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Did you know that understanding the Jewish roots of Christianity can deepen your faith and Bible comprehension? Today, we chat with David Nekrutman, an Orthodox Jew and advisor to The Chosen TV series, who has dedicated his life to fostering relationships between Jews and Christians.

Listen to discover how David is working to strengthen Christian education with Hebraic thought and bring a historical perspective to the study of the Scriptures today – and even learn some interesting facts about the Bible and Jewish culture along the way.

Want to learn more? Visit https://www.theisaiahprojects.com/ to explore educational resources from David and his team.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:

Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today from Israel we have David Nekrutman. I tried, did I say it right?

David Nekrutman:

You said it correctly and you could call me Brother David. You can just call me David or Al, according to the song.

Marlin Detweiler:

Oh, Paul Simon's song, You Can Call Me Al. I know it well. Thank you. David, as we get started, I must note that you said you can't promise that there won't be sirens going on in the background. And that brings a very vivid way of thinking about the world in which we live and how small it is for us to be joined together here in one place while thousands of miles away. But before we get into the things that you've been working on, tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, your education, your career, and that sort of thing.

David Nekrutman:

Father of three boys, 24-year-old, 21-year-old and a 17-year-old. My wife is actually a second generation Israeli. Her family came over from Yemen during Operation Eagles Wings in 1949, and they pioneered what is called a moshav, an agricultural community, not far from the Tanya, which is close by to Caesarea.

So I met my wife almost 28 years ago. Everything is great. The marriage and being back in Israel, I made my move about 19 years ago. I'm the first of my family to return back home after 2000 years. I did this because I wanted my children to grow up with a sense that being Jewish is something to be proud of, and not to be weighed down as a responsibility of burden in the diaspora.

So you could be whoever you wish to be in Israel, understanding that being Jewish is just like breathing and also when we're talking about education, unlike the United States until recently, you have a separation of church and state where tax dollars were not able to go to religious education. We have a fusion of synagogue and state where we can use our tax shekels to pay for religious education that represents your values. So that's the primary reason, when my oldest was five years old, that we decided to make our move here.

For 23 years, I've dedicated my life to the reconciliation, the rapprochement between Jews and Christians, because I believe fully that I can't be who I am as a Jew, stewarding this land under his covenant and kingdom without our covenantal partners. And I don't know any other faith community that understands the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that understands Scripture as divine, like my Christian brothers and sisters and through this journey, I had the honor of attending Oral Roberts University with a Master's in Biblical Literature.

For my work in Jewish Christian relations, it's been recognized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ religious department. They gave me the honor as an ambassador for Jewish Christian relations to the world. And recently, I think most people are more excited that I'm a Jewish advisor to the Chosen, but I can't give away any secrets to season five. Okay, so just letting you know I signed an NDA.

Marlin Detweiler:

But let me clarify one thing for our audience. Because it wasn't clear to me as I researched and you made it clear as we talked before this interview. But you remain Jewish. You are not Christian. You do not call yourself a Christian, but you are committed to conciliatory efforts between Jews and Christians. And you're also committed to helping Christians understand the Jewish nature of their faith in a historic sense. Is that well put?

David Nekrutman:

That is well put. I'll even go further with the verbiage. I want Christians to be Christ centered. And that identity of who Jesus is for a Christian is also to take in consideration that he was born in a Jewish home. He was raised with a Jewish education, and he spoke Jewish-ese, and the disciples were Jewish.

It's Jews speaking to Jews. So it might be helpful to understand, for a Christian making their journey with God to understand the high definition of Jesus’s background. And for years I've been utilizing this platform and understanding the Hebraic roots of Christianity to make the reconciliation between our faith communities, celebrating the differences, but then addressing what the commonalities are and further expanding that.

Because I think there's a thin line between Jews and Christians and their walk with God, and that thin line of the differences will ultimately be reconciled when Messiah comes back and God will work out the details on that. But until that happens, there's a partnership that we need to work together. So I'm one of the Jews who works on this relationship from a relational model, not from a relationship of convenience or crisis.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, that I understand. Let's keep on that topic for just a moment. As a Christian who believes, as I do, that Jesus is summed in the Trinitarian God of Christianity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that Jesus of Nazareth was Jesus the Messiah and made some exclusive claims that people don't relate to him except, excuse me, don't come to being reconciled to God.

With regard to the need for reconciliation due to man in general, and me in particular, being a sinner, those are things that are unique to Christianity, and they have deep theological implications. But there is enormous need for me as a Christian to understand my roots back into Judaism because it's out of Judaism that Jesus comes.

How do you deal with those things as you seek to bring reconciliation between Jews and Christians? How do those things play out? Because they at a sense, they are incompatible and have to be understood as an agreement to disagree at some level, from my vantage point.

David Nekrutman:

100%. I do think at the end of the day there's going to be some disagreements. But I do ask for grace from a Christian to recognize Paul's Romans chapter 11 outline. I don't see what you see. So let's accept the veil that I have so you can come into this covenantal experience with God. So if you can accept this mystery that Paul writes in Romans 11, where I have a veil, at the end of the day, that's what you believe.

So can you accept that veil and still walk with me? And I believe you can for sure, if that's the nature of grace to begin with. That although we are different in the way we express our faith in God and the theological implications for that, it doesn't mean that there's no responsibility that both faith communities need to be working together.

The divide shouldn't be we're in separate corners, because if we are truly to be his agents on the earth, to bring the kingdom of heaven down here, then I believe that could be done working together as opposed to certain times in church history where it was a duel to the death, for us, at least on our side when it came to Jews and the church itself.

I don't put the entire church history on the individual Christian that I meet today who has a heart for Israel and the Jewish people. I think that's not fair. Many Christians come to faith, all of a sudden they have this awakening or calling when it comes to learning about the Hebraic roots, or maybe have some type of heart for Israel and Jewish people.

So I am not judge and jury. I have to take this relationship in front of me, nurture it, enhance it, and actually have that mystery. Because it's also a mystery for us as Jews, because although the church has spread out to the four corners of the world, when that happened, we were unable to do our own mission the same way anymore, because often what happened was Jews were put into very precarious situations throughout church history, ending up in ghettos, pogroms and so on and so forth.

So what the mystery is on our side is, there seemed to be a divorce not only from the Jewish roots of Christianity, but an active call to actually hurt Jesus's family. So that is a mystery on my side that I have to grapple with when working with Christians. Because Jews live in memory. We don't live in history. In fact, there is no biblical word for history.

Okay? You will never. Actually, the modern day Hebrew calls it historia. That is our accented way to talk about history, because we live in something called memory, which is represented by the Hebrew word Zayhare, which really means a past episode lived in the present moment for the future of God and your people. And because that memory includes very negative episodes with the church, it's hard for many Jews to get out of their comfort zone to make a reconciliation effort with Christians who have a heart for the Jewish people and Israel. So I've been very fortunate.

Marlin Detweiler:

For your motivation on the side of your people, the Jewish community, to say, hey, we need to be able to get beyond this, to relate to these people who are willing, if we're willing to relate to them.

David Nekrutman:

Correct. Again, I want you to believe Jesus is divine and Savior. All right. I'm saying this. I want you to believe that because if you do truly have a Christ-centered approach to your faith, I really don't have anything to worry about. But when it becomes exclusively the social gospel or exclusively the prosperity gospel, I get a little worried.

Marlin Detweiler:

Oh, I will if I were you, and I do it for me, too!

David Nekrutman:

So. And anyway, that's not the compass of where Christianity is supposed to be exclusively. There's a combination of faith and how that faith is being actualized into the world. So for me, I believe there is enough in the hands of God for both of our communities to finally have this long overdue discussion, but more importantly, to cooperate with one another so we can do the Kingdom work for God together.

Marlin Detweiler:

The people that are listening to this are likely to be almost entirely a Christian audience. That's who we serve. What are the things we need to learn to enhance our faith from a historical standpoint or from a memory standpoint that will help us better understand the roots from which Christianity comes?

David Nekrutman:

So remember, we're in a geographic location. I'm actually speaking to you from that geographic location. So Jesus wasn't born in Rome. Jesus was born in Israel. He was born in a Jewish family. Yeah. When he's speaking parables and teachings, a third of just let's deal with a third of Jesus's teachings is all in parables. Well, where did Jesus get the story format of a parable?

Well, it's part of his upbringing. There is something called the Book of Proverbs, which is these one-liners of parables. They're really parables. The Book of Proverbs in Hebrew is called mish lay, where the Hebrew word the root word for that is mashal, which is parable. But the story format of a parable begins when David's being rebuked by Nathan through a story format parable.

It's a teaching, right? And if you truly do a deep dive into parables, it's always about asking the listener to do an immediate action. That's why you see David when he finally gets the “aha” moment that it's him being talked about in the parable. He goes into repentance mode. There's an immediate action. So Jesus, because he knows the story when he's talking to his own disciples and people around him and uses parables.

It's not just a teaching moment. It's an action moment. It's almost as Nike borrowed their slogan, Just Do It, from the parable moments that happen in the Bible, because that's basically it. Because if you look at anything that's going on, the reason why he's bringing the parable is for the listener to make a decision. Sometimes the decision is not to Jesus's liking. Some people walk away. Some people actually say yes. So for me, if you don't have the Hebraic lens to some of the teachings of Jesus, sometimes the person who's studying it may lose out in the fullness of the revelation of what's going on. So having a Hebraic background is very important, and the art of the question is all part of how Jesus operates, which is very much a Jewish way of learning.

Often in schools you have a Greek way of learning, but a Jewish way of learning is really questions. You have 300 questions in the Gospels, but only three answers. So isn't the question more important than necessarily the immediate need for an answer? And that's what I learned when I studied the gospels. Like this is very, very much a Jewish way of teaching.

And so it resonated with me. But often because we live in an American society and everything is instantaneous and we need the instantaneous gratification. Going through the process of a good question is often ignored in education. So you're not supposed to spoon feed your students, you're supposed to get them to the point of asking, why is this happening? What's going on?

Marlin Detweiler:

So you what you are referring to also brings to mind the idea of a Socratic approach to learning. Would you consider those, quite parallel, quite similar?

David Nekrutman:

Yes and no. So again, a thinking is not always linear in its approach. You because we can remember when you're looking at the Bible, the Bible is pretty much a hyperlink. You can go to different places. Right. Although I appreciate Calvary Chapel's approach to the Bible learning verse by verse, going from Genesis all the way to Revelation, the way that Jews approach it is very much from a macro approach because of the hyperlinks.

Language that is used in one book can be very important to help us understand context and actually interpretation and translation for another book. So it's important to understand the hyperlinks. Therefore, linear approach alone doesn't necessarily work in a Hebraic deep dive in excavating sacred text. And sometimes you have to go off a little bit on the tangents to get back to what the revelation is from the text. Okay, I hope that's helpful.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. You are easily the most articulate Orthodox Jew on the New Testament that I've ever spoken to, and I'm fascinated to hear that perspective. We have, you know, as classical Christian educators, we have really come to embrace the need to understand context and that sort of thing. So when Paul is preaching on Mars Hill, the context of what Mars Hill was to the culture is significant. But you take this in a much broader and deeper way by saying, Christian, you will benefit a lot from understanding the historic context from which your Christian faith comes.

David Nekrutman:

I'll even go. Let's just do a quick deep dive for a second because when we talk about the woman who is experiencing a heavy blood flow for a number of years and she's rushing into the crowd, all she wants to do, well, in most translations is touch the hem of Jesus's coat. Right. And there's the famous gospel song on that in the 1940s.

Where Sam Cooke is singing that when he was part of the Soul Stirrers. So it's not the hem of Jesus's coat, it's actually the tassels or fringes or in Hebrew, Ceteth that Jews wore as part of their garb and their expression of their faith to him as outlined in the Book of Numbers. All right. So why is the woman wanting to touch the tassels?

Why is that so important for her? Why that particular thing? So why don't you ask the question? Because Matthew's version of it is the shortest and sweetest of it. It does. It's just straight to the point. She had an issue. She had a disease. She's looking for a remedy. There's no remedy. She sees the remedy in Jesus. And all of a sudden she figures that the way to do this is to touch his tassel. And then Jesus tells her, and he is not saying he healed her, it's her faith healed her. So what does faith have to do with these funny looking strings that you see? And the answer is you have to go back to the book of Numbers. But the book of Numbers is a weird book. It's a hodgepodge of stories and was.

Marlin Detweiler:

It’s very hard for me as a Christian to understand Numbers.

David Nekrutman:

Yeah, it is because it's a hodgepodge. It's not. It doesn't work out as a law book. It has stories. So the story of the Ten Spies is very important to the introduction of the fringes mandate that’s given to the Jewish people. Now, I don't call it the story of the ten spies because you can't say anything is a recon mission if you're telling the public about it, if you're selecting people who are heads of this, who have no training in spy work whatsoever.

And you're bringing back large amounts of fruit that are pretty big. So, like, you're asking customs to beg you to ask you the questions, what are you doing? So nothing of the smells of spies and in fact, I call this the 10 TripAdvisor reviewers I episode. It's really Moses is trying to accomplish a PR win when the people are low in their morale. He wants people to get excited. They're going into Israel. So he figures he'll do this PR thing of getting the heads of the tribes to go into Israel, come back with a great report. Everyone is pumped up. We're ready to go in. And unfortunately, they gave a bad review. Ten of these people give a bad review on TripAdvisor.

And then what happens? So much happens in this moment where they lose their faith to such a degree. They want to replace Moses, and that is the nail in the coffin. The generation that's our open revelation and went through all these miracles, lost their faith in a moment because of a bad TripAdvisor review. And they get killed out in the desert.

Okay, but it comes down to faith. Right after that story you have the introduction of the fringes on a four corner garment that you're supposed to wear and it's about faith. It's about making sure that you don't deviate from what God wants or will permit. So now we can understand why this woman was so desperate for a remedy who technically should have given up on her life because she didn't see any remedy whatsoever from a physical world point of view.

But she remembered something about her history. And she figured if I could touch the fringes of Jesus, that might be the key. So with the background of understanding Numbers properly from a macro approach, it helps then to see the story, even from a Matthew point of view, which is the shortest in a new light and it comes out.

Now you can understand Jesus's response finally, it's your faith that healed you. Yeah, because she remembered her ancestors. So that makes sense. This is like a real deep dive in a few minutes.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, it is in all of what you're doing. What I see is an attempt to educate Christians about Judaism, to help them understand their faith better. I get that. I think it's very important. But what does success look like for you beyond that? What do you hope to accomplish in 20 years? You will have been involved in this more than 40 years and you look back, what will you hope to have had happened as a result of your work?

David Nekrutman:

I've been very fortunate that many pastors that I brought to Israel, or I have a relationship when I go around the world and I speak that they have a heart for the Jewish people, for the relationship in and of itself. So I've already like, if God took me now I'm really content because I search something that is truly higher than me.

I move the kingdom of God just a little bit in the reconciliation between both our faith communities. But my new chapter in the last couple of years is really to go into Bible education in the Christian world, and my hope is that by fuzing critical thinking skills with Hebraic thought that this may be a key for teenagers that are learning the Bible, get an appreciation of the sacred text in a more profound way that they're walking with this.

I don't have to hear the Barna research statistic anymore. Or the 90% of teenagers that grow up in Christian homes leave their faith. I don't want Christian teenagers to walk away from their faith. A, you have an amazing faith, B, that maybe the way that we're teaching the Bible can be done a little differently by providing the developing of the muscle of critical thinking skills through the Bible.

Because often what happens in Christian education with critical thinking skills is you're buying secular books to help you develop that muscle. And I'm like, wait a second, you only spending like four years, you know, with the secular book, why don't I use the one that will be with me eternally? And that's the Bible, right? So when God takes us up to heaven, you know, what are we doing all day? We're learning His word. We're basking in the light, but we're learning his word. Well, do you have an elementary approach to that, or do you have a more sophisticated approach? And maybe we have a more sophisticated approach. A win for me is that many Christian students do a deeper dive than mostly what happens in Christian education is a devotional approach to Scripture.

We're reading chapters and verses. You got the highlights, and then you do a worship and you pray. Very important, but you can't expect someone who's going through their teenage years and developing their mind to use the old-school method for that age. So as long as God has me on earth for me, my mission now based upon Christian mothers and grandmothers asking me to step out from my previous leadership role and to go into this educational calling, and, for me, as I said, if Christians can, especially Christian teenagers, can recognize that Jesus is Jewish for them and that the text is profound.

But many people just don't know how to dissect it in a way that will resonate more than just how I'm feeling about the text, as opposed to what is the text really saying, and what can I learn from that in my walk with God?

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah yeah. Well God is an imminently logical God and logic is a discipline that can be studied and understood. And it's a critical element within classical Christian education and contributes to what you're talking about as well. In the last few minutes, I have to ask you, tell us about your work on The Chosen and tell us what you're allowed to tell us. I understand you can't reveal any secrets. You made that clear.

David Nekrutman:

Correct. So I first of all, I want to say to The Chosen leadership, it's amazing that they're willing to hear from an Orthodox Jewish voice. I think you have Jason. You have a few people within the messianic world that become commentators with The Chosen and that's important. But for The Chosen to open up their willingness, their doors for us to give them advice on the following.

This is how we determine our role. I had Doctor Faccia Shapiro, who's a female Orthodox theologian that lives in Israel as well. We came to the determination, this is our way of helping The Chosen. What is being presented in the script is that authentically what was said and practiced in Second Temple Judaism? Judaisms. So I would say with the plural.

So let me give you an example. This is something that happened in a season that had nothing to do with Jesus walking into town on Rosh Hashanah, on the Jewish New Year, as outlined in Leviticus chapter 23. And the people giving him an apple so he can dip it into honey. Okay so I want to say my appreciation for The Chosen is that that's a Jewish practice that they incorporated well-intentioned.

But if I would have been the advisor back then, I would have said that that custom of taking an apple and dipping it in honey to represent that everyone should have a good and sweet New Year did not exist at the time of Jesus, it's an 18th century custom.

Marlin Detweiler:

Okay.

David Nekrutman:

So in fact, even dipping things into different fruits being eaten or the understanding of what the holiday is about through a meal. That is not actually being done in Jesus's time, in the geographic location of Israel. It was being done in Babylon, in the Jewish community there. So I think it was our role to say, we appreciate the intention because it's the most Jewish Jesus ever depicted on the silver screen.

And therefore gratitude should be given to that. But at the same time, we want to make sure that you should know, as our advice, that that particular practice, if I was advising back then, didn't exist. You have to make a decision for theatrical purposes, whatever you want to do, if you want to still have that in the script or not.

So I'm talking about something that's in the past. So that was we felt that that was our thing. Certain blessings that take place that's in the script because you don't see – remember The Chosen is there to set up the punchline from the Gospels. So I can give you an example. I can tell you the biggest thing.

So I was on season four's scripts. So when Rima was killed by a Roman that people knew that I was the Jewish advisor to The Chosen, they all called me up and said, why didn't you tell me that Rima was going to be killed by the Romans? I said first of all, I signed an NDA.

Second of all, that story never existed in the Gospels. It's a reason why Thomas is doubting. It's a theatrical piece. It's great but we shouldn't mourn over something that never happened. Okay so let's just take a chill pill for a second. So that's you know, so that's part of what we were doing is really advising what took place in equitable Judaism. And then it's again, it's advice. They take it, or they leave it.

Marlin Detweiler:

Fascinating. Well we have run out of time. I could go on for a long time about this. I am fascinated with what I'll call the enigma with which you live as a way of trying to build bridges. And I can't say enough how much I appreciate the aspect of you wanting Christians to understand the roots of their faith in the way that you do that. That's remarkable. Thank you thank you.

David Nekrutman:

I appreciate the compliment.

Marlin Detweiler:

Folks, thank you again for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of Classical Christian Education. We hope to see you next time.