The world was going on as normal.

While my life was falling apart, I got in my car and sat there for a long time.

My phone started ringing almost immediately.

I didn’t answer.

It would ring constantly for the next several days.

Rabbis calling to condemn me, community members calling to express their shock and anger, a few calling with genuine concern for my mental health.

The local Jewish newspaper would run a story about me within 48 hours.

The headline would call me a traitor.

Other rabbis would issue statements denouncing me and warning their congregations against my influence.

My name would be removed from every rabbitical association I had been part of.

Within a week, someone would spray paint mashumid apostate on the side of my house.

I would receive death threats, hate mail.

People I had considered friends for 20 years would cross the street to avoid me.

My parents would sit Shiva for me as if I had actually died.

When I tried to call them, my father would tell me I had no father anymore and hang up.

Rachel would file for divorce.

My children would be caught in the middle, confused and hurt and angry.

I would lose my job, my income, my health insurance.

I would have to sell our house because I couldn’t afford the mortgage.

I would move into a small apartment and take whatever work I could find.

Everything I had built over nearly 50 years would be destroyed in a matter of weeks.

But sitting there in my car that morning, in those first moments after walking out of my synagogue for the last time, what I felt most strongly was not grief or fear or regret.

It was freedom.

For the first time in my life, I was free from the burden of trying to earn God’s approval through my own righteousness.

free from the weight of all those laws and regulations and traditions that were supposed to bring me closer to God, but always left me feeling like I was falling short, free from the nagging sense that something was missing, that there were parts of scripture I was ignoring because they didn’t fit my theology.

I was free because I had found the truth and the truth had set me free.

I started the car and drove home.

The house was empty.

Rachel and the children were still at her parents’ house.

I went to my study and sat in my chair and I prayed.

I prayed differently than I had ever prayed before.

I didn’t recite memorized prayers.

I didn’t follow any liturgy.

I just talked to God like you would talk to your father.

I thanked him for leading me to the truth even though the truth had cost me everything.

I asked him to protect my family to help them understand eventually to not let them be hurt any more than necessary by my decision.

I asked him for strength for the difficult days ahead.

I asked him what I was supposed to do now.

And as I prayed, I felt the presence of God in a way I had never felt before.

Not the distant transcendent God who dwelt in unapproachable light, but Emanuel, God with us, God who became human so he could be with us, suffer with us, die for us, rise for us.

Yeshua.

I sat there in the silence and I felt loved in a way I had never felt loved before.

Yeah.

Completely, unconditionally.

Not because of anything I had done or any commandment I had kept, but simply because I was his.

And I knew that whatever came next, I would not be alone.

The first few months after that Shabbat were the darkest of my life.

I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Following Yeshua didn’t make everything suddenly easy.

It made everything harder, at least in the short term.

I lost my job immediately.

The synagogue’s board met and officially terminated my position.

I had no savings to speak of.

We had been living on a rabbi’s modest salary and putting every extra dollar toward the children’s education.

Within weeks, I was struggling to pay basic bills.

I applied for teaching positions at Jewish day schools and was rejected immediately.

Word had spread throughout the Orthodox community.

I was persona nonrada, unwelcome, unclean.

I tried applying for positions at Christian institutions, thinking that maybe they would value someone with my background in Hebrew and Jewish studies.

But that proved complicated, too.

Some churches and Christian schools were excited about the idea of a former rabbi who believed in Jesus.

Others were suspicious.

Was this real or was I just looking for a job? Did I really understand Christian theology or was I still too Jewish? It was a strange place to be.

Too Christian for the Jews, too Jewish for some Christians.

I ended up taking a job stocking shelves at a supermarket at night.

It was humbling going from rabbi of a thriving congregation to wearing a name tag and unloading boxes of cereal at 2:00 in the morning.

But it paid enough to cover rent on a small apartment and buy groceries.

I would come home as the sun was rising.

He exhausted and smelling like cardboard.

I would shower and then spend time reading the Bible, both the Tanakh and the New Testament, praying, trying to understand what God wanted from me.

Now the isolation was crushing.

I had spent my entire life surrounded by community, family, congregation, fellow rabbis.

Now I was alone.

My phone rarely rang.

When it did, it was usually someone calling to tell me what a terrible person I was.

Rachel filed for divorce 3 months after I left the synagogue.

The papers arrived on a Tuesday afternoon.

I sat in my empty apartment holding them and I cried.

Not because I was surprised I had known this was coming, but because it made it real.

23 years of marriage over.

Because I believed in Yeshua.

The divorce process was brutal.

Rachel’s lawyer painted me as mentally unstable.

and an unfit father who had abandoned his faith and was therefore a danger to the children.

In the Orthodox community’s eyes, this wasn’t an exaggeration.

By believing in Yeshua, I had committed the ultimate betrayal.

The judge granted Rachel full custody.

I was given supervised visitation rights with my children twice a month.

Twice a month I could see my own children and only with a courtappointed supervisor present.

Sarah, my oldest, wouldn’t speak to me at first.

She would sit in the corner during our visits with her arms crossed, refusing to look at me.

Benjamin, my son, was angry.

He would yell at me, asking how I could do this to our family, how I could throw everything away.

Miriam, the youngest, was the only one who would still hug me, though I could see the confusion in her eyes.

Those visits broke my heart every single time.

I tried to explain to them what I had discovered, why I believed what I believed.

But they had been raised their entire lives to see Jesus as the enemy, as the false Messiah who led Jews astray, as the God of the people who had persecuted our people for 2,000 years.

How could I expect them to understand in a few supervised visits what had taken me two years of intensive study to grasp? I prayed for them constantly.

Every night I would pray that God would protect them, that one day they would understand, that our family would be healed.

It felt like praying into a void.

I saw no evidence that my prayers were being answered.

My parents sat Shiva for me.

Traditional Jewish mourning.

For seven days they sat on low stools, covered the mirrors in their house, didn’t bathe or work or do anything except mourn their dead son.

Because that’s what I was to them now, dead.

I tried calling after the Shiva period ended.

My mother answered.

I could hear her crying.

She asked me why I was doing this to her.

why I wanted to kill her.

She said that her son had died and a stranger had taken his place.

Then she hung up.

My father never spoke to me again, not once.

He died 4 years later, and I wasn’t allowed at the funeral.

I stood across the street from the cemetery and watched from a distance as they buried him.

I couldn’t even say goodbye.

My siblings, both my sisters and my brother, cut off all contact.

My nieces and nephews, who I had watched grow up, who I had celebrated with at their bar and bat mitzvah, were forbidden from having anything to do with me.

I became a ghost in my own family.

The hate mail continued for months.

letters telling me I was going to hell, that I had betrayed my people, that Hitler should have finished the job with people like me.

Someone left a dead rat on my doorstep.

My car was vandalized three times.

I would be lying if I said I never doubted during this time.

There were nights when I lay awake in my small apartment and wondered if I had made a horrible mistake, if I had thrown away everything that mattered for a belief that might be wrong, if I had destroyed my family for nothing.

But then I would remember the prophecies.

I would remember Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Daniel 9.

I would remember how perfectly Yeshua fit the portrait painted by the Hebrew prophets.

I would remember the peace I felt when I prayed.

The sense of God’s presence that was more real than anything I had ever experienced in all my years as an Orthodox rabbi.

I and I would know that I hadn’t made a mistake.

The cost was terrible, but the truth was worth it.

Slowly, very slowly, things began to change.

A Messianic congregation in a neighboring town reached out to me.

They had heard my story and wanted to invite me to visit.

I was hesitant at first.

I still wasn’t sure where I fit in this new reality I was living in.

But I went.

Walking into that congregation was one of the strangest and most wonderful experiences of my life.

They were worshiping Yeshua, singing songs about him, praying to him.

But they were also lighting Shabbat candles.

They were reading from the Torah scroll.

They were celebrating Passover and Sukkot and all the festivals I had grown up with.

They were Jews who believed in Jesus, and they weren’t ashamed of either identity.

The rabbi, a man named Jacob, who had his own conversion story, his own journey from Orthodox Judaism to faith in Yeshua, welcomed me with open arms.

He introduced me to other Jewish believers, and I heard their stories.

A doctor who had lost his practice, a teacher who had been disowned by her family, a businessman who had lost all his clients.

Each one had paid a price.

Each one had counted the cost and decided that Yeshua was worth it.

I started attending regularly.

I started making friends, real friends who understood what I was going through because they had been through it themselves.

For the first time since leaving my congregation, I didn’t feel alone.

Jacob asked if I would be willing to teach.

They had a weekly Torah study and they needed someone with rabbitical training to lead it.

I agreed and I found myself doing what I loved again, studying scripture, teaching, helping people understand the depth and beauty of God’s word.

But now I was seeing scripture through new eyes.

I was seeing how the whole tanuk pointed to Yeshua, how the sacrificial system foreshadowed his death, how the Passover lamb represented him, how the bronze serpent lifted up in the wilderness, was a picture of him being lifted up on the
cross.

How the rock that Moses struck, which poured out water in the desert, was a symbol of him being struck so that living water could flow.

The Bible became alive to me in a way it never had been before.

It wasn’t just a book of laws and stories and history.

It was a unified narrative all pointing to one person, one event, one solution to humanity’s fundamental problem.

I started writing.

I had always been a writer.

I had published articles in rabbitical journals for years.

Now I started writing about my journey, about the prophecies, about why I believed Yeshua was the Jewish Messiah.

I started a blog.

It got some attention, mostly negative at first, but gradually I started hearing from people who were searching, who had questions, who wanted to know more.

I heard from Orthodox Jews who were secretly reading the New Testament and didn’t know what to do with what they were finding.

I heard from secular Jews who had rejected all religion but were curious about this Jesus who so many people throughout history had died for.

I heard from Christians who wanted to understand the Jewish roots of their faith.

and I started corresponding with them, answering their questions, sharing my story, pointing them to the prophecies.

Yet, about a year after I left my synagogue, I got a phone call from a Christian seminary.

They had read some of my articles and wanted to know if I would be interested in teaching a course on the Hebrew Bible and Jewish backgrounds of the New Testament.

I took the position.

It meant I could quit stocking shelves at the supermarket.

It meant I could use my education and training again.

It meant I had a purpose.

I threw myself into teaching.

I loved showing my students, most of whom had grown up in churches and had read the Bible their whole lives, the Jewish context of everything they thought they knew.

I showed them how the last supper was a Passover seder.

How Jesus’s parables used rabbitical teaching methods.

How his arguments with the Pharisees were in-house debates about how to interpret Torah.

Sak are how the early church was entirely Jewish for the first few decades.

My students were fascinated.

Many of them had never thought about the fact that Jesus was Jewish, that all his disciples were Jewish, that the faith they practiced had started as a Jewish movement.

And teaching them helped me understand my own calling.

I wasn’t just a rabbi who converted to Christianity.

I was a bridge.

I could help Jews understand that Yeshua was their Messiah.

and I could help Christians understand that Yeshua was thoroughly, completely, beautifully Jewish.

Two years after the divorce, I got an unexpected phone call.

It was Rachel.

I almost didn’t answer.

We hadn’t spoken since the divorce was finalized, except through lawyers regarding the children.

But something told me to pick up.

She asked if we could meet for coffee.

She I drove to the cafe, she suggested with my heart pounding.

I had no idea what to expect.

Was she going to tell me I could never see the children again? Had something happened to one of them? She was already there when I arrived, sitting at a small table in the corner.

She looked tired.

She had aged in the two years since I’d last really looked at her face, but she was still beautiful.

We ordered coffee and sat in awkward silence for a moment.

Then she started talking.

She told me that the past 2 years had been terrible for her, too.

That she had lost her husband, her life partner, the father of her children.

That she had been angry and hurt and confused.

that the community had supported her at first, but then had started to smother her, always watching, always judging, always reminding her of what her husband had done.

I She said that she had started reading, the books I had left behind, the New Testament I had hidden in my study.

She had read it out of anger at first, wanting to understand what had possessed me to throw our life away.

But then she had started seeing what I had seen.

The prophecies, the Jewish context, the way it all fit together.

She had started attending the Messianic congregation quietly, sitting in the back where no one would recognize her.

She had heard me teach there a few times.

She had listened to my story, our story, from my perspective.

and she had started praying, not the wrote prayers of the liturgy, but real prayers, asking God if Yeshua was really who he claimed to be.

She paused and looked at me with tears in her eyes.

She said, “I think you were right.

I think he is the Messiah.

” I sat there stunned.

I had prayed for this.

I I had begged God for this, but I had stopped believing it would actually happen.

The next few months were complicated.

Rachel couldn’t just announce her belief in Yeshua to the Orthodox community.

She would face the same ostracism I had faced.

We had to move slowly.

But she started coming to services at the Messianic congregation openly.

She started studying with the women there.

And gradually, carefully, we started rebuilding our relationship.

Not as husband and wife.

That ship had sailed and we both knew it.

But as friends, as co-parents, as two people who had walked through fire and come out believing the same truth.

The children’s reaction was mixed.

Sarah, now 19 and in college, was furious with both of us.

She accused us of brainwashing each other, of abandoning our heritage.

She stopped taking my calls.

But Benjamin, I now 16, started asking questions.

He came with me to the Messianic congregation once, then twice, then regularly.

He started reading the prophecies for himself.

And one day, sitting in my small apartment, he told me that he believed too, that he wanted to follow Yeshua.

I wept.

I held my son and I wept.

Miriam, the youngest, was still too young to fully understand, but she saw that her mother and I were talking again, that the family wasn’t completely destroyed, that maybe there was hope.

I started getting invitations to speak at churches, small churches at first, then larger ones.

They wanted to hear from a former rabbi.

They wanted to understand the Jewish roots of Christianity.

They wanted to know how to share the gospel with Jewish people.

I traveled and spoke and told my story over and over.

And each time I told it, I I met people who were impacted by it.

Jews who were searching and found courage in my journey.

Christians who gained a deeper appreciation for the Jewish foundation of their faith.

Pastors who learned how to minister to Jewish people with sensitivity and respect.

I wrote a book.

It was called Finding Messiah, a rabbi’s journey from Moses to Yeshua.

It detailed my discovery of the prophecies, my struggle with the implications, my decision to follow truth at any cost.

The book got published by a Christian publishing house and gained some traction.

Not enough to make me rich, but enough to make a difference.

enough that I started hearing from people all over the world, Jews in Israel, Russia, Argentina, South Africa, who were on their own journeys and found my story encouraging.

Some Orthodox rabbis reached out to me privately.

They wouldn’t do it publicly.

They couldn’t risk their positions, but they had questions.

They had been reading Isaiah 53 and couldn’t shake the feeling that the traditional interpretation didn’t quite fit.

They had been studying Daniel 9, and the timeline bothered them.

I answered their questions as best I could.

Some disappeared back into their lives, and I never heard from them again.

But a few kept studying.

A few eventually came to the same conclusion I had.

A few lost everything just like I did and found everything they had been looking for in Yeshua.

5 years after leaving my synagogue, I started a ministry specifically to help Jewish people discover their Messiah.

We created resources, books, videos, websites explaining the messianic prophecies.

So, we trained Christians on how to share the gospel with Jewish people without being offensive or dismissive of Jewish culture.

We connected Jewish believers with Messianic congregations in their areas so they wouldn’t have to walk this road alone.

The ministry grew slowly but steadily.

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