Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld
May 23-24, 2025 • 27 Iyar 5785 • BeHar (Lev 25-end).
If you read this "Table Talk" blog regularly, you know that sometimes I pitch softballs and sometimes hardballs.
The weekly aim is provocative open-ended questions that hopefully anyone can have an opinion about, fostering dinner table conversation.
By “hardball,” I mean questions that have a higher chance of pushing emotional buttons.
Today, this week’s current events have prompted such questions.
I’m referring to this DC tragedy, the wanton snuffing out of life of these two young Israelis.
Some have labeled the murder anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism means of course, Jew-hatred.
First question for your table: But were they targeted for being Jewish or for being Israeli? And does it make a difference?
How about this…
It turns out that Yaron Lischinsky has a Jewish father and Christian mother who raised him Christian and he was a member of the FFOZ Bram Center for Messianic Jewish Learning in Jerusalem. Therefore, according to most definitions of "Jewish" (other than Jews for Jesus), he wasn’t an MOT.
Therefore (second question for your table): Does that fact change your assessment of whether or not the murder was anti-Semitic?
Third question – and this is the hardest one: Was this tragedy a wake-up call that it's time that we start to consider Messianic Jews to be part of the Jewish People? What do you think? And if not, was it a wake-up call in any way?
Another angle on the same topic:
This week I had a conversation with someone who considers himself Jewish and whom others consider Jewish who calls himself an atheist. When I asked him to clarify if he meant atheist as opposed to agnostic, his response wasn’t crystal-clear, so it is possible that he was technically agnostic. But either way, he calls himself atheist and celebrates a few Jewish traditions like Pesach because he enjoys them.
Now, is such a person any less Jewish than a Jew for Jesus who keeps all of the holidays, eats kosher etc.? What do you think?
Shabbat Shalom
Appreciated this Table Talk? Like it, tweet it, forward it....
The weekly aim is provocative open-ended questions that hopefully anyone can have an opinion about, fostering dinner table conversation.
By “hardball,” I mean questions that have a higher chance of pushing emotional buttons.
Today, this week’s current events have prompted such questions.
I’m referring to this DC tragedy, the wanton snuffing out of life of these two young Israelis.
Some have labeled the murder anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism means of course, Jew-hatred.
First question for your table: But were they targeted for being Jewish or for being Israeli? And does it make a difference?
How about this…
It turns out that Yaron Lischinsky has a Jewish father and Christian mother who raised him Christian and he was a member of the FFOZ Bram Center for Messianic Jewish Learning in Jerusalem. Therefore, according to most definitions of "Jewish" (other than Jews for Jesus), he wasn’t an MOT.
Therefore (second question for your table): Does that fact change your assessment of whether or not the murder was anti-Semitic?
Third question – and this is the hardest one: Was this tragedy a wake-up call that it's time that we start to consider Messianic Jews to be part of the Jewish People? What do you think? And if not, was it a wake-up call in any way?
Another angle on the same topic:
This week I had a conversation with someone who considers himself Jewish and whom others consider Jewish who calls himself an atheist. When I asked him to clarify if he meant atheist as opposed to agnostic, his response wasn’t crystal-clear, so it is possible that he was technically agnostic. But either way, he calls himself atheist and celebrates a few Jewish traditions like Pesach because he enjoys them.
Now, is such a person any less Jewish than a Jew for Jesus who keeps all of the holidays, eats kosher etc.? What do you think?
Shabbat Shalom
Appreciated this Table Talk? Like it, tweet it, forward it....
