Messianic Synagogue

Messianic Jews occupy an uncomfortable position between a Christian church that sometimes fails to appreciate their distinctives and a Jewish community that often rejects them as intruders. In living out their faith in Jesus as Savior in the framework of Jewish identity and tradition, Messianic Jews experience their "in-between" status as a major factor in their own spiritual formation. Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin has called the Jewish community "a family, an expanded family to be sure and ofttimes a far-flung family, but a family nevertheless" (To Be a Jew [New York: Basic Books, 1972], 8). Messianic Jews consider themselves to be an integral part of that family and reflect Jewish cultural and religious forms in their worship and throughout their lives. Nevertheless, there is a distinctive of Messianism, as understood by Messianic Jews, which is fiercely disputed by most, if not all, of the balance of the Jewish "family. " For Messianic Jews believe that Yeshua ben Yosef-Jesus-is the M…