My colleague Yoel, the secular historian, sensed something as well, though he could not have known what specifically.

We had coffee together most weeks, and over the course of several months he became progressively more watchful in our conversations, more attentive to whatever was beneath the surface of what I was saying.

One afternoon, after I had said something about the interpretive history of Isaiah 53, that was slightly more uncertain in tone than my usual declarations on the subject.

He looked at me in a way that was not quite a question but functioned as one.

What he said when I came close to articulating what I was actually thinking was a warning measured private.

The warning of a friend who understood the sociology of what I seemed to be approaching.

He was not speaking from faith.

He was speaking from decades of watching Jewish academics navigate the particular territories of communal expectation and professional consequence.

Don’t, he was saying in the specific way that people say don’t when they mean be very certain before you do.

I heard him.

I was not ready to answer him.

It was during this middle period that I made the decision to read the New Testament.

Not for the first time technically.

I had read portions of it over the years as an academic necessity.

I’m surveying the primary sources of the movement I was studying in its historical context.

But I had never read it the way I read it now.

I had never read it as a reader.

a person sitting with a document and receiving it rather than analyzing it for professional purposes.

I started with the passion narratives, the accounts of the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and burial in the four gospels.

I read them in Greek first, then in plain English translation.

I was looking with everything I had for evidence of retrospective construction, for the signs that these accounts had been shaped after the fact to fit the prophecy of Isaiah 53 rather than having independently recorded events that happened to correspond to it.

This is a legitimate historical question.

I approached it as a historian would.

What I found was more complicated than I expected.

And the silence before the accusers is in all four accounts with a consistency and detail that is difficult to attribute simply to the desire to match a prophecy.

The burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arythea, a wealthy member of the council, accounts for the rich in his death detail.

The crucifixion alongside two criminals accounts for the grave with the wicked.

The substitutionary logic of the death, one dying so that others need not, is not retrospectively imposed on the crucifixion narrative, but appears to be present in the accounts of what Jesus himself said about the meaning of his death well before the passion itself.

And then there was this, the accounts of the resurrection.

I want to handle this carefully because I am aware that it is the most contested element of the entire story and I have no interest in being less than rigorous here.

What I will say is that when I read the resurrection accounts as a historian asking the historical question of what best accounts for the evidence, the evidence was not as easily dismissed as I had always assumed it would be.

The accounts are diverse enough and consistent enough simultaneously to be interesting.

The transformation of the disciples from people hiding behind locked doors to people willing to die proclaiming the resurrection is not easily explained by a fabricated story.

People do not die for claims they know to be invented.

The conversion of Paul who had been actively persecuting followers of Jesus is not easily explained without some account of his Damascus road experience.

The conversion of James, Jesus’s brother, are who apparently had not believed in his brother’s messianic identity during Jesus’s ministry is most naturally explained by what James himself claimed that he had seen Jesus alive after the crucifixion.

None of this is proof in the mathematical sense.

I am not offering it as such.

I am telling you that when I read the evidence as a historian rather than as a defender of a predetermined conclusion, it was considerably more substantial than I had previously allowed myself to see.

There was one night during this period, perhaps five or 6 months in, when I reached a kind of internal exhaustion that I had not anticipated, not despair, not breakdown, but the particular depletion of a man who has been fighting on multiple fronts
simultaneously for a very long time, and is running out of what is required to maintain the fight.

I sat at my desk very late.

I could not have told you the hour.

And I sat for a long time without reading, without opening any book, without doing anything at all.

Just sitting in the chair in the lamplight, aware of the silence.

And I prayed, not lurggically, not in Hebrew, not with any formal structure, just spoke haltingly into the quiet of the room.

I told the God I had believed in my whole life that I did not know what I was seeing.

I told him that something in the text I had devoted my life to was pressing on me in a way I could not manage or explain.

I told him I was afraid.

I asked him without using any particular name to show me clearly what was true.

It was not a dramatic prayer.

It was not answered that night with anything I could point to, but something about the act of praying it, of stopping the internal argument long enough to simply ask, shifted something in me.

The exhaustion was still there, but underneath it something else, not peace exactly, more like a willingness that had not been there before.

a small, cautious, terrifying willingness to follow the truth wherever it led, even into the territory I most feared.

That willingness is the thing that made the next night possible.

The meeting with Daniel took place about 10 days after I had written back to him.

I had written carefully, several drafts, I think, before I settled on the right words.

I told him I had read the article he sent.

I told him I had been working through some of the sources and had questions.

Questions I described as scholarly ones, which was true, though it was not the whole truth.

I I said I would value a conversation if he was willing.

His response came within hours and was warm and brief, and I noted, not triumphant.

There was nothing in it of a man who thought he had won something.

There was something more like relief, the relief of someone who had been waiting a long time for a door to open slightly.

We chose a cafe in a neighborhood where neither of us was likely to be recognized by the people who knew us.

I arrived first and sat with a coffee, noticing the particular quality of my own nervousness, which was unusual for me.

I had sat with challenging interlocutors my entire career, and had never been particularly nervous.

This was different, and I understood it was different, though I was not fully ready to articulate why.

I Daniel arrived and we greeted each other with the warmth of people who have genuine history together and the careful courtesy of people who understand that the conversation they are about to have is not ordinary.

We covered the preliminary ground how he was doing what he was working on how my own work was going and then I brought the conversation to where it needed to go.

I told him what had been happening.

I told him about the months of reading and wrestling, about the specific textual problems I had encountered, about the grammatical issues with the pronouns, about the burial detail, about the Daniel timeline.

I told him about the pre-Christian Jewish sources and my increasing discomfort with the way I had managed them in my published work.

I told him all of this in the careful a measured language of a scholar presenting his working notes because that is how I speak when I am most uncertain, most exposed, most in need of the protection of professional register.

He listened without interrupting.

He did not take notes.

He did not reach for a Bible or a list of counterarguments.

When I finished, he sat quietly for a moment, and then he said something that I could not have anticipated, and that I have thought about in the years since, more than almost anything else in this entire story.

He said he couldn’t outargue me.

He said it plainly and without embarrassment, that my knowledge of these texts was vastly greater than his, and that anything he could produce as an argument I could probably identify the weakness in before he had finished making it.

And then he said that the arguments had been important to him at the beginning of his own journey, had opened a door, had made faith seem intellectually possible, but that the thing that had ultimately changed him was not an argument.

It was an encounter.

He had asked into his own silence whether Jesus was real and whether he was present and whether the text of Isaiah was describing him.

And something had happened in response that he had no category for and no explanation of and that he had been living in the reality of ever since.

Those words I encountered him.

They were not a theological argument.

They were not a scholarly claim.

They were a report from someone who had been somewhere who had experienced something who was telling me what the experience had been or and the reason they stayed with me.

The reason I drove home with them, still in my mind, and sat with them through dinner, and could not put them down at bedtime, was that they pointed to something I had not allowed myself to consider in all my months of textual analysis.

The text was about a person, not about a concept, not about a theological category, not about an interpretive tradition, a person.

And persons unlike concepts can be encountered, can be present, can be addressed.

And if the text was right about who this person was, then the possibility existed.

The terrifying, thrilling, lifealtering possibility existed that I could simply ask.

Miriam was away when I got home.

She had gone to spend several days with our daughter and the grandchildren.

a visit planned weeks before and I had the house to myself in a way I had not had it for a long time.

I made dinner alone and ate alone and sat for a while afterward in the quiet of the kitchen.

Then I went to my office.

I turned on the lamp.

I sat down in my chair.

I opened the Hebrew Bible to Isaiah 52.

What I did differently that night, the essential thing, the thing that made that night different from every other night of reading in all the months of wrestling, was that I stopped protecting my conclusion.

I am going to say that again because I think it is the most important sentence in this entire testimony.

I stopped protecting my conclusion for 40 years.

Every time I had opened Isaiah 53, I had opened it as a man who already knew what it said and was reading it to confirm, to sharpen, to arm.

Even in the months of honest wrestling, I had still been coming to the text with a covert defensive agenda.

genuinely trying to be fair, yes, but still hoping that fairness would ultimately vindicate what I already believed.

Still wanting to be right.

That night, I laid it down.

I opened the text and I made an interior decision, not a dramatic one, not announced to anyone, not accompanied by any outward change in how I sat or what I did.

to be willing to be wrong, to receive what the text said without filtering it through what I needed it to say, to follow wherever it went, regardless of the cost.

I began at 52:13, raised, lifted up, highly exalted.

The same language the book of Isaiah uses only one other time in the throne room vision of chapter 6 where Isaiah sees God himself high and lifted up, the hem of his robe filling the temple.

I had noticed this before um academically.

I had noted the verbal parallel in my research files, but I had not let myself sit with its full implication, which was that this servant, this suffering, disfigured, rejected servant, is introduced by the text of Isaiah in language reserved for the divine.

The servant is being described in terms that in this specific book belong to God.

I moved into chapter 53, the man of sorrows, the one acquainted with grief, the one from whom people hid their faces, despised and not esteemed.

Though we who confess, surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering.

Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities.

The punishment that brought us peace was on him.

And by his wounds, we are healed.

I read this out loud in Hebrew.

And the sound of it in the quiet room, the particular music of the ancient language, the compressed weight of what it was saying arrived differently than it had ever arrived before.

Not because the words were different, because I was different, because the man reading them was no longer managing them.

He was pierced for our transgressions.

The Hebrew word is mechulal.

Pierced, wounded by an external agent, not ill or afflicted by nature.

Someone pierced him.

And the reason was our transgressions, not his, ours.

The punishment that brought us peace was on him.

This is not poetry describing parallel suffering.

This is logic describing substitution.

The punishment that was owed to us was placed on him.

Because it was placed on him, we have shalom, wholeness, peace, restoration.

This is not a difficult interpretive move.

It is what the text plainly says.

By his wounds, by the singular word chabra, the woundstripe, the mark of a specific act of violence, we are healed.

Not despite the wounds, by them.

The healing and the wounding are inseparable.

The wholeness comes from the place of the breaking.

I came to the silence before the accusers.

I came to the death, the burial with the wicked and the rich simultaneously.

the strange and specific doubleness of a detail that fit no corporate metaphor and read like a historical report.

And I came to the vindication after death.

I put the Bible down.

I sat in my chair in the lamplight in the quiet of my empty house, and I was still for a long time.

The city outside was making its distant nighttime sounds.

The lamp was making its small circle of light.

I the books around me were the books I had lived with my whole professional life.

And I asked it was not a polished prayer.

It was not theologically precise.

I did not have the vocabulary for it yet.

I didn’t know what vocabulary to use.

I spoke into the quiet and I said something that amounted to this.

If this passage is about you, if you are the one described here, if you are the one Isaiah saw, if you were the one who was pierced and crushed and silenced and killed and vindicated, then I need you to be real to me right now because I am out of arguments.

I have run out of the ability to argue my way around you.

And if you are real, I am asking you to make yourself known.

What happened next? I have described perhaps a dozen times in three years and each time I am aware that the words I have available are inadequate to what actually occurred.

There was no vision, no voice, no physical sensation of the dramatic kind.

What there was, and I am choosing every word, with the care of a man who has spent his life believing that words matter, was a presence, an arrival, a warmth that came into the room without a natural source, and that was not an emotion I generated, but something that arrived from outside
myself, and with it a certainty, not the intellectual certainty of an argument one, Not the satisfaction of a conclusion reached after sustained analysis, but the certainty of recognition.

The certainty of a man who has been looking at a face in a crowd and suddenly realizes he knows who it is.

I knew in that moment that the one described in Isaiah 53 was alive.

Not historically alive.

Not alive in the sense that his influence persisted or his teachings endured, alive, present in this room, in this lamplight, at this desk with me, and that his name was Jesus.

I wept.

I am not a man who weeps readily.

The upbringing I described at the beginning of this testimony, the shadow of a father who had used up his tears on things that deserved them, had left me with a high threshold for open emotion.

But I wept that night.

Long, steady, unhurried tears that came from somewhere deeper than sadness.

They were not tears of loss, though there was grief in them.

grief for the years, for the arguments, for the students I had taught not to look at this text honestly, for all of it.

What they were more than anything else were tears of recognition, of something found on of a door opened that had been shut so long that I had stopped being aware I was standing in front of it.

At some point in the midst of this, I began to speak to him, not in Hebrew, not in the formal language of liturgy.

In ordinary words, the words of a man caught completely offguard by where he has ended up and who has no prepared remarks.

I told him I believed.

I told him the text had been telling the truth about him all along and that I had fought it for 40 years and was done fighting.

I told him I was sorry for the arguments, for the papers, for the certainty I had performed for congregations who trusted me.

I told him that I did not know what would come next, that I could see enough of the cost from where I was standing to know it was going to be significant, but that I was giving him whatever I had left, whatever remained of my career, my
reputation, my remaining years, because there was no longer any honest alternative.

The prayer ended.

The room was quiet.

I sat for a while longer in the warmth that had not left, and I was aware, in the way you are aware of things that have become permanent rather than temporary, that the man who was sitting in this chair was not the same man who had sat down in it 2 hours before.

I called Daniel.

It was past midnight.

He answered on the second ring.

I could not find a sentence that held what had happened.

I said something I cannot now reconstruct exactly what that was enough for him to understand.

He began to cry.

I was still crying.

We were on the phone for several minutes, not saying much.

We inhabiting a silence that was full enough that words would have diminished it.

When Miriam came home, I told her everything.

I told her from the beginning, the email, the first night of reading, the months of private wrestling, the specific things I had found in the text, the Daniel timeline, the New Testament accounts, and finally the night alone in the office.

I told her slowly, clearly, with the same care I would take, explaining something significant to someone whose understanding I genuinely valued, because her understanding genuinely mattered to me more than any other person’s.

I watched her face as I talked.

She was completely still.

She asked no questions while I was speaking.

She simply received.

When I finished, the kitchen was quiet for a long time.

I could hear the refrigerator humming outside.

It was beginning to get light.

We had been talking through the night.

I realized her face held things I recognized and things I didn’t.

There was grief in it.

Real grief.

the grief of someone whose world has just been asked to reorganize itself around a fact she hadn’t chosen.

There was fear, the specific fear of a woman who understood, as I did, what our community would make of what I had just told her and what it would cost our family.

There was love, unchanging, settled, the love of four decades that was not going to be unmade by this, whatever it ultimately meant.

And there was something else, something harder to name, a quality of attention, of deep, careful listening, as though she was filing everything I had told her away in a place where she would continue to examine it.

She told me she needed
time.

She told me she was frightened.

She told me she didn’t know what this meant for our life.

She did not tell me she was leaving.

She did not tell me she understood.

We sat at the kitchen table as the light came up with the Hebrew Bible lying open between us at Isaiah 53.

Her hands were near it, not touching it, near it.

That nearness, I understood, was everything.

3 years have passed since that night.

I am standing here, wherever you are watching or listening from.

As a man who has lived inside the consequences of that kitchen morning for three full years and who wants to be as honest with you about those consequences as I have tried to be about everything that came before.

The honesty of the aftermath matters as much as the honesty of the journey because anyone can tell you about a turning point.

The truth of whether the turning point was real shows up in what you live through afterward and whether it holds when everything around it is pulling at it, testing it, asking it to prove itself under conditions that are not comfortable.

It has held.

I want to say that first before I tell you what it cost, because I think you deserve to know the ending before I describe the road.

The cost came in layers and the first layer was professional.

I want to be careful here because I have no interest in overstating what happened institutionally and I have even less interest in positioning myself as a victim of persecution which would be both inaccurate and unbecoming.

What happened professionally was more subtle than persecution and in many ways harder to address because of that subtlety.

Yeah.

Before I had told anyone outside my family what had happened to me, before I had made any public statement, something in the texture of my professional life began to shift in ways that I could feel but not point to directly.

A colleague who had always been colleial became careful with me in the way that people become careful when they are uncertain of someone’s stability.

An invitation I had expected to receive was quietly given to someone else.

The review of a paper I submitted came back with a sharpness that was not quite the sharpness I knew from that journal’s editors.

These things were deniable individually.

Together they told me something.

The formal disclosure came about 4 months after that night.

I submitted a letter to my institution.

I will not reproduce its specific language or because it was a private professional communication.

But its substance was this, that my views on Isaiah 53 had undergone a fundamental revision, that this revision was connected to a personal theological journey, and that I had come to believe that Isaiah 53 pointed to Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfillment of the Hebrew prophetic tradition.

I told my department chair in person before the letter was submitted.

That conversation was long and difficult and conducted on both sides with the care of people who had genuine respect for each other and were navigating something that neither of them had any template for.

He was a decent man.

He handled it as decently as the situation permitted.

But his face when I finished telling him, I told me clearly that the professional landscape I was going to be navigating from that point forward had changed.

What followed was not a firing.

Tenure protects against that.

And I want to be accurate.

What followed was the institutional equivalent of being moved to the edge of a room.

still technically present, still officially a member of the faculty, but no longer centered.

Committees I had served on were reorganized in ways that left me out.

Graduate students who had expressed interest in working with me were redirected by advisors whose concern for those students professional futures I understood and did not resent.

My course offerings were adjusted.

The informal invitations to participate in the intellectual life of the department, the colloquia, the visiting speaker dinners are the departmental reading groups tapered off and then stopped.

I resigned before the end of the following academic year.

The book contract, the commentary on the servant songs that was to have been the capstone of my professional life, was dissolved by mutual agreement with the press.

I left behind a career of 30 years, a position I had loved, a community of scholars I had respected and learned from, and a professional identity that had been so central to how I understood myself that losing it was in some ways like losing a language I had been thinking in my whole adult life.

I want to sit with this for a moment because I don’t think it should be moved past too quickly.

What I lost professionally was real.

It was not a small thing.

I had given 30 years of serious honest.

I dedicated scholarly work to an institution and a discipline that I genuinely loved and the manner of my departure was not the manner I would have chosen.

The commentary will never be written, at least not in the form it was intended.

There are papers I will not publish, arguments I will not make in the venues where they would have had the most impact, conversations with colleagues that will not happen because the professional relationship that would have made them possible no longer exists.

I have grieved this.

I am still grieving it in the way that real losses are grieved, not continuously or devastatingly, but in recurring waves that arrive without scheduling, and that require each time a conscious returning to what I know to be true.

The community layer of the cost was in some ways harder than the professional one because it was more personal.

My rabbi called me for a meeting perhaps 3 weeks after my letter to the institution became known in the community as these things inevitably do.

He had known me for 30ome years he had married Miriam and me.

He had sat with me through the deaths of both my parents.

He had praised my teaching, valued my scholarship, trusted my voice in the congregation.

The meeting he called was not a meeting of pastoral care.

It was a boundary meeting, a conversation that both of us understood without needing to say so explicitly was about the terms under which I could continue to be part of the community.

I will not tell you the details of that conversation.

Some things that pass between people in moments of genuine shared grief belong to them and not to public testimony.

What I will tell you is that he was not cruel.

He was genuinely grieved.

The grief was real and unperformed and I shared it completely from the other side of the distance that had opened between us.

We were both grieving the same thing.

The loss of something that had mattered to both of us.

A relationship and a shared life that was not going to survive in the form it had taken.

I did not return to that synagogue after that meeting.

The community I had belonged to for 30 years.

The people who had known my children as children, who had sat at my table and whose tables I had sat at, who had celebrated and mourned with us through all the occasions that require the presence of people who know you.

That community was no longer mine to belong to in the way I had belonged.

This is not a loss that can be summarized.

It has to be lived.

I I have lived it.

The family dimension of the cost arrived in stages and is still in some respects ongoing.

Our son was the most difficult.

He is a man I love without reservation, a man whose own integrity and seriousness I respect as deeply as I respect anyone’s.

And his response to what I told him was not anger exactly, though there was anger in it.

It was more like the response of someone whose foundational map of the world has had a significant feature removed without his consent.

The father he had known, the father who had represented in some ways the intellectual and spiritual anchor of his own Jewish identity had become from his perspective someone different.

someone who had crossed a line that he had not expected his father capable of crossing.

We did not have proper conversations for the better part of a year.

Or we spoke practically briefly about family logistics and necessary matters.

But the real conversations, the conversations of fathers and sons who were in genuine contact with each other were not available to us during that period.

I did not push.

I wrote him one letter longhand that laid out what I had found and why I could not have found differently without being dishonest.

And that told him I loved him and was not going anywhere and that when he was ready to talk, I would be ready to listen.

I gave him the time he needed.

When we came back to real conversation slowly over many months through careful phone calls and eventually a visit that was one of the most important days of my recent life.

I did not try to convince him of anything theological.

I tried only to be his father fully and honestly let him see that the man he had known was still the man who was present.

that faith in Jesus had not turned me into someone unrecognizable.

He has not come to faith.

I do not expect him to, and I hold no pressure toward that end.

What we have now is a real relationship marked by what we have been through, honest about the distance that still exists on certain questions, but real.

He calls me every week.

We argue about other things the way fathers and sons argue, and those arguments are among the things I am most grateful for.

Our daughter surprised me more than I can say.

She had always been the less predictable of the two, the one who processed things inwardly before she expressed them, who waited until she understood something before she spoke about it.

She called me perhaps 2 weeks after I had told the children and and the questions she asked were not the questions of someone reacting.

They were the questions of someone who had been quietly thinking for a long time before she called.

She asked about specific verses.

She asked what the night in the office had actually been like, not for drama, but because she wanted to understand.

She asked how I was living differently as a result of what had happened to me.

She is on a journey of her own.

I will not say more than that because it is her story.

But I pray for her.

And then there is Miriam.

Miriam is the center of this story in a way that I hope has come through in everything I have shared.

Without her steadiness during those months of my private wrestling, I do not know if I would have had the stability required to follow the questions honestly.

Without her willingness to stay, to remain present in our marriage during the long uncertain period after I told her what had happened, I would have faced the professional and communal losses in a loneliness that might have broken something.

She was the anchor.

She was the constant.

She was, as she had always been, the most important human presence in my life.

She did not come to faith immediately.

I did not expect her to and I did not ask her to.

What I tried to do, the only thing I tried to do, because anything more intentional would have been a form of manipulation that our marriage did not deserve, was live honestly in front of her.

Pray where she could see me praying, not as a performance, but as a reality.

read the texts with the same care I had always brought to reading.

Be the man I had always tried to be, or and let her observe whether faith had changed that man in ways she recognized as genuine.

She began asking questions about nine or 10 months in.

Careful, specific questions, about textual details, about the historical evidence, about what I understood Jesus to have said and done and been.

I answered everything as carefully and honestly as I could.

I did not overstated certainty I did not have.

I did not hide the places where questions remained open for me.

I tried to share with her exactly what I had found and exactly how I had found it.

And then I let her carry it wherever she needed to carry it.

About 14 months after my own surrender, on a Tuesday afternoon in our living room, while I was reading in the next room, Miriam prayed.

She told me about it afterward, standing in the kitchen, and the telling was characteristically Miriam, quiet, precise, without drama, grounded in the specific reality of what had happened rather than in the performance of emotion.

She said she had found she could not not speak to him anymore.

That the accumulation of everything she had been reading and thinking and watching in me in the texts in her own private wrestling had reached a point where the only honest response was to address it directly to him to Jesus.

And that when she did something happened that she recognized as real.

I held her in the kitchen and we stood together in the afternoon light and I could not speak for a while.

There are some moments that deserve to be received in silence and that was one of them.

Now let me tell you about what I have found because the story is not only about what was lost and I would be doing you a disservice if I let it end there.

I have found in the three years since that night in my office a faith that is unlike anything I had before.

Not because it replaces the faith I grew up with, but because it completes it in ways I had not known it needed completing.

I am still a Jew.

This is important to me and I want to say it clearly.

My Jewishness is not something I set aside when I came to faith in Jesus.

It is, if anything, more alive in me than it has ever been.

Because I now understand the Hebrew prophets not as texts to be analyzed and interpreted, but as witnesses to someone I know.

When I read Isaiah, I am reading about a person I have met.

The shadow has found its substance.

The pointing has found its object, and the completion of that pointing has made the texts, including the texts I spent my life studying, more luminous than they ever were.

The peace I have is not the peace of having resolved every question.

I am a scholar.

I will always have questions.

There are things I do not understand about the nature of what happened to me, about the theology of the incarnation and the atonement, about the relationship between the faith I grew up with and the faith I have now come into.

I do not pretend otherwise.

What I have is something beneath those questions.

Something more fundamental, more settled, more resistant to disturbance than any intellectual position I have held.

A relationship with a person who is alive and present, and who has not left since the night I first spoke to him.

That relationship is not an abstraction.

It is not a feeling that comes and goes with my emotional weather.

It is a daily reality in prayer, in the reading of the texts, in the ordinary decisions of ordinary days.

It is in the most precise language I can find, a relationship with someone who knows me fully and has not withdrawn from what he knows.

I think about my father’s hands more than I ever have.

those large, rough, marked hands held out over the Shabbat candles every Friday evening, reaching toward a God who was real to him in the aftermath of everything that had tried to make God impossible.

My father and I would have disagreed about the content of what those hands were reaching toward.

That disagreement would have been painful, and I do not minimize it.

But I believe with the same conviction that I believe everything I have shared with you tonight that the God those hands were reaching toward is the one I found in my office at 2 in the morning.

That the God who sustained my father through the uncservivable is the same one who walked into human suffering and bore it and came out the other side taking us with him.

I believe I will tell my father this one day.

I believe I will see him and that when I do, I will have the chance to tell him that the God he held on to through everything was holding on to him all along.

and that his name, the full name of the one who was holding on, is the name that Isaiah saw 2 and a half thousand years ago, marred beyond recognition, and then raised and lifted up and highly exalted above every other name.

Let me end where I began with the text.

Audi not with argument, not with defense, just with reading.

In the Hebrew, Elohim Muavalanu.

And in English, surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering.

Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities.

The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.

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.

I have read these words 10,000 times.

I understand them finally are for the first time.

The shadow always pointed to the substance.

I just finally stopped protecting myself from what it was pointing to and let myself look.

My father survived the Holocaust holding the Torah.

I hold it still.

I just finally understand what and who it was always pointing to.

Thank you.

 

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