Called to Controversy (42 page)

David Brickner and Rich Robinson, two staff members of Jews for Jesus, were invited to one of the meetings. Brickner recalled,

I was excited to be there. [There were] all of these rock stars of evangelicalism, and Moishe seemed to be known to everybody. And he had this amazing reputation. It wasn't just Moishe. It was Jews for Jesus [that] had that reputation. It was an excellent reputation, but it was partly because of his genius. People recognized it.

He [Moishe] said [the ICBI] is an organization that exists for one purpose, and when its purpose is completed, it needs to go out of existence. It doesn't need to be self-perpetuating. And he spoke with a voice of authority that everybody . . . acknowledged [and saw] that Moishe was the organizational genius [of the group]. He had very strong theological convictions that he could articulate and questions that probed and prodded the theologians to get it right, but he never wrote any of those statements.

Moishe felt strongly that no group should outlive its usefulness. He was immensely pleased that the ICBI chose to disband in 1988, satisfied that they had completed their task by clearly defining and bringing public attention to the issue of inerrancy.
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By 1982 Moishe had contributed his own cache of writings that was not so much scholarly as practical and useful for laypeople. In addition to his articles in the Jews for Jesus newsletter and his broadside tracts, Moishe wrote articles for many Christian magazines.
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The 1980s, perhaps more than any other decade, show that throughout his career, Moishe's life greatly affected many individuals and groups beyond Jews for Jesus. Nevertheless, Jews for Jesus remained his passion, so much so that it is difficult to write a biography that, from the 1970s onward, does not focus primarily on his role within and his concerns regarding that organization.

Moishe feared that Jews for Jesus had grown too fast. One of his purposes for the Avodah year was to ascertain who would stay or leave the ministry. He also wanted to see natural leadership emerge, so he half jokingly and half seriously required all who had been leaders prior to Avodah to wear special buttons for the first few days. The buttons said, “I am not a leader.”

Over the course of the Avodah year, Moishe hoped to see more emphasis on community and a renewal of godliness and evangelistic fervor among the staff. But he also wanted to see a new level of consistency in ministry.

Jhan Moskowitz reflected,

Avodah did a lot of good things. It did professionalize us. It really taught us how to be good missionaries. Gave us a standard to work by. But in some ways you know, it moved us away from that spontaneous “tribe.” And I think the eighties were reflective of that, and I know that Moishe bemoaned that loss.

As someone who took part in Avodah, I agree that the regularizing and professionalizing of ministry made spontaneity more difficult, but I also think that the changing demographic of the staff would have seen to that anyway. As people married and had children, life would naturally become less spontaneous, and people would naturally become more focused on their spouses and children and the routines necessary for family as well as professional life.

Moishe was a great proponent of marriage and had suggested that Avodah would be a terrific time for single people to marry and for married people to have children—and he rejoiced whenever those events occurred. But he also recognized that entering these stages of life could create natural tensions in how people would want to spend their time. He expected missionaries to realize that theirs was not a nine-to-five job because missionary work does not take place in an office. He insisted that everyone set weekly goals and have a shared understanding of what it meant to meet those goals.

There is no doubt that Moishe saw his role differently in the post-Avodah era. Comparing his function in the 1980s to that of the 1970s, he said,

In the 1980s, I feel my role was to be a discerner, to figure out what kind of music, outreach, and branches we needed. [And] because we had resources, I found [some] people coming to us [mostly] because they wanted to get a job, and I needed a great deal of discernment because a highly dedicated, “called” person and a clever job seeker sound the same.

The other thing between the seventies and the eighties was this: in the seventies we were the revolution, and in the eighties Jews for Jesus wasn't a novelty; we were the establishment. . . .

And so, it was a period of establishment. . . . A lot of it was building up the distribution for things that we have done and services we have provided—going nationwide.

Probably the task I prayed and thought about most was the deployment of personnel and the utilization of resources, to get the right person in the right place or at least the place where they could work. And one of my regrets is that we tried to cover too many fields and thus used some of the less qualified people in leadership.

Of course all the creativity did not dry up during the 1980s. Moishe never regarded professionalism and creativity as either/or propositions. He believed that within the framework of principles, policies, and procedures, there could still be freedom and creativity. In fact, in 1982, Moishe, with his talent for timing, spurred the group into one its most creative periods. As was often the case, the burst of creativity came in response to opposition.

One morning, Moishe and the rest of the headquarters staff were devastated when they arrived at the office to be greeted by a blasphemous misuse of the name of Jesus scrawled across the front of the building. Not content merely to paint over the offensive graffiti, Moishe called the staff together to discuss how to heal the deep hurt they felt over the obscene statement. Moishe concluded that since someone had attempted to soil the name of Jesus, the best way to “counter the attack” would be to lift up the name of Jesus, to honor it, and to draw attention to who Jesus really is. Together, the group brainstormed how to do this, and from that came the Y'shua campaign,
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which included writing new songs, gospel ads, and even the book titled
Y'shua
:
The Jewish Way to Say Jesus
that was offered to those who responded to the ads. The burst of creative communications once again seemed to prove Moishe's aphorism that “every knock is a boost.” But much of the Y'shua campaign came from Moishe's sense of timing.

One matter of timing that Moishe did not seem to address quite as consciously was his shifting role in the lives of many whom he had mentored. By the 1980s, it became clear that aspects of Moishe's leadership style that had helped to keep the group together in the 1970s were at the point of diminishing returns. He did work at relating differently to the staff as they grew older, got married, and had children of their own; nevertheless, adapting his role in the lives of the maturing staff was not his forte. It therefore remained for others to deal on a somewhat unilateral basis with the changing relationships that are natural between mentors and their maturing mentees.

Three people who can provide insight into this are Tuvya, Jhan, and Susan. Each of them was part of the original group who remained with Jews for Jesus “through thick and thin.” Each saw Moishe as a mentor.

Tuvya Zaretsky recalled:

In 1971, I prayed specifically asking God for a mentor. There is no doubt in my mind that the Lord brought me into Moishe's sphere to fulfill that longing.

Tuvya went on to explain one of the most memorable times when he received encouragement and affirmation from Moishe.

In the summer of 1977, I was 30 years old. I had completed a 25-month itinerary with the Liberated Wailing Wall. While it was a pressure-packed, character-stretching, life-changing experience, I wasn't prepared for the transition off of the tour.

I had given my all for the ministry and I was a little too eager to settle down. I met a young woman who happened to be serving at our headquarters. It was infatuation at first sight. In spite of my impetuous inclinations, Moishe spoke to me with an expansive, almost visionary calm.

In the midst of a precarious life transition, on the precipice of making some bad choices, Moishe said to me, “Tuvya, you are a winner.” Those words of encouragement had a huge impact on me at the time. I came through that transition period, a better person by the grace of God and Moishe's timely affirmation.

Moishe was too young to be my father. I think only 15 years separated us. However, those caring, uplifting words of confidence gave the sort of fatherly support that a young man needed. It was an extraordinary and very personal moment. I know that God used Moishe to touch many of us with his grace.

But not all of Moishe's moments were so grace filled, as has been previously mentioned.

Tuvya also explained,

There's no way that he could have used the same leadership behaviors in the 1980s that he had employed with such an unruly group back in the early 1970s. Moishe did make some adjustments in his leadership style—at least he did with me. Some people said he was “over controlling,” but I found him personally respectful. He was demanding and dissatisfied with mediocrity. He expected everyone in the ministry to strive for excellence. He often said, “It's better to do the right thing than a good thing.”

Still, there were times when I considered his behavior to be unnecessary or over the top. It was usually in reaction to something he found unsatisfactory. I don't know whether those behaviors were from habit or if they were expressions of frustration. The reason didn't matter to me; I didn't want to excuse it and I usually found that he didn't either. I wasn't going to change the way he occasionally reacted. The best I could do was take responsibility for how I might respond.

Jhan Moskowitz added,

By the 80s we were [geographically] separated. Our relationship [Jhan's and the various branch leaders no longer in San Francisco] was on the telephone and at council meetings. We were a bunch of emerging leaders that Moishe had to figure out how to release, healthily. And I'm not sure he knew how. I think he worked at it but . . . that was a difficult time, the 80s.

When asked if there was a particular event or process that Jhan utilized to see his relationship with Moishe differently, he said,

Yes, I did. I was in England, 1983. I was in charge of the London witnessing campaign, “Messiah Has Come.” And for the summer, I didn't talk to Moishe. We just didn't talk. I didn't report in once a week. And I really had to rely on my own leadership gifts. It was after that that I felt like, he can be my friend, and he can be my boss, but he's not my mentor anymore. The interesting thing is, that helped me stay [with Jews for Jesus].

You get to a certain place where you start defining yourself and trying to find out where that individual who is so significant in your life, where his influences kind of end, and yours start. And I think that summer was a real paradigm shift for me. It wasn't that I stopped learning from him, but he stopped being the dominant voice in my life.

I felt fortunate that circumstances and God and grace allowed me to be able to continue to be listening and loving [Moishe] and [at the same time] finding my own voice.

Some have suggested that Moishe tended to relate better to women. Susan Perlman said,

I actually do think he did better with women than with men. I think part of that is because Moishe was such a sensitive, verbal person. But I don't think that he was able to relate to women better than men in the mentoring role simply because they were women . . . he also had a high regard for women that a lot of women, particularly in evangelical circles don't feel [from other male leaders]. That was a very enabling thing that men didn't need from him. If I look at other Jewish missions and other missions back in those days, the idea of having women leading teams or being chief advisors was not very common. Moishe just looked at people. Their gender and their age weren't the issue. If they had something to contribute, he gave them opportunities. And I think that he had a lot of brainy women around . . . because he gave them opportunities that they weren't getting elsewhere.

In terms of the mentoring relationship she had with Moishe, Susan recalled,

In a sense it was very much a matter of situational mentoring. Moishe would go on visits to Jewish people [who didn't believe in Jesus] and he would take me along and I would observe how he would interact. And then after the visit was over, we would talk about it; we'd analyze it. He'd say, “What did you learn?”

Moishe was always throwing out aphorisms and taught me through those as well. Things like “Susan, in life you're going to have to choose whether you want to get something done or get credit for it.” Or “there are good choices and then there is the best choice to make in a situation.”

Some of how he mentored me I don't even know if he was aware of. But I would see how he treated people and cared for them and especially how he related to younger people. When Moishe had opportunities [he could have kept] for himself, I observed him giving those to others to do and helping them to do them in a successful way.

Susan also responded to the question of whether she reached a certain point when she felt that that mentoring period was drawing to an end, and whether it was a difficult transition:

Yeah, that is definitely true. I continued to learn things from Moishe, but I don't see it in the same way as my early role with him. The transition. . . . was difficult all around. When he was mentoring me, he almost had a father role in my life and there came a point where I felt like, ‘Okay, [now] he's more of an older brother than a father.' I wanted to maintain the proper respect but I [no longer felt] that I was the student he was the teacher in every situation.