(An excerpt from Shemitta: For the Land Is Mine by Mark Edward Vande Pol
Christian Gentiles need to understand the role we share in the historic misunderstanding of Shemitta. Gaining that understanding starts with recognizing how we appear to the Jewish people, too often deservedly.
The children of Israel were given a task by the Creator of the universe, to be a nation of priests, a light to the nations. Their forefathers were given a land to be theirs forever. As far as the Jew is concerned, we, as goyim, took that land, and never did stop taking. We looked down upon them with little concept for our own roots in a Jewish Messiah, and only a vague understanding of the Torah we claim our Savior kept all His life. We blamed them for His death while celebrating His atonement. We grabbed the Torah as our own having “replaced” Israel. We tortured, forcibly converted, dispossessed, persecuted, and murdered Jews all over Europe. A nation whose Divine mandate was to spread the Word of G_d was kept landless and driven underground.
All the Jew had left as uniquely his own was the Talmud, to keep secret and to study in a Hebrew script the Gentiles did not understand. We tried to force Jews to convert to a “G_d of love” they already had, and could not figure out why they were having none of it.
Thus, many Jews see Christian Gentiles as violent, cruel, grasping, crass, and uneducated, while they cling to what “little” he has left, faithful to a G_d we too seldom seek to understand fully. Christian Gentiles would do well to avail ourselves of that understanding, for it articulates the many ideas in the Torah that are in the New Testament. Unfortunately, the Talmud, while containing some of the greatest expositions on charity, brotherhood, and holiness found in any body of literature, also contains confined arguments that ended up universalized into Laws held equivalent to Torah. Such bits and pieces have been twisted by those with lust for power and revenge to justify a monstrous evil.[133]
From where I stand, this Marxist motive to destroy the culture is the price we pay for not having blessed our Jewish brothers with the whole Torah our Savior consummated with His death and resurrection. We failed to bring them to jealousy as Paul taught us. We drove them away with our demands for submission and then persecuted them for what they saw as obedience to G_d. Most of them did not capitulate to their anger, in a manner entirely consistent with Christ’s example. Instead, they kept close to the G_d of Abraham while we inflicted punishment for a death they did not commit. They were our doctors, musicians, artists, and scientists, among the finest history has to offer. Although some Christians offered them refuge, others punished them anyway.
If lacking intimate contact with the land is bad, having no homeland at all is a deficit that makes people crazy, an obvious motive for anger. Still, now that there is an Eretz Israel, it is high time to redress that deficit and sense of loss. Hopefully, in sharing this revelation, this little piece of Torah, and returning it in better condition than we found it, it can serve as an offering of love toward which to redress our historic mistakes and help the Jews find their way fully back into the land G_d gave them.
My Jewish brethren, for my people, I apologize, and I beg you also to see: We are all created in G_d’s image to care for His Creation. We are lost without it, lost without Torah, and lost without Him. It is therefore, in my hardly august opinion, an urgent matter that the modern rabbinate reconsider the Sabbath for the Land in a free and independent Israel. This is an opportunity to keep Shemitta in a manner less subject to the constraints in force at the time the Talmud was recorded, to which I offer this alternative hypothesis and its attendant suggestions.
May G_d Bless Israel
______________________
[133] In Sanhedrin 98a, R. Jochanan says that Messiah will only come in a generation “overwhelmed by many troubles,” one that is “altogether wicked.” The most “wicked” thing one could do is to abet everything against which the Torah stands. Hence the heretical social tenets of Marxism, as being implemented globally through the fascist architecture of the Agenda 21, educating the masses in depravity, to covet other people’s family and property by the illusion of collective power in democratic socialism. See Lev. 19:34; Lev. 20:17; Deut. 5:21; Deut. 27:17, 24, & 26; Deut. 28:58; Luke 10:29-37; Matthew 25:31-46…
