A Match Made in Heaven

by Zev Chafets

  A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN

  American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man’s Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance

  ZEV CHAFETS

  For June McGinn, my hero’s hero.

  And for Ella, my baby’s baby.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  AMONG THE CHRISTIANS

  1 Jews for Jesus

  2 In the Beginning

  3 The Grocery Store at the End of the World

  4 Cell Phone Conversion

  5 Doc and the Pat

  6 Revenge of the Mainline

  7 A Fly on the Wailing Wall

  PART TWO

  IS IT GOOD FOR THE JEWS?

  8 The Kingdom Guy

  9 Foxman’s Complaint

  10 Iraq: “It’s Not My Problem”

  11 Jews Are Democrats, Israelis Are Republicans

  12 Eric in Wonderland

  PART THREE

  AFTERWORD: WARTIME

  13 Summer Camp

  14 Yes for an Answer

  Acknowledgments

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by Zev Chafets

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  AMONG THE CHRISTIANS

  ONE

  JEWS FOR JESUS

  I’ve been keeping a sharp eye on Christians ever since an eleven-year-old first baseman named Monroe informed me that I, one of the Chosen People, would be going to hell when I died. It wasn’t a threat, or a recruiting pitch. He didn’t care. It was just a piece of information he had picked up at the Emmanuel Baptist Church Sunday school, in Pontiac, Michigan. We were Little League teammates, and he figured I should know.

  The warning seemed absurd to me. I went to school with Christians. They were my neighbors. I learned to ride my bike in the parking lot of the Grace Lutheran Church, across the street from my house. The house was built by my grandfather in the 1930s, a place where my mother grew up before me. There were very few Jews around during my childhood. Mostly I knew Christians, and it had never occurred to me that, dead or alive, they were going someplace I wasn’t.

  Naturally I knew that Christians came in different varieties. The Sicilian kids went to Catholic school and put ashes on their heads every year around Easter. I saw different preachers on television on Sunday mornings, too. Oral Roberts was my favorite; I loved the way he pounded people on the skull, healing them in the name of Jesus and issuing dire threats to the unsaved. I regarded this as entertainment, plain and simple, something along the lines of pro wrestling.

  But after Monroe’s warning, I became interested in Emmanuel Baptist Church, and the more I leaned, the more interested I got. I found out it had its own football team, the Crusaders. The pastor, Reverend Tom Malone, owned a personal airplane—more than enough to qualify him as a celebrity in the Pontiac of the 1950s. In the summer, Malone held tent revivals in the empty lot next to his church. Sometimes I’d cruise by on my bike, just to hear the muffled shouting and singing going on inside. I didn’t venture in myself, but I put it on my list of future adventures.

  I was in high school when a traveling evangelist named Hyman Appleman came to town. He was a Russian-born Jew who found Jesus in Denver in 1925. I heard him tell his story on the local radio station in a Yiddish accent and I was determined to enter the big top and see him for myself.

  I enlisted a friend, Jim Embree, as a guide. He was an Episcopalian who had never been to a Baptist revival in his life, but I figured he’d have some idea what to do. I figured he would give me a little cover, and possibly even some tent cred.

  Appleman preached that night in his comical brogue, telling mildly sarcastic anecdotes at the expense of the Chosen People. My fellow worshippers guffawed, and I laughed right along with them. He struck me as a buffoon. Only later did I learn he was a world-famous evangelist and an early influence on Billy Graham. “Thousands of names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life because Dr. Appleman passed their way,” Graham has remarked.

  Appleman finished his stem-winder and instructed the congregation to close their eyes. “If there is anyone here who hasn’t been saved by the Lord Jesus, I want him to raise his hand,” he said. My friend showed his Protestant smarts by keeping his hands in his lap. I raised mine. I didn’t know that spotters were deployed throughout the crowd. By the time I opened my eyes they were on me, half a dozen hyperexcited Baptists imploring me to come forward and accept Jesus. I tried to politely refuse but they didn’t want to hear it. Someone handed me a little information card and a ballpoint. I could picture an evangelical posse turning up at my house the next day if I filled it out. So I did what any young. self-respecting Jew would have done—I wrote down the name and address of the local rabbi and hotfooted it out of the tent. I wasn’t saved that night, but I came closer than any Chafets ever had, and I found the foray into foreign territory exhilarating.

  MICHIGAN IN THOSE days was a great place for a kid with an eye for exotic religious practitioners. I became a devotee of Prophet Jones, the ecstatic black spiritualist preacher who wore a crown and an ermine robe, spoke directly to Jesus on a disconnected telephone during Sunday night ser vices, sometimes threatened to strike inattentive members of his congregation dead, and gave sermons with titles such as “God Don’t Like Women.” Eventually the Prophet was run out of Detroit by the vice squad for what was then regarded as illicit sexual activity, leaving behind a fifty-four-room mansion painted blue, a closet of expensive outfits, and a coterie of passionate admirers.

  Father Charles Coughlin was another favorite of mine. During the Depression he had been a nationally famous radio preacher who specialized in railing against Jewish communists, bankers, and warmongers (1930s versions of the euphemism “neocon”). Coughlin’s followers marched in the streets of Detroit chanting, “Send the Jews back where they came from in leaky boats.”

  World War II was hard on Father Coughlin. He bet on fascism and lost. By the time I caught up with him, in the 1960s, he was a spent force, a red-faced old priest who looked like he would be willing to drink hair tonic. I made it a point of attending Christmas mass at his Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak in suburban Detroit. I’d sit in the rear of the huge church and think, ‘This guy would drop dead if he knew I was in the audience.”

  Around this time a local Reform rabbi named Sherwin Wine announced that he didn’t believe in God and that he was starting a congregation for Jewish atheists. This seemed perfectly natural to me. Most of the Jews I knew in Pontiac were Reform Jews. Their denomination (and mine) in those days was almost entirely about civil rights. We didn’t speak to one another about God. Our prayers, such as they were, consisted primarily of reflections on an abstract being who resembled Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Bible was second-rate Shakespeare. To the extent we read it at all, we concentrated on those prophets whose teachings were in line with Pete Seeger. The Holocaust was never discussed. Israel was a foreign country.

  I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan in May 1967, when Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran and mobilized troops in the Sinai. This was an obvious act of war intended to choke Israel’s most vulnerable shipping lane. Even from my distant perch, it was pretty clear there would have to be a response. I heard military analysts on television predicting that Israel would lose an all-out fight with the Egyptians and their Arab allies. I read in the papers that Israeli citizens were being called into the military reserves and teenagers were digging mass graves in Tel Aviv.

  One day I got a call from a friend in Massachusetts, Eric Yoffie. We had known each other from camp, and we were both active in the National Federation of Temple Youth. Eric said tha
t the Jewish Agency, a group I had never heard of, was signing up volunteers to take the place of Israelis called up to fight.

  Eric was going. Did I want to come too? To my surprise, I did.

  I passed a mandatory physical and bought a trunkload of surplus gear suitable for a safari from Joe’s Army and Navy. We were scheduled to take off on June 5. That morning the war broke out and we were bumped off our flight by returning Israeli reservists. By the time we were rescheduled, the fighting was all over. They don’t call it the Six-Day War for nothing.

  I got to Israel anyway, two months later, as a junior year abroad student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. My goal was to learn a little Hebrew and maybe pick up a few Jewish customs. I expected to be in Israel for an academic year, but within a month I knew I was staying permanently.

  I had my reasons. Some were pretty trivial: I loved Jerusalem’s mild weather and the girls were sexy. Others were more grandiose: I was thrilled and honored, in the self-centered way only an American baby boomer could be, to find myself a member of the first generation in two thousand years to live in a Jewish country. All this for me! I was also delighted to learn that you didn’t have to be a nice Jewish boy to be a Jew in good standing. Some Americans were put off by the rough manners and macho posturing of Israelis, but I loved being in a place where the Jews got to be the gentiles.

  It was in Jerusalem that year that I saw, for the first time in my life, men and women with concentration camp numbers on their arms. I had been raised to consider Hitler from an American perspective—a wartime enemy. Suddenly I took the Nazis personally. It seemed wrong that people who had gone through the camps could again be in mortal danger, twenty years later. I began to feel that the fight for Israel, like the fight for racial integration in the United States, was an obviously moral cause. I was embarrassed to leave it to the children of the people with the numbers on their arms.

  I WAS IN Israel in 1969, when I got drafted by the American army. I had two choices: go back and serve or stay in Israel. Draft evasion was a federal crime punishable by $10,000 and five years in prison. Since there had never been any amnesties for draft dodgers, I figured that whatever I decided would be a lifelong choice.

  I loved America. My family was there, and in the days before direct-dial telephone and the Internet, Israel was, in my mother’s mordant phrase, “in Asia.” Israel had the economy of a Warsaw Pact nation and a standard of living to match. Musically, it was still behind the Irving Berlin Wall. The only sport was kickball (known to the rest of the world as soccer). I had no job, no close relatives, no profession, and no prospects. I barely spoke the language. Who could resist?

  I wrote to my draft board in Pontiac and said, “Sorry.” Instead, I served in the Israeli army. I didn’t exactly tip the balance of power in the Middle East, but I felt I was doing something important in a place where I was needed.

  The Palestinian issue was just becoming trendy, and some of my Jewish friends at the University of Michigan had a hard time understanding my decision. Why would I want to live in a country the Black Panthers didn’t approve of? How could I fight Arabs? Weren’t they on the same revolutionary side as the Vietcong?

  I was never bothered by this particular scruple. The way I saw it (and still do), the Arabs had a lot of legitimate grievances, and if I were an Arab myself I’d probably be on the Arab side. But I was a Jew. Besides, I didn’t think the Arabs had behaved very well, starting with their invasion of Israel at its inception in 1948. You have to be a special kind of jerk to attack people fresh out of the concentration camps, no matter how upset you are with the idea of living next to them.

  The big issue when I first came to Israel was the future of the territories Israel conquered in the Six-Day War, but the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria had no special religious or emotional meaning to me. If the Arabs wanted them back in return for peace, fine. If they didn’t—and they made that clear at an Arab League summit in the fall of 1967 by declaring a policy of “no negotiation, no recognition and no peace” that they didn’t—that was fine, too. I was raised during the cold war and I took protracted conflicts more or less in stride.

  Besides, I couldn’t really buy into the Israeli left’s notion that giving back the territories to the Arabs was a moral imperative. I noticed that a lot of the Israelis making this argument lived in houses or on kibbutzim that had belonged to Arabs before 1948. Many had businesses that relied on cheap Arab labor. Still, hypocrisy isn’t a capital crime, and I was too busy getting acclimated in my new country to worry about mere ideology.

  Meanwhile, back in the States, the FBI was now officially on my case. When agents staged a surprise inspection on Christmas Eve, my mother helpfully informed them that we were Jews and that it would be much more sensible to search for me on Passover. That way the agents could spend next Christmas with their families. When I heard this I had to laugh. My mother was too American to be mean to the FBI. On the other hand, she knew damn well that I wasn’t going to try to sneak into Michigan to attend a family seder.

  AFTER FINISHING THE army, I answered an ad in the newspaper and landed a job with the Liberal Party, the junior partner in what was to become the Likud. The Liberals were a secular petit bourgeois faction with no ideology greater than tax avoidance. Issues of war and peace were left to the senior partner, Herut, and its leader, Menachem Begin. Begin had run for prime minister in every election since 1949, and lost every time. No one expected a different outcome in the future.

  When Begin won the 1977 election, there were more senior government positions than Likudniks to fill them. I was appointed director of the Government Press Office, a position that was something like the White House director of communications. I was twenty-nine years old.

  As the only American on Begin’s staff, I was occasionally consulted on issues relating to my native country—especially after it became clear that the Israeli embassy in Washington, staffed by holdovers from the Labor years, wasn’t being very helpful. One of the things I was asked about was Christian Zionists—evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who wanted to establish relations with the government of Israel.

  I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic. To me, these Christian Zionists were evangelists like Pontiac’s Reverend Tom Malone. But Israel didn’t suffer from an overabundance of friends, and gradually I began to see that Christian Zionists were politically useful, even if their hypersincerity was a bit off-putting.

  I don’t mean to suggest that my opinion was in any way crucial. Menachem Begin liked evangelicals from the start. They believed, as he did, that the Bible gave Israel a deed to the Holy Land. They supported his policies. And they were willing to go to the mat for him against Jimmy Carter over the issue of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

  Begin’s office became a destination for visiting Christian Zionist celebrities. One day Johnny Cash and June Carter came by for a photo op. Cash was a lover of biblical history and came to see Begin directly from a visit to Masada, the mountain fortress where Jewish zealots had, two thousand years earlier, staged a sort of kosher Alamo in their futile rebellion against the Roman conquerors of Palestine. The early Zionists adopted Masada as a symbol of steadfastness and courage. When Cash told Begin he had been there, the prime minister slammed his hand down on his desk and proclaimed, “Masada will never fall again!” The Man in Black was so startled he nearly jumped out of his cowboy boots.

  The American Jewish leadership was scandalized and outraged by the company Begin was keeping. Most of the Jewish grandees were liberals who had never met an evangelical Christian and didn’t want to. They disagreed with Begin’s settlement policy and saw (correctly) that it would lead to a clash with the Carter administration. They were also put off by Begin’s European looks and Jewish mannerisms. The Jews of New York and Los Angeles wanted Sabra heroes like the dashing, one-eyed warrior Moshe Dayan. Begin reminded them of their uncle Louie in dry goods.

  This didn’t bother the evangelicals a bit. Beg
in suited their notion of what a Jewish prime minister ought to be. He called them “Reverend” and swapped Old Testament quotes with them. The prime minister was a man who divided the world into three parts: Us (the Jews), Them (the gentiles), and Me. He didn’t judge Christians by where they went to college, their rural accents, or, for that matter, what political party they belonged to (at this stage, the late 1970s, many, including Pat Robertson, were still Democrats, although they were quickly trending Republican). The Christian Zionists supported Begin’s policies, and that was enough.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. I supported the war and defended it to the international press. The PLO had created an armed, hostile ministate on Israel’s northern border (just as Hezbollah did a generation later), and having grown up a bridge away from Canada, I believed that sovereign states had a right to expect peace and quiet from their neighbors.

  The Christians of Lebanon were allies of Israel in the war, and Begin was happy to have them. They were impressive fellows, but unfortunately, Begin overestimated their fighting spirit and underestimated their hatred of the Palestinians. After Israel conquered Beirut in the late summer of 1982, Christian militiamen massacred Palestinian Muslims in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

  Israel was blamed for this, and rightly so: occupying powers have the obligation to protect civilians. But Begin bitterly resented the charge that he was responsible. “Christians murder Muslims and they blame the Jews,” he said. “This is a blood libel.”