Yom Kippur (What?)

Who woulda thunk? The Messianic Christians are active in Madiun. Ray, a senior at the high school where I teach, spent last year in Texas on an exchange with the American Field Service. My first day of school, he asked me the usual questions, “What’s your name? Where are you from? Are you married? What’s your religion?” After hearing my reply of “Yahudi” to his last question, he went buck wild. “JEWISH! Really? Well, me too, sort of.” Since I don’t really know much about Christianity – or Judaism, for that matter – it makes my commenting on Messianic Christianity a bit of a hairy undertaking. All that I really could gather was that they are Christians who believe in observing Jewish rituals and holidays. Thus my attendance at the Indonesian take on Yom Kippur, described in literature given to me by Ray as one of the “Seven Feasts of the Lord.”
“From a Messianic standpoint, there is much symbolism in Yom Kippur. Forgiveness is asked on the basis of Abraham’s offering of Isaac as a sacrifice, a foreshadowing of the sacrifice of Messiah which was to come. Though Messiah is our Kippur, our scapegoat, our high priest, this holiday offers us an opportunity to celebrate the fulfillment of prophecy and the awesome nature of God who gave His only Son for us and for the remission of sin through his shed blood. It should be a day of self-examination and prayer, including fasting and intercession for Israel.”
Really weird, right? More pamphlets proclaimed, “The Jewish Prophets show the Way” or “How can you be Jewish if you believe in Jesus?” – which is answered with “We believe that Scripture plainly shows who Messiah was to be… and we believe he is Yeshua (Jesus). (And you don’t even have to be Jewish to believe in Him!)” I mean, WHAT?
Anyway, the service was epic, in a small room on the second floor of an even smaller church. A banner featuring Hebrew with translated Indonesian (YAHWEH inside of JESUS is the LORD!) hung over a set of keyboards, an amp, and a nearly obscured cross. A chubby little boy in a Spiderman t-shirt sat stuffing his face with Oreos. Generic keyboard rhythms kicked in, and we were off as well- but shabbily-dressed Indonesian men and women tinkered with the PA system. “Shalom, Mr. Nick, hag samea.” So FRIGGING bizarre.
Ray’s mom met some dude named Mr. Suradi in Jakarta about six years ago, and since then, the whole family has been practicing Messianic Christianity. The pastor intoned, “The name of the Lord is Yahweh, not this corrupted version, Jesus. We go back to the Hebrew, not the modern Greek interpretation.” Ray’s mother, a portly middle-aged woman in a bright orange, pearl bespangled jumper and matching lipstick, turned around and gave us the English translation of the Bible – ON HER HANDHELD HP EQUIVALENT OF A BLACKBERRY! There I was, in the midst of the most populous Muslim nation on Earth, listening to Christian rock while reading computerized versions of Leviticus. The temptation of a still-robed challah lay under the watchful flickering of two Shabbat candles, as cellphones intermittently chimed between shouts of “Hallelujah!” and “Shalom!”
The pastor continued (in Indonesian), “Yom Kippur is a command from the Lord – it should be observed by all Christians.” The muezzins’ call to prayer, announcing the end of another day of Muslim fasting, floated through the open windows of the church as the pastor dove into his sermon. The three pillars of Western civilization, repeating, reflecting and reverberating off one another like waves, melded into a cacophony of fast-addled surrealistic interpretations of the world around me. Are those elements of the world that I pick apart as obvious as I imagine, or am I transposing hopeful generalizations on to a scene that really requires contemplation, if not deeper understanding? “If you test the DNA of Jews and Javanese,” Ray tells me excitedly, “a lot is the same!”
I’m not sure whether it’s a curse or a blessing to be able to speak for hours. Maybe I just don’t understand how it’s done. When I speak publicly, and I see my audience’s eyes glazing over, I speed-up, change topics, or talk more animatedly. This pastor just kept on going. You could hear the eager sighs of relief every time he issued an amen, hallelujah, or shalom, but such wishful thinking was quelled with another soliloquy on something that I couldn’t understand. Ray made efforts to translate, but it all turned into something having to do with Yahweh’s love and Israel and the fast and I told him to stop. I might have been mildly hallucinating. It’s tough to tell in situations like that.
We prayed for Israel, and then had Kiddush, the most ridiculous event of all. Sipping thimble sized glasses of bootleg Manischewitz (read: grim grape juice) and chomping on chopped-up pieces of Wonderbread (alas, the napkin was hiding bowls full of pasty white crustless cubes, not a big, beautiful mountain of kneaded bread, as I’d hoped) I broke the fast. This year in Indonesia? Next year in Jerusalem!