A Christian student stood up at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Iowa and asked Ben Shapiro the question he has heard more times than he can count: why don’t you accept Jesus and become a Christian? Shapiro answered with a compliment. He told the student that Christians are already in good standing with God and that they are “doing a great job” by believing in Jesus. Within days, social media influencers with millions of followers were telling their audiences that Shapiro had called Christianity idolatry, and that the Jews were hiding a secret legal code they planned to impose on the world, one under which Christians could be executed for their faith.
Rabbi Elie Mischel, Director of Education at Israel365, took on the controversy in a new lesson on The Israel Bible YouTube channel.
“A few weeks ago, that question blew up the internet,” Rabbi Mischel said. “But as usually happens on social media, people were yelling and screaming and also saying nothing that actually made sense.”
He named the commentator who drove the attacks. “Tucker Carlson obviously amplified the attacks on Ben. If there’s something that he could say that’s nasty or untrue about a Jew, he’ll do it,” Rabbi Mischel said. “And within a few days, people were saying that Ben Shapiro and the Jews have a grand plot to kill all the Christians. It was one lie after another.”
The noise around the story raises a serious question, and it is one that many of Shapiro’s Christian critics never stopped to ask. What do Jewish law and the Sages actually teach about the fate of a Christian in the World to Come?
A nation, a family, a people
Rabbi Mischel started with what he calls the root of the confusion, which is the idea that Judaism belongs on a list next to Christianity and Islam as one of the “three great monotheistic faiths.”
“Here’s the truth. Judaism does not belong on that list at all,” he said. “There is no such thing anywhere in the Bible, in the Hebrew Bible, as Judaism. The word does not exist in Hebrew. It comes from a Greek word, Ioudaismos, that the Greeks used to describe Jewish beliefs and practices.”
“We Jews are not a religion. We are a nation,” he continued. “The Bible is not the foundation story of a faith or of a religion. It is the foundation story of a people, a single family, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who eventually grew into a nation. Moses was not the founder of a religion. He was the leader and teacher of a nation that pre-existed him.”
Jewish identity passes through the mother, the rabbi explained, or is acquired through conversion. “There’s no creed that you have to sign, no confession that you have to make,” he said. “It’s like being an American. If your parents are American, then you’re automatically an American citizen.”
He pointed to the verse God spoke to Israel at Sinai: “and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel” (Exodus 19:6).
“Holy is the description. It’s the adjective,” Rabbi Mischel said. “But nation is the thing itself. That’s the essence here.”
That status stays with every Jew. “Even a secular Jew, even an atheist Jew who rejects the Bible and rejects God and votes for Abdul El-Sayed and hates the fact that he’s a Jew and wishes he was something else, it doesn’t matter. He is still a Jew just as much as I am.”
Why Jews never knock on your door
Because the Jews are a nation, the accusation that they secretly want to convert the world collapses, the rabbi said.
“People are claiming that Jews secretly want to force everybody on Earth to convert and become Jewish. That’s like America announcing that every single human being on the planet has to become an American citizen,” he said. “Nobody wants that.”
“If everybody became Jewish, being Jewish would have no meaning anymore,” he continued. “That’s exactly why Jews do not go knocking on doors trying to convert anyone. I’m pretty certain that even if you live in the middle of a Jewish community, nobody has ever knocked on your door and told you about the Hebrew Bible and that you should become a Jew. And that’s why there are only 14 million Jews in the world total. We are tiny because we aren’t trying to make you all Jewish.”
Rabbi Mischel cited his teacher, Rabbi Yehuda Léon Ashkenazi, known as Manitou, who passed away about 30 years ago and described humanity as a bouquet of flowers.
“Every nation is a flower and every flower matters. If you pull one of the flowers out, the bouquet is no longer what God intended it to be,” Rabbi Mischel said. “Empires always try to force every flower, every nation, to look identical to themselves. That’s what empires do. The British go to India and they try to make India look like a colony of Great Britain. But Israel’s job is the opposite. Our job is to be the rubber band that ties the bouquet together, that brings all the different flowers together without crushing a single one.”
God still asks two things of the nations, he said: “Belief in the one true God, the God of the Bible, the creator of heaven and earth, and number two, to live a righteous moral life. That’s the real test. If a nation is bowing down to idols, or if it’s a nation that is built on cruelty and bloodshed, which celebrates murder like the mullahs in Iran, well, that nation fails the test. But a faith that worships the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and calls its followers to live righteous, godly lives certainly passes the test. And that’s how we Jews see Christianity.”
What the Sages said 1,800 years ago
The Sages took up the question directly in the Tosefta (Sanhedrin 13:2) and the Talmud (Sanhedrin 105a): do the nations of the world have a share in Olam Haba, the World to Come? Rabbi Eliezer argued they do not. Rabbi Yehoshua answered him with a close reading of the Book of Psalms:
“The wicked shall return to Sheol, all the nations that forget God” (Psalms 9:18).
“If you read that verse closely, it says that the nations that forget God are wicked and they return to the grave,” Rabbi Mischel said. “Meaning only those nations, the wicked nations, do not go to heaven. Which means that the righteous among the nations do go to heaven. And of course they do. God never intended for all people to become Jewish. So why on earth would heaven be reserved only for Jews?”
Rabbi Yehoshua’s view became the law. Maimonides ruled in his Mishneh Torah (Laws of Kings 8:11) that the chasidei umot ha’olam, the pious of the nations of the world, have a share in the World to Come.
What God asks of a non-Jew, Rabbi Mischel explained, is the seven mitzvot bnei Noach, the commandments of the children of Noah. “All human beings descend from Noah, and therefore all human beings are obligated in the laws of Noah,” he said, listing them: “Do not worship idols. Do not curse God. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not live in sexual immorality. Do not be cruel to a living animal. And build real courts of justice so that your society lives by these rules of righteousness.”
“If you are a non-Jew who lives by these seven foundational categories of morality, then we Jews believe that you are a righteous person who will go to heaven,” he said.
These laws are no secret. In 1991, the United States Congress passed Public Law 102-14, which recognized the Seven Noahide Laws as the historical ethical principles on which civilization was built, and designated a national Education Day in honor of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
The idolatry charge
Shapiro’s critics seized on the first of the seven laws, the prohibition on idolatry. If Jews consider belief in the Trinity to be idolatry, they argued, every Christian fails the test.
“So am I lying? Do we Jews really believe that Christianity is idolatry and therefore all Christians are going to hell?” Rabbi Mischel asked in the lesson. “Is that really the case, as Tucker Carlson of course will have you believe?”
He answered with Rabbi Menachem HaMeiri, a leading 13th-century Torah scholar in Provence, who ruled that Christians are not idolaters. The idolaters the Bible condemns, Rabbi Mischel explained, “were the pagan nations of the ancient world, people who bowed down to many gods, who lived without any moral law.”
The Meiri placed Christians in a separate category, which he called umot ha’gedurot b’darchei hadatot, “nations bound by the ways of religion.”
“These nations, he says, acknowledge God’s existence, His unity and His power, even though from the Jewish perspective they are wrong in certain matters of faith,” Rabbi Mischel said. “When he saw the Trinity, he did not see idolatry. We Jews believe that Christians are mistaken in the words that Christians use to describe God. But the God that Christians are praying to is really the same God that we Jews are praying to, the one Creator of heaven and earth who revealed Himself to Israel at Mount Sinai.”
“The disagreement is really just about how to understand God, not about who we are worshiping,” he said. “And because Christians believe in the God of Israel and live by the Bible’s moral law, they stand together with Jews shoulder-to-shoulder against the evil of paganism.”
Other authorities reached the same conclusion through the concept of shituf, Hebrew for “partnership,” meaning worship of the Creator alongside another figure associated with Him. “These Jewish authorities said that believing in shituf is forbidden to Jews, but it’s not forbidden to non-Jews, as long as their worship is ultimately directed to the same one Creator of heaven and earth,” Rabbi Mischel said. “For a Jew, belief in the Trinity is a problem, but for Christians it is permissible. And so we Jews do not consider Christians to be idolaters.”
“You’re certainly not going to hear any of this on social media because it’s complicated,” he said. “But this is the truth. The Jewish Sages over the course of nearly 2,000 years are very, very clear that good Christians go to heaven.”
He called the outcome ironic. “You have these misinformed Christians who are furious at Ben Shapiro because they allowed antisemites like Tucker Carlson to twist what Ben Shapiro said,” he said. “Ben told a room full of Christians that they are good and holy people who are in good standing with God. And Ben was right. Jewish tradition backs him up completely.”
Turning the question around
Rabbi Mischel then asked what Christians believe about him.
“If you ask most evangelical pastors, you’ll probably get an honest answer that there is no salvation without faith in Jesus. Not for anyone,” he said. “And that includes me. That includes the Jews. So according to this approach, Ben Shapiro and every Jew who doesn’t accept Jesus as God and Messiah is going to hell. Myself and my wife and my children included.”
He holds no grudge over it. “Some of the Christians who believe I’m going to hell for not believing in Jesus are the best friends that Israel and the Jewish people have,” he said. “Obviously I don’t agree with that, but I respect the right of Christians to believe it. You’re entitled to your beliefs.”
“Think about how upside down this is,” Rabbi Mischel said. “Ben told Christians, ‘You guys should stay exactly who you are. You have a place with God. God loves you.’ And for that, Ben Shapiro is called a liar and a threat to Christians. Yet Christians tell Jews, ‘You have to give up who you are. You have to believe what we believe, or you Jews will be damned forever.’ And what do we Jews say in response? We say, ‘Okay, we can agree to disagree, and we’re happy to go right on being your friends.'”
“So who’s really being intolerant here? It’s not the Jews,” he said. “We have never needed Christians to agree with us in order to respect our Christian friends. All we ask is the same courtesy in return.”
He ended with a plain answer to the question that started the uproar. “So, are Christians going to hell? Now you have the Jewish answer, and it comes straight from the sources. No. We Jews believe that a Christian who loves the God of Israel and lives a righteous life is going to heaven.”
He also gave viewers advice for dealing with the conspiracy peddlers: “The next time someone online tells you that the Jews are secretly out to get you, ask him one question. Do you actually know anything about what Jews believe, or did you just hear it on a podcast?”
Rabbi Mischel and Israel365 founder Rabbi Tuly Weisz will lead a nine-day Bible tour of Israel from May 5 to May 13, 2027. The tour runs from Jerusalem to the Galilee and the hills of Shiloh and includes Israel’s Memorial Day and Independence Day.
