The Messiah Unbound

By Andrew Grossman | Thursday, July 22, 1999

Smack between Hanover Strings and Makin' Waves sits a somewhat curious office. On the white frosted glass door is the icon of a lion, and beneath it, in ornate Semitic text, the organization's name, 'The Lion of Judah.' Their mission: 'Proclaiming Jesus, King of the Jews.'

Initially, this was as close to the mystery of the Lion of Judah as I was able to get. My phone calls and messages went unanswered. Notes slipped under the door disappeared without reply. Searching through the Internet, I was able to find only a single reference to the group, listing its address, phone number, and pastor, a Daniel Gruber. No fax, no email, no website. Yet, it was on the Internet where my exploration into the bowels of the Messianic movement began.
In Missouri, in the town of Hannibal, there is another Lion of Judah. A pleasant drive down the too-perfectly named Hope Street will bring you to their world headquarters, the residence of Ruth Bross, who demurely identifies herself as a 'facilitator' rather than pastor.

When I first called, Ruth's daughter, Lisa, answered the phone and, for a moment, didn't recognize the Lion of Judah. 'I guess you want to speak to my mom,' she quickly guessed. She was right, I did.

Ruth Bross is a product of the Midwest, this I could tell over the phone. Jolly, courteous, and optimistic, Ruth explained to me about her Lion of Judah, the name under which she schools her children and others. We discussed the upcoming Messianic Conference in Orlando and the importance of Yeshua (Jesus, in the Hebrew of the Old Testament) in everyday life. Ruth did try to convert me, but it was kind and cajoling rather than forceful; Ruth wanted to save my soul. This would be a recurring motif.

Ruth suggested that I talk with Rabbi Moshe Koniuchowsky, who operates out of Miami. Unfortunately, having recently moved she was unable to locate his website, which she checks up on frequently at the Hannibal Public Library to keep in touch with the latest developments in, well, whatever it is the Rabbi does.
The thing is, Koniuchowsky is a dynamic man, and trying to pin him down, to categorize him, in any way just defies reality. For those who don't know, Koniuchowsky is the founder and maverick publisher of Your Arms to Israel, the quarterly newsletter of scriptural teaching.

Koniuchowsky fields the most challenging questions furiously, breathing deeply as a thin layer of sweat condenses on his heaving brow. Although a stout figure, on stage he conducts himself in a lithe manner; from the pews, all of creation seems a sermon pouring forth from the Rabbi's ebullient lips. To him, the Messianic movement is 'the last great hope of the Jewish nation on the Earth' and 'the true, pure, and holy final solution to the world Jewry's place among nations.'

Like all Messianics, Koniuchowsky believes in the sanctity of the Messiah, Yeshua, and in the eventual reunification of the sons of Ephraim with the sons of Judah. This reunification will be a signal of the Messiah's 'ultimate restoration' to the world's faithful. He labels Christianity, and much of Judaism, traif (not kosher): not only unholy, but dangerously so.

One must recognize that Messianic Judaism, although unified by sweeping theological theory, is splintered in practice, the result of their disdain of overarching churches that tend to co-opt the power of God. I quickly came to know a variety of Messianic pastors, priests, and rabbis, all of whom seem unable to agree on anything, save for the sanctity of Yeshua. Through them, I would get to the heart of the movement.

Koniuchowsky's site led me to the next stop on my whirlwind Messianic tour. 'MessiahNet' is the Excite or HotWired of the Messianic movement, the centerpiece of a family of websites. Messianic leaders, rabbis, pastors, or otherwise tend to look alike. The by-line of the site's lead article points to a portly Pastor Mike Hohman, who discusses 'Living a Lifestyle of Praise and Worship,' a virtual laundry-list of taboos and traditions that would surprise even a devout Muslim by its extensiveness.

According to the pastor, '[Congregants] desire to see the latest antics made by their pastor, or favorite TV ministry, and when it is not exciting enough anymore, they leave and go to another church or turn the channel. That is where their faith level ends. Ministries play into this vicious cycle, even unintentionally, and burn themselves out trying to keep support by raising the level of the incredulous in the natural.' Surely the pastor missed the irony of his words: to describe the Messianic movement more faithfully would be a challenge.

Despite the gospel, momentous, self-styled leaders, like Koniuchowsky and Hohman, who preach with strong words and devastating parables, construct beneath them congregations of sycophantic followers to whom desertion, unimaginable, would be blasphemy incarnate. Each church is, unto itself, a singular cult of personality, unlike nearly every other in the erroneously-dubbed movement.

Although their distaste for a formalized Catholic-like Church is understandable, such larger organizations provide the institutional momentum that has kept Catholicism, Protestantism, and other religions viable in these increasingly secular times.

Yet, in the Messianic movement, evangelism still lives. Messianic sermons bring to mind the notorious radio services and great-tent revivals of the Reverend J. Charles Jessup, whose alluring blend of old-time religion and grand showmanship swept across the country nearly fifty years ago. The miracles, energy, and swooning crowds would seem more at home beneath a tent in the Midwest than in Eastern, urban Synagogues.

At one 'revival'—which Messianic meetings are increasingly being called—we witnessed the testimony of a woman whose uteral polyp simply disappeared in the days between diagnosis and surgery; we were asked to join in 'praising the wonderful surgery God had performed on me.'

A middle-aged woman gave thanks for returning her daughter, a teenage runaway; was it divine might or adolescent rebellion, perhaps against an overly-religious, over-zealous mother?

Among supplicants present was a burly working man, hopelessly mired in credit card debt; a troubled wife seeking the softness of her husband's ear; and an Internet pornography addict, temporarily derailed from the road to salvation.

These are the people who have been largely left behind by the technological and financial tidal waves of the past decade, who are increasingly lost in our cosmopolitan world. That they should retreat into the warm traditions and strong rhetoric of religion is unsurprising. While the Messianic movement offers a place for these cultural refuges, it simultaneously cuts them off, miring them further in societal debt that will one day have to be paid, if not in this generation, then by their children.

You may know them as 'Jews for Jesus,' which they consider derisive, but even the apparent contradiction of Jews believing in the Christian Messiah doesn't fully capture the historical disjunction that the movement has created around itself. Like modern witches and wizards, who practice a 19th century religion that they claim is as old as the dirt itself, the Messianics work doggedly to place themselves in the origins of Judeo-Christian mythology. They are the disenfranchised. They are the true believers whose religion has been suppressed for epochs. They are the holy in a world of misguided pagans.

Yet, they are really the misguided, the followers and those who have fallen into the trap of believing their own misinformation. The Messianic movement holds to its chest the same sources that are dear to Jews and Christians but either ignores or blatantly misinterprets them, convinced of their own eternal rightness.

Fortunately, unlike other fringe religious sects, the Branch Davidians and Aum Shinrikyo, the Messianic movement is passive, waiting for doom to fall upon the hordes of unbelievers rather than bringing it themselves. Messianics are not in the spotlight as much as their more notorious spiritual cousins, but theirs is not a victimless movement. Their religion may not even qualify as a cult, strictly speaking, but it is only a matter of degree, which may be slowly shifting in their favor.

I finally tracked down Pastor Gruber and spoke with him at the Lion of Judah's headquarters at 34 South Main Street. Entering the Lion's offices, one is immediately struck by the Jewishness of the place; the sights and chiefly the smells, which would be more appropriate in a relative's kitchen during Rosh Hashanah, make the experience overwhelming. Gruber completes the picture, with the essence of guttural Yiddish beneath his every word and his rabbinical visage, Messianic but thin. He's aware of the extremists, like Koniuchowsky, and disdains their overzealous and, perhaps, blasphemous methods. Gruber sees the movement increasingly as 'breaking into two camps' in this way and therefore enjoys the disconnectedness of Hanover, which leaves him 'isolated from such controversies.'

Gruber means well and lives strictly by his beliefs, although his explanations of the movement were historically misguided, as they must be to give his religion a place in the Judeo-Christian oligarchy. Unlike the others, Gruber has a sincere handshake and is genuinely likeable; he even tried to save me.

The Messiah Unbound

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