Rabbi Kirt A. Schneider - The Lion of Judah: How Jesus Completes Biblical Judaism and Why Judaism and Christianity Separated

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THE LION OF JUDAH by Rabbi Kirt A. Schneider

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Copyright 2018 by Kirt A. Schneider

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Visit the authors website at http://discoveringthejewishjesus.com.

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International Standard Book Number: 978-1-62999-539-7

E-book ISBN: 978-1-62999-540-3

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CONTENTS

TO A DEGREE, we are all products of those around us who have invested into our lives. God often uses others to impart something of Himself to us. With this in mind, I want to thank my parents, my wife and children, my first Messianic Bible teachers, and the many others who have poured into my life and taught me much about the Lord. For this book in particular, I also want to acknowledge my good friend and editor, Marcus Yoars, for helping me to bring this book, The Lion of Judah, to the forefront!

I SPENT THE FIRST ten years of my life in Beachwood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland with the second-highest concentration of Jewish people outside Israel. Ninety percent of Beachwoods residents are Jewish, so seeing a Gentile in our community was rare. In fact, everywhere you turned, you could find evidence of just how Jewish the environment was. Almost all the families in my neighborhood had names such as Rosenthal, Levine, Katz, Feinberg, Schwartz, Berg, and Stein. Most children my age attended Hebrew school three days a week after regular school had ended. Public schools closed on Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish new year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), and on those days it seemed as if the whole community was in temple.

Although my family moved to Pepper Pike, another Cleveland suburb, when I was in the sixth grade, I continued attending Hebrew school. My family remained heavily involved with the Jewish community. I attended synagogue not only for Hebrew school but also every year on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. In the seventh grade I was bar mitzvahed in a conservative synagogue, and by that time it was clear to me that I was to be proud of my heritage.

I remember getting this sense particularly during services in temple, when the rabbi would pray the Shema, the ancient prayer found in Deuteronomy 6 that has become the centerpiece of Jewish belief and declaration. The Shema begins with:

Shma Yisrael! Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai echad.

DEUTERONOMY 6:4, CJB

Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God. The LORD is one!

DEUTERONOMY 6:4

The problem, however, was that God wasnt really part of the picture, nor did He seem to be intimately ours. Although we were called Gods chosen people, no one around me ever actually talked about Him, much less referred to Him in a personal way. The people I knew referred to Him as Adonai (the Hebrew word meaning Lord), but they never actually discussed who He was. Through all my early years I never heard anything about knowing God or having a relationship with Him.

A personal God was far removed from my experience in Beachwood and Pepper Pike. He was somewhere out there. At one point in history He had interacted with my ancestors, but that was long, long agoso far back that any stories about Him felt more like fairy tales than actual accounts.

When I began attending Hebrew school at Park Synagogue, one of Clevelands largest conservative synagogues, I again heard the Shema and its other parts, including:

Vahavta eit Adonai Elohekha bkhol lvavkha uvkhol nafshkha uvkhol modekha.

And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

DEUTERONOMY 6:5

As moving as these words sound, they were almost meaningless to me since I still knew nothing about Gods love for me or His desire to be involved in my life. My mother drove me three days a week from regular school to Hebrew school, where I learned how to read and write Hebrew. There I memorized Hebrew prayers and was taught about my Jewish heritage, culture, and customs.

I absolutely dreaded it. In fact, I became so bored with Hebrew school that often I feigned walking into the school building and, after my mother drove off, went across the parking lot to sit under a tree in a secluded wooded area. My playing hooky eventually cost me, and I spent that summer with a private tutor while all my friends were out having fun. Yet even in this one-on-one setting where I was to learn about what it meant to be Jewishpart of a people formed out of covenant with GodI dont remember even once my teacher telling me about a god whom I could be close with or who loved me.