Rabbenu
A Discussion of Messianic Judaism, the Emerging Messianic Jewish Paradigm, and Related Leadership Issues from the Preoccupied Mind of Rabbi Stuart Dauermann, PhD.
All Contents ©2004-2007 Stuart Dauermann - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Saturday, June 03, 2006
The Shavuot Blessing
(This is a Sermon for Shabbat Shavuot, presented June 3, 2006 at Ahavat Zion Messianic Synagogue, Beverly Hills, CA. It concerns the quality of life which should be the norm of all who claim to be part of Yeshua's Messianic people, a quality of life too often conspicuous in its absence.)
Today we are celebrating Shavuot, the time when we give thanks for both the gift of the Torah/Scriptures and the gift of the Spirit, this, in addition to the original agricultural significance of the holy day.
As Messianic Jews, we believe that through Yeshua’s faithfulness and our faith in Him, we become heirs of a deeper relationship with the Scriptures and with the Presence of God than is otherwise possible, what we might call “The Shavuot Blessing.” Consider this statement from the Prophet Jeremiah.
31 "Here, the days are coming," says ADONAI, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Isra'el and with the house of Y'hudah. . . . 33 "For this is the covenant I will make with the house of Isra'el after those days," says ADONAI: "I will put my Torah within them and write it on their hearts; I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34 No longer will any of them teach his fellow community member or his brother, 'Know ADONAI'; for all will know me, from the least of them to the greatest; because I will forgive their wickednesses and remember their sins no more."
Three blessings are promised here: forgiveness of sins, deeper relationship with God, and a more intimate relationship with God’s word. Today, we are going to concentrate on the latter two blessings— a deeper relationship with God and with Torah/Scripture.
We learn from the Prophet Joel that, through the Shavuot blessing, we all become “prophets” in a sense—that is, we become heirs to a prophetic kind of intimacy with God. This is why our Newer Covenant passage, referencing Joel, says this:
14 Then Kefa stood up with the Eleven and raised his voice to address them: "You Judeans, and all of you staying here in Yerushalayim! Let me tell you what this means! Listen carefully to me! 15 "These people aren't drunk, as you suppose - it's only nine in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken about through the prophet Yo'el: 17 'ADONAI says: "In the Last Days, I will pour out from my Spirit upon everyone. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. 18 Even on my slaves, both men and women, will I pour out from my Spirit in those days; and they will prophesy.
This brings me to a question for all of us, a question I have been pondering for a while, and here it is: If we are supposed to have this supernatural intimacy with God and with His Word, where is it? Please, it is not enough to say “The Bible says we have it therefore we have it!” Frankly, too few of the Yeshua believers I know experience any sort of remarkable intimacy with God and with His Word. The best we can say is “The Bible says we should have it, but where is it, and how do I get it?”
Let’s take a deeper look at this prophetic relationship with God by examining today’s haftarah from the Prophet Habbakuk, who lived and prophesied during the time when Judah was attacked by the Babylonians, and the Temple destroyed. This is why, at the beginning of the book that bears his name, the Prophet Habakkuk says this:
How long, O Hashem, will I cry and and You not hear me: how long will I cry out to you regarding injustice and You not save? Why do you allow me to see iniquity and You look at evil deeds, with robbery and injustice before you while the one who carries strife and contention still remains? That is why the Torah is weakened and justice never emerges. Since the wicked surround the righteous, therefore justice emerges distorted. Look among the nations and observe, and be utterly astounded, for God is bringing about an oocurrence in your days that you will not believe when it is related. For behold, I am establishing the Chaldeans, that bitter and impetuous nation that will go across the breadth of the earth to possess dwelling places not its own. . . . It comes utterly for plunder. [Habakkuk 1:2-6, 9].
As we examine today’s Haftarah, chapter three of the prophecy, notice the texture of the prophet’s spirituality—feel the grain of it. What is going on in this man’s relationship with God?
Chapter 3
1 A prayer of the prophet Habakkuk. In the mode of Shigionoth.
2 O Lord! I have learned of Your renown;
I am awed, O Lord, by Your deeds.
Renew them in these years,
Oh, make them known in these years!
Though angry, may You remember compassion.
17 Though the fig tree does not bud
And no yield is on the vine,
Though the olive crop has failed
And the fields produce no grain,
Though sheep have vanished from the fold
And no cattle are in the pen,
18 Yet will I rejoice in the Lord,
Exult in the God who delivers me.
19 My Lord God is my strength:
He makes my feet like the deer's
And lets me stride upon the heights.
Let’s take Habakkuk as the prototype of the prophetic people of God, whom we are supposed to be. What characteristics of such people can we identify here? I detect seven.
Seven Characteristics Of People of Prophetic Faith Who Know the Shavuot Blessing
1) They are people whose prophetic faith is due to Holy Spirit enduement.
2) They are persons of prayer, so much so that they even write down their own personal prayers, at least at times.
3) They know the Scriptures, and study them as a habit of life
4) They have trusting faith that the Scriptures are a dependable record of the dramatic interventions of God.
5) They deeply long to see these works and deeds renewed in their own day.
6) They trust in the faithfulness of God despite dire threat and circumstance and God’s apparent absence.
7) They live out their spirituality in the givenness of their social context—as members of their people and their context, contemporaneously connected.
Let’s look at these characteristics briefly, each in turn.
1) They are people whose prophetic faith is due to Holy Spirit enduement.
Clearly, prophets were people who were especially anointed by the Ruach haKodesh the Holy Spirit. This is axiomatic in the Bible, as may be seen, for example, in Bamidbar/Numbers, chapter 11:
24 So Moses went out and told the people the words of the LORD; and he gathered seventy men of the elders of the people, and placed them round about the tent. 25 Then the LORD came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was upon him and put it upon the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did so no more. 26 Now two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad, and the spirit rested upon them; they were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, and so they prophesied in the camp. 27 And a young man ran and told Moses, "Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp." 28 And Joshua the son of Nun, the minister of Moses, one of his chosen men, said, "My lord Moses, forbid them." 29 But Moses said to him, "Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the LORD's people were prophets, that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!"
In a very real sense, the anointing of the Spirit of which the Messianic Jewish Day of Shavuot speaks, and of which Joel prophesies as mentioned in today’s Newer Covenant reading, is God’s affirmative response to Moses’ prayer.
In addition to being part of the chosen people, Messianic Jews know ourselves to be those who are made right with God through the faithfulness of Yeshua, our Messiah, leading to an assurance of such right standing for those who have faith in Him. We also know ourselves to be in Messiah and he in us—there is a mystical union whereby He is the vine and we are the branches, and as we abide in union with Him we bear much fruit. But on top of this, more than anything else, the early Yeshua believers knew themselves to be the community of the Spirit. As one scholar puts it, “the sect of the Nazarenes was marked out within first-century Judaism by its claim to have been given the Spirit of God in a new and exceptional way” [James Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998:417]. It seems clear that there was a widespread belief in Second Temple Judaism that the prophetic Spirit had been withdrawn from Israel, such that prophetic activity had ceased. But the early Yeshua believers claimed to be that community upon which and through whom the prophetic spirit had returned to Israel.
The Newer Testament is unself-conscious in repeatedly making reference to the fact that the early Yeshua believers were the community of the Spirit, so that, for example, Paul could ask the Galatians “did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by the hearing of faith?” This question would have been nonsensical unless the Galatians knew themselves experientially to be the community of the Spirit. Similarly, in Ephesians, Paul speaks of the Spirit having been given to us as a downpayment on the greater inheritance we are yet to receive. This also makes no sense unless the Ephesians had an experiential sense of having received that downpayment.
So fundamental is this gift of the Spirit to Messianic self-consciousness, that Paul could say this in Romans Chapter 8:9 But you, you do not identify with your old nature but with the Spirit - provided the Spirit of God is living inside you, for anyone who doesn't have the Spirit of the Messiah doesn't belong to him.
He continues:
11 . . . if the Spirit of the One who raised Yeshua from the dead is living in you, then the One who raised the Messiah Yeshua from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you. 12 So then, brothers, we don't owe a thing to our old nature that would require us to live according to our old nature. 13 For if you live according to your old nature, you will certainly die; but if, by the Spirit, you keep putting to death the practices of the body, you will live. 14 All who are led by God's Spirit are God's sons. 15 For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to bring you back again into fear; on the contrary, you received the Spirit, who makes us sons and by whose power we cry out, "Abba!" (that is, "Dear Father!"). 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our own spirits that we are children of God; 17 and if we are children, then we are also heirs, heirs of God and joint-heirs with the Messiah - provided we are suffering with him in order also to be glorified with him[Romans 8:11-17].
Of course, ultimately, we Messianic believers are supposed to be people of the Spirit because this was the case for our Messiah, whose first words of public ministry in Nazareth, referring to the Prophecy of Israiah, were these: “18 The Spirit of ADONAI is upon me; because he has anointed me to announce Good News to the poor; he has sent me to proclaim freedom for the imprisoned and renewed sight for the blind, to release those who have been crushed, 19 to proclaim a year of the favor of ADONAI."
2) They are persons of prayer, so much so that they even write down their own personal prayers, at least at times.
Clearly, the prophets were people of prayer, Habakkuk was a person of prayer—prayerful communion with God, struggle with God, praise of God, all took place in an almost continual dialogue with God, which was the atmosphere in which the prophets lived, moved and had their being. Prayer was not so much something they did, as it was the air they breathed, and the environment in which they encountered and interacted with the Holy One.
We read of Yeshua as well, “he made a practice of withdrawing to remote places in order to pray”( Luke 5:16). As is the case with the Prophets, and certainly with our Messiah, of we are people of the prophetic Spirit, if we are people who know and exhibit the Shavuot Blessing, we must become and remain people for whom prayer is our spiritual oxygen—the environment where we strengthen and sustain our life in God.
3) They know the Scriptures and their holy tradition, and study them as a habit of life
Habakkuk, others of the prophets, Yeshua and the Emissaries, and prophetic people of God throughout the ages are not only people of the Spirit, as evidenced in an ongoing and growing life of prayer. They are also people whose spiritual vitality is sustained and nurtured through living in the Scriptures.
It is not simply a matter of knowledge, so that a person could say, “O, I already know the Bible, I’ve read it many times.” That is like a person saying, “O, I know what food and drink taste like! I’ve eaten and drank many times!’ One must revisit the food of the Word again and again, or else one risks spiritually withering and dying, just as surely as the person who foolishly stops eating. And by the way: if you don’t have much of an appetite for the Bible, do not fear. It is an appetite that grows with the feeding—the more you prayerfully and intensely interact with the Scriptures, the more you feel sustained by them and the “hungrier” you will get.
But if you do not know, study, and live in the Scriptures and in the intergenerational dialogue of your community concerning them [also known as tradition], then you will almost certainly not have a vibrant, real, Shavuot Blessing relationship with God. Your spiritual life will be anemic, flat, isolated and dead.
4) They have trusting faith that the Scriptures are a dependable record of the dramatic interventions of God.
We all need not only the gift of the Spirit, of prayer, and of the Scriptures, we also need the gift of faith, and faith is a gift—it is something that is kindled in our hearts by God, whether we realize or not. This is why, whenever you feel faith stirring, when you find yourself unaccountably drawn to or excited by something connected with the things of God, it is a good idea to pay attention to that—carefully tend these now warm embers of faith, and to ask God to blow upon them by the wind of His Spirit. In addition, we should each cultivate in ourselves a confidence that the Bible is the reliable account of what God did among people just like us, in times past, and of what God stands ready to do in the future and even in our day. We need to read, and pray in an atmosphere of trust, of hope, of anticipation. Paul puts it this way: “everything written in the past was written to teach us, so that with the encouragement of the Tanakh we might patiently hold on to our hope” (Romans 15:4).
5) They deeply long to see these works and deeds renewed in their own day.
Holy people, prophetic people, God’s people, will be people of longing—people who want to see the hand of the Lord in the land of the living.
“ADONAI, turn us back to you; and we will come back; renew our days, as they were in the past” [Lam 5:21]
Adonai, all my longing is known to you; my sighing is not hidden from you [Psalm 38:9]
“My soul yearns, yes, faints with longing for the courtyards of ADONAI; my heart and body cry for joy to the living God” [Psalm 84:2]
“Just as a deer longs for running streams, God, I long for you. 2 I am thirsty for God, for the living God! When can I come and appear before God? 3 My tears are my food, day and night, while all day people ask me, "Where is your God?" 4 I recall, as my feelings well up within me, how I'd go with the crowd to the house of God, with sounds of joy and praise from the throngs observing the festival. 5 My soul, why are you so downcast? Why are you groaning inside me? Hope in God, since I will praise him again for the salvation that comes from his presence” [Psalm 42:1-5]
27 "Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say - "Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." [John 12:21-28].
“1 After Yeshua had said these things, he looked up toward heaven and said, "Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, so that the Son may glorify you -- 2 just as you gave him authority over all mankind, so that he might give eternal life to all those whom you have given him. 3 And eternal life is this: to know you, the one true God, and him whom you sent, Yeshua the Messiah. 4 "I glorified you on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. 5 Now, Father, glorify me alongside yourself. Give me the same glory I had with you before the world existed” [John 17:1-5]
Glorifying the Father, seeking the glory and honor of God was Yeshua’s core motivation.. If we are people of the Spirit, the same will be true for us—we will want to see God glorified, and we will want to finish the work we sense he wants us to do in the world. Why? For His Name’s sake.
6) They trust in the faithfulness of God despite dire threat and circumstance and God’s apparent absence.
Lately I have been praying in the Psalms, and I have been repeatedly struck with how the Psalmist cries out to God in faith, and praises God, remembering His great faithfulness, amidst threatening and dire circumstances. Too many people run hot and cold on God—when things go well, they have a good word to say about Him, but when things are going badly, they either have nothing to say, have something negative to say, they complain about Him, or want to bail out on the whole religion thing. Such people do not really know what the Scriptures and the history of God’s people have to teach us. People who know the Shavuot Blessing will be people whose faith in God, whose praise of God, whose expectation of God, are not responses to pleasant circumstances, and are not quenched by threat and disaster. No: such people give evidence that they know God and His character, even when they do not know what God is doing or where He seems to have disappeared to. They trust in the faithfulness of God despite dire threat and circumstance and despite God’s apparent absense.
7) They live out their spirituality in the givenness of their social context—as members of their people and their context, contemporaneously connected.
This kind of spirituality and relationship with God is not an isolated, private thing, it is not the province of loners. This kind of prophetic spirituality is demonstrated, proven, and nurtured in the full orb of human social identity and relationship. Such people demonstrate themselves to be part of their people, and part of their people’s history with God. They are not hermits and superstars but prove what they are made of in how they relate to family, friends, the people of God, general society, the school, the workplace, the marketplace, the worlds of entertainment, commerce, ideas, education, politics. They demonstrate how they are related to God by how they relate to others. And again, they are not isolated, but see themselves as rooted in their people and their people’s heritage of faith, living respectful of that heritage and taking responsibility to pass that heritage on to others.
By way of summary, think of matters this way:
1) Yeshua is our link with God
2) The Scriptures are our outlook from God
3) The Holy Spirit is the Life of God among us
4) Faith is our outlook toward God
5) Our longing is for the will of God to be accomplished in our time
6) Our perseverance is a life of long of obedience in the same direction
7) Our connection is living as part of our people, contemporaneously connected.
"The essential thing in heaven and earth is ….that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living." [Friedrich Nietzsche, of all people, also quoted by Eugene Peterson in his book, “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction”].
I am suggesting today that without these seven things working together in our lives, and without us working on all of them as a habit of life, we will fail to experience and demonstrate the quality of life which we claim to be ours and which Yeshua came to provide. We will fail to enter into the Shavuot Blessing, we will fail to exhibit prophetic faith. Conversely, the more we give ourselves to these priorities and the disciplines and habits of life that support them, the deeper will be our relationship with God, with the Scriptures, and with that life which is truly worth living.
posted by Stuart Dauermann @ 8:28 PM
11 comments
"Yeshua is our link with God"
Are you saying this is your experiential truth for you and your congregation?
Or are you saying that Yeshua is everyone's link with God?
Do you think it possible for people to have a link with God without a conscious understanding and acceptance of Yeshua?
What would you tell an observant Jew his/her link with God is?
Thank you for your thoughts.
In the context of this blog posting, my intention was to refer to those of us who, recognizing Yeshua as the Messiah, consciously rely upon Him as our link to God, through the atonement He provided and his High Priestly ministry.
I believe that there is an intimacy with God and an experience of "a foretaste of the Age go come" available to people who have such conscious and lively faith in Yeshua.
However, this is not to say, as some are wont to say, that Yeshu has NO ministry to the faithfulo of Israel who do not consciously rely upon Him. My conviction is that Yeshua is the High Priest of ALL Israel, but that those of us who know that and consciously rely upon Him have "boldness of access through our faith in Him' [as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes], and a certain "kavvanah" which comes through this conscious and intimate reliance.
What would I tell an observant Jew his/her link with God is? Good question. I think it might be more than a trifle presumptuous for me to "rule" on such matters!
I am working on being humble. In sixty-one years I have not succeeded, but I am still working on it.
Thanks for writing!
Something needing emphasis, mentioned at the start of my posting, but too easy to miss, is the fact that Messianic Jews who know the Shavout Blessing will be people whose "long obedience in the same direction" will involve a renewed relationship with Torah, not simply by way of subjective experience [delight, insight, etc.] but rather conformity to Torah. Paul himself picks up on this idea when, in Romans 8, he mentions that through the Spirit, we ought to be people in whom the righteous requirements of Torah are fully met. One ought not to blithely contrast obedience to Torah and the life of the Spirit, as too many are apt to do.
What would I tell an observant Jew his/her link with God is? Good question. I think it might be more than a trifle presumptuous for me to "rule" on such matters!
But this is not presumptuous?
"Paul himself picks up on this idea..."
Stop ducking the issue.
You have already said:
27 And a young man ran and told Moses, "Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp." 28 And Joshua the son of Nun, the minister of Moses, one of his chosen men, said, "My lord Moses, forbid them." 29 But Moses said to him, "Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the LORD's people were prophets, that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!"
and
"In addition to being part of the chosen people, Messianic Jews know ourselves to be those who are made right with God through the faithfulness of Yeshua, our Messiah, leading to an assurance of such right standing for those who have faith in Him. We also know ourselves to be in Messiah and he in us—there is a mystical union whereby He is the vine and we are the branches, and as we abide in union with Him we bear much fruit. But on top of this, more than anything else, the early Yeshua believers knew themselves to be the community of the Spirit. As one scholar puts it, “the sect of the Nazarenes was marked out within first-century Judaism by its claim to have been given the Spirit of God in a new and exceptional way” [James Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998:417]. It seems clear that there was a widespread belief in Second Temple Judaism that the prophetic Spirit had been withdrawn from Israel, such that prophetic activity had ceased. But the early Yeshua believers claimed to be that community upon which and through whom the prophetic spirit had returned to Israel."
Stop dancing and answer the question.
I am not dancing. I cannot dance, which is which is why God made me a piano player [my first profession].
You seem to want me to categorically rule non-Yeshua-believing Jews out of the realm of spiritual life and vitality.
That has never been my profession.
I have already indicated in an earlier comment that I believe that Yeshua-faith opens to us vistas of assurance and spirituality not otherwise accessible in this life. However, I do not believe that I must therefore "rule" that Jews lacking explicit Yeshua faith have nothing and we have everything.
I continue to believe that presumptuous at best. You consider it ducking and dancing.
Such disagreeements are part of the spice of life.
Shalom.
"I have already indicated in an earlier comment that I believe that Yeshua-faith opens to us vistas of assurance and spirituality not otherwise accessible in this life."
" I do not believe that I must therefore "rule" that Jews lacking explicit Yeshua faith have nothing and we have everything."
As the leader of a Messianic congregation, you should be able to identify
in specific terms
what Jews gain by believing in Yeshua
....if Jews would actually benefit from this belief at all.
We know you believe that Messianics would gain a great deal by becoming more Jewish.
What would be the benefit(s) of Jews becoming a Messianic?
"As the leader of a Messianic congregation, you should be able to identify
in specific terms
what Jews gain by believing in Yeshua
....if Jews would actually benefit from this belief at all.
We know you believe that Messianics would gain a great deal by becoming more Jewish.
What would be the benefit(s) of Jews becoming a Messianic?"
A short answer. (1) Assurance of forgiveness of sins and certainty of peace with God; (2) Assurance of life in the Age to Come; (3) An intimacy with God in the Ruach HaKodesh, complete with spiritual gifts and graces not otherwise avaialble; (4) The great joy of knowing that by "believing in the one whom He sent" [John 6} one is honoring the God of our ancestors;
There is more, but this will have to do for now.
And if you are my normal arguing interlocutor, who constantly wants me to admit that Jews who do not believe in Jesus are necessarily without hope and without God in the world [as Paul said of Pagans, not Jews!], lest you come back and argue that on the basis of my argument here therefore, Jews who do NOT believe in Yeshua necessarily have none of these things, I will state that by doing so you violate the nature of grace. It is the nature of being a recipient of grace that one cannot deny it to others--that is really the province of the Master who has extended undeserved grace to you. It is unseemly at the very least to do otherwise.
Although Jews not believing in Yeshua may lack assurance in the areas I outline, and will, in my view, not experience the influx of the Divine Spirit and his gifts and graces made available in Yeshua, I cannot, will not, and must not, therefore consign them to the outer darkness, cerftainly not to satisfy persons whose theological convictions demand such tight and snug categorical corners.
I am reminded of the parable of the laborers in the Vineyard who each receive the same payment from the Master. He rebuked those who believed it unjust for Him to give to others what he had given to those who worked harder and longer. He reminded them it was all of grace, and that it was his right to give what he wished to whom he wished.
It is still that way.
When John said, "In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God and the Word was God."
Do you think John was talking about Yeshua?
What I think is kind of besides the point. It is clear from the writing of John Chapter One that this is exactly what the author was saying! No guess work here!
"Yeshua is our link with God"
Are you saying this is your experiential truth for you and your congregation?
Or are you saying that Yeshua is everyone's link with God?
Do you think it possible for people to have a link with God
without a conscious understanding and acceptance of Yeshua?
What would you tell an observant Jew his/her link with God is?
Thank you for your thoughts.
At 6/03/2006 9:17 PM, Stuart Dauermann said...
In the context of this blog posting, my intention was to refer to those of us who, recognizing Yeshua as the Messiah, consciously rely upon Him as our link to God, through the atonement He provided and his High Priestly ministry....
What would I tell an observant Jew his/her link with God is? Good question.
In response to this comment:
"Are you saying this is your experiential truth for you and your congregation? Or are you saying that Yeshua is everyone's link with God?"
I haven't been talking or really very much thinking about "everyone." I concern myself with the Jews. I believe the Jewish people are God's chosen, covenant people, unique in the midst of the earth, and that they are "beloved for the sake of the Fathers" [Romans 11:29]. Whatever this might mean is disputed, but it does at least underscore that the Jewish people are a unique case. I believe Yeshua is the High Priest for all Israel, not just for Messianic Jews, for there can be no High Priest other than He. I believe it is presumptuous and doctrinally strange at the very least to insist, as some do, that Jews who do not explicitly believe in Jesus ALL have no knowledge of God, and are without hope and without God in the world. More that this being "politically incorrect," such a position is theologically incorrect in that it lays claim to a level of informatiion denied to mere mortals, and it negates the unique status of Israel.
Paul said his ministry to Gentiles was that they might "turn to God from idols, to serve a living and true God and to wait for His son from heaven, Jesus who delives us from the wrath to come." Do religious. pious Jews have to turn to God from idols? They are already worshipping and serving the God of Israel, and to say that this makes no difference in the absense of Yeshua faith is at the very least bizarre. And yes, I know the proof texts often used in this regard, but they do not negate what I am saying here.
"Do you think it possible for people to have a link with God without a conscious understanding and acceptance of Yeshua?"
Yes. Cornelius did in Acts 10, and he is certainly not the only case in world history!
"What would you tell an observant Jew his/her link with God is?"
I don't know. I would speak of commonalities with him or her, and seek to explain why Yeshua is the path to greater Jewish faithfulness and satsifaction.
Shalom.
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