Will they continue to reject me and face the consequences? Or will they recognize me and be saved?” I was overwhelmed by the weight of what he was asking.

I said,”Lord, I am just one man.

I’m not a rabbi or a scholar.

I’ve been a spy and a soldier.

Who will listen to me? And even if they listen, they will hate me.

They will call me a traitor.

My family will disown me.

I will lose everything.

” Yeshua looked at me with eyes full of compassion and said, “Yes, you will lose everything that does not matter, and you will gain everything that does.

I never promised that following me would be easy, especially for Jewish people who know the cost.

But I promised that I will be with you, that I will give you the words to speak, and that your testimony will accomplish what I send it to accomplish.

Many will reject you, but many will believe, and every soul that comes to know me through your witness will be worth more than everything you sacrifice.

” He paused and then said, “I’m sending you back now, Avi.

You will return to your body and you will live.

Your return will be a sign, a testimony that I am real and that I have the power over death.

Tell Israel what you have seen.

Tell them that I am the Messiah they have been waiting for, that I love them with an everlasting love and that I am calling them to come home to me before it is too late.

I wanted to stay there with him despite everything I had seen, the horror of hell and the coming tribulation.

I wanted to remain in his presence forever.

But I knew he was right.

I had to go back.

I had a mission to fulfill, a message to deliver.

I bowed before Yeshua and said, “I will go.

I will speak.

I do not know how, but I trust you to help me.

” He smiled and placed his hand on my head like a blessing.

And he said, “Go in my power, Avi Benhaim.

I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

” And then suddenly I was being pulled back and traveling at impossible speed through dimensions in space, hurtling back toward St.

Petersburg, back toward the warehouse, back toward my broken body, lying in a pool of blood on a concrete floor.

The transition was violent and jarring, like being slammed back into a prison after experiencing perfect freedom.

And then I felt it.

the crushing weight of my physical body, the searing pain in my chest, the desperate need for oxygen.

My lungs suddenly expanded with a huge gasping breath, and my eyes flew open.

I was alive.

I was back.

The warehouse was dark and silent.

Vulkoff and his men were long gone.

My body was wrapped in plastic sheeting, and I was lying in what I realized was the back of a van.

They had moved me, probably planning to drive me somewhere remote to dispose of the body.

Um, but they had not checked carefully enough to make sure I was actually dead.

Or perhaps Yeshua had kept me in a state that appeared dead until the right moment.

I do not know the medical explanation, and I do not care.

All I know is that I had been dead.

I had been in the presence of the living God, and now I was alive again with a mission that would cost me everything and give me everything at the same time.

I lay there in the darkness of that van for several minutes, trying to process what had just happened and what I needed to do next.

The pain in my chest was excruciating.

But when I managed to pull open my blood soaked shirt, I saw something impossible.

The bullet wounds were still there, two dark holes in my chest that should have killed me, but they were not bleeding anymore.

The edges of the wounds looked weeks old rather than hours old, like my body had somehow accelerated through the healing process while I was dead.

I could breathe, though each breath sent sharp pains through my ribs.

I could move, though my muscles felt weak and unsteady.

I was alive when I should have been a corpse, and the reality of the miracle was undeniable.

I forced myself to sit up, fighting waves of dizziness and nausea.

The van was parked and empty.

I could hear traffic sounds outside, which meant we were still somewhere in the city.

I pushed open the back doors of the van and stumbled out into a dark alley behind what looked like an industrial building.

It was night, cold, and I was alone, soaked in my own blood in a foreign country with no identification and no way to contact my handlers without risking exposure.

My training kicked in despite the impossibility of my situation.

First priority was survival and safety.

I needed to get off the street, find shelter, and assess my condition properly.

I stumbled through the alley and found a 24-hour internet cafe three blocks away.

The young man at the counter looked at me with alarm, seeing my bloodstained clothes, but I told him in Russian that I had been mugged and just needed to use a computer for a few minutes.

I paid him with cash I still had in my pocket, and he pointed me to a terminal in the back corner, too afraid or too indifferent to ask more questions.

I logged into a secure encrypted channel that the MSAD maintained for emergency communications and sent a brief message with my identification codes.

Extraction needed immediately.

St.

Petersburg, target compromised.

My agent status critical.

Within 10 minutes, I received a response with coordinates for an emergency safe house and instructions to get there without being followed.

I deleted all traces of the communication, left the cafe, and made my way carefully through the city, using every counter surveillance technique I knew to make sure I was not being tracked.

The safe house was a small apartment in a residential neighborhood maintained by a local asset who asked no questions.

I let myself in with the key code I had been given, and once inside, I finally allowed myself to collapse.

I stripped off my ruined clothes and examined my chest under the bathroom light.

The bullet wounds were definitely real.

Two holes just left of my sternum that had somehow stopped bleeding and started healing at an impossible rate.

I should have been dead.

Any doctor would tell you that wounds in that location, that close to the heart, are almost always fatal within minutes.

But I was standing there breathing alive with scars that looked like they were weeks old.

I cleaned the wounds as best as I could, bandaged them with supplies from the emergency medical kit in the apartment, and then I sat on the floor and tried to make sense of everything that had happened.

I had died.

I had met Yeshua.

I had seen heaven and hell.

I’d been shown the future of Israel.

And I had been sent back with a message that would destroy my entire life as I knew it.

For the next 3 days, I stayed in that safe house waiting for extraction.

And during those 3 days, my entire world view continued to shatter and rebuild itself.

I could not stop thinking about what I had seen and heard.

Uh, every time I closed my eyes, I saw Yeshua’s face, heard his voice, felt the overwhelming love that had poured from him.

I thought about the scriptures he had brought to my mind and I found myself pulling up a digital Tanakh on the secure computer in the apartment reading Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 and Zechariah 12 with completely new eyes.

The words practically jumped off the screen.

How had I read these passages hundreds of times and never seen Yeshua in them? The veil that had been over my understanding was completely gone now.

And everywhere I looked in the Hebrew scriptures, I saw him.

The Passover lamb, the bronze serpent lifted up in the wilderness, the suffering servant, the son of David who would reign forever.

The messenger of the covenant, the stone the builders rejected.

It was all there.

It’s a clear thread running through the entire Tanakh, pointing to one person, one Messiah, one salvation.

And his name was Yeshua.

On the fourth day, a MSAD extraction team arrived at the safe house.

They were shocked to see me alive because the intelligence they had received indicated that I had been killed during the operation.

They had intercepted communications from Vulov’s organization mentioning the disposal of an Israeli agent’s body, and they had assumed I was dead.

Seeing me standing there, wounded but alive, confused them completely.

They asked me what happened, how I survived, where I had been for the past 4 days.

I told them the basic facts, that I had been shot, that Vulkoff’s men had left me for dead, that I had somehow survived and made it to the safe house.

But I did not tell them about dying, about meeting Yeshua, about heaven and hell and the visions.

I knew they would think I had suffered brain damage or psychological trauma.

I knew they would pull me from active duty and put me through psychiatric evaluation.

So I kept silent about the most important part and they evacuated me back to Israel through a series of covert routes that took another 2 days.

When I finally arrived back in Tel Aviv, I was taken immediately to a secure medical facility where MSAD doctors examined me thoroughly.

They were baffled by my condition.

The bullet wounds were clearly visible.

The trajectory indicated the bullets had passed through critical areas near my heart and lungs, but somehow I had survived with minimal permanent damage.

They had no medical explanation for it.

One doctor told me privately that I should be dead, that he had seen thousands of gunshot wounds in his career, and mine should have been instantly fatal.

He asked me if I had any explanation for how I survived, and I just shook my head and said I did not know.

After two weeks of medical observation and debriefing, I was cleared to return home to my family in Ramadan.

My wife Shosana wept when she saw me, having been told only that I had been injured during a business trip and was receiving medical treatment.

My daughters, 12-year-old Tamar and 9-year-old Leah, hugged me carefully, afraid of hurting me.

I held them and tried to act normal, but inside I was being torn apart by the knowledge of what I had experienced and what it meant for my future.

I could not continue living as if nothing had changed.

I could not go back to synagogue and pray the prayers I had prayed my whole life, knowing now that the Messiah we were waiting for had already come.

I could not look my Orthodox father in the eye and pretend I still believed what he had taught me.

I could not serve in the Mosad protecting Israel while knowing that the greatest threat to Israel was not Iran or Hezbollah or Hamas, but our own spiritual blindness to Yeshua.

Everything had changed and I knew I could not keep it hidden for long.

I spent the next month in agonizing prayer and study, reading the New Testament for the first time in my life, finding a Messianic Jewish congregation in Natana where I could meet other Jewish believers in Yeshua and trying to figure out what obedience to Yeshua’s command would look like practically.

The believers I met were kind and welcoming, but they were also careful because many of them had experienced severe persecution for their faith.

They baptized me in the Mediterranean Sea one evening at sunset.

And when I came up out of the water, I felt the same overwhelming presence of Yeshua that I had felt when I died.

I knew I was on the right path, no matter how difficult it would be.

6 weeks after returning to Israel, I submitted my resignation to the MSAD.

My superiors were shocked and tried to convince me to reconsider.

They offered me a promotion, a desk job with less danger, more time with my family, but I refused.

I could not explain to them the real reason without sounding insane.

So, I simply told them that my near-death experience had changed my priorities and I needed to step away from operational work.

They were not happy, but they could not force me to stay.

As after 17 years of faithful service, I walked away from the only career I had known as an adult, from the identity I had built, from the purpose that had driven me.

When I told my family the full truth, that I had not just resigned from the Mess, but that I believed Yeshua was the Messiah, the reaction was even worse than I had expected.

My father declared me dead to him, literally sitting Shiva and mourning me as if I had died.

My mother wept and begged me to recant, to see a rabbi, to come back to the faith of our fathers.

My brothers refused to speak to me.

Shashana, my wife, was devastated and confused.

She had grown up secular and was not deeply religious, but even she understood that what I was claiming was an absolute betrayal of our Jewish identity.

She gave me an ultimatum.

Pete, either I would renounce this insanity about Yeshua and return to being the man she married, or she would divorce me and take the girls.

I begged her to listen, to read the prophecies with me, to consider the possibility that I was telling the truth.

But she refused.

Within 3 months, she had filed for divorce.

I lost my wife.

I lost daily access to my daughters.

I lost my extended family.

I lost my community in the Orthodox world.

I lost my career.

I lost my reputation.

Everything Yeshua had warned me about came true exactly as he said it would.

But even in the midst of that terrible loss, I felt his presence with me constantly, strengthening me, comforting me, reminding me that I had not lost anything of eternal value, and that what I had gained was worth infinitely more.

And I began attending the Messianic congregation in Natana regularly.

And the leader there, a former rabbi named Yakov Stern, took me under his wing and began discipling me in the faith.

He taught me how to read the New Testament as a Jewish book, how to see Yeshua in the context of first century Judaism rather than through the lens of Gentile Christianity, and how to articulate my faith to other Jewish people in a way they could understand.

I learned that there was a growing movement of Jewish believers in Yeshua across Israel.

Thousands of us meeting quietly in homes and small congregations facing opposition from both the Orthodox community and the secular government which had laws restricting religious proitizing.

But despite the opposition to the movement was growing because Yeshua was revealing himself to Jewish people in dreams and visions all across the country just as he had revealed himself to me.

Yakov told me stories of rabbis who had encountered Yeshua while studying Torah, of Holocaust survivors who had seen him in dreams, of IDF soldiers who had experienced his presence during combat, of secular Israelis who had supernatural encounters they could not explain or deny.

Every story was unique in its details, but the same in its essence.

Yeshua was moving in Israel, calling his people to recognize him, and nothing could stop what God was doing.

After 6 months of learning and growing in my faith, I felt Yeshua calling me to begin sharing my testimony publicly.

The idea terrified me because I knew what the cost would be.

But I also could not escape the memory of standing before him and hearing him commission me to warn Israel.

I started small sharing my story in Messianic congregations around the country and the response was powerful.

People wept as I described my death and encounter with Yeshua.

Many came forward afterward to say they had experienced similar things.

Word began to spread through the Messianic community that a former Mossad agent was openly sharing about his encounter with Yeshua and invitations started coming from different groups asking me to speak.

I shared my testimony in Jerusalem, in Hifa, in Bayer Shva, in small living rooms, in rented halls, wherever people would listen.

Each time I spoke, I saw the same pattern.

Some people would become angry and walk out, offended by the idea that a Jew could follow Yeshua.

But others would approach me afterward with tears in their eyes, confessing that they too had experienced something supernatural that they had been afraid to talk about.

An older woman in Jerusalem told me that Yeshua had appeared to her three times in dreams, calling her by name, but she had been too frightened to respond because of what it would cost her in her religious community.

A young man in Hifa, a combat soldier, described seeing Yeshua standing next to him during a firefight with Hezbollah on the Lebanese border.

A presence so real and protective that he knew without question who it was.

A university professor in Tel Aviv shared that while reading Isaiah 53 in preparation for a lecture in the words had suddenly come alive to her and she had understood for the first time that the suffering servant was not the nation of Israel but a person and that person was Yeshua.

These testimonies confirmed what Yeshua had shown me in the vision.

He was actively revealing himself to Jewish people across Israel, breaking through centuries of religious tradition and cultural [snorts] resistance with personal encounters that could not be denied or explained away.

The movement was growing and I was becoming part of something much larger than myself.

But as my visibility increased, so did the opposition.

I began receiving threatening phone calls and messages telling me to stop speaking or face consequences.

Someone vandalized my apartment in Ramat Gan spray painting traitor and Nazi collaborator on my door.

Though I was followed on several occasions by men I recognized as working for Orthodox extremist groups who specialized in harassing Messianic Jews.

One evening after speaking at a congregation in Ashdod, three men attacked me in the parking lot, beating me severely and warning me that next time they would do worse.

I went to the hospital with broken ribs and a concussion, but I refused to stop speaking.

The persecution only confirmed that I was doing what Yeshua had called me to do.

If the enemy was fighting this hard to silence me, it meant the message was having an impact.

Then, in February 2024, almost a year after my return from Russia, Yakov approached me with an idea that seemed both exciting and terrifying.

He said that the Messianic community in Israel had been praying about organizing a large public event where multiple Jewish believers could share their testimonies openly, not hidden in small meetings, but broadcast widely so that the entire nation could hear.

The goal was not to be provocative or confrontational, but simply to let Israelis know that there were thousands of their fellow Jews who believed Yeshua was the Messiah, and to give them an opportunity to hear why.

Yakov wanted me to be one of the main speakers because my story as a former MSAD agent and Orthodox Jew carried weight that could not be easily dismissed.

I spent two weeks praying about whether to participate, knowing that this would cross a line from which there would be no return.

Speaking in small messianic congregations was one thing, but broadcasting my testimony to the entire nation was something else entirely.

It would bring a level of visibility and persecution that I had not yet experienced.

But every time I prayed, I felt Yeshua’s presence confirming that this was what he wanted me to do.

The time for hiding was over.

The time for boldness had come.

We scheduled the event for March 27th, 2024 at the Eshkol Events Hall in Ashdod, a venue that could hold 8,000 people.

We arranged for live streaming online so that people across Israel and around the world could watch.

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