Panic in Jerusalem as Respected Jewish Scholar Declares Jesus Is God, Says Isaiah 53 Points to Him


I have spent 40 years studying the Hebrew Bible.

I have debated missionaries.

I have written papers defending traditional Jewish interpretation.

I have stood before congregations, students, and colleagues and told them with full confidence that Isaiah 53 has nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth.

Tonight I am standing before you to tell you that I was wrong.

Isaiah 53 points unmistakably undeniably to Jesus.

And 3 years ago in my home office at 2 in the morning surrounded by books I had read a hundred times, I surrendered my life to him.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother continues his story, we’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.

Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony.

This is my story.

I want to start by telling you about my father’s hands.

He had large hands, rougher than you would expect for a man who spent most of his adult life working in a tailor shop in Brooklyn.

The roughness wasn’t from the tailoring, though.

It was older than the work.

It It came from somewhere else entirely, from somewhere he rarely spoke about directly, though its shadow fell across everything in our home.

across the food we ate, the way he locked the door at night, the way he flinched at certain sounds, the particular manner in which he held the Torah scroll on Shabbat morning with both arms pulled close to his chest, the way a man holds something he almost lost and is not prepared to lose again.

He was 16 years old when the
war ended.

I want you to sit with that number for a moment.

16.

By the time the liberation came, he had lost nearly everyone he had started life with.

His parents, two younger sisters, one of them barely old enough to have started school.

A grandmother who, he told me once, in one of the rare moments he allowed himself to speak about her.

I had the kind of voice that made whatever room she was in feel larger and warmer than it actually was.

He said she used to sing while she cooked and that you could hear her three apartments away.

He told me her name once early in my childhood.

I cannot remember it now and that forgetting is one of the small griefs I carry.

I think for him saying her name was something he could only afford to do once.

He came to America with almost nothing.

A cousin’s address sewn into the lining of a coat that was much too thin for a New York winter.

A faith that by any rational calculation should not have survived what it had been put through.

And yet it had survived.

Not without damage.

You could see the damage if you looked closely, in the way he startled at raised voices, in the way he never fully relaxed in open spaces, and in the way certain dates on the Jewish calendar would descend on him like weather.

But the faith itself had survived.

It had come through the uncservivable with him, battered and scarred, but intact.

And that faith, his faith, the faith of a man who had witnessed what human beings could do to one another at their worst, and had still chosen deliberately and at great personal cost to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

That faith was the first and most consequential inheritance my father gave me.

I was the eldest of three sons.

We grew up in a part of Brooklyn that in the way of all specific neighborhoods of a specific time no longer quite exists in the form it took then.

It was a dense a living Jewish world, synagogues and kosher butchers and bakeries that smelled of chala on Thursday afternoons and Shabbat tables crowded with neighbors who were in every practical sense family.

The Yiddish you heard in the street was not a curiosity or an affectation, but a first language, a mother tongue.

Being Jewish was not in that neighborhood an identity you chose on Sunday morning or performed at high holidays or explained to co-workers.

It was simply the water you swam in, as natural and unself-conscious as breathing.

I love that world without fully knowing I loved it the way you love the place you’re from before you’ve been anywhere else and had the distance to understand what you had.

My father was not a wealthy man, but we were not poor in any way that mattered.

What we had was richness of a different kind.

the richness of a community that knew itself, of a tradition that explained where you came from and where you were going, of a table on Friday evening that was always set before sundown with a seriousness that I understood even as a
small child was not just about the food.

The Shabbat table was in my father’s house an act of resistance and an act of faith simultaneously.

You could not destroy us.

Those candles said, “We are still here.

We are still lighting the lights.

” I went to the yeshiva two blocks from our apartment beginning at age five.

I loved it almost immediately, and I want to be honest that the love was not in those early years particularly pious in character.

I was not an unusually devout child.

What I loved was the texts themselves, the way the Hebrew felt.

I the particular music and density of it, the way a single word in the Torah could open into centuries of argument and counterargument, the way the rabbis had been in conversation with each other across a thousand years as though the distance of time were no obstacle to a good argument.

My father used to say that
every letter of the Torah had a universe hiding inside it.

I believed him then as an act of inherited faith.

I believe him now as an act of personal discovery, though what I understand that universe to contain has changed in ways my father did not foresee and would not, I think, have chosen.

By the time I reached my late teens, it was clear to the people around me, to my teachers, to my father, or to the rabbi of our synagogue, who had known me since I was small enough to fall asleep during the Cole Neidra service and be carried
home, that the texts were going to be my life, not as a rabbi, as it turned out.

The rabinate requires a different set of gifts than the ones I possessed.

And I understood this about myself early enough to save everyone some difficulty.

as a scholar, an academic, a person who would spend his professional life in the company of these ancient documents, asking the questions that only become possible when you sit with the text long enough and carefully enough that it begins to give up what it has been quietly holding.

There were people in my community, good people, people I loved, who never entirely understood the difference between a rabbi and an academic scholar of religion.

They were not wrong to be uncertain.

The academy can be a colder place than the synagogue.

The questions that scholars ask are not always the questions that communities need asked.

And the distance required for rigorous analysis can, if you are not careful, drain the living warmth out of something that was meant to be lived and not merely studied.

I was aware of this danger throughout my career and worked against it consistently.

The texts I spent my life studying were never for merely objects of analysis.

They were also always underneath the footnotes and the methodology love letters from a god I believed in and wanted to understand.

I did my undergraduate work at a university in New York.

My doctoral work at a major research institution.

I am choosing not to name it are for reasons that will become apparent as this story continues.

I joined the faculty of that institution after my doctorate and spent the next 30ome years teaching courses on the Hebrew Bible, on the history of Jewish interpretation, on second temple Judaism, the rich complex world of Jewish thought in the centuries immediately before and after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.

This period roughly 200 B.

CE CE to 200 CE had always fascinated me particularly because it is the period during which so many of the ideas and texts and practices that define Judaism as we know it were being formed, debated, contested and crystallized.

It is a period of extraordinary intellectual and spiritual ferment and spending a professional lifetime inside it never became routine.

My specific area of expertise, the thing I was known for among colleagues, the thing my name was attached to in the literature was Isaiah and specifically the figure that modern scholarship refers to as the suffering servant.

This figure appears most concentratedly in four passages within chapters 40- 55 of Isaiah, what scholars call the servant songs, and most dramatically and extensively in chapter 53, the passage that has generated more interpretive controversy, more interfaith tension, and more genuine scholarly disagreement
than perhaps any other chapter in the Hebrew Hebrew Bible.

It was in many respects the text around which I built my professional life.

My doctoral dissertation touched on it.

My first major book was substantially about it.

Two subsequent books returned to it.

The journal articles I wrote that were most widely read and debated were the ones that engaged Isaiah 53 directly.

I had read that chapter by the time everything changed more times than I can count.

Hundreds of times, perhaps thousands if you include the partial readings, the verse byverse analysis, the comparative work against other versions.

I knew it in Hebrew, in the ancient Greek of the Septuagent, in the Aramaic of the Targum.

I had read every major commentary written on it in the last two centuries and most of the significant medieval ones.

I had taught it to undergraduate students and doctoral candidates.

I had lectured on it in synagogues and at academic conferences.

I had argued about it in print with scholars whose interpretations differed from mine.

I was in the most complete sense available to a human being.

I familiar with this text and I was I now understand completely wrong about what it meant.

But before I get to that, I need to tell you about Miriam.

You cannot understand my story without understanding her.

And you cannot understand her without me telling you something true, which is this.

She is the finest person I have known in my life.

This is not the sentimental overstatement of a husband describing his wife.

It is the considered assessment of someone who has spent his career in the company of brilliant, accomplished, intellectually serious people, and who has found consistently and without exception that the person across his breakfast table surpasses them all in the qualities that actually matter.

We met in our mid20s.

I was finishing my doctorate deep in the miserable final stages of dissertation writing, existing on coffee and the specific anxiety of a person who has committed four years to a project and is no longer sure the project is worth what it cost.

She was teaching elementary school in a neighborhood not far from where I had grown up with a particular quality of attention and patience that good teachers of young children develop an attentiveness to the human being in front of her that was not professional technique but simply who she was.

We
were introduced at a Shabbat dinner by a mutual friend who understood us both better than we understood ourselves at the time.

And from the first conversation, which ran considerably longer than Shabbat dinners are generally supposed to run, something was clear to me about her that has never become unclear in all the years since.

She was not an academic and had no ambition to become one.

She had no patience for the particular vanities of academic life, the status games, the citation battles, the elaborate performances of intellectual authority that scholars deploy in conferences and faculty meetings.

What she had instead was wisdom.

Not the academic kind, not the kind you acquire through graduate training and peer review, but the deeper older kind that some people are simply born toward and that, if they are fortunate, develops through a lifetime of paying real attention to real people.

She could read a room in 30 seconds.

She could understand what was happening underneath a conversation while it was still happening on the surface.

She was almost never wrong about people, and when she was, she acknowledged it without defensiveness, which is rarer than it sounds.

She was also a woman of genuine unscentimental faith, not the performed faith of communal obligation, not the faith that consists primarily of following rules because the rules have always been followed.

The faith of someone for whom the reality of God was a lived experience woven into the texture of daily life in the blessing over bread in the candles on Friday evening in the way she moved through Yam Kipur with a quality of inwardness that was not theater for anyone’s benefit.

She lit the Shabbat candles every Friday of our marriage with the same careful attention and watching her do it, watching her hands move through the particular motion of drawing the light toward her face, watching her eyes close, knowing that whatever passed
between her and God in those moments was real and private and not for public display.

That sight never became ordinary to me.

It was one of the things I loved most about our life.

We built something together that I can only call full.

two children who grew up at a Shabbat table that was always a little crowded and a little loud, where the arguments were as vigorous as the laughter, and the food was always better than the occasion required, because Miriam cooked the way she did everything thoroughly and without half measures.

a home full
of books, mine stacked on every horizontal surface, in a manner that Miriam found exasperating, and that I found entirely reasonable.

The smell of coffee and old paper that I associate with every good memory of my working life.

Colleagues I respected deeply.

Students whose development I watched with genuine investment.

A synagogue community that had known us for decades.

Where I was a familiar face at the adult education classes and a trusted voice on textual questions.

I was by any honest accounting a man whose life had worked out.

I was aware of this.

I was grateful for it in the particular way of someone who grew up in the shadow of a father’s losses and understood without being told that survival and flourishing were not to be taken casually.

I did not take them casually.

Now let me tell you about the other thing.

The thing that ran alongside the rest of my life for all those years and that I understood very differently then than I do now.

Throughout my career and with increasing frequency in its later decades, I encountered the Isaiah 53 debate in its popular form.

Not just in academic journals where the conversation was controlled and footnoted but in synagogues in community lectures he in interfaith panels in conversations with students who had Christian friends or Christian partners who had asked them the question.

The question was almost always essentially the same arriving in different phrasings.

Doesn’t Isaiah 53 describe Jesus? Isn’t this a prophecy pointing to him? How do you explain that the description matches so closely? I had answers, careful, well-developed, academically grounded answers that I had been refining for decades and believed sincerely.

The servant in Isaiah, I would explain, is not an individual messianic figure, but a corporate one, Israel itself, the nation, suffering among the nations of the world, bearing the weight of history’s violence, and ultimately to be vindicated by God in the sight of those
who had dismissed and persecuted them.

I would point to the chapters surrounding chapter 53 where Israel is explicitly and repeatedly called God’s servant.

I would trace the history of interpretation, explaining carefully and fairly how the individual messianic reading had been substantially abandoned by mainstream Jewish scholarship in the early medieval period, in part as a necessary and understandable response to the aggressive christoologgical use Christians were making of the text.

I was always fair to the complexity.

I acknowledge that early Jewish interpretation had been diverse on this question, but the conclusion was always the same.

This text is not about Jesus of Nazareth.

I taught this in my synagogue with the confidence of someone who had published on the subject.

I presented versions of it at academic conferences.

I engaged it in print or and every time someone challenged me, every time a Christian student or a curious questioner or a Messianic Jewish acquaintance raised an argument I hadn’t specifically addressed, I had a response ready.

I was not hostile in these exchanges.

Hostility would have been professionally unbecoming, and more than that, it would have been personally inaccurate.

I was genuinely not a hostile man on this subject.

I was something more settled than hostile.

I was certain.

There was one moment from a synagogue adult education class perhaps 12 or 13 years before everything changed that I have returned to many times in the last three years.

A young man, barely 20, I think, raised his hand near the end of the session and asked me with a directness I found genuinely refreshing how I explained the phrase pierced for our transgressions if the servant was meant to represent the nation of Israel.

He said that in his understanding, the nation of Israel wasn’t pierced.

Individual Jews were pierced.

Individual Jews were killed, but the nation as a whole was not.

And if it was individual Jews being pierced, then who was being healed by their wounds? The Jews themselves or someone else? It was a good question, a structurally good question, the kind that reveals a genuine engagement with the text rather than a rehearsed challenge.

I answered it smoothly, I thought, drawing on the collective nature of second Isaiah’s imagery.

The way the poems in these chapters move fluidly between individual and corporate, the specific history of the verb translated as pierced, and the range of its meaning in biblical Hebrew.

I gave him three or four layers of response.

The room seemed satisfied.

The young man nodded, though something in his face suggested that the nod was acknowledgment rather than full agreement.

I drove home feeling the comfortable confidence of a man who has done what he came to do.

I think about that young man sometimes now.

I do not know his name.

I hope he kept asking questions.

I hope wherever he is, he eventually found better answers than the ones I gave him.

In the period leading up to everything changing, I was working on what I expected would be my final major scholarly project, a comprehensive commentary on the four servant songs in Isaiah, the definitive treatment of a subject I had spent my career circling.

It was contracted with a major academic press.

I was several chapters into it.

I was, as I told Miriam on more than one occasion, finally in a position to say everything I had wanted to say about these texts, with the full weight of the accumulated scholarship behind me.

It was a good feeling, the feeling of a craftsman in the late stage of a long project who can finally see the shape of the finished thing.

And then one afternoon I opened my email.

It came from Daniel, not his real name, but the name I will use for him in this testimony.

Daniel had been one of my doctoral students perhaps eight or nine years before this.

He was one of the most genuinely gifted students I supervised in 30 years of doctoral training.

Not just intelligent, which many students were, but capable of the particular kind of sustained I honest engagement with a difficult text that distinguishes the real scholars from the merely clever ones.

His dissertation on prophetic
literature was excellent work.

We had stayed in occasional contact after his graduation, a note when he published something, a brief exchange at a conference.

I thought of him as someone who was going to do important work in the field.

What I didn’t know, had not known was that several years after finishing his doctorate, Daniel had undergone a transformation that his academic training had not prepared me to anticipate.

He had come to faith in Jesus as the Messiah.

He had become, in the terminology he would use himself, a messianic Jewish believer.

He was attending a messianic Jewish congregation, was active in a community of Jewish believers in Jesus, and had, as I would discover later, I’ve been praying for me specifically for years before he finally wrote.

His email was short.

It was also, I recognized immediately, one of the most carefully composed messages I had received in years, because Daniel knew exactly who he was writing to.

He knew my work.

He knew my arguments.

He knew the particular combination of scholarly pride and communal loyalty that would make an aggressive or clumsy approach not just ineffective, but instantly dismissable.

So he didn’t do anything aggressive or clumsy.

He wrote simply that he had been thinking about me, that he remained deeply grateful for my mentorship and what our years of working together had meant to him.

He said he had been wrestling with something for a long time and felt he needed to share it, though he understood if I preferred not to engage.

He mentioned a scholarly article from an organization I might not be familiar with, he said carefully, that compiled pre-Christian Jewish sources interpreting Isaiah 53, as referring to an individual Messiah.

He wasn’t asking me to agree with those sources, he said.

He was asking with the respect of a former student for a teacher he still admired whether I had engaged with them fully and what I made of them.

He included the link.

He said nothing else.

I almost deleted the email.

I want you to understand that clearly because it matters to what comes next.

My first instinct, automatic, trained, immediate, was that this was missionary material, well packaged perhaps, written by someone with enough academic background to make it look scholarly, but missionary material nonetheless.

I had seen this kind of thing before.

I knew the genre.

I knew how to handle it.

delete or at most a brief kind response explaining that I appreciated the thought but was familiar with the arguments and had addressed them in my published work.

I didn’t delete it.

I have sat with that fact many times in the years since.

Why didn’t I delete it? I have never arrived at a fully satisfying answer.

Part of it was Daniel’s name, a student I had trusted and respected, not someone I could dismiss as intellectually careless.

Part of it was the timing arriving as it did in the middle of my own deep immersion in the same text.

Part of it was something else.

Something I couldn’t have named or identified at the time.

A small quiet pull that I now understand differently than I did then.

Whatever it was, I left the email in my inbox.

I told myself I would look at it when I had a spare hour, probably to confirm what I already suspected.

I went back to my commentary draft.

I had dinner with Miriam that evening.

I read for a while and went to bed, but I kept thinking about the email in the way you keep thinking about something that doesn’t quite belong to the category you’ve put it in.

3 days later, I opened the link.

I want to pause here and be careful about something because this moment tends to get dramatized in conversion stories in a way that can make the whole account feel less credible rather than more.

I was not when I opened that link a man in spiritual crisis.

I was not searching for something I had lost.

I was not dissatisfied with my faith or my community or my interpretation of the text.

I was a contented man, a professionally successful and personally settled who was about to read an article he expected to disagree with.

That is the honest description of the moment.

What makes the story significant is not the drama of the moment itself, but what happened when an intellectually honest man read something he had already decided was wrong and discovered with considerable discomfort that it was more right than he had allowed himself to know.

The article was better than I expected.

I need to say that plainly because saying it costs me something even now and the things that cost something are usually the ones worth saying.

It was not a perfect piece of scholarship.

I could see the places where the argument was overstated, where a source was being stretched slightly further than it could bear, or where a point was made with more certainty than the evidence warranted.

But the core of what it was doing, presenting genuine pre-Christian Jewish sources that had read Isaiah 53 as referring to an individual Messiah, was not fabricated, not distorted beyond recognition, not academically fraudulent.

The sources were real.

The Talmudic references were real.

The medieval rabbitic commentators were real.

their words accurately represented.

Some of them I knew well.

Some of them I had cited in my own published work carefully and selectively in ways that I now for the first time began to examine with discomfort.

I closed the article.

I went back to my work.

I told myself I would address these sources in my commentary.

Of course I would.

I had always intended to engage the full range of interpretive history.

Nothing had changed, and this was simply professional preparation.

But something had shifted, something small and precise, like the adjustment of a lens that brings into focus something that had always been there, but slightly blurred.

I could not locate the shift exactly.

I could not have articulated that afternoon what was different, but it was different.

And in the weeks that followed, the difference grew rather than faded, in the quiet, persistent way of a truth that has been given an opening, and is in no hurry, because it has all the time in the world.

I did not sleep well the night after I read the article and the night after that and the one after that.

My father’s hands.

I keep coming back to them because I think they are the beginning of everything even though I did not understand that until very recently.

those large, rough, marked hands, I held out over the Shabbat candles every Friday evening of my childhood in a gesture that I now understand was prayer of the most honest kind.

The prayer of a man who had no words adequate to what he had survived and what he still believed, who could only hold his hands out toward the light and let the gesture say what language could not.

What was he reaching toward? What was he asking for? I think he was asking for the same thing we are all asking for underneath every other question.

That the suffering meant something.

That the losses meant something.

That the darkness he had walked through had not been empty of God.

Had not been abandoned by the one in whom he had placed his life.

I understand now in a way I could not have articulated then what I believe those hands were pointing toward.

But that understanding came slowly or and at great cost and not without a night when everything I thought I knew was required to give way.

That night was coming.

I did not know it yet.

It was well past midnight when I finally settled into the chair.

The house had that particular quality of silence that arrives after everyone else is asleep.

Not an empty silence, but a full one occupied by the sound of your own breathing and the occasional creek of the building adjusting to the temperature and somewhere far below the audible, the persistent hum of a city that never entirely stops.

Miriam had been asleep for 2 hours.

I had lained in bed for a while, unable to quiet my mind, and had eventually done what I always did when the mind would not quiet.

Got up, went to the office, turned on the lamp over my desk, and sat down with the work.

But tonight, the work was different from what it usually was.

Tonight I had Isaiah 53 open in front of me.

My personal copy of the Hebrew Bible, not my annotated academic edition with its forest of notes in the margins, but the older one, the one I had owned since the early years of graduate school, whose margins held a different kind of notation, less systematic, more personal.

the book that had been in my hands through the whole of my professional life.

I want to be very precise about what I intended when I sat down.

I was preparing for a lecture series I had been asked to give at my synagogue on the suffering servant.

A series I had been developing for weeks, working from my commentary draft and my accumulated years of engagement with the text.

I I was reviewing the passage the way a surgeon reviews an anatomy before an operation, not because he doesn’t know it, but because the act of deliberate, unhurried attention before the moment of real engagement has value in itself.

Professional preparation, nothing more dramatic than that.

But something happened that night that I have spent 3 years trying to find adequate words for and I am still not sure I have found them.

What happened was not dramatic in the conventional sense of that word.

There was no lightning, no vision, no sudden emotional upheaval.

What happened was that a text I had read hundreds of times, a text I knew in the way that a musician knows a piece he has performed for decades, the way his fingers know the notes before his mind has consciously directed them.

Refused for the first time ought to behave the way my familiarity with it required it to behave.

It fought back, not against my skill or my knowledge, against my prior conclusion, against the invisible assumption I brought to every reading, which was that I already knew what this text said and was reading it to confirm what I knew.

I started, as I always did, at Isaiah 52:13, which is where the passage scholars call the fourth servant song actually begins.

Three verses of introduction before chapter 53 opens.

God’s announcement that his servant will act wisely, will prosper, will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.

Then the sharp nearly violent turn, the servant whose appearance was so marred, so altered by suffering that many were appalled at him, so altered that he was barely recognizable as human.

And then the astonishing reversal.

kings would shut their mouths before him because they would see something they had never been told and understand something they had never heard.

I had read these three verses hundreds of times.

I knew every word.

But that night, reading them slowly, something in the sequence struck me with a freshness that I had not expected and could not easily explain.

The structure of the passage is an arc of extremity.

Not a moderate arc, not a gentle movement from difficulty to resolution, but an arc of the most extreme contrasts imaginable.

The most disfigured and appalling suffering followed by the most complete and universal exaltation.

Humiliation so total it strips away recognition of humanity.

Vindication so complete that the most powerful people in the world are struck silent.

What kind of suffering does that to a person? What kind of event produces that specific combination of maximum humiliation and maximum vindication? And why are the kings silent? Not dismissive, not contemptuous, but silenced.

What would silence a king? I moved into chapter 53.

And here I want to take you with me through the reading slowly.

The way I move through it that night because I think the only way to understand what happened to me is to understand what the text actually says when you stop managing it and start reading it.

The chapter opens, as I mentioned earlier in this testimony, with a question, not a statement of certainty, not a proclamation, a question.

Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed.

The speakers are bewildered by their own report.

They are about to tell us something they themselves find astonishing.

Something about the servant that confounded every expectation they had of how God’s power and vindication were supposed to look.

Then the description of the servant himself.

No form or majesty that we should look at him.

Nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

Despised and rejected by people.

a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

People hid their faces from him.

In the standard rabbitic interpretation, the interpretation I had defended and taught, these descriptions are applied to Israel as a corporate body suffering among the nations through centuries of persecution and exile.

The nations despised Israel, rejected Israel, hid their faces from Israel’s suffering.

This is a coherent reading with real textual support.

And I want to be honest about that even now.

It is not a foolish interpretation.

It draws on genuine features of the passage.

But here is where the grammar begins to press back.

Because the we who speak about the servant, the we who confess that they despised him, that they hid their faces from him, that they esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.

Who are they? In the traditional reading, if the servant is Israel, then the we must be the nations of the world.

Finally coming to recognize and confess that Israel’s suffering was vicarious, that Israel bore something for the nations.

The nations are the speakers.

But then the Wii says this, “We all like sheep have gone astray.

Each of us has turned to our own way.

And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

And here something becomes difficult to resolve.

The language of straying sheep, of turning each to one’s own way, of iniquity requiring a bearer.

This is not the language Isaiah uses for the nations of the world.

It is consistently and repeatedly throughout Isaiah the language he uses for Israel.

When Isaiah speaks of straying and iniquity and the need for God’s intervention, it is Israel that strays.

Israel whose iniquity requires addressing.

So if the we who stray are Israel and the servant is Israel, then we have Israel bearing the iniquity of Israel.

The same group is simultaneously the suffering servant and the straying flock whose iniquity is laid on the servant.

The poem requires a single group to occupy two mutually exclusive positions within the same extended metaphor.

I had always handled this tension with careful qualification.

But that night alone, reading slowly, I I could hear how much work those qualifications were doing, how hard they were straining to hold the traditional reading together.

I moved forward.

He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth.

He was led like a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before its sheerers is silent.

So he did not open his mouth.

I have read this verse so many times that it had become nearly invisible to me.

The way the most familiar sentences of our lives can become transparent, present, but unseen.

That night it arrived with what I can only call its full weight.

The servant is silent, not just patient, not just enduring, actively, deliberately, completely silent before those who are leading him to his death.

The silence is not passivity.

The silence is something chosen, something that is itself part of the meaning of what is happening.

I’d pushed the thought away when it came.

The thought I was not ready to have yet.

I pushed it away deliberately and moved on.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

Yet who of his generation protested? for he was cut off from the land of the living.

For the transgression of my people he was punished.

The phrase cut off from the land of the living is not metaphorical in biblical Hebrew.

It is the language of death of someone whose life has ended not of someone who is suffering or in exile.

The servant dies.

He is not expelled or imprisoned or exiled.

He dies and then the burial.

He was assigned a grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death.

I stopped here for a long time, longer than I had stopped anywhere else.

Both.

A grave with the wicked and with the rich.

Not one or the other, both simultaneously.

The specificity of this detail had always been something I had handled carefully in my academic work.

too carefully.

I now began to understand.

The detail is not easily absorbed into a corporate metaphor.

The Jewish people collectively have not been assigned a single grave with both criminals and wealthy individuals simultaneously.

The image is too precise, too particular, too specific in its strange doubleness to function as collective metaphor without straining the language past what it can bear.

It reads like repotage.

It reads like someone describing an actual event.

An event that actually happened to an actual person.

A death that was classified with criminals and yet a burial that was provided by someone wealthy.

A specific historical datable locatable event.

And then the poem turns after the death after the grave vindication.

Not the corporate vindication of a nation restored from exile, the vindication of this individual servant specifically who has specifically died and will specifically see life again.

After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied.

By his knowledge, my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.

After death, life.

after the grave, seeing the light, and then the cosmic consequence.

Because this individual poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with transgressors, and bore the sin of many, because of all of this, he is given a portion among the great.

I closed the chapter.

I sat in the quiet of my office for a long time, not moving, not reaching for another book or another cup of coffee, just sitting with what I had read.

And I became aware.

I in that sitting of something I can only describe as a hairline fracture running through the foundation of a building I had been living in for 40 years.

It was not a collapse.

It was not a sudden ruin.

It was something more precise and more frightening than that.

The discovery that something I had believed to be solid was not in every place, as solid as I had believed.

Then I went to my bookshelf and pulled down the Talmudic texts I knew well.

I opened the Babylonian Talmud to trackate Sanhedrin to the passage I had cited in academic papers.

The passage where the rabbis discuss the name of the Messiah and one opinion offered is the lepous one of the school of rabbi citing Isaiah 53:4.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.

Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God.

the Messiah in this rabbitic discussion.

It is one who bears grief and carries sorrow in a way that looks to outside observers like punishment from God.

Exactly the dynamic described in Isaiah 53.

This is the Babylonian Talmud.

This is the central document of rabbitic Judaism.

This is not a Christian source.

I pulled down the commentary of Rabbi Mosha Elshik, a 16th century scholar writing in the Ottoman period before the modern era of Christian Jewish palemics had fully shaped Jewish exugesus into the form in which I had inherited it.

Elshake reads Isaiah 53 as referring to the King Messiah, not to the nation, to an individual messianic figure who suffers and who is rejected and who bears the sins of others.

Writing before the pressures of modern interfaith debate had fully solidified the collective interpretation as the only acceptable Jewish reading.

He follows an older interpretive tradition.

I had cited these sources before.

I want to be clear about that.

I had not hidden them or pretended they didn’t exist.

I had cited them as evidence of the diversity of preodern Jewish interpretation, noted them as minority opinions, and moved on to explain why the collective reading was the more textually defensible one.

I had done this professionally, responsibly, by the standards of my discipline.

But sitting alone in my office at 2 in the morning, with no audience to satisfy and no argument to win, reading these sources without the invisible but real pressure of prior conclusion, they felt different.

They felt heavier.

They felt like evidence I had been measuring on a scale that was not quite level.

I went to bed at nearly 4 in the morning.

I I lay on my back in the dark and tried to let my mind go still.

Miriam was breathing quietly.

Outside the city made its distant sounds.

The dark of the room was the ordinary dark of the room, the familiar dark of 30 years of sleeping in this house.

But I was not the same man who had got into bed the night before.

Something had come loose.

Some internal architecture that had seemed permanent had been shown to rest on foundations that in at least one place were less certain than I had understood.

And the place where it was less certain happened to be exactly the place that bore the most weight.

I did not pray that night.

I was not ready to pray.

But the question that arrived in the quiet of the room, not formed in words, but present the way await is present.

The way the first light before dawn is present before you can see it was something I had never allowed myself to genuinely ask.

Not in 40 years of reading the text.

Not in 40 years of scholarship and argument and publication.

Who is this person? Not what does this passage mean understood within its literary and historical context? Not how should this text be situated within the broader interpretive tradition, but simply who is the one this passage is describing? I had never asked that question before, not with my whole self, not without already knowing the answer I was going to arrive at.

The question stayed with me into sleep.

It was there when I woke up.

It has never entirely left.

There are stretches of time in a life that resist being turned into narrative.

They are too slow, too interior, and too full of contradiction and reversal to compress cleanly into story.

They don’t have the shape that stories require, the forward momentum, the clear sequence of cause and effect.

They are more like weather than plot, pervasive, atmospheric, present in every moment without being reducible to any single moment.

The months following that first night were like that.

I can tell you things that happened.

I can describe conversations and discoveries and specific evenings in my office.

But I cannot fully convey what those months felt like from the inside.

The particular quality of carrying something you cannot put down and cannot share.

of being engaged in the most significant intellectual and spiritual struggle of your life while simultaneously teaching classes, attending faculty meetings, having dinner, attending synagogue, lay and maintaining the full ordinary surface of a life that looked from the outside exactly as it always had.

What I can tell you is that I was not the same man I had been before that night.

And the gap between the man I had been and the man I was becoming was growing rather than narrowing.

And the gap was invisible to almost everyone around me.

I went back to Isaiah 53 obsessively, not every night, but often in the late hours when the house was quiet, with the specific compulsion of a person returning to a wound that won’t stop commanding attention.

Each time I tried to read fairly, I gave the traditional interpretation every advantage I could manage.

I was intimately familiar with its strongest form.

I had spent 30 years developing it, and I presented it to myself with as much force as I could summon.

And each time I pressed the text the same way I would press any other text on which a student was arguing an interpretation I thought needed more rigorous examination.

I applied to my own longheld position the same scrutiny I had applied to other scholars positions throughout my career.

It did not hold up the way I needed it to hold up.

Not because there was nothing to it.

There was but because it required in the places where it mattered most a level of exoggetical maneuvering that I would not have accepted from a student.

the pronouns, the specificity of the burial detail, the substitutionary logic of the servant suffering, not suffering alongside, but suffering instead of suffering so that others would not have to.

The vindication after death that was not merely metaphorical restoration, but something the text described as the servant himself seeing the light of life.

The more rigorously I examined the traditional reading, the more I felt the places where it strained.

And the more I felt those places, the more an alternative reading, one I had spent my career resisting, began to present itself not as missionary overreach, but as a genuine, textually defensible, historically rooted possibility that I had not been fair to.

I also during this period began working my way carefully through what the passage demanded in terms of timing.

This led me to spend several weeks with Daniel’s prophecy.

Chapter 9 of Daniel, the famous passage projecting a timeline from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem to the coming of the anointed one, the Messiah.

The mathematics of this passage have been disputed for centuries and I do not intend to rehearse all of that here.

What I will tell you is that when I work through the timeline with the same rigor I brought to any other chronological calculation in ancient neareastern history, the window it pointed toward ended somewhere in the first century of the common era before the destruction of the temple in 70 CE before any further possibility of fulfillment within the terms the text itself establish.

establishes because the text specifies that the anointed one would come and be cut off while the temple was still standing while the sacrificial system was still operative.

This meant something I had avoided the implication of my entire career.

If Daniel’s prophecy was genuine prophecy and meant what it said, the Messiah had to have come and been cut off, had to have died before 70 CE.

There was no later window.

The temple was gone.

The timeline had closed.

And if the Messiah had come before 70 CE, who was the most prominent Jewish figure of the first century, who had died in precisely the manner Isaiah 53 described, rejected by his own people, executed by the governing authorities, killed in a manner associated with criminals, buried in a wealthy man’s tomb, and whose followers subsequently claimed that he had been raised from the dead and exalted.

Exactly as Isaiah 53 projected.

I am an academic.

I am not prone to overstatement.

But I sat with this convergence.

Isaiah 53, Daniel 9, 1st century Jewish history for a very long time, and I could not make it point anywhere else.

My relationship with Miriam during this period had a quality I had not felt in our marriage before.

a sustained, gentle, unresolved tension that lived in the space between us without either of us naming it directly.

She knew something was wrong, or more precisely, that something significant was underway in me.

She is too perceptive for it to have been otherwise.

But she also trusted me enough and understood me well enough to know that this was not something that could be resolved by simply asking me to talk about it before I was ready.

We had one conversation about 4 months into this period that I think about often.

She had found me at my desk past 2:00 in the morning again and had stood in the doorway of the office in the particular way she had of making her presence known without intruding on it.

We talked not about the specific content of what I was wrestling with, but about the fact of the wrestling itself.

I told her I was working through something in the text that was more complicated than I had anticipated and that I needed time to think it through properly.

She sat with me for a while in the quiet of the office, not reading or working, but simply present in the way she had of offering her presence as a form of companionship that required nothing in return.

Before she went back to bed, she said something I have thought about many times since.

That she trusted me and that whatever I was working through, she believed I was working through it honestly and that she would still be there when I came out the other side.

I did not tell her what I was really working through.

The trust she expressed made that harder, not easier.

But it also anchored me.

The knowledge that she was there, that the foundation of my personal life was not in question, gave me enough stability to continue the interior wrestling without falling apart entirely.

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