In Colorado, a former Messianic Jewish pastor is struggling to make his way back to Jewish life – and finding that he is caught between two worlds.
Jeff Brodsky’s journey back to Judaism, not yet complete, has caused considerable controversy in the Denver-area Jewish community.
“He’s stuck in the middle of having walked out of one world and not decided about the other,” said Rabbi Mordechai Twerski, a well-known Orthodox rabbi in Denver who has been instrumental in guiding Brodsky back.
“It’s a very painful place for him. We try and have as much compassion and patience as we can,” Twerski said. “But it’s Jeff and his wife who have to take the steps. Nobody can take them for them.”
Jeff Brodsky was born a Jew, but as a teen-ager, he joined the Unification Church and became a Moonie. He later converted to Christianity through an evangelical Christian group and went on to become a Southern Baptist minister.
Today, Brodsky, 39, is an observant Jew with a kosher home, yet his wife, Sharla, and their six children remain Christian.
Brodsky married his wife, who was born a Christian, in a Baptist church in 1980.
He said they got involved with what is commonly known as “Messianic” Judaism, or Hebrew-Christianity, in 1988, and they began lighting candles and eating challah on Friday nights.
Five years later, Brodsky began working as the pastor of Kehillat Sha’arit Israel, or Community of Remnants of Israel, a Messianic Jewish congregation in Colorado Springs, Colo., where 15 percent of the congregants were born Jewish.
He had been there several months when he decided that because he was preaching about Judaism and did not know very much about it, he should study the religion of his birth.
He approached area rabbis to see whether they would teach him.
The local Reform rabbi “wanted nothing to do with me and one Orthodox rabbi told me to get out of his house,” Brodsky said in a recent phone interview.
Then he heard about Twerski, who is well-known for his outreach work to nonreligious Jews.
Soon after he began studying with Twerski, he attended Shabbat services at Twerski’s congregation, the Talmudic Research Institute, and was surprised that it was not at all what his evangelical and Messianic Jewish teachers told him it would be.
“I had though everything Orthodox was dead formalism but people were clapping and singing and really enjoying themselves. I had a real awakening,” Brodsky said.
Back at his own Messianic congregation the next week, Brodsky said he preached a sermon asking: “By what right do we pick and choose what commandments of God’s to obey and not to obey; do we know better than God? The Torah is not a Chinese menu.”
“Boy, did everyone get upset,” said Brodsky, “The rabbis and the Messianic Jews, no one was very happy.”
The Messianic congregation quickly fired him.
“They told me I was fired for being argumentative, arrogant and divisive. That’s when I returned to Judaism,” Brodsky said.
Brodsky moved his family from Colorado Springs to Denver and he and his family began spending more time with families connected to Twerski’s synagogue.
It was not a comfortable fit.
Brodsky’s wife and children, after all, were not Jewish. Twerski told Brodsky that he would not convert the children unless Sharla decided that she, too, wanted to be a Jew.
And even though they are all Sabbath observant and adhere to the traditional dietary laws, their level of kashrut was not completely trusted by Denver’s Orthodox Jews.
“The Jewish community would really not reach out of my wife or eat at my house because they were afraid that my wife wouldn’t be letter perfect with kashrus,” Brodsky said.
The family moved back to Colorado Springs and began attending an Orthodox-style Messianic congregation.
“It was a way to keep peace in my home,” said Brodsky.
He also opened up a school, the Center for Judaic Studies, with a Christian friend and allowed people to call him “rabbi,” which sparked great controversy in the Denver area.
“I have a beard and look like a rabbi, so that’s what people called me,” he said.
The school still exists, offering classes in Talmud and other Jewish sources. Although his partner has left the enterprise, Brodsky remains the academic dean.
Brodsky continues trying to integrate his life into the Jewish community.
Meanwhile, he works as a telemarketer for a long-distance company and has been trying to find a home closer to Denver.
Some in Twerski’s community say their patience with Brodsky’s uncertainty is wearing thin and that they doubt his intentions.
“If he doesn’t feel accepted here it can only be because he doesn’t understand the basic distinction between Judaism and Christianity, notwithstanding all the learning he’s done,” said Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, editor of the Intermountain Jewish News in Denver.
“People here have had him over, put him up for weeks at a time, broke their backs for him,” said Goldberg, a member of Twerski’s congregation. “I don’t think that he’s an honest person. He wants to be an Orthodox Jew and a Messianic Jew.”
Twerski, who has been working with Brodsky for three years now, acknowledges that “having enough patience isn’t always easy.”
“Some people here feel burned out because they’ve extended themselves many times for his family and he has yet to figure out how to cope with his own life,” said the rabbi.
Still, Twerski said he has faith that Brodsky would be able to make the transition.
“He’s still in the middle of his dilemma, caught on its horns. For him the move back to Judaism was simple. For his wife it’s been very difficult and she hasn’t yet quite figured out if she really wants to do it.”
Brodsky knows that the way back to Judaism continues to be a struggle for him.
“I realize that you can’t walk in both, and I am choosing Judaism,” he said.
But, he said, he’s “not sure” where his wife will end up.
“The Christians have treated her very coldly,” he said. “She’s hanging onto that threat called Jesus, which she won’t give up today or tomorrow. The longer we go on, though, the more I think she’ll come along.”
“People have to understand the struggle,” he added. “Without community you don’t survive.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
