There's a 2000 year legacy of antisemitism and hatred
in the name of Christ and Christianity
that I think every Jew that's brought up
with any sense of identity hears about.
We're Jews, they're Christians,
and they blame us for killing their God, Jesus Christ.
When my grandfather died, I was six or seven years old
and it was a very hush-hush thing.
Nobody wanted to talk about it.
What happens after you die?
We don't, we weren't even allowed to go to the funeral.
And I remember asking my teacher in synagogue,
what happens after we die.
And she didn't really know.
She said, go see the rabbi.
So I met with the rabbi and I remember him telling me
this story about a man climbing up a mountain.
And he's only seeing the trees and he's journeying
up the mountain and never sees what's over the other side
because he's climbing the mountain.
But God who is at the top of the mountain
sees over the other side of the mountain.
And that was my rabbi's answer.
The rabbi had no more idea than I did
what happens after you die
He didn't know.
I went on to university and those two driving issues
remained in my mind.
Why am I here?
I'm here for a purpose and what's going to happen to me
after I die.
I got involved in drugs and rock and roll.
I started to go to Grateful Dead concerts and doing drugs.
And that was, I guess, sort of a hobby for me,
but there was something spiritual about that experience,
the drugs and the music.
And I knew very clearly from my drug experiences
that there's more to this life than just what we see.
There's a world beyond this world.
So through college, I'm exploring,
I'm involved in these cults and the occult
and I'm searching for God.
A friend of mine had really gotten heavily involved
in drugs and I saw her lose interest in classes,
she stopped attending classes.
She disappeared from my life.
She really looked like she was dying from using drugs.
She was suicidal.
She was considering taking her life until one day
I was walking on campus and I bumped into her,
and her name was Susie, I said,
"Susie, what happened to you?"
Because she was smiling.
She was vibrant.
She looked terrific.
And she began to tell me that something profound happened.
She had wandered into a pool hall and the owner of the hall
had just become a Christian.
And he witnessed to her and told her about Jesus.
And she had prayed with him to accept Jesus.
And now she was born again.
Her life had completely been transformed.
And I said to her, I'm really happy for you, Susie.
That's great.
It's not for me, but if it makes you happy, that's great.
And then she invited me to a Bible study
and I wanted to say no, but somehow out of my mouth,
I said, yes.
And it was pouring rain.
And I had a motorcycle and I thought I have a good excuse
not to go to this Bible study.
But I remember getting on the back of the motorcycle
and driving through the pouring rain to this Bible study
that I didn't wanna go to.
And I remember walking into the study and I was soaking wet.
My clothes were soaked,
but from the time that the Bible study started
and I don't even remember what was taught,
it was the Book of Revelation
and how the world's coming to an end.
But I just thought I wanna get out of here,
but I couldn't because my clothes were in the dryer.
So I was a captive audience.
And at the end of the Bible study,
the teacher invited me to go upstairs and talk with them.
He gave me a Bible and he began to take me
through these Scriptures in my own Jewish Bible
to begin with.
And then in the New Testament about sin
and separation from God.
I had never read the Bible before other than preparation
for my Bar Mitzva.
We Jews are supposed to be the People of the Book,
but most Jewish people have never even read the Scriptures
that we claim to be our own.
And as he showed me verses about my sin
and separation from God, like all have sinned
and come short of the glory of God.
Our righteousness is as filthy rags.
I just felt the weight of my sin.
I was hot.
The room was bright.
I felt the presence of what I knew to be God himself.
And so I prayed this prayer with him.
And as soon as I prayed,
the room went back to normal temperature.
The lights went back to normal.
The sofa that felt like it was holding me
in place, released me.
The Bible shrunk back to a normal size.
My clothes were presented to me, dry.
I changed and I raced home and tried
to forget this experience,
but something changed in my heart that night.
And I had a desire for the first time to read the Bible.
I had never read the Bible before.
I claimed to believe the Bible, but I didn't really
know what the Bible said other than the stories
that I had learned growing up.
And I just devoured the Bible.
And I began with the Book of Matthew.
I had never read the New Testament.
I was taught that the New Testament was the Christian Bible.
The only connection that it had with my heritage
as a Jew was that it was antisemitic.
And much of Judaism as we wandered through Europe
and other nations was an effort to survive
in what became a Christian world.
Christianity was defined by its hatred
of the Jewish people and blaming the Jewish people
for almost 2000 years now.
So for a Jew to consider Jesus,
there's really a terrible history to overcome.
But I really felt this pull to read the New Testament.
And I began in Matthew chapter 1.
Right in the beginning, it listed the genealogy of Jesus,
Jesus, the son of Abraham, the son of David.
And that just jumped out at me and I immediately was,
it was shocking.
What is Abraham and David, two of the greatest men
in our history doing in the Christian Bible?
I discovered things that were completely different
than I had been taught growing up.
I discovered that Jesus was Jewish,
that he had a given name, a Hebrew name Yeshua,
which means salvation because he will save his people
from their sins.
I discovered that he was born in Israel, of Jewish parents.
I thought he grew up in Rome, in the Vatican.
All of the first followers of Yeshua were all Jews.
And none of them converted to another religion.
They didn't convert to Christianity.
There was no Christianity.
No, they were Jewish men and women
who had found their promised Messiah
from their own Scriptures, the Tanakh.
And that changed my life.
I began to find the answers that I'd been looking for
in my own Scriptures, in the Tanakh.
I discovered that God had a purpose for my life.
And that purpose was to know him, to walk with him,
to serve him.
I discovered that there is a life after this life.
I knew almost immediately that God was calling me,
that he had a destiny for my life to serve him full time.
I ended up moving to Russia
after leading a messianic congregation
for a number of years in Upstate New York.
And then began to work in Ethiopia,
in Zimbabwe, throughout Africa.
And for the last number of years,
we've been providing medical clinics where we provide
dental care, eye care, medicines, even surgeries,
free of charge.
We just do it to serve and to let people know
that God loves them.
And my brother was a photographer.
That's one of the things that he did.
And I was able to bring him to Ethiopia as our photographer
to one of our medical clinics.
And he experienced in that clinic, the presence of God.
As lives were being changed,
he was photographing everything and he saw people
not only being cared for, but he saw people being changed
by the love of God.
And I watched in him, I had the joy of watching him
go through the same experience I did.
As he received Jesus Yeshua into his life
and was completely transformed.
He passed away from cancer fairly recently,
but I know where he is today.
And I'll be seeing him again.
This is my destiny.
This is my heritage.
This Yeshua is my Messiah promised in my own Scriptures.