the work that I do, and in my work I travel around a lot, I speak in churches, I speak at Christian seminaries, and I was on the road, this must be about, I don't know, four or five years ago, and I had arrived in some city where I was speaking that evening, and I got to my hotel and I had a few hours to kill. So I flipped on the TV, and I'm flipping channels, and I flipped over to one of the Christian cable networks, and a replay of a speech that you gave in a church was just beginning. And I said, oh, you know, let me see what this guy's all about, and you were speaking about the history of Christian antisemitism, the sensitivity that Christians should have about it, and also about how, however present the awareness of the history of Christian antisemitism is for Jews, and sensitizing this Christian audience to that, and it was such a remarkable presentation, and I was really taken by it, and I felt, the main feeling that I felt watching it was gratitude, but gratitude to you for being such a powerful voice against antisemitism in the Christian world.

All right, friends, we'll be right back. What's been presented is absolutely fascinating. We're getting it straight from the mouth of an Orthodox rabbi right here on The Line of Fire.

We're going to get into some really interesting dialogue when we come back. It's The Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Your voice of moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome friends to Thoroughly Jewish Thursday. I am speaking with my new friend, Rabbi Pesach Wallicki, Orthodox Jewish rabbi and a leading voice in Jewish-Christian relationships where the Jews can be Jews and the Christians can be Christians. Rabbi Wallicki, this leads me to a really important question, and again, I know that in asking the question, it's not going to offend you, and your candid answer won't offend me, but on the one hand, I'm thrilled to see the relationships deepen. I'm thrilled for it, and I'm thrilled to see mutual cooperation for the good of the Jewish people, and I'm thrilled to see conversations and dialogue. But here's my question as a Jewish believer in Jesus, so I've got a stake in both sides here, right?

So here's my big question. If I understand the Scriptures correctly, Jesus and the entire New Testament say he came to fulfill what was written in the Hebrew Bible about the Messiah, that he is the Messiah, that he died for our sins and rose from the dead, that he will return at the end of the age, all right? And if that's true, then he's the Messiah of Israel and the Savior of the world, and everyone, Jew and Gentile, should follow him. If it's not true, if he is not the one and only Messiah of Israel, then the New Testament is false, then whatever good he did, he didn't die for our sins, he did not rise from the dead, he's not seated at the right hand of God, and therefore, no Jew or Gentile should believe in him.

So the question I have in all of this is, how do you land there? Is it a matter of, well, we'll see when Messiah comes, you ask him the question, is it your first time here, are you coming back, you know, the old joke about that? And obviously, these are major issues and issues that we can talk about while working together when cooperating and fighting antisemitism together and fighting misunderstanding together. We can do that, even me as a Messianic Jew and you as an Orthodox rabbi, but to me, it's either or. How do you explain that? Well, your framing of why it's either or has to do with accepting the entire narrative of the New Testament. I mean, you see that as inerrant scripture in the same way that you see the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament as inerrant scripture.

I obviously don't, and therefore I don't necessarily have to see it as a zero sum game in the same way that you do. Let me explain what I mean by that. That from a Jewish perspective, I can see that what Jesus has brought about, this whole thing called Christianity, has accomplished something incredible for the vision of the Bible, for the vision of what the Jewish people are meant to be doing in the world. Let me bring it back to what Maimonides said, and then I'll be more direct about answering what you said. When I meet these Christians, millions of Christians all over the world, hundreds of millions of Christians who know about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. They know about the Exodus from Egypt, the Ten Commandments, and they live their lives according to the values of the Bible. The reason they know all these things and the reason they know about the Bible is not because Jews have gone around teaching them. They know about these things because of the spread of Christianity. So Christianity has spread knowledge of the God of Israel throughout the world. The fact that Christianity did that, getting back more directly to your question, the fact that Christianity did that through the promotion of some things which also don't fit with Jewish theology and that from a Jewish perspective, maybe we're mistaken, and I'm not bound by the understandings of the writers of the New Testament of who Jesus was. I'm not bound by them.

So what I see is the impact of Christianity and how all these people in the world and all these multitudes in the world have been brought into a relationship with the God of Israel from a Jewish perspective. We both believe that at the end of the story, you're going to know I'm right. And that's fine. I'm willing to live with that.

I'm willing to live in that mystery and we'll kick the ball down the field. But your framing of the question as a zero sum game, it's either all correct or it's all false. I don't necessarily accept that. Let me give you an example. And I don't want to I don't want I don't I'm not worried about offending you.

You've got a thick skin, but I just want your listeners to, you know, you know, hold on to yourselves a little bit. The Christians believe two things about Jesus. They believe that that in their minds are often one. But to a Jew, they're two different things. So it was when if a Christian asked a Jew, why don't you believe in Jesus? I don't think Christians realize they're actually asking two questions.

I don't even know if most Jews have thought about it enough to realize it's two completely separate questions. One question is, why don't you believe that Jesus is God? And the other question is, why don't you believe that Jesus is Messiah? Because Christians believe that Jesus is God and he's Messiah and that the God and the Messiah are the same thing. In Judaism, the way we understand things and the way we understand the writings of of of the Bible, of the Old Testament, God and the Messiah are two different concepts. And they've been blended in Jesus. So I mean, that's just I'm using that as just as an example, I have no problem believing that God exactly as Maimonides put it, this movement called Christianity, spreading the God of Israel and the knowledge of the Bible and the values in the Bible and that whole faith to the world needed to happen. And in order for it to happen, as you as you said, paraphrasing Maimonides just to understand it, not necessarily agreeing with him, but to understand it, that God was Maimonides says that God was using Jesus and he was using this thing called Christianity to spread the knowledge knowledge of him to the world.

So he did that. I don't even have a problem believing I don't even have a problem accepting the fact that God empowered Jesus and his followers to perform miracles. It doesn't bother me in the slightest.

It doesn't. And I'm not the first rabbi to say it. There's rabbis from centuries ago who said the same thing. If that was God's plan, meaning building off of Maimonides, if God's plan was for this Christianity to be successful in spreading to the nations of the world, then why wouldn't he empower them to do that as well? So just to jump in, the answer would be that God would be empowering falsehood because these people are preaching these very things about Jesus, which are then being backed by miracles so that people are believing that God is backing what these people are saying about Jesus, that he's the way, the truth, and the life, that no one comes to the Father, but by him that he died, rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, is at the right hand of God. So this is God's vindication. So if God is backing that message through miracles, then he'd be backing something that's doing a lot of good, but is fundamentally filled with falsehood. Not necessarily falsehood. Look, it's entirely, if you think about the context in which Christianity began, it's entirely possible, and here I'm just going out on a theological limb.

It's entirely possible. I mean, if I'm playing God for a second, I need all these people in the world, all these heathens and pagans, to know me. And this is the only way it's going to work because they need some incentive, and this concept of personal salvation, which is so central to Christianity, which has virtually no currency whatsoever in traditional Judaism, you know, we think nationally, but this concept of personal salvation, which becomes a central component of this faith system, the idea of a tangible human being who embodies God, maybe this was necessary for people to have something to attach to, because the Jewish people, we have the law. We have a very comprehensive relationship with God through the law.

I don't know how I would be able to be intimate with God in the absence of the law. And perhaps, you know, if I'm the apostles and I'm going out, or if I'm God and I want people to go out and I want them to spread knowledge of me, maybe it was a concession. Maybe it was a concession to allow this, what you call falsehood, or some, you know, in Judaism there's a concept with regard to the faith of the nations. Now I'm getting a little bit into the weeds, but from Judaism's perspective, you know, I said before that my, as I entered into this relationship, it was a redefinition of what Judaism is for me, because the goal of the people of Israel is to spread knowledge of God to all the peoples of the earth. The goal is not to make everyone Jewish. We're called a kingdom of priests, and that means that there has to be a flock.

If we're the priest, there's got to be a flock, and the flock is the world. And it makes sense that just like the family of Aaron, who were the priests of Judaism, had laws that applied to them that didn't apply to the rest of Israel, they had restrictions on them that weren't in the rest of Israel, they had places they can go and things they could eat and not eat, that didn't apply to the rest of Israel. The same is true of the relationship of the people of Israel to the world. We have rules and ways that we interact with God that are different than everyone else. And therefore, according to Judaism, our goal for the world is that everyone have faith in the God of Israel. If they also have faith in, if they also believe about the God of Israel that he incarnated himself in a human body, that may not be what God wants from his priestly class, but it may be perfectly fine.

For the nations of the world, if that's their way into believing in him. This is... Let me just interrupt, and then I'll get the really short answer to this. And then the next segment, we turn the tables, and you get to question me, okay?

Good, because I got a big one for you. All right, yeah, because I've got... And it's not a gotcha question, it's a real question. All right, and this is, we've just got a minute, but do you believe Jesus rose from the dead? If you just give me a yes or no in terms of your own belief. No.

No. No, okay. So that's something... We can pursue this in another dialogue, and I want to be fair so you can fully unload and unpack what you're saying. But I'll just close this part out here, and then when we return, I'm going to turn it right over to you for you to ask me these questions. But that is so fundamental, in other words, there can... Now, I know that's just your belief, right? But I would press in and say, this is where it is a zero-sum game, this is where it is either or, because either he rose from the dead, and our faith in this living Savior is real, or he didn't, in which case, fundamentally, our faith is built on a lie.

If he did rise from the dead, then of course, God vindicated him and you should believe in him, and if he didn't, none of us should. So that's where it still comes to zero-sum for me. All right, we come back, I'm turning it over to Rabbi Wolicki, who will then ask me the question or questions that he wants to. We'll be right back. It's The Line of Fire with your host, activist, author, international speaker, and theologian, Dr. Michael Brown. Your voice of moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution. Get into The Line of Fire now by calling 866-34-TRUTH.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. All right, last segment, we're going to turn the tables, Rabbi Wolicki gets to press me in some questions. First, let our listeners know about your book.

Oh, thank you. My book is called Cup of Salvation, and it is a, I call it a devotional commentary, it's a line-by-line commentary on Psalms 113 through 118, which are very significant for Jews, as Jews are familiar with them, as they're called Hallel, the Psalms of praise, and we sing them on all of the festivals and all of the important days on the calendar. And what the book is, is on every single verse of these six Psalms, I dig down into the Hebrew and I pull out, I try to pull out nuances of meaning that are not necessarily apparent in the translation, but also because I didn't just pick a whole bunch of random verses in the Bible, but went through six successive Psalms, I show a kind of poetic narrative of these six Psalms, and there's a theological narrative, as it were, that they go through. So it could be read as a devotional, where on each verse there's just a short essay with a lesson, but it also builds, as the book goes, it's called Cup of Salvation, it's a Bible study, basically, this is, it's not a book about Jewish-Christian relations or about anything else, but it's a Bible study if people are interested in digging into the Hebrew and gaining insights from an Orthodox rabbi about Psalms, and I think in there also you can really learn how to study Psalms, because Psalms is a book that's very different than the other books in the Bible.

It's a book of us praising God, it's a book of prayers, really, and of poetry, which is different than the other books, and I think it has to be studied differently. Great, excellent. So it's available on Amazon, it's called, again, Cup of Salvation.

Cup of Salvation, last name spelled W-O-L-I-C-K-I. All right, back to you, sir. Yep. All right, so I have one short question for you, maybe it's short, and then I have one longer question for you, is that okay?

Go for it. Okay, my short question is, like, you're talking about, you know, the fundamental faith of God incarnating himself and Jesus dying and coming back from the dead and being the Messiah, but I have a question for you. Do you believe in the Trinity, in the concept of three co-equal, co-eternal persons?

And if so, why do you believe that? Because I, as an outsider, I read the New Testament and I don't see it there. Yeah, as best as I understand the scripture, yes, that is what I believe.

I'm actually in active dialogue with a leading ultra-orthodox rabbi, who for years assumed that's what the New Testament taught, of course he didn't believe the New Testament, but upon further study is convinced that that was not the teaching of the New Testament, and because he sees me as an honest student of scripture, is now engaging in dialogue with me, so we're in the early process of massive in-depth reanalysis of key verses. But as best as I understand it, let me say this, the way things were formulated in later creeds and things like that, a lot of that ties in with Greek philosophy and larger theological issues of the day, and the creeds, while I wouldn't say are inaccurate, I would say they go beyond the testimony of scripture in terms of formulating things, I leave much more room for mystery in terms of the nature of God, but as I've defined things, I do believe in God's complex unity, and I'll give the shortest answer because I know you have a larger question to follow up with, but in short, I see God as hidden in scripture and untouchable and invisible, and yet as visible and tangible and present, just in the Hebrew scripture. I see him as the one that no one can see and the one who is seen. I see him as, I see the Spirit teaching and leading and instructing, which indicates personality, and when I look at these things and even see some messianic prophecies that point to the divine nature of the Messiah, as I put it together, at least as I understand it, he has revealed himself to us as Father, Son, and Spirit, but the role of the Son is to make the Father known, so the main emphasis of the New Testament is that God sent Jesus into the world as the Messiah and Lord to die for our sins, rise from the dead, and point everyone to worship God the Father, and the Spirit, then working invisibly, points us to the Son who points us to the Father.

Ultimately, Revelation 22 speaks of one throne for God and the Lamb, and it speaks of one face, not multiple faces. So I do believe that God's ultimate revelation is as one God, but has revealed himself to us as Father, Son, and Spirit, which I understand to be his eternal nature, as best as I can wrap my mind around the scriptures. That sounds to me like not the traditional understanding of the Trinity, but I don't want to get too far into the weeds on that, because what you're describing seems to be three different manifestations of a one God. I'm not a modalist, and I don't believe that in terms of what you just said, but the way that the Creed states things, to me, overstates and goes beyond the mystery.

So I want to make clear I'm not a modalist, but I don't use standard Christian terminology just because when I read scripture, I don't see it in that same way as fully developed. Okay, thank you, because I say this honestly as I've gotten to know, I have many pastors as friends in Christian academics who are my friends, and when I ask for their understandings of the Trinity, because I really just want to understand it. When I first got involved with Christians, first I just didn't understand what the whole Holy Spirit thing was, and then I understood it more, and what I find is that I get a lot of different answers about the Trinity.

That's the question that I get the most variant answers on, meaning there's no one answer. I'm not going to out people, but I get all kinds of very disparate answers on that question about how they understand the Trinity, and it leads me to believe that maybe a lot of Christians sitting at home profess faith in the Trinity, but they don't even really know how to explain it. There's more mystery and grandeur in the nature of God than we sometimes acknowledge, and that to me is good and right. One of my colleagues who's a... What's his background in astronomy, PhD in astronomy, and he says that one of the proofs of the Trinity is our inability to wrap our minds around it, which is in keeping with the nature of God, but anyhow, you get another question and the clock is ticking.

Okay, we're almost out of time. I just want to ask you this other question. Maybe it will be a quick question, and it's a question that I'm not the first Jew to ask someone who believes in Christianity, who was born Jewish. This is a question that was asked by the great Orthodox Jewish professor, Michael Wishegrad, to Cardinal Lustiger, Jean-Marie Lustiger, the French Cardinal who was born Jewish, and I'm asking you, Michael, or Dr. Brown, as a born Jew. In Acts 15, when the apostles come back from their journey, where they went to preach the gospel and they come back, and they essentially made a sale, and they have these Gentiles who now they've bought in, and there's a whole debate about whether they need to be circumcised and whether they're under the law or not, and you know the scene. And in that debate, of course, in the end, Paul wins the day, and they rule that these Gentiles do not have to follow the law. If these Christians who were debating, these Jewish believers in Jesus who were having that debate, if they believed at that time that they were no longer under the law, then that entire passage is incoherent. It's clear, regardless of their conclusion about the Gentiles, it is clear that they understood that they were bound by the law, and therefore, their conclusion must mean, meaning everyone on both sides of the debate agrees that they, as born Jews, are bound by the law, which means that it's unanimous that someone like yourself would be bound by the law.

Right, so I'm cutting in only so I can answer your question, because otherwise you could ask it beautifully. Right, so the moment you mention Acts 15, I assume you're going in that direction. There are Messianic Jewish colleagues of mine who do come to that same conclusion and believe, although it will not damn you to hell, that to be fully obedient to God, you should be keeping whatever aspects of the law you can. And so there are colleagues of mine who do hold that view, and they would say, hey, we mean you who are born Jews, who are members of the people of Israel, like yourself.

Like myself, right. And I normally don't think about, quote, Christianity. I think of being a follower of Jesus, because there's so much baggage associated with Christianity. But the short answer is that as you talk about the vantage point of history and looking back, this was before the destruction of the Second Temple. This was before we came to a period which is almost 2,000 years, where 75% of the forever commandments of the Torah we cannot keep. To me, God was making his full statement. Jesus said in Matthew 5, 17 and following that nothing would pass from the law until everything was fulfilled. More and more has been fulfilled. And with that, we have come into the revelation of the new covenant and of new life in the new covenant so that the commandments were more like scaffolding for the building as the building is fully erected.

You even mentioned Christians living by certain moral principles. So my role as a Jew is to live by the moral principles that God gave out, to learn lessons from every word of Torah, but to recognize that it finds its fulfillment in the Messiah, that God made a statement about the old system being finished with a new and better system as he prophesied that the new covenant, Jeremiah 31, and that now my great role is to take the knowledge of God to the ends of the earth. That's, that's all we got time for. I've got an idea that I'm going to pitch to you privately and we can have further dialogue on them, especially if our folks are interested, but there's so much misunderstanding about the Talmud. I'd love to do an open ended discussion where we can just set the record straight, but thank you, Rabbi Ruelicki for joining me. We're out of time. Another program powered by the truth network.