IF There Was God...

[Questor]

That's an interesting arc for your family.  From ethnically but not religiously jewish in the 20's - to culturally christian by your birth and now religiously christian.  What, three generations?  Four? I suppose that tracks with the rate of assimilation here in the us.  Are you the first in the community, or were your parents also in?

Actually, no, for there have been many Jews that held to their heritage, and allowed a patina of what is a Gentile belief system to protect them from persecution. But true assimilation is usually by the 3rd generation, and yet my family was clinging enough to Judaism as to marry only within the family, so to speak, and thus did not do so. They knew they were Jews, and fought to hide it. My poor grandmother had her nose bobbed without anesthesia in the 1910's, trying for normality, and yet married all the same another Jew! What my family believed was demonstrated, or accidentally revealed, because 'it was what we did', and they could not bring themselves to enter a church once past the age of twelve except for a wedding or funeral, and even them, only with loud complaints.
 
What I find fascinating is the assumption that if one follows a Jewish Rabbi that Gentiles also follow, but in a highly divergent way, one is instantly seen as a Christian, when our very different beliefs meet only in the beginning years of Nazarene Judaism that was the result of the death and resurrection of a Jew called Yeshua. Christianity developed over centuries, and to some degree, still does, and often in direct contradiction to what Yeshua himself lived and taught as an observant Jew. Judaism is still Judaism, even with Yeshua, for everything in Torah and the Prophets point to him.
 
As for the generations of religious belief, my parents were but a few of many generations who wanted to survive, and fled to America, and went underground. 
 
I never have been culturally Christian, never having been accepted among that group, and indeed, wanted not to be, as it was they who required adherence to what they believed, and in essence was conversion to what was often non-scripturally based assumptions. I merely wanted what the Scriptures described and promised. To me, this is so for every Jew who finds out a smidgeon of information about the prophecies that are commonly hid by their Rabbi's, research the matter in the Scriptures, and are not inclined to adopting a non-Jewish belief system, even one with truth at the heart of it.
 
Gentiles have no physical inheritance in Judaism, and thus, upon belief in Yeshua, are always first generation believers in that they are presumed to be proselytes to Judaism. They can teach what they know to their children, but it doesn't create a connection with Judaism until they are grafted into Yeshua by adhering to him above all else. Thus, Christians are always first generations adherents to Messiah.