Religion : The Israel-Asia connection

It’s a Friday noon and I’m walking in Jerusalem’s downtown area. There’s good weather and it’s relatively quiet. Some people are doing their shopping, others sitting down at coffee places sipping coffee. I walk down the street slowly, dodging a few ultra-orthodox Jews who try and convince me to take part in for a quick prayer only to face a strange looking person, white beard in sack clothing shouting out loud – "Behold, the Children of Israel, for it is I – God – who calls upon you on this day… God of Abraham, Isaac and Jaacob… Jesus… Salvation… Repent… We are one".

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That day I was bored as hell. Sure, I had plenty of things to do – some work I needed to finish, some papers I needed to make progress on, but doing all that at home was boring and I got tired very quickly. The usual cure in cases like that is to combine all those activities with my number one hobby – perfected in my Asia tour – "people watching". I put the laptop in my bag, get my self a bottle of ice-water and head out to town. For me – there’s always something interesting happening there, even if there’s nothing happening there at all.

I stop and stare at this guy, who – with all the Jewish and Muslim crowd going about – could be getting him self into a whole lot of trouble. Jerusalem is very religion sensitive and what ever it is you do – you should watch out for anybody who might be offended by what you’re saying. He was going on and on, preaching the world of God to God’s chosen people, namely Jewish people, to come back and embrace Jesus. He was on a roll, and was a bit hard to follow, especially when the by-standers started making fun of him.

I must admit I was enjoying the show and that I was very curious to hear what the guy has to say and how this whole situation would turn out.

After about 2 minutes of staring at him, a Korean girl came up to me and quietly asked me about my thoughts. Her Hebrew accent was perfect, and when I told her I figured from her accent that she was born here she was kind enough to share her intriguing life story with me about the "Messianic Judaism"  religion – Jews who believe in Christ, following both the old and the new testament. She was also curious hearing about my personal journey with religion. We both had a lot of questions so by the time we both got tired the preacher and the whole crowd were long gone.

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I still have a hard time with western-world religions in places like Asia, embraced by Asians, and I can’t really say why. The growing power of Christianity that I’ve seen in Taiwan and have heard about in Korea and China is an issue that has been on my mind for a long while.

Whether or not this thing makes sense or not, it is something that’s happening regardless. In an peculiar way – Christianity and "Messianic Judaism" form the strongest connection that Israel has with Asia and Asians, and the way I see it – that has to be a good thing.