Jews For Jesus - Moishe Rosen by Moishe Rosen

Author:Moishe Rosen
Language: eng
Format: mobi

9 THE TRIBE

“In our society anyone whose religion matters is considered to be too religious. For most people, a religious faith is like a blood type. It’s just something you put on an identification card, but it doesn’t affect your life very much, except in emergencies.”

This observation by Stuart Dauermann reflects a basic complaint of the group which, in the fall of 1970, came to be known as the Jews for Jesus. These young people, ranging in age from the late teens to the middle twenties, were attracted to Jesus not by contemporary, watered-down versions of Christianity, but by His call for a total commitment. They joined a movement, not an organization. Their operational structure, which has many lessons to offer the church as a whole, can best be described as tribal.

The innate impulse to gather into tribal groups is deeply imbedded in the human personality. The popular anthropologist, Robert Ardrey, has pointed out in his book, The Social Contract, that for thousands of years men spent most of their waking hours in roving, hunting bands of about eleven individuals each. In those early days, when agriculture and even the bow and arrow were unknown, humans had to learn to work together to kill game, or they perished.

The Jews-for-Jesus movement represents a return to the tribal relationship within the church. The sources of our tribal tendencies are twofold. In the first place, many of our young people came from the hippie subculture, where communal living and extended family units were a way of life. In most of the urban communal pads I’ve visited, each person has an informal, natural function that satisfies a peculiar need of the group. Some of the hippies are dealers. They bring in money for food and other necessities by selling drugs. Others are poets or artists. They enhance the cultural life of their tribe. If cleanliness occupies a high priority for another communal hippie, he might be the first to help with domestic cleaning chores. The best cooks will also contribute their skills to the welfare of the whole social organism. No matter what an individual’s particular “thing” may be, he contributes to the overall raison d’etre of the group, which is usually just to “be beautiful.”

But there’s a second, peculiarly Jewish tradition that reinforces our tribal instincts, As I’ve mentioned, primitive man recognized he couldn’t stand alone against hostile nature. He needed other people to aid in hunting and to give him a sense of status and the encouragement to develop his own abilities. Jews have been involved in tribal relationships for centuries because of the need to insure their own survival as God’s chosen people. God called Abraham out of the urban society of Ur of the Chaldeans and commanded him to assume a nomadic life. Jews ever since then have maintained an internal tribal organization, whether they were moving around as itinerant peddlers or living in the ghettos of Europe and Russia. Despite increasing cultural assimilation, there is still a strong Jewish subculture in many parts of the United States.

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