One of the most moving videos I have seen recently was a short video I came across on Israel National News at the end of January. It showed the moment when Israeli soldiers who had just recovered the body of Staff Sergeant Ran Gvili, the last Israeli hostage left in Gaza, gathered round his coffin and spontaneously sang the Jewish song 'Ani Maamin', ‘I believe.’
The reason the video was so moving was because of the words of the song and the provenance of the traditional tune to which it was sung. The words of the song are: ‘I believe with a complete belief In the coming of the Messiah And even though he may tarry I will wait for him, whenever he comes.’
The traditional tune to which they are sung originated in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II and the song was sung by Jews as they marched to the gas chambers in the death camps during the Holocaust.
The singing of 'Ani Maamin' thus has been, and still is, a testimony to the resilience of Jewish faith in the midst of the disasters that have overtaken the Jewish people in the course of their history. Singing it declares a continuing belief that, whatever happens, God remains faithful and thus the Messiah will come to save his people and the world.
Reflecting on the video also led me to think that while I, as a Christian, am deeply humbled by the resilience of Jewish faith, I also have to recognise that the words of 'Ani Maamin' witness both to the belief that Jews and Christians share in common and to what divides them.
The words of 'Ani Maamin' are taken from the twelfth of the Thirteen Principles of Faith developed in the twelfth century by Maimonides, a Sephardic Jewish rabbi who is regarded as one of the greatest Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages. The thirteen principles, or statements of belief, run as follows:
‘1. I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, is the Creator and Guide of everything that has been created; He alone has made, does make and will make all things.
2. I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, is One, and that there is no unity in any manner like His, and that He alone is our God, who was, and is, and will be.
3. I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, has no body, and that He is free from all the properties of matter, and that there can be no (physical) comparison to Him whatsoever.
4. I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, is the first and the last.
5. I believe with perfect faith that to the Creator, Blessed be His Name, and to Him alone, it is right to pray, and that it is not right to pray to any being besides Him.
6. I believe with perfect faith that all the words of the prophets are true.
7. I believe with perfect faith that the prophecy of Moses our teacher, peace be upon him, was true, and that he was the chief of the prophets, both those who preceded him and those who followed him.
8. I believe with perfect faith that the entire Torah that is now in our possession is the same that was given to Moses our teacher, peace be upon him.
9. I believe with perfect faith that this Torah will not be exchanged and that there will never be any other Torah from the Creator, Blessed be His Name.
10. I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, knows all the deeds of human beings and all their thoughts, as it is written, ‘Who fashioned the hearts of them all, Who comprehends all their actions’ (Psalm 33:15).
11. I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, rewards those who keep His commandments and punishes those that transgress them.
12. I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah; and even though he may tarry, nonetheless, I wait every day for his coming.
13. I believe with perfect faith that there will be a revival of the dead at the time when it shall please the Creator, Blessed be His name, and His mention shall be exalted for ever and ever.’ (Text from David Birnbaum, Jews, Church & Civilization Volume III, Millennium Education Foundation, 2005) p.157).
These thirteen statements of faith have historically achieved near universal acceptance within Judaism, and they remain a good summary of generally accepted Jewish beliefs to this day.
There is much in these thirteen propositions which an orthodox Chrisian can accept and they thus testify to the amount that Jews and Christians agree on theologically due to their common acceptance of what Jews call the Tanakh and Christians call the Old Testament.
However, the fact that Jews and Christians differ theologically is shown by the fact that Christians would want to make important additions to the thirteen propositions. We can see this if we consider what is said in the second article of the Nicene Creed, a statement of Christian faith that has a similar status within Christianity to that enjoyed by the Thirteen Propositions within Judaism.
The second article of the Nicene Creed declares:
‘[I believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God, Begotten, not made, Being of one substance with the Father, By whom all things were made: Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man, And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, And ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead: Whose kingdom shall have no end.’
In this article the word ‘Christ' is a direct English equivalent of the Jewish word Messiah via the Greek translation of Messiah as Christos in the Greek New Testament. This means that the final sentence of the article shows that Christians share with Jews a belief in the future coming of the Messiah: ‘[I believe] he (the Messiah) shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.’
Thus, a Christian could sing with sincerity the words of the 'Ani Maamin'. Christians too ‘believe with a complete belief in the coming of the Messiah.’ However, and this is where Christian and Jewish beliefs differ, a Christian would have to say that this future coming of the Messiah is the Messiah’s second coming. That is the significance of the crucial word ‘again’ in the Nicene Creed.
As the second article of the Creed as a whole makes clear, the Christian faith, like the New Testament witness on which it is based, holds that the Messiah has already come in the person of Jesus Christ, being born of the Virgin Mary, dying by crucifixion, rising again on the third day and ascending into heaven.
This previous coming of Jesus as the Messiah is central to Christian belief, but it is something that no Jew can affirm unless he converts from Judaism to Christianity.
The opening words of the second article of the Nicene Creed point to a second key difference between Jewish and Christian beliefs. They tell us that the Messiah who was born of the Virgin Mary was God himself.
As we have seen, the Thirteen Propositions affirm the oneness of God: ‘I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, is One, and that there is no unity in any manner like His, and that He alone is our God, who was, and is, and will be.’ Christians would agree with this statement but would add that the oneness of God is a threefold oneness. For Christians the oneness of God consists in the one divine nature which is possessed identically by God the Father, God the Son, Jesus Christ, and God the Holy Spirit. In the words of another key Christian statement of faith, the Athanasian Creed, ‘the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet there are not three Gods: but one God.’
For both Christians and Jews these matters over which they differ are not small matters on which they can agree simply to disagree. They are fundamental truth claims about who God is and what God has done which Christians accept and that Jews do not, and which cannot simply be glossed over by a specious claim that Christians and Jews really believe the same thing.
As anyone who knows the tragic history of Jewish-Christian relations will be aware, over the centuries many Christians have regarded their theological differences with Jews as a justification for antisemitism and the active persecution of Jewish people.
This kind of Christian attitude to Jewish people was (and is) totally wrong because the New Testament itself warns Christians about thinking themselves in any way superior to Jews. This point is made very clearly by Paul in Romans 9-11 in which he makes states that God has not rejected the Jewish people, but that their current disbelief in Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God is part of God’s plan to offer salvation to everyone, Jew and Gentile alike.
As Paul insists in Romans 10:17-24 this means that those Gentile Christians who currently believe the Christian faith have no grounds for boasting about their superiority over those Jews who currently do not (and by extension no grounds for persecuting them). Using the image of God’s people as an olive tree, Paul writes:
‘But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not you that supports the root, but the root that supports you. You will say, ‘Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.’ That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast only through faith. So do not become proud but stand in awe. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise, you too will be cut off. And even the others, if they do not persist in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again. For if you have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree.’
In the words of David Torrance and George Taylor in their book Israel God’s Servant, Paul’s point is that:
‘The Gentiles who have come to saving faith in Christ should remember in humility that they have been introduced as strangers into the people of God. They are branches from a wild olive tree which have been grafted into Israel. Their faith does not sustain the people of God, it is the people of God who sustains them. Some of the natural branches of the olive tree, because of unbelief, have been cut off, but with faith they could easily be grafted back in. Gentile believers who do not continue in faith, could just as easily be cut out. They can only live and bear fruit as they share in the spiritual life and heritage of the Jews.’
To return to where I began this article, with members of the IDF singing 'Ani Maamin', what this all means is that Christians should acknowledge that their belief in the coming Messiah is one that Jews also share, albeit differently, and that the resilience of Jewish faith in the face of centuries of displacement and persecution is something that they should admire and desire to emulate. However, they should grieve that so many of the Jewish people do not yet accept that the Messiah not only will come but has already come in the person of the God-Man Jesus Christ, and pray that through the witness of Jewish and Gentile Christian believers more and more of them will come to faith in him.
