“Why is this night different from all other nights?” The answer to that question—the question at the heart of every Passover Seder of the Jewish people throughout the world for approximately 3,500 years—lies at the heart of the salvation of not only the Jewish people but the entire world.
On the eve of the tenth plague, God instructed the Jewish nation, while slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, to slay a pure, unblemished lamb, which they would then consume, whose blood, painted on the lintels of the doorposts of their houses in Egypt, would take the place of the firstborn of every Israelite family and free them from the death of the tenth plague (cf. Ex. 12). In remembrance of that deliverance, the Israelites were instructed to celebrate anew and annually that first Passover (the night the angel of death “passed over” the houses of Egypt) with the death of a spotless lamb whose shed blood was the cause of their deliverance.
Approximately 1,500 years later, our Lord and his Jewish disciples celebrated that same Passover—also with a slain lamb at their table—to be eaten in remembrance of that first Passover. Could any of the twelve have imagined the answer to the “routine” question “Why is this night different from all other nights?”Could they have understood that what was prefigured in the lambs of Egypt would be fulfilled in the Lamb of God, the Lamb to which all other lambs pointed, the Lamb who would deliver them not from temporal bondage to slavery from Egypt but from eternal bondage to slavery from sin?
They fought his death. They couldn’t understand why, if he was the Messiah, the Son of David, he had to die. Not even their witness to his Resurrection put all the pieces together. It was in the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (in Hebrew, Shavuot—the Jewish celebration of the giving of the law on Mount Sinai) that their eyes were finally opened and their hearts flooded with the truth of who this Jesus was. Indeed he was the Christ (the Messiah), the Son of the living God (cf. Acts 2).
Salvation from the Jews, through whom the Messiah came, was not only for the Jews but for the whole world. Following his Resurrection and prior to his Ascension, Jesus gave instructions to the twelve (Jewish) disciples to take the gospel (the “good news” of salvation) to the ends of the earth: “You shall receive power when the Holy Sprit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). And, again, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matt. 28:19–20).
There was no question among the Jewish people of his time that Jesus was a Jew from the family of David, from the tribe of Judah, from the people of Abraham. There was no question that his first disciples were all Jewish and that the 3,000 baptized on Pentecost were Jews who had come to celebrate that Jewish feast and ended up receiving salvation through the One they had come to believe was the Messiah of Israel.
You would have been hard pressed, in our Lord’s day, to find anyone—Jew or Gentile—who did not look upon Christians as Jews who had formed a new sect within Judaism. Christianity was Jewish. Its followers were not converts; they were Jews who had done what Jews had been waiting to do for 2,000 years: welcome their Messiah, the long-expected hope of Israel.
Is the Christianity proclaimed in the first century as the fulfillment of Israel’s hope anything different now, twenty centuries later? What has happened? What has caused a Jewish religion, with a message that has extended to the whole world, to be seen as a Gentile religion not meant for Jews at all? Why should some Christians, in a pernicious form of anti-Semitism masquerading as ecumenism, tell the Jewish people that the Messiah who came through them is not for them?
In this present hour, when much of the world has lost its way, and when some, including some who claim to be scholars within our fold, are proclaiming a different gospel—that salvation through the Jewish Messiah is for Gentiles only, and not for Jews—I have longed for a present-day Moses who will have the God-given courage and clarity to lead God’s people to truth and to be a light once again to the nations.
Roy Schoeman, though quite a bit younger than Moses, might be such a one. From a devout Jewish background, Roy set out to taste the riches of Egypt and ended up filled with the emptiness of a life without God. But the God who appeared to Moses also came to Roy and led him to the fulfillment of the Mosaic covenant, to the Messiah and his Church, and to an appreciation of his Jewishness and the hope of the Jewish people beyond all he had known.
There is no way in the space of this article to do justice to the spirit and themes of his book, Salvation Is from the Jews, but I am happy and grateful to be able bring its author into this brief introduction in order that we might have a glimpse into what I believe is one of the most important books of our time.
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Rosalind Moss: Roy, how did you, a New York Jew and the child of German-Jewish holocaust refugees, come to believe in the Jewish Messiah and become a Catholic?
Roy Schoeman: Believe me, as a Jew born and raised, it was the last thing I wanted to do. But praise be to God, he didn’t leave me much choice: I received the grace of discovering, whether I wanted to or not, that the Jewish Messiah already had come and that he was Jesus Christ.
I had been raised quite devoutly Jewish but dropped most of my religious faith when I went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, absorbing instead a pseudoscientific, evolution-oriented worldview and became effectively agnostic. I fell even further away when I found myself on the faculty of Harvard Business School at the age of twenty-nine. At that point I actually became quite depressed, because the success and glamour of my career only made me more aware of the emptiness, the lack of meaning, at the center of my life.
It was in this state that I was walking early one morning in the dunes of Cape Cod. Then God took matters into his own hands. From one moment to the next I went from just walking along, not thinking of much of anything, to finding myself fully and immediately in his presence, looking at my life as though looking back on it after death. I saw everything I would be happy about and everything I would wish I had done differently. I saw that my two greatest regrets would be every moment that I wasted not doing anything of value in the eyes of God and all the time and energy I wasted worrying about not being loved, while at every moment of my existence I was held in an ocean of love greater than I could imagine. I saw how every action has a moral content, for good or evil, that mattered for all eternity. I saw that everything that had ever happened to me—especially those things that caused the most suffering at the time—were the absolutely most perfect things that could have happened, arranged by the hand of an all-loving, all-knowing God.
From one moment to the next I knew that the meaning and purpose of my life was to worship and serve this wonderful God who watched over every moment of my existence and loved me as though I were the only person in the world. On the spot I prayed, “Let me know your name so that I can love and serve you properly. I don’t mind if you’re Apollo and I have to become a Roman pagan; I don’t mind if you’re Buddha and I have to become Buddhist; I don’t mind if you’re Krishna and I have to become Hindu—as long as you’re not Christ and I have to become Christian!”
I’m sure that you, Ros, as a fellow Jew, can understand this resistance to Christianity. It wasn’t animosity so much as the mistaken sense that Christianity had been the source of the suffering of the Jews over the past 2,000 years. Anyway, as a result God did not reveal his name to me, but every night before going to sleep I would say a short prayer to know the name of my Lord and Master who had revealed himself to me that day on the beach.
A year to the day after the initial experience, I had an extremely vivid dream of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She offered to answer any questions I might have. I asked her five or six, and then she spoke to me for a few more minutes, and the audience was ended. When I awoke I was hopelessly in love with our Lady. I knew that it had been Christ that day on the beach, and all I wanted was to be as good and as complete a Christian as possible. I still didn’t know anything about Christianity or the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism, but between my love for the Blessed Mother and an intense desire to receive Holy Eucharist that came soon after, I found my way to the Catholic Church.
I’ve heard you say that you did not “convert” from being Jewish to being Catholic. How is that?
If Jesus is who he said he was—the only-begotten Son of God, God himself come as man to bring salvation to all mankind, the long-awaited and long-prayed for Jewish Messiah—then it is not a matter of conversion at all. If I was a Jew before, hoping and praying for the coming of the Messiah, then aren’t I even more a Jew now that I’m worshiping and adoring that very same Messiah? I simply went from being a Jew who was “in the dark” to a Jew who knows the truth! How could a Jew become any less Jewish by recognizing and falling in love with the Jewish Messiah, the very purpose and heart of Judaism?
Some might have an issue with the title of your book, Salvation Is from the Jews. My own Jewish mother might have said, “Oy, such chutzpah [boldness]!” Would she have been right?
Of course no mere mortal should have the chutzpah to say such a thing. But it wasn’t a mere mortal who said it—those are the words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman at the well (cf. John 4:22). If people want to quarrel with the statement, they’ll have to take it up with him.
I mentioned in the introduction that some teach that salvation through Christ is from the Jews, but not for the Jews. What is your response?
What matters isn’t my response but Jesus’ response when talking about his earthly ministry. It was Jesus who said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 15:24). It was Jesus who said to Nicodemus, certainly a devout Jew, that “unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). It was Jesus who said to his disciples (all Jews), “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). Jesus obviously thought he had come for the Jews. He spent his entire life evangelizing only Jews, and after his death the twelve apostles began by evangelizing primarily Jews.
The first Church council, the Council of Jerusalem(cf. Acts 15), was called precisely to determine whether Christianity was for Gentiles at all or only for Jews. Today the idea that Jesus came for Gentiles and not Jews might be a “politically correct” way to avoid offending the Jews, but, after all, Jesus said, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword . . . to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother” (Matt. 10:34–35). It is only natural that the truth should offend good people who are sincere but in error; but that is no reason not to preach the gospel to them. Isn’t it Jesus’ “Great Commission” to do so?
As the majority of the Jewish nation did not recognize their Messiah, it has been assumed by many—both Christians and non-Christians—that the Jewish people failed in their God-given mission. Did they?
How can they have failed? Their mission was to bring Christianity to the world, and Christianity has been brought to all the world, so they, by definition, must have succeeded. Sure, many of them rejected Christ and were unfaithful, but isn’t that always the case with mankind—that it is always the few, the “faithful remnant,” who fulfill God’s wishes, while the great majority fall far short? The “chief priests and the scribes” rejected Jesus, as did the majority of the general population, but on the other hand the apostles and most of the first Christians were Jews. Remember that the 3,000 who were baptized on the first Pentecost were all either Jews or “proselytes,” that is, converts to Judaism (cf. Acts 2:41).
Paul’s reference to the Church as the “Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16) has led many throughout Church history to conclude that the Church has replaced Israel in its mission. Is the Church the “new Israel,” and if so, where does that leave the Jewish people and the mission entrusted to them?
This is a mystery about which Catholics may hold differing views. I think in some ways the Church has replaced “Israel” and in others it has not. The same Paul who called the Church the “Israel of God” also said, speaking about the Jews, that “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29). A number of passages in Scripture imply that the Jews have a key role to play in the Second Coming. And the history of the Jews over the past 1,500 years seems to show that God is still involved with them in a very special way. Their very survival, despite almost continual persecution, is itself miraculous, and they certainly seem to exhibit special gifts and to play a disproportionately great role in the world. The final proof for me of their continued role is the otherwise inexplicable diabolical hatred focused on them century after century, as manifested most recently in the Holocaust.
What motivated you to write Salvation Is from the Jews?
A number of factors converged and resulted in an overwhelming desire—almost a compulsion—to write it. I always had been proud of being Jewish, but prior to my conversion I had little to base that on other than ethnic chauvinism and the stories of the Old Testament, which I didn’t even completely believe. But when I recognized Jesus for who he is, I realized that the Jews really had been chosen to bring salvation to all mankind, that Judaism really was God’s revelation of himself to mankind, that when God became man he became a Jew following Jewish law, and that the religion that dominates the world—Christianity—is in fact nothing but “post-Messianic” Judaism! Being Jewish was infinitely more significant than I had ever imagined before, and I wanted to share that joy, that excitement, with my fellow Jews.
At the same time I was appalled by the lack of understanding in Catholic circles about Judaism, which was further exacerbated by the activities of the mainstream Catholic-Jewish dialogue. Rather than illuminating this glorious role of Judaism, this dialogue has, in its desire not to “offend” Jews, introduced a “dual-covenant” theology that states in essence that God meant Judaism for Jews and Christianity for Gentiles, and never the twain shall meet. This denigrates Judaism far below its true stature and makes nonsense out of Jesus’ own teachings. So I saw, on the one hand, a tremendous interest in and thirst for understanding Judaism among Catholics, a sort of visceral sense that it was the source and foundation of their religion and of immense significance, and on the other hand real inadequacies in what was being taught out of deference to the sensibilities of Jews.
Thank you, Roy. Our Lord and our Blessed Mother obviously have showered on you extraordinary graces and chosen you for a very special mission that has unfolded over time and blossomed in a wonderful way through your book. May this be only the beginning of God’s glorious work in and through you to the end that, in the words of the aged Simeon, the Messiah may be “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to [God’s] people Israel” (Luke 2:32).
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Response to Salvation Is from the Jews has been nothing short of phenomenal—from Catholics whose faith and prayer life have been rekindled, to fallen-away Catholics who have been led back home, to Jews whose eyes have been opened to their Messiah, at least one of whom was baptized into the Church this past Christmas.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “The glorious Messiah’s coming is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition by ‘all Israel’” (CCC 674). May all of us, Jewish and Gentile Christians alike, be God’s instruments to hasten that day when, in fulfillment of our Lord’s desire (cf. Matt. 23:37–39), God’s people Israel will proclaim, “Baruch haba bashem Adonai”: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”