"Dude, how could you possibly have known
"radical terrorists were gonna hijack a plane
"and fly it into an American city,
"I mean you wrote about that in your book".
The first page of my first novel
puts you inside the cockpit of a hijacked jet,
hijacked by radical Islamic terrorists,
coming in on a kamikaze attack mission
into an American city.
Now, I had written that nine months
before September 11, 2001.
The book became a New York Times bestseller
and people kept asking me
how could you possibly have known what was gonna happen.
"You seem to have this crystal ball.
"You seem to understand the future.
"What do you think's gonna happen next, dude?
"Your name is Rosenberg, right?"
I said, "Right."
"So you're a heeb, right?"
I said, "Well, I'm Jewish."
He said, "Yeah, okay, that's fine, but you're Jewish,
"your name is Rosenberg, but you...
"What are you, a born again?
"You know, an evangelical?"
I said, "Well, I do believe that Jesus is the Messiah
"and I am a follower of Jesus."
"Dude, how can you be Jewish and believe in Jesus?
"To have a novelist on my program
"that predicted the future, that's one thing,
"but to meet a Jew who believes in Jesus,
"that's a story I gotta hear, son."
So I grew up in a family in upstate New York
where my father is Jewish.
He was born in Brooklyn as an Orthodox Jew
to an Orthodox Jewish family.
His grandfather was a black hat Orthodox Jew.
His parents and grandparents had escaped from Russia
in the early years of the 20th century
when the Tsar was fomenting all kinds of pogroms
and anti-Semitic attacks against Jewish people.
My father came home one day from work
and he came into the kitchen and he said,
"I can't believe I'm saying this, but I have come to believe
"that Jesus actually is the Messiah.
"He's the savior that we Jews have been waiting for
"and I've decided to follow him."
And this was not a conclusion he wanted to come to,
but that's where the text led him.
My father thought he was the first Jew
since the Apostle Paul who believed that.
I was watching my parents change.
My father was going from being someone
that had a volcanic temper,
it could just erupt at any moment
and he was a very angry person, but he was changing.
I could see it.
My mother had been a person paralyzed
by fears and phobias and anxieties
and she was starting to have this peace.
As a child, I could see it,
and I was connecting that their love for Jesus
was making them better people.
It was changing them.
It was all very exciting for my mother and father.
They were excited.
I was not because they started dragging me off to church.
No more sleeping in.
No more going out to play.
Now we had to go to church every week,
and I was not a big fan.
And they made me go to a Sunday school class.
These kids had all been to church.
I had never touched a Bible.
I'd never thought about the Bible.
I did not care less about the Bible.
They had these contests.
Every kid had to hold up his Bible
and then the teacher would say, "Ready, John 3:16."
Everybody had to look it up real fast.
John 3:16, I mean what is that?
I see a Mark, I see a Jenny, I see a Gary, I see a Nancy.
I don't see anybody named John in this room.
And I didn't know what they meant
and I was struggling to figure it out
and I was getting smoked in all these contests.
And over the course of the year, if you won enough points,
you won a baseball bat and a ball.
Well, I loved baseball.
I did not love the Bible.
So I asked my parents, hey listen,
I'm getting killed in this game.
I never win.
I need a Bible.
So my parents bought me a little New Testament.
It just has the New Testament books
and then Psalms and Proverbs from the Old Testament
in the back of the Bible.
But one day, they said, "Ready?
"What's the last book of the Bible?"
And I was like, oh, oh,
and I got my hand up.
Everyone was shocked.
They're like, "Joel is raising his hand?!"
The teacher said: "Oh, okay Joel.
"Well, what's the last book of the Bible?"
And I said, "Proverbs!
"My Bible, right here, Proverb, it's the last one.
"Look at it."
Proverbs.
They didn't give me the ball, they didn't give me the bat,
and honestly, to this day, I'm a little bitter.
My parents said oh, now Joel,
we want you to go to Vacation Bible School.
I said, "What is Vacation Bible School?"
"It's kinda like Sunday school, but it's every day."
I'm like what, you've gotta be kidding me.
Every day?
I'm not going to that.
I can think of a lot better ways to spend my summer
than gluing elbow macaroni to strips of burlap
to write 'Jesus loves me'.
You understand what I'm saying?
I had no interest.
Well, my father came home from church
and my father says, "Listen, I've been teaching
"this 6th grade Sunday school class at our church
"and we're going to have a Passover seder next week
"in my class, and I'd love it if you would all
"come and be part of that."
And I said, "A what?
"A Passover wha, wha--?
"What is Passover?"
He says, "What do you mean what is Passover?
"Passover is a very famous Jewish holiday."
I said, "How would you know how to do a seder?"
And he said, "'Cause I'm Jewish."
And I looked at him and I said, "You're Jewish?!"
"Does that mean I'm Jewish?
"How did this never come up?"
I was in 5th grade and I didn't know I was Jewish.
Your name is Joel Rosenberg.
What do you mean you were in 5th grade
and you didn't know you were Jewish?
You must've been the stupidest kid in the class.
He didn't want to talk about his upbringing.
Didn't want to talk about being Jewish.
So it never came up, but it began a process for me
of trying to figure out, okay, if I have these Jewish roots,
what does all that mean?
But as I got into high school, I began to get depressed.
I was beginning to lose emotional altitude.
I wanted to go to film school in college
so I wrote a screenplay about a high school student
that commits suicide.
This was getting worse and worse.
I was getting darker and darker.
It was January of 1984 and it was one of these days
in the dark of winter, upstate New York,
very snowy, very gray, very bleak.
I was in my room after school
and I was having a blow-out session with God.
I mean I was mad.
I don't understand.
I am not experiencing love and joy
and hope and peace and happiness,
and that's what you promise in the Bible
for followers of Jesus and I don't have any of it.
So either it's not true or I totally don't get it.
You have got to show me if you are real
because, otherwise, I'm out.
But I heard God speak to me directly, and it shocked me.
Joel, do you ever really read my word?
Meaning do I ever really read the Bible.
And I thought no, I don't read it on a daily basis.
I don't really study it for myself.
No, I don't, no.
Joel, do you ever spend time really talking to me in prayer?
I knew what he was asking.
He was asking me do you really talk to me,
do you listen to me, do you share your heart with me
and talk to me in prayer, and the answer was no,
I don't spend time in prayer.
And he said Joel, why would you ever expect
to experience my blessings when you don't even know me?
God had just spoken to me and I was electrified.
I mean that moment, that night changed everything for me.
I think that that's the key,
is to sit down and study the life of Jesus from the Bible.
And I believe that rabbis and religious leaders
and just Jewish people,
when you actually look at what did Jesus actually do,
what did he actually say by reading the accounts
in the New Testament.
He spent time with children.
He spent time with sick people.
He had a compassion.
That's the game changer.
That's when people begin to say is this true or isn't it.
The question is what did Jesus say
and is he the Messiah or isn't he?
That's the central question.
So I often think back to that question
that radio show host had asked me,
"Dude, how can you be Jewish and believe in Jesus?"
The answer is very simple, actually.
Jesus was Jewish.
His disciples were Jewish.
He lived in Israel.
And he fulfilled all the prophecies
that the Jewish prophets had said,
that he would die as a suffering servant
and that he would rise again.
It's amazing that, when Jewish people study
the life of Jesus, what he said, what he did,
we come to the conclusion.
I came to the conclusion.
My father came to the conclusion.
Jesus is who he claimed to be.
He is the Messiah that we have waited for.
The most Jewish thing in the world that you can do
is follow the Jewish Messiah.