When a believer is finally convinced in what they believe, it would require a New York moving company to get them to budge on their beliefs. While I find steadfast faith inspiring, such unwillingness to be open to new teaching is what keeps some people from missing out on all that G-d has for them.

For the Jewish people, two thousand years of anti-messianic teaching has created a blind spot for the possibility that Yeshua was indeed the promised messiah. Some have even abandoned the messianic hope altogether, which is a shame. Yet that is relatively minor compared to the error of the Christians.

Mainstream Christianity long ago abandoned the Jewish roots of their faith, and it shows up not only in the big issues, but in the details. They exchanged the true name of Yeshua for the less-Hebraic-sounding Jesus. They exchanged Adonai’s own feasts and festivals, declared and established in the Torah itself, for shame pagan holidays like Easter and Christmas. They celebrate most of their holidays with a feast of ham, rather than a kosher menu that Yeshua himself could have joined them in.

Any Christian who says Jewish people are “too stubborn” to recognize the truth of Adonai and his messiah, Yeshua, needs to take a good long look in the mirror; what they see reflected there could easily be found in Webster’s Dictionary as the very definition of the word “stubborn.”

Believe it.

It’s strange.

One of the main reasons I am a bar/bat mitzvah teacher at my congregation is that those who are parents themselves aren’t exactly beating the door down for their turn at bat. In the nine or 10 months I’ve been doing it, even though I’m not a parent, I miss the class and the kids quite a bit on Saturdays I can’t make it, which are thankfully few and far between.

Take this past weekend for example.

I loved being in Chicago with my wife, spending time with her grandmother, her uncle John, and other important people in her life. It was great fun, a nice getaway and long overdue: over two years since we’d been down there ourselves. The whole weekend was memorable in good ways. But I must confess that, come Saturday morning, I missed getting up and going to Sar Shalom to teach “my kids.”

Sure, they can be challenging, hard to deal with at times and a bit of a handful. But they can also be bright and studious and full of joy. I enjoy teaching them. And it beats buying body shop supplies.

Saturday this week can’t arrive quickly enough.

There’s really nothing messianic about it, but I’ve been appreciating the lyrics of an old country tune lately. Written by Chuck Howard and made famous by Conway Twitty, it’s an old-fashioned song that reminds us how some of the best things in life we have to offer are not material things at all.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DARLING
Sung by Conway Twitty
Lyrics by Chuck Howard

Hello darling, happy birthday
I’ve decided not to give you a present this year
In fact I think it’s about time I took some things away.

I’d like to take away the suspicion
That I know clouds your world at times
By giving you some faith to hold on to, honey
Whenever your hand is not in mine.

Happy birthday darling, I’ve no present, no fancy cake
But I hope I’ll make you happy with everything I take.

I’d like to take away some of your lonely moments
By spending more time with you
And I’d like to take away some of those so, so kisses
And replace them with ones that really say, I love you.

And I want to take away the doubt
You sometimes have about my love
By showing it more, much more than I’ve shown you lately

And then if someone should ask you
What I got you for your birthday
Well you can say, why he didn’t give me anything
But he sure took a lot of things away.

Happy birthday darling I’ve no present, no fancy cake
But I hope I’ll make you happy with everything I take.

Happy birthday darling I’ve no present, no fancy cake
But I hope I’ll make you happy with everything I take.

Happy birthday, darling…

It’s that a nice sentiment? I find it hard to believe many folks who have no concept of G-d in their lives could come up with lyrics like that. As a messianic believer, I’m not overly concerned with romantic Christmas gifts this time of year, but Hanukkah, on the other hand, is an acceptable time to think about such things even for Jews and messianics.

Yet songs like this remind me that if I can work to improve how I interact with my wife on a day-to-day basis, that’ll mean more than ever the most expensive, well-selected material gift I could ever afford.

Whether one is planning to stay with relatives, escape to condo hotels in a tropical destination, whether road-trippin’ it or flying, here’s a brief prayer for all of us on the road this long weekend.

Blessed are you, Adonai our G-d,
King of the Universe
May you lead us through the dark valleys
May you guide is safely through the camps of our enemies
May you be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path
May you lead us beside still waters and restore our souls
Thank you, Adonai our G-d,
The G-d of Abraham, Issac and Jacob,
The L-rd G-d of Israel.
Worthy are you to receive blessing, honor, glory and power,
Thank you for Yeshua, our salvation and messiah,
Amen.

A friend of my wife and me recently had her first child with her husband. It was born healthy and strong, as we all hope all children will be. The child is only a few weeks old and can’t get around by itself much just yet, but by New Year’s will definitely be reaching “amby baby” mode – crawling around and driving its new mom and dad batty with worry.

There is plenty to be inspired by within the miracle of birth. Just the fact that conception works at all is a mind-bogglingly complex biological process when one considers all that must go correctly just to bring one child from conception to birth successfully.

Scientists can drone on and on about biological imperatives and the necessity of reproduction and really, no matter how much they can explain the science behind it, drowning the listener in technical jargon, the truth is none of it ever really succeeds in grasping the complexity of the process or the pure, spiritual wonder of it.

And since science can only legitimately comment on what can be observed and measured, it never truly will.

Although it is not one of Adonai’s appointed feasts or festivals, I am grateful for the Thanksgiving holiday.

In this crazy, mixed-up world, Thanksgiving is one holiday that has a rather pure intent: it reminds us of the importance of being grateful for what we have, rather than coveting what we lack. When it comes to secular holidays, there’s not many others like it.

Christmas: Aside from the fact that it’s not really Yeshua’s birthday, but a celebration co-opted by Christianity that originally celebrated the birth of the Roman god Mithras, Christmas is really the term life insurance of holiday; it’s all quite temporary, covering your needs for a time but with an expiration date well in mind. It’s also a gimme holiday; in this case, gimme presents.

Halloween: Gimme candy or I’ll egg your car or TP your house and trees. One of the worst gimmes holidays.

Easter: Gimme candy and colored eggs!

So many holidays are about filling our unfulfilled wants and desires. Thanks Adonai that in at least one secular holiday, our country is reminded to say, “Thank you.”

Even if some don’t know who they ought to be thanking.

There was no such thing as banks or checking accounts back in the times in which the Torah was written. Furthermore, things like online banking probably could only be imagined by Adonai himself.

But the Torah does speak to some issues in banking and the handling of money; it condemns charing unreasonable fees and interest, calling such things a sin known as “usury.” Usury is just that – charging people unreasonable fees and interest for the use of the money you lend them.

While times have changed how such usury practices are defined, there are plenty of banks that I think might drift afoul of this ancient sin. For example, I have a married couple who are friends of my wife and me who overdrew their account by a few bucks and within three weeks or so, lost an entire paycheck to the quickly-accumulating debt and still owed over $1,000.

That’s certainly an example of usury.

That’s why it’s good to be careful in selecting a bank, and while online banking might not be Torah-endorsed, it’s certainly a good idea to take advantage of all the options and features an online bank like WaMu has to offer. While there are many good banks still around, a few I won’t name here are getting very impersonal and heartless.

Writing about faith isn’t always fun.

Now, blogging is a fun form of writing, to be sure. And faith, for avid believers like me, can also be fun. But I’m not sure the two always mix well in inspiring a sense of fun.

For me, faith is a bit more serious and deeper than the “fun” label implies. That’s not to say faith isn’t fun. I’ve found ways to get my bat and bar mitzveh kids to get excited about searching through Torah, and I’ve developed a knack for making the principals of Torah relevant to the world as they know it.

But blogging about faith is sometimes more utilitarian than it is fun; kind of like buying car covers rather than a jazzy new sound system for a car.

I think it’s because, to blog meaningfully about faith, you have to know your stuff, and that means research. Fortunately, I enjoy research most of the time. But all of the time? No, not always.

Still, once one gets down to actually doing it, I think writing or blogging about what I believe had deepened my faith more than most traditional faith-building activities.

I’m beginning to get a clue about how reluctant Adonai is to discipline us, even though he does and must. In teaching the bar- and bat-mitzveh preteens for the past several months, I’ve become close to many of the young ones I help instruct each week. Some, I’ve grown especially proud of for their maturity and earnest desire to do the right thing.

But kids are kids are kids. This week, one of those had an anxious, restless week. He was fidgety in his chair, talkative when it wasn’t his turn, and generally disruptive.

I hate to send kids up to their parents in the middle of service, but sometimes it simply must be done so that our time with the rest of the kids isn’t wasted. After a third “strike” today, I reluctantly told him, “That’s really close to your last strike. I don’t want to send you upstairs.”

As fate would have it, while I was struggling to do what I knew I had to, he stepped up and submitted to the penalty he knew he’d earned.

“I think I better go up then,” he said, knowing it really WAS his third strike for disrupting class.

Wow. Some of these kids may be kids, but in the midst of it, they are closer to the mindset they need to be ready for their bar/bat mitzveh than perhaps they realize.

I’m just glad I was on my game this week, so that my co-teacher and I had a handle on all 15 kids we teach. Last week I showed up, but as I had both a head cold and a migraine headache at the time, I wasn’t much help. That was a bad week, and while I never considered Botox for migraines or anything so radical, I did have to go out and get a new supply of migraine medicine. Yikes!

Genuine prophets of G-d are not generally known for marketing efforts like handing out personalized pens. So it’s amusing to roam late night Saturday and early morning Sunday television and witness how many crazy things are done in G-d’s name, from asking people to send in loads of money in exchange for a $20 hardcover commentary on how America is going to hell if… fill in the blank, to asking someone to send in a personal fortune to get a sweat-stained hankie from Pastor X, which is guaranteed to heal you of any affliction, perhaps even including death if you believe BIG-TIME.

One would think the era of the Bakkers and the Falwells and the Robertsons would have taught the country something. But if anything, it’s spawn a whole new generation of Benny Hinns, T.D. Jakes and Creflo Dollars. Where did spiritual and religious life drift in America so far off course that so many people are so willing to trade the Ruach haKodesh for the Montreal Miracle … or at least a high-def DVD of it.

I have a feeling that by the time he does return again in glory, Yeshua’s going to have more than one Temple to cleanse from a den of thieves.