Rituals to join? Not really.
MJ is both a very ancient and rather new movement within the New Covenant redeemed community. We take our inspiration from the first century congregation in Jerusalem under James as seen in Acts and from other extra biblical sources. That is the ancient part.
The "new" part goes back to the later 19th century, mostly starting in the 1880s. Orthodox Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstien in Hungary became a believer after reading the NT in Hebrew. He converted his entire congregation and wrote a lot about the Messiah, but would not get any of it published until after his death in 1906. Chassidic Rabbi Joseph Rabinowitz in Moscow became a believer in the 1880s and started several messianic synagogues in western Russia. In the 1890s Orthodox rabbi Leopold Cohn in Hungary started frantically searching the scriptures and talmud for the Messiah after the untimely death of his father. His search eventually brought him to New York where he found his Messiah.
What is now called "Messianic Judaism" was known by several names before that term was accepted in the 1970s.
We try to be a Judaism that teaches the New Covenant. That is a serious error to most evangelical christians and total heresy to regular Judaism. But we firmly believed that God did NOT want to start a new religion when our Lord came to earth. And we also believe (per Romans 11.11) that the #1 calling of every gentile christian is to "make Israel jealous," in order to drive them to the Messiah. To do that we have to be something that does not look pagan to religious and normative Jews. So our services are (to one degree or another) patterned after contemporary synagogue services.
Our doctrinal stance will be difficult to nail down.
You know the old joke: 3 Jews in a room and there being 4 opinions. We resemble that remark.
www.chosenpeople.com
The modern Messianic Jewish movement also commonly called Messianic Judaism has evolved through five specific periods of recent history.
www.jewishvoice.org
More later.is jewish voice jonathan bernstein?