Pence sets off firestorm with campaign prayer by ‘Christian rabbi’

By Alex Johnson

Vice President Mike Pence was roundly criticized on Monday for appearing at a campaign rally in Michigan at which a “Messianic rabbi” invoked Jesus in mourning the deaths of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Messianic Judaism, which believes that Jesus is the messiah and considers the New Testament to be authentic, is not recognized as Jewish by any mainstream Jewish movement in the United States or by the Chief Rabbinate, the supreme spiritual authority for Judaism in Israel.

Pence, who has often proclaimed himself to be a born-again evangelical Christian, invited Rabbi Loren Jacobs to the stage at a rally in Waterford Township, a suburb of Detroit, for Lena Epstein, a Republican candidate for the open congressional seat in Michigan’s 11th District.

Jacobs, the founder and senior rabbi of Congregation Shema Yisrael in nearby Bloomfield Hills, a Messianic congregation, opened by invoking “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God and father of my lord and savior Yeshua, Jesus the Messiah, and my God and father, too.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.