Westboro Church Coming to Nashville JCC

This Monday the good people of the Westboro Baptist Church are coming to the Nashville Jewish Community Center to sing these words to the tune of Hatikva, the Israeli National Anthem:

Christ is soon returning
to take you from this land

You won't obey Him
or do what he commands.
Wrath will soon pour on you,
for your awful sins

Your great affliction,
it will soon begin.

All the nations, on Israel will march.

You're not Zion, no hope in your heart.

You killed the Savior, for this sin you all must pay.

Those who fear God, come out from them - To Day.

Based on the last line, the intent of this hymn is to call Jews out of our ignorance and into the true faith as Westboro Baptists understand it. I don’t think it will work. Let’s take a closer look at the hymn to see why.

Christ is soon returning to take you from this land
 Actually no. If Christ returns he will take Christians from this land and lift them into Heaven. Jews he will leave behind to deal with later. Of course if the Jewish messiah comes he will take Jews from America and bring them to Israel. I’m looking forward to this seeing as I can’t afford to fly there on my own.

You won't obey Him or do what he commands. True. Most Jews just don’t take God and mitzvot all that seriously. We used to, but after two exiles, the Inquisition, innumerable pogroms, the Holocaust, and the endless wars against Israel we just got tired.

Wrath will soon pour on you, for your awful sins/Your great affliction, it will soon begin.
Yeah, this is pretty much our standard worldview as well.

All the nations, on Israel will march.
Yep, we’ve been saying that for centuries as well. As far as we’re concerned the Arab Spring just might turn out to be an Arab springboard for an all out war on Israel and world Jewry.

You're not Zion, no hope in your heart.
 This makes no sense. We are ZIONists, and HOPE is our anthem. It is the very tune they are singing.

You killed the Savior, for this sin you all must pay. While we might quibble that the Romans killed Jesus, certainly there were some Jews at the time who were down with that. But the fact is God isn’t punishing Jews for killing Jesus. God sends people to Hell for not accepting the right brand of Christianity and get the Get Out Of Hell Free Card that comes with it.

Those who fear God, come out from them - To Day. Most Jews are fairly agnostic on the God thing, and those who do fear God worry more about improperly killing a cow than illegally killing Jesus, so I doubt this is going to get the Westboro folks many converts.

All in all, then, the Westboro hymn is going to fall on deaf ears, and not simply because most of the Jews at the JCC at the time of the Westboro visit are old and deaf anyway. After you've survived the Nazis, a gaggle of Christians singing a silly song just isn't going to do much.

Even if the Westboro folks were coming just to remind us that God hates Jews just as much as they believe God hats fags (see their website godfatesfags.org), they would still fail. We already know this about God and gays. After all when it comes to God killing Jews, and calling homosexuality an abomination, we wrote the Book.