(08) Dimas Guaico: What Jews and Christians Still Get Wrong About Each Other

Rabbi Tuly Weisz sits down with Dimas Guaico of Generation Zion on a hillside in Samaria for a conversation that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

It starts with a verse. Isaiah 61:5 promises that strangers will tend Israel's flocks and foreigners will work her fields and vineyards. In Hebrew, that word does not refer to Jews. Jeremiah 31:5 adds the location: vineyards planted again on the mountains of Samaria. Both men are standing on those mountains while they read it, watching Christians and Jews put vines in the ground together.

From there the conversation goes where these conversations usually don't. Dimas raises Paul's image in Romans 11 of roots and grafted-in branches, and Tuly takes it seriously — then turns it around. If the Jewish people are the roots, what responsibility do the roots carry for branches that may be withering in America and Europe? What does it mean that the next generation is losing the connection?

They visit Gvaot Winery, where petrified grape seeds recovered from clay vats near ancient Shiloh were dated and eventually replanted, producing wine that may descend from the vines of the Tabernacle period. They walk into Shiloh itself, where the Tabernacle stood for 369 years, where Hannah prayed so intensely that Eli assumed she was drunk, and where the Jewish approach to prayer was born.

And they lean into the subject both sides have spent decades politely stepping around: the Messiah. Tuly explains the deliberately scandalous bloodline running through Lot, Judah and Tamar, and Ruth of Moab, and why Jewish tradition holds that the Messiah points toward God rather than being worshiped himself. Dimas answers honestly from the Christian side, and neither man flinches. What emerges is not agreement, but something more useful — two people who trust each other enough to disagree out loud.

Subscribe for more conversations from the land where the Bible comes to life.