One man’s spiritual journey

Haim Levi grew up Jewish in Colombia. Then he traveled to Israel and heard Jesus call.

[Times photos: Mike Pease] During services at Beth Israel Congregation, men, women and children form circles and dance to upbeat music, often in Hebrew.

By JOSH ZIMMER

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 6, 2001

KEYSTONE -- The first time Haim Levi heard the Holy Spirit was 27 years ago after a hair-raising journey through the Middle East.

Rabbi Haim Levi reads from the Torah during a service in March for the Beth Israel Messianic Congregation. Levi, 75, leads a congregation of 75 regular members.

Levi, who speaks Spanish, French and Hebrew, was translating for a vacationing church group shortly after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. A Jew, he feared for his life as they passed through Lebanon and Jordan.

They finally arrived safely in Israel after crossing the Jordan River, so famous in the Bible, into the West Bank. Standing alone by the Dead Sea, Levi said he screamed "Hallelujah." To his amazement a voice responded, "Hallelujah was said here first!"

Levi, 74, came to believe that Yeshua -- the Hebrew word Messianic Jews use to refer to Jesus -- was calling him to service.

Now he is Rabbi Haim Levi, an Odessa resident. He tells the story while seated at his desk in a modest office off Gunn Highway. From this small white building behind a stand of tall pine trees, he leads the Beth Israel Messianic Congregation, one of several Messianic Jewish congregations in the Tampa Bay area.

John Bramble, with a tallit, or prayer shawl, draped over his head, prays during a Beth Israel Congregation service in February.

He paints his theology with a benign brush, one of fervor and glorious possibilities. The Messianic tradition, in which Jews believe that Jesus is the Messiah, is firmly rooted in the ancient Jewish scriptures, he says. When the sun sets Saturday night Levi and his followers will celebrate the Jewish Passover instead of the Christian Easter.

No amount of positive spin can breach the chasm between Messianic Judaism and mainstream Jews, who view Messianic Jews as a threat to a religion already struggling with assimilation.

With his emphasis on the Spanish-speaking world, Levi, who comes from Colombia, is something of a renegade even among Messianic Jews.

Nor do Christians necessarily accept Messianic Jews into their fold. "Some people welcome them and support their ministries, support their work, give them space to work in their churches," said Jay Rock, director of interfaith relations for the National Council of Churches.

"Then there's a group that's uncomfortable with a blurring of identities."

All Walks of Life

The Saturday morning Shabbat service is small, emotion-filled and intimate. The congregation's 75 regular members come from all walks of life: doctors and lawyers, secretaries and homemakers, computer programers and real estate agents. Half are Jews and half are former Christians, as is typical in Messianic Judaism.

Adults and children work their way into a crowded prayer room that is unadorned by the standards of most Jewish synagogues. They sit on folding chairs and read from song sheets. They are on their feet much of the time, losing themselves in prayer and raising their hands toward the sky. Eyes well up with tears.

Dennis Bacon, a visiting Messianic rabbi from Bradenton, wears a tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl, and a headcover called ayarmulke. Before leaning his forehead against the ark and touching it gently with his hand, he walks around the room and appeals for salvation.

"We are weak but we look to you, oh God, to give us strength. Hallelujah."

Women and men form dance circles. Upbeat music, often in Hebrew, pushes the senses.

"I like the way we worship, the way we dance," says Bacon, who was born Christian but became a Messianic Jew eight years ago. "We read from the living Torah. This is the way we're supposed to be. Yeshua was in the synagogue on Shabbat."

In addition to Hebrew, prayers are said in English, Spanish and a smattering of Portuguese. Many in the room are from Latin America.

The mix of Jewish ritual with spontaneous, emotional evangelism may make outsiders uncomfortable.

"Jesus is nowhere in the Old Testament," said Richard Birnholz, senior rabbi at Schaarai Zedek in Tampa. "Therefore what they are doing is using Jewish scripture and Jewish ritual objects and Jewish traditions and filling them with Christological meaning, which I consider to be an abuse of a religion that holds those symbols sacred."

Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice-president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, says Messianic Jews "pretend to be something they're not," and that the concept of Jesus as the Messiah is "entirely outside the sphere in Judaism."

Epstein added, "There's always a feeling of concern when somebody tries to draw away members."

Unlike other Messianic leaders, Levi is focused on millions of Spanish-speaking Christians whom he believes have Jewish souls hidden under centuries of Christian oppression and assimilation.

A former president of the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America, Levi left that umbrella organization in 1995 to form the International Federation of Messianic Jews. It is the only Messianic Jewish group to reach out to Sephardic Jews -- Jews with ancestors who left southern Europe because of the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century.

The federation claims between 1,000 and 2,000 members. By contrast, there are about 1-million Messianic Jews throughout the world, according to the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America.

Levi travels to Mexico, Costa Rica and other countries in the region, convinced the Americas have 25- to 35-million Christians waiting to hear the word of Yeshua. "We let them hear Jewish music and they start to cry," he said.

"We do great things with hardly anything," Levi said. "The money, I have to borrow it. Once I get there they treat me like a king. It's all a miracle."

Critics within Messianic Judaism say Levi reaches too far in trying to establish people's Jewish origins. A person with the last name Perez, for example, becomes a potential follower because the word erez is Hebrew for land.

"It is true that there are many, many Jewish people that were totally assimilated," said Joel Chernoff, general secretary of the Messianic alliance, which says that it, too, ministers to the Spanish-speaking world. "And this has gone on for centuries, really. And many people . . . didn't tell their children."

But, "He just starts calling everybody Jewish."

He had to forgive

Success could not shield his family from unsympathetic authorities, he said. In the 1940s he obtained a U.S. visa and arrived in 1944. For the next five years he worked with a New York state senator to bring his family to this country.

Most of his brothers and sisters are still alive. His parents are deceased. His father died in Colombia after returning to salvage some of his government-appropriated businesses and properties. When he fell sick, Levi said the local archbishop denied him treatment until he accepted Jesus as the Messiah. His father refused.

"I had to learn to be very forgiving," he said. "The man who died on the tree said, "Forgive them because they do not know what they do.' "

His own spiritual journey parallels that of many Messianic Jews dissatisfied with the usual denominations.

Levi prospered in the United States, training as an engineer and raising a family. But when his oldest son was killed in 1966 by a drunken driver and his marriage began falling apart, he said he failed to find spiritual salvation in mainstream Judaism.

He visited churches but never felt at home. Then he heard Yeshua's voice at the Dead Sea and then, again, after returning to Sarasota.

Through the rush of wind and rain, the same voice said, "You know who I am," Levi recalled. "I am not giving you much time. I'm on my way."

He hardly slept. "When morning came, I was blind," Levi said. "That's when I said, "Yes, I accept you.' "

'We are not Christians'

Eventually, Levi moves to the podium to begin his sermon. He speaks intimately, as if addressing a gathering of close friends. His second wife, Rachelle, a Sephardic Jew from Greece, sits by his side. Each sentence is repeated in Spanish. Cassettes and videotapes from the services are often sent abroad.

He lays out the Messianic vision of a world headed toward Armageddon, the forces of good and evil arrayed in battle lines. Recent fighting in and around Israel is a sure sign for people to expect the Messiah's second coming.

"Come, let us go up to Zion," he says.

Inspiration to reach out to Sephardic Jews came during a trip to Israel in the mid-1980s. With Rachelle, he stood in the Negev desert and remembered a verse in Obadiah predicting the return of Sephardic Jews to Israel.

"I realized something's going to happen in the Negev," he said.

A day before leaving, he said he read in the Jerusalem Post, Israel's English-language newspaper, that there were as many as 35-million Jews living as Christians in Latin America.

In addition to his travels, Levi says he has ordained many Messianic Jewish rabbis in Florida. He bristles at the frequent accusation that his movement undercuts Judaism.

"Really, we are not Christians," he says. "We are told we are Christians because we believe Jesus . . . is the Messiah. To be Christian is to believe and to follow the writings of all the Roman Catholic priests: the dissolution of Shabbat, the dissolution of all the Jewish holidays, the adoption of Christmas, Easter. I'm sorry to say they are all pagan practices."

A low profile

Cesar Garzon, like Levi, was born in Colombia. About 25 of Beth Israel's members are Sephardic, Levi said, and Garzon is one of them. He said was raised Christian, though some of his father's relatives were Jewish.

Through a translator, Garzon said that becoming an evangelical Christian led him to explore his Jewish roots, and that search led him to Messianic Judaism.

In Colombia, he said he saw correlations between native and Sephardic culture: unleavened bread like matzo, ponchos that resemble the Jewish prayer shawl and names with Hebrew roots. Garzon buys into Levi's theory that last names are indicators of a person's past.

"It's growing a lot," Garzon said of Messianic Judaism in Colombia, where his wife and two children live. "I believe there's a lot of . . . Christians down there who know they have become saved because they received Jesus into their hearts. But there comes a time in their lives that they know something is missing, but they can't put a hand on it. They don't understand because nobody is teaching them their roots."

Garzon has joined Levi's organization. But, like many members, he tries to keep a low profile about his faith. "It's the mainstream Jews that give us the most problem," he said. "They feel like they're owners of the Jewish faith."

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