Called to Controversy (30 page)

When the remodeling was complete, Moishe was especially pleased with the sanctuary. Attendance for the 3:30 worship services increased to about 120, the maximum the chapel could hold. While Moishe usually gave the sermon, every few weeks he asked Rachmiel Frydland, a true scholar of the Bible and of rabbinical writings, to preach.

Moishe had never lost his childhood sense of reverence for holy places or holy books and how they were set apart from ordinary things. Accordingly he was upset to find that the chapel was doubling as a “warehouse” (his word) on a regular basis. The mission mailed out a publication called “The Chosen People” to some 60,000 of their constituents every month. Whoever was in charge of the mailing had been accustomed to piling the mailbags full of magazines into the chapel until it was time to bring them to the post office.

To Moishe, this was a matter of great irreverence. He complained about the dirty gray canvas mailbags filling up the aisles of the little chapel, and in some cases, being deposited on top of the brand-new chapel seats. He pointed out that there was plenty of room to store the mailbags in the basement. He complained of this three months in a row. When, during the third month he came in one Sunday to see the mailbags still there not long before the service was to start, he threw them all down the stairwell. Bags burst open, bundles that had been put in zip code order broke apart, and it was quite a mess.

Daniel Fuchs roundly scolded Moishe over the incident. It seemed that the person who had put the bags in the chapel had never been told that it was wrong. Moishe recalled, “The authority structure was like a maze—I had to tell so-and-so who then told so-and-so and eventually the person concerned would hear it from so-and-so.” But sometimes things fell through the cracks. This frustrated Moishe who believed that the purpose of authority is to facilitate things and to see that the standards and quality are maintained. He felt that some people were using authority as a means of dominance—not Daniel Fuchs, but some of the people under him.

Apparently the concerns Moishe had had about bureaucracy and authority before he left Los Angeles had not been misplaced, and that was discouraging. However, as unpleasant as the entire incident was, it did put an end to the use of the chapel for warehousing magazines and mailbags.

A bright spot in Moishe's ministry with the ABMJ in New York was the training program. The mission was already conducting many good classes when he arrived. Dr. Henry Heydt, founder of Lancaster Bible College, taught Hebrew and was the resident scholar. Rachmiel Frydland also had great academic stature. Charles Kalisky taught Hebrew, and veteran Coney Island missionary Hilda Koser taught child evangelism. Moishe respected these people and considered them tremendous resources. However, he added a level of practical experience to the largely academic course work.

His first training class included such notables as Arthur Katz, a Brooklyn-born Jew who was as controversial as he was charismatic. Katz finished his training and did well with the mission; however before long, he began his own evangelistic ministry. Another candidate was Eliezer Urbach, a Jewish believer who, after barely escaping Poland in time to survive the Holocaust, came to faith in Jesus in Brazil. Eliezer served with the ABMJ (later Chosen People) for years. He pastored messianic congregations, mentored Jewish believers in Jesus, and is considered a patriarch of the messianic Jewish movement.

Dan and Arlene Rigney, graduates of Moody Bible Institute, took part in the training program in the fall of 1968. They recalled,

He [Rosen] taught us street boldness and how to do street preaching on Broadway in New York City. He was also influenced, although he didn't know him directly, by Joseph Hoffman Cohn . . . Moishe would teach us principles that he thought that Joseph Hoffman Cohn would have used as well.

He loved to keep us awake in class by shooting his cap gun off, particularly if he spotted someone who'd fallen asleep. He had us eat schmaltz herring
*
and he said we probably wouldn't like it. But everyone did like it.

Sometimes during class we would sit at the window on the sixth floor and look at people walking by and Moishe would say, “Now, try to imagine what this person might be thinking today.”

He was the first to introduce us to Japanese food, he was the first to take us down to Katz's deli on the Lower East Side.

He also enjoyed teasing people. But if he ever said anything outrageous and you asked if he was for real, he'd always confess if he was teasing.

Despite his mischief making, Moishe took the training very seriously; yet some in the mission did not regard all of his practices favorably. Moishe was aware of the disapproval and looked for someone who could be a sounding board. Avi Brickner, a colleague and close friend, was ministering in Boston with Israel's Remnant during those years. Moishe invited him to see the training program for himself. Avi recollected:

The exercises that day were aimed at preparing the group for the emotional aspects of intense opposition that they would face in street evangelism.

Moishe tried to stimulate the trainees to express their own extreme anger . . . but the trainees had a very hard time expressing anger spontaneously.

Suddenly Moishe arose from his seated position, took his chair in hand, and with heated angry words began to smash the chair to pieces on the floor. The intensity of his expression shocked most of those in the group, and one woman burst into tears and fled from the room.

A second exercise that day involved dealing with harassment when one was giving a street testimony. Moishe acted as the opposition, and several were asked to give testimonies. Moishe was very effective in unsettling those who tried. He asked me to step in and give it a try. He became particularly vociferous with me, and the louder he got, the softer I got. This response tended to wear him down, while I remained fairly calm. It was the very response, it turned out, that he wanted to demonstrate. We had not really devised this beforehand. . . .

I learned later that . . . Moishe wanted to use my presence and observation to verify the psychological soundness of his methods of training to meet opposition because of my then present involvement in graduate work in psychology and counseling. Moishe told me later that he thought it far better that missionaries were conditioned beforehand to face opposition and anger rather than to have it come upon them suddenly and be unprepared.

Avi Brickner's relationship with Moishe spanned more than four decades, but they were never closer than during those three years that Moishe served with the ABMJ in New York. Years later Avi recalled,

Moishe always had a desire to effect creative and positive change in both the organization with which he was working and also in the entire field of Jewish evangelism. Therefore, he always seemed to seek ways and channels through which he would be an influence for such change. He did this through personal networking with individuals, through seeking to influence the direction of the FCTJ and through a willingness to lend a helping hand to boost the ministries of other individuals and organizations that he thought worthy of assistance. I had the impression that he never sought to guard what he thought valuable and keep it for himself or his own organization, but to share it with others and other organizations so that they might benefit.

He had been trying to recruit me to join the ministry of the ABMJ. I began to share with him how discouraged I was . . . and how unfruitful I felt myself to be in the ministry of Jewish evangelism. I told him that I had decided to leave the field and that I had received an offer to become a teacher in a private school in Connecticut when I had completed my graduate work. . . .

He quietly remarked (these may not be his exact words), “I think that the poorest efforts of some people who may think themselves failures are better than the best efforts that some other people can make.” Those words went deep into my heart so that I never forgot them. I felt that I was hearing not just the words, but the heart of a friend who truly valued me.

Avi was the kind of quality friend Moishe truly did value, as were many others he met through the work in New York. Yet even as new friendships were developing, his relationship with Daniel Fuchs seemed to have cooled, and Moishe did not know why. He thought there might have been some disappointment on Daniel's side concerning their social life. From Moishe's perspective, “The Fuchses led a quiet life and socialized quietly,” whereas “the Rosens tended to have a younger, more energetic circle of friends.” As time went by, he perhaps did not seek out Daniel's company as much as he might or ought to have done.

Moishe was also less and less content with the status quo. The large variety of gospel tracts that were available included a few that Moishe found worthwhile, but he dismissed most of the literature as too syrupy, too preachy, or just too far-fetched to engage the interest of most modern Jewish people. He knew that a more current style of literature was needed, but it was easy to sideline his concerns when there was so much to do. His schedule had grown so busy that by his second year in New York, he rarely met with Jewish seekers anymore. Most visits he scheduled were in conjunction with the training. He also served on numerous boards and committees of other organizations and was in demand as a speaker at churches and schools. It is not surprising, then, that some feelings of self-importance were in play during this time.

Three things happened to shock Moishe out of his complacency and orient him toward the ministry that eventually became Jews for Jesus. One was the scenario with Sidney Lawrence, described at the beginning of this chapter. Something changed in Moishe the day that Lawrence spoke, but it was only one turn of the screw. It took two more painful realizations to turn Moishe completely around and and orient him toward the ministry that eventually became Jews for Jesus.

The second turn that helped to shake Moishe loose from his seventh-floor office was the death of his mother, Rose Rosen. His last visit with her was painful, to say the least. Moishe deeply regretted his old promise not to bring up religion, a promise both his parents held him to for the rest of their lives. As he grieved for his mother, he wondered if the Jewish identity he'd grown up with had become somewhat diluted—and that was disturbing.

The third thing that helped launch Moishe into a new stage of ministry was an encounter at Columbia University. Moishe had been asked to address a regional meeting of InterVarsity, a strongly evangelical organization dedicated to helping Christian college students grow in their faith and share that faith with others. Moishe's topic was “Hippies, Radicals, and Revolutionaries.”' Moishe got a lot of laughs when he repeated a joke he'd heard defining a hippie as someone who “talks like Tarzaan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah.” But when he finished speaking, Bob Berk, a Jewish social worker who also believed in Jesus as Messiah, confronted him:

“Did you ever smell a hippie?”

“No, I never got close enough” came the wry retort.

“Do you know that a lot of hippies are Jewish? Do you know what they're saying, how they feel? What are you doing to try to talk to these people?”

“I don't want to talk to people who don't want to talk to me.” Moishe rarely found himself on the defensive, and he didn't much like it. Who
was
this guy who was challenging his position as the expert on Jewish evangelism? It's not unusual to feel testy in the face of criticism, especially when it's given with zero tact. But Bob Berk seemed oblivious to the testiness and pressed on.

“Well, you're making fun of a group of people you should be trying to reach.” And with that accusation, his point hit home.

So began Moishe's long-standing friendship with Bob Berk. Berk—abrasive, unmannerly, and often unkempt—was considered offensive by some, but Moishe valued him as a man whose blunt truthfulness helped to change the course of Jewish evangelism. Moishe's willingness to accept the truth wherever or from whomever it might come had brought him to faith in Jesus to begin with—and now that same willingness was about to radicalize his ministry.

Moishe knew a young Jewish believer in Jesus, Susan Alexander, who was familiar with the hippie counterculture. He told her what Bob Berk had said and how it had troubled him. Susan told Moishe that if he would go to Greenwich Village and “just sit around,” he'd find it easy enough to meet and talk with hippies.

Moishe, now considerably overweight and still sporting a crew cut and a skinny tie, began to frequent Manhattan's Washington Square Park on Wednesday afternoons. Most hippies did not judge him by his appearance and would talk to just about anyone who wanted to engage in meaningful conversation. As he interacted, he found that while some simply wanted to enjoy life unfettered from the establishment, many had deeply spiritual values and aspirations.

Next, Moishe began writing his own gospel tracts (he called them “broadsides”) to communicate what the traditional tracts could not. He handwrote and illustrated his first broadside, “A Message from Squares,” with a simple figure of himself, made up of bulky squares, on the front. Here is its message:

Hey, you with the beard!

We think you are Beautiful.

God likes long hair and beards, too.

He didn't want the Israelites to trim their beards.

Can you just imagine Moses or Elijah with a crew cut?