Kosher Goyim
Jews For Jesus is a Christian ministry, based in California (of course), which is devoted to the conversion of Jews to the worship of the savior Jesus Christ. As an admiring Baptist Pastor in Minneapolis, explains:I love the gospel of the glory of Jesus the Messiah, and I love Jewish people, and I love bold, compassionate ways of connecting Jews and Jesus. All I have seen and all I know of Jews for Jesus makes me happy to say a rousing YES to their ministry.
According to the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, Jews For Jesus had a total income in the 2010 financial year US$20,728,530. This is clearly a case of doing well by doing good, and at $21 million/year, I would hope that my own organization might do half so good.
My own group is Kosher Goyim, a Christian Faith Fellowship which believes that the best approach to the mysteries of the Holy Trinity is through Jewish food. Our talisman is the traditional Christian symbol of the fish, although in our case it is, of course, a gefilte fish. In our celebration of the Eucharist, we replace the bread and wine with motza balls and chicken soup, and of course we do not say "This is my body and my blood." Instead we say "Dus iz gevehn a mekhiah!" ["that was a pleasure!"], which we feel conveys a similar spiritual significance, maybe even a deeper one through being in Yiddish.
On Ash Wednesday, we did not join our Christian colleagues in handing out ashes to the faithful. Instead, our volunteers were everywhere, distributing motza brei in shopping centers, train stations, hospital waiting rooms, and traffic queues. To our friends in the evangelical churches, we say: one smeck of our kugel, and you will be born again, again. In fact, one of our teaching films shows Jesus Christ Himself, smacking his lips and exclaiming: "That's the Last Supper that we'll have without extra rugelach."Deep Christian thinkers have taught that "the sacraments are efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us." Following the precept that divine life could not be dispensed better than through food, we administer the sacrament of Baptism by means of beef brisket; we replace Confirmation by kreplach; and in our celebration of the Mass, the Celebrant, the Deacon, and the Sub-Deacon pass chopped liver back and forth, and then offer it to the congregants. At the Sunday service, we invite the worshippers to come in their pajamas --- and we include a breakfast of lox and bagels, followed by reading the Sunday New York Times all morning. On Christmas Day, of course, we order out Chinese food.
In earlier times, doctrinal disputes in Christianity were settled by rather drastic procedures, such as the crusades against the Albigenses and the Hussites, burning heretics at the stake, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and the Thirty-Year's War. At Kosher Goyim, we do not dismiss the possibility that doctrinal differences may arise, but we expect to settle them in a slightly different way. Heretics will simply be sent to bed without supper. If there is a reformation, our counter-reformation will take the form of a lunch counter, at which the Sacrament of Penance will be transformed (or transsubstantiated, if you will) into the Sacrament of Pletzlach.
In recent years, Kosher Goyim has expanded its educational activities, including chapters in cooking schools across the nation. We hold symposia on pressing academic topics, such as whether Cheez Doodles should be classified as kosher, trayf, or parveh. Since boycotts are so much in fashion these days, we are organizing academic boycotts of Cordon Bleu. We are also working to pressure the Christian Broadcasting Network to maintain separate TV channels for milchik and fleishik. Our motto for these campaigns is: Forgive them Father, for they know not what they eat.In our view, to summarize, the true message of the Gospels is to be sought in gribbenes, and holiness in holishkes. We find that these practices do much to strengthen our faith in Christ, although sometimes there may also be a touch of heartburn.
--- Lox Vobiscum
(Reverend) Dr. Phage