Christianity

Out of awe and fear regarding the gravity of the subject and the memory of the holy ones who were killed for kiddush Hashem, and out of love for every person created in the image of God, and respect for all who believe in God and pray for repentance and redemption, I will try to explain the position of the Torah regarding the Christian religion. At the outset I will preface that there is no pretension here to encompass the Christian religion in all its branches, but rather to focus on the general position of Judaism regarding Christianity.

The Christian religion caused great pain and terrible suffering to the Jewish people. Because of our sins, chief among them the sin of baseless hatred, the Romans conquered the Land of Israel. Many in Israel were drawn after foreign ideas, the various groups fought one another, and it seemed that unless a tremendous movement of repentance took place in Israel, the Second Temple would be destroyed and Israel would go into exile, and all the curses written in the Torah for breaking the covenant with God were about to befall Israel. Sages and righteous men indeed arose in Israel who continued to pave the way of the Torah, and established a Torah foundation that later turned out to be what sustained the people throughout the long exile; but they did not succeed in magnifying the Torah such that the whole people would unite around the values of Torah and mitzvot. To many it seemed at that time that the Jewish people had reached the end of its road, that the great vision of bringing blessing to all the families of the earth would no longer be fulfilled, and instead troubles upon troubles descended upon Israel, and the curses written in the Torah began to be fulfilled.

Out of this despair the Christian religion was founded and took shape. It claimed that the Jewish people had failed in its mission to fulfill the word of God and to bring about the rectification of the world, and therefore God’s choice of Israel had been annulled, and the value of the Torah’s commandments had also been annulled. From then on, the redemption written in the Torah would come through a “New Covenant” by means of “that man,” who is “God” who appeared in the world in the form of flesh and blood. The Christian religion turned to all human beings equally and claimed that from now on its believers are the true Israel, and the Jews are “Israel of the flesh,” who will be saved only if they convert to Christianity. And the Jews who did not convert bear responsibility for the death of “that man,” and responsibility for the postponement of the world’s redemption and for all the suffering caused as a result, and therefore there is no end to their punishment in this world and in the World to Come.

Against this position, which sought to uproot the foundations of Israel’s faith, its value as a nation, and the obligation to observe the mitzvot, Israel stood firm for their lives, and refused to consider the Christians a Jewish stream but rather minim, that is, seemingly similar but in truth essentially different.^¹