When I was nine years old,
we moved to the United States from Jerusalem,
and the number one song in the country was Anne Murray,
"One Day at a Time, Sweet Jesus."
And I'll never forget,
my mom comes into the car and I'm like,
♪ One day at a time, sweet Jesus ♪
My mom says, "What did you say?"
And I said, "I'm singing the song."
She's like,
"We don't say Jesus."
But why?
In Hebrew she says, "He's Yeshu."
I grew up not being able to say that name.
My son at the age of five was diagnosed with Asperger's.
He was not verbal, he was very distant.
He was the cause of me going back to school
and becoming a special education teacher.
I knew a lot about science.
I studied a lot about everything.
But I really never even opened the Bible.
Ironically, I was teaching Hebrew school as a side job.
Teaching the prayers, teaching the liturgy.
I mean, I knew everything.
I had seen my father pray the prayers and put on the tallit,
and I know all of the rhetoric and everything that,
you know, goes along with being Jewish,
but I didn't feel any connection to God.
I would sit at synagogue
and I'd try to feel something, I'd try to feel God.
And it was like the Chagall stained glass windows
and everybody around me, and the bema, and the arc,
and the Torah being taken out.
And I felt, I remember feeling nothing.
At my school I worked at an after school program
and there was a woman that had written a book called
"Jesus, Can I Talk to You?"
So she said to me, "I don't have a money to hire an editor,
"would you help me edit my book?"
And I said, "Well, I don't know anything about Jesus."
I do know about writing, I know about English,
I know about commas, I know about semicolons,
I just don't know anything about Jesus.
It was a lot of stuff from the Old Testament.
And I would see things like, you know,
this is from Ecclesiastes or this from Samuel or Kings,
and I was like, these are our books.
This came from the Jewish Bible.
I've never read the Bible.
I read about the fact that He would be pierced,
and that's exactly what happened to Jesus,
and for the first time the Bible came alive to me.
And it's Isaiah 53 and I said, how can you miss this?
It's like right there, it's right there in the scripture,
in our book.
Saying the prayer and asking for him to come into my life
and I accepted Him as my Savior.
Even though I just became a believer in the Jewish Messiah
but in Jesus whose name I can't even say
at the private Jewish school.
Wow, this is too weird.
The grandson of the head of our Judaic program,
in the first year that he was there
he would talk to me and I would say,
"Oh it's time to go to tefillah."
Students were required to go to prayer
and you must go to tefillah.
He's like, "I hate tefillah."
I'm like, "Your grandfather's the head of Judaic program
"of the school."
And so he comes up and he puts a kippah on my head
and he is like, "You're like a rabbi."
'Cause rabbi in Hebrew means teacher.
He goes, "I can just see it,
"one day you're gonna become a Hasidic."
And I said, "No no no, Joshua."
Totally the furthest thing I'm going to become.
Turns to me and goes, "I don't understand you.
"Do you keep Shabbat?
"What kind of a Jew are you?"
What do you mean what kind of a Jew am I?
And he goes, "There's something different about you.
"I don't know what it is,
"there's something different about you."
And I said, "Joshua, sit down.
"I really respect you and I'm gonna tell you
"what's different about me is
"that I believe that Jesus is the Messiah."
And his eyes got wide and he stood up and he pointed at me,
he's like, "I knew it, I knew it.
"You're always talking about love and stuff."
And the students know, they know.
I can talk about God all day.
See, I couldn't do that in public shool.
Public school, you can't talk about God.
But at a private Jewish school,
I could talk about God all day.
And you know, sometimes they'll go,
they test me and sometimes they get really close
and they really question what am I really saying.
But if they ever come to me and say,
"What do you really believe?"
Like Joshua does, or did,
I would tell them.
I believe that Jesus is my Messiah.
Coming out of the Messianic closet,
that's pretty much a good way to put this.
I've gone completely against the grain.
When you go against the grain, you get splinters.
It's not easy.
It's not been an easy path for me,
especially knowing what I know and hearing what I hear,
how the rabbis talk about Him, how the students mock Him.
And I say, okay, I'm here for you.
I wanna stay here.
And people ask me, "Aren't you afraid
"if they find out at your school
"that you believe that Jesus is the Messiah
"that you'll get fired?"
So?
God will always provide, he has through everything,
and He always delivers.
He took it on the cross for me.
Jesus died so that I can be born again.
The greatest pain is to give up your own child.
How much God must have loved us
to give up his only Son for us?