You’ve heard the phrase, “Never judge a book by its cover.” But that is exactly what we do. We see a cover that we find intriguing, and we pick it up. In this case, it wasn’t so much the cover as it was the title, The Return Of The Kosher Pig.
While I’m not sure what I expected to find, this book surprised me. What I discovered was a Jew, a rabbi, who has diligently searched the Hebrew Scriptures, the additional commentaries by centuries of Jewish scholars,and even the New Testament, and concluded that he found the Messiah. And he is Yeshua (Jesus).
First of all, allow me to briefly explain the title. The pig represents everything that is unclean to a Jew. It is unkosher. It is threatening to the Jewish mindset. In the eyes of orthodox Judaism, those who have accepted Jesus as the Messiah, both Christians and Messianic Jews, represent the ultimate uncleanness. The fact that God would take the form of a man is found to be ridiculous and scandalous. Since Jesus claimed that very identity, Judaism has labeled him as the unkosher pig, deviating from the truth of the Scriptures.
I have to admit, following all of this was very difficult for me. And I’d only made it as far as the introduction! It became very clear to me, very quickly, that Jewish though and Western thought are radically different. Western thought tends to be linear in fashion, straight and precise, based on a Greek and Latin foundation. Jewish thought, however tends more to be circular, or organic, in nature, and Hebrew reasoning is as different from Western thought as day and night. That’s a foreign way of thinking for me, and I had to take this very slow in order to understand many of the concepts that are presented in The Return Of The Kosher Pig. And I’m sure I missed much more than I captured, simply because this is so unfamiliar to me.
