Lina's back!!!!

[Guest Anonymous]

Lissar: early 2011

Thanks!

Also, something just struck me.

I am a fan of your blog, but it really saddens me that you have stooped to the level of speaking lashon hara against a fellow convert in the making. Perhaps a private e-mail would have been more appropriate.

Doesn't lashon hara mean that something is *true* but said in a gossiping manner? What's up with that, Lina? Did you just admit you're still a cheerleader for Yeshua?

[fundiefun]

She made a second youtube video further spouting her tripe crazy is as crazy does with this one. I find it funny she blocked me from commenting for calling her out on her fake Jewishness.

[GeoBQn]

I'm not a Messianic Jew and I'm not a Christian Jew. I'm not Messianic, I'm not Christian. I am a Netzari Jew. I am a Jewish believer in Yeshua Hamashiach, from the Netzari sector of Judaism. Period.

Hasn't RaYBaSHKatan ever learned that when you are defining a word, you should explain it without actually using that word?

ETA: Here's what I got when I looked up "Netzari" on Wikipedia:

Netzarim (Hebrew: נצרים) may refer to:

Netzarim, twigs that shoot off from a branch of a tree (Hebrew from the root "neitzer" (נצר) meaning "a shoot")

Netzarim (settlement), the name of an Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip

See also

Notzarim, Nazarene sect

Notzrim, Hebrew for "Christians"

[FaustianSlip]

Pretty much what I expected. I was actually kind of shocked that it took her this long to reply. Good for Kochava for going toe to toe with her, and ten bucks says Lina either conveniently ignores the comments asking her point blank whether she still believes the whole Jesus thing or tries to evade the question, as per usual. She's deceptive, and she's not even very good at it. Shame on you, Lina, if you're reading this. You and your husband aren't converts, you're not practicing "every detail" of halacha (which isn't capitalized, usually, BTW), and the read that Kochava and others have gotten of your beliefs isn't "assumptive" at all; it's exactly what you and your husband have stated on your blog, repeatedly. If you really want people to regard you two as sincere conversion candidates, make an explicit post on your blog plainly stating your opinions with regard to Jesus. I can just about guarantee that any rabbi's going to require the same thing of you. If you've changed your attitudes, that's great, but you owe it to your readers to be honest with them, and you owe it to yourself to make teshuva with regard to anyone you've mislead. I think you're being deliberately misleading about your beliefs, and it's pretty evident at this point that I'm not the only one.

If you want to be Jewish and participate in a mainstream Jewish community, you're going to have to give up your belief that Jesus is the Messiah. If you don't want to do that, go ahead and keep being Messianic. But this isn't a scenario in which you're going to be able to have your cake and eat it, too. For someone who claims to love the Jewish community so much, Lina, you don't seem to have very much respect for us. You don't even respect us (not to mention your Christian friends) enough to come right out and tell us, in plain English and without equivocation, where you stand.

[Kelya]

As ridiculous as I think Lina's being, I wonder if she can really even articulate her beliefs right now without everything falling apart. She's built herself quite the house of cards and she's going to severely disappoint and come under criticism from a huge amount of her readers if she renounces her belief in Jesus, and she's coming under a huge amount of criticism for her current beliefs (which probably include a belief in Jesus but who actually knows for absolute certain, now.) Oh, and she's married...but not married according to either religion she may be practicing (they weren't married in a church or under a chuppah, yeah? She got the same ceremony me and my partner would get at the courthouse, i think.) but she's living as a married woman and presumably having sex outside of a religious marriage, which neither religion is fond of. So if she actually steps back and says, "I'm not actually Jewish, but I renounce my belief in Jesus Christ and am sincerely pursuing an Orthodox conversion," she has a legal husband, which I think complicates the conversion process a fair bit and if she comes clean and admits she thought it was a Jewish marriage and considered it a Jewish marriage, she's going to have even more issues. And if she steps back and says, "I'm a Christian and deeply admire Judaism, but I am a Christian and believe in the divinity of Jesus," she's sinned by having sex outside of a church sanctioned marriage, which is a pretty hard sin in her conservative Christian viewpoint.

She loses either way. She almost has to play down the middle with the Messanic Jewish thing because it seems to have a lot less structure and can be smushed and mushed to fit her circumstances- "its a messanic Jewish wedding because we're living together and obeying some of the rules of family purity, and i went to the ritual bath in a swimming pool so it counts for us!"

She annoys me, but I actually feel bad for her right now. She dug herself a pretty deep hole, publicized it all the way, and is now in a legal marriage with a scary asshole and no real way of winning regardless of what her religion turns out to be.

[FaustianSlip]

She does lose either way, and I have a measure of sympathy for her position, but not a lot, mostly because people have been telling her all of this for a long time now. She can't claim that she was unaware of the problems her weird mishmash of beliefs was going to cause her, because she's been told repeatedly and by a lot of different people- commenters, rabbis, friends... it's been made very clear to her that she can't have this thing both ways. And you know, that's part of being an adult. Sometimes you can't have everything you want, and you just have to choose. I can understand that she's reluctant to alienate any of her readers, but at the end of the day, all she's doing now is deceiving about half of them, regardless of what side they're on. That's not right, and I think that in spite of all of her spinning and justifications, she knows it's not a morally tenable position. And as I think someone else has pointed out, would Jesus be very impressed with followers who are to ashamed or embarrassed to proclaim their beliefs? Would he be impressed with followers who are apparently content to deceive and disrespect the practitioners of another religion in order to get what they want? I don't think so. Jesus didn't seem very big on hypocrisy in the New Testament to me.

Lina's the one who made the decision to act all of this ridiculousness out in the public sphere, to attach her real name and her real identity to her blog and put all of her spiritual searching out there on the internet for the world to see. I know she's young, but at the same time, if you're old enough to get married, if you're old enough to try and lie your way into a religion, you're old enough to have some sense that by posting your every thought on a blog, you're opening yourself up to some criticism. And even if she didn't know that at the beginning, she absolutely had to know when she started getting negative and argumentative comments and when she and Tony stumbled upon the various discussions about her here. That's why she closed her blog, after all. But she couldn't handle not having all of that glorious drama and attention, so she reopened her blog, and now she's got attention in spades. It may be more than she bargained for, but at the end of the day, the rest of the world is not responsible for handling her with kid gloves because she's a bit foolish and doesn't seem to have an abundance of good judgment.

The wedding thing is one of the things that completely confuses me. She had to know that neither crowd of readers was going to be impressed by it and that it would raise a ton of fairly pointed questions. It's one of the reasons I think this may have been a, uh, shotgun type of affair, especially in light of the whole shomer negiah thing. But when Lina replies to posts like Kochava by getting up on her high horse, claiming that she follows Jewish law to the "smallest detail" and lecturing people about lashon hora, she loses any sympathy that she might have gotten from me. She's just like all of the other Messianic types- all to eager to tell Jewish people where and why and how they've been doing everything wrong for the last thousand years, but completely incapable of taking on any kind of criticism herself, no matter how legitimate it might be. Get used to it, Lina. If you ever do try to join an Orthodox community, you're going to have all kinds of people up in your business, telling you you're doing XYZ wrong, wanting to know why you bentch the way you do or who told you you could use such-and-such a hechsher. That's what everyone's been trying to tell you: Judaism isn't practiced in a vacuum, and just doing whatever your little heart desires because it's "cool" isn't Orthodoxy (or any form of Judaism, really). It's playing dress-ups, and you're in for a shock in the event that you actually do pursue a conversion. It seems she's now discovering all of this, but maybe it will shock her into joining the rest of us here in reality town. Probably not, but I live in hope.

[sea_gale]

What will Lina's next move be? Will she address Kochava's post on her blog (neatly skirting the Messiah question, but lambasting her for lashon hara and whatever) or follow up with some more drivel about life with Love? Personally, I think another flounce is in the post.

Personally, I'm not a big Starbucks fan. I've had a couple of fancy drinks from them that were so repulsive I had to throw them away. And their basic drinks are mediocre in quality and overpriced for what they are.

[Guest Anonymous]

She really needs to proofread before she posts. "Everything that you store scout me and my blog is untrue." - What the hell is that supposed to say? "Said about" maybe?

That response reads very much as if Taliban Tony himself may have written it. Didn't he come over all 'speechless' when he posted over on the old FJ board to tell us how ashamed he was of us? He also came across as someone who has never heard of a spell checker.

[Kishiria]

The courthouse wedding might be legal in the Christian church from which Lina originates. Catholics and Orthodox Christians don't believe a courthouse wedding is "marriage" but plenty of other Christian churches are fine with it. PP and ZuZu played that game, but added deception to it when they didn't tell anyone!

[formergothardite]

I think Lina is probably desperatly trying to figure out what to do. If she is really a Christian (which I believe she is) then denying Christ is like the ultimate sin, but if she doesn't do that soon, she is going to get rejected by all the real Jews who she wants so bad to fit in with. She has gotten herself into a damned if she does, damned if she doesn't situation and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

[TheJewAmongUs]

I don't think that one blog post is enough to shake Lina from her set narrative yet.

I expect the next post will be about keeping a Jewish home.

[raineymott]

Regarding Starbucks...WAY over-hyped IMO. There's a chain of coffee shops where I come from, City Brew, and they blast Starbucks out of the water.

[LilMissMetaphor]

Love has a really hairy wrist.

[raineymott]

Love has a really hairy wrist.

YES...I'm not the only one who noticed!!! lol!

[emmiedahl]

I asked a Starbucks employee yesterday whether their products are kosher. She needed details on what makes something kosher and I explained minimally. The answer is no, no they are not. They don't use kosher dairy, and they clean equipment in the same sinks used to clean plates that have had meat, dairy, pork, whatever. Apparently some of their flavorings & syrups may have gelatin as well, not kosher gelatin but the normal pig bone type.

[longskirts]

Some Starbucks products are kosher. Employees probably won't know enough about kashrut to tell you which ones. I just was wondering about that particular product--I don't know if it is or isn't kosher.

[saraelise]

I'll try to post this in the right thread, but I came across a website on Kosher Starbucks items while bloghopping one day: http://www.kosherstarbucks.com/ My impression was that it's very thorough.

Starbucks is generally overpriced, the only thing I ever buy there is chai tea latte.

[Kishiria]

Lina must be reading here. She changed her signoff from "In Him" to "With Lots of Love".

[lizzy]

She's updated with a recent post clarifying her beliefs. Fascinating read for those following the Lina melodrama.

[formergothardite]

So to sum it up she is a Christian who does a whole bunch of Jewish stuff. LOL

[Lostie]

To be honest I did find Lina's new post rather fascinating. I'm glad she's trying to explain her beliefs to her readers and not just brushing the belief in Jesus under the rug.

[Guest Anonymous]

So to sum it up she is a Christian who does a whole bunch of Jewish stuff. LOL

Nooooo! She *said* she isn't a Christian. She just believes Jesus is the Messiah. She's twisting herself into a cognitive dissonance pretzel.

ETA:

….And we also happen to believe that Yeshua, a Pharisaic Jew who never deviated from the Torah, was the long awaited for Messiah.

Why am I telling you all this? Simply because it drives me crazy to be falsely labeled as either a Christian...

I don't even.

[synchroswimr]

So to sum it up she is a Christian who does a whole bunch of Jewish stuff. LOL

How dare you call her a Christian! She's a Jew who believes that Jesus is the Messiah! Not even close to the same thing, silly. Boy, some people...*walks away shaking head*

Just kidding. I totally agree with you

[Kishiria]

How dare you call her a Christian! She's a Jew who believes that Jesus is the Messiah! Not even close to the same thing, silly. Boy, some people...*walks away shaking head*

Just kidding. I totally agree with you

Me three. And they are not Jews in any sense: they were not born Jews nor have they so much as gone through a Reform conversion, which I imagine would be the easiest.

[formergothardite]

I get the feeling that they want to be God's most super-special snowflakes EVER!!!!! Calling themselves Christians or even Messianic Jews is just way too mainstream. So they are just going to be fake Jews. Cause there is no well in hell they can be considered real ones.