I must have been seven or eight years old.

I and I asked him how he could still believe in God after what happened to him, after what he saw.

He looked at me with those deep sad eyes and he said that the Nazis had taken everything from him, his parents, his siblings, his first wife, and their baby daughter.

Everything.

But they couldn’t take his faith.

That was his.

That was the one thing they couldn’t touch.

And as long as he had his faith, as long as he had the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they had not won.

I grew up believing that my faith was the most precious thing I possessed, more precious than life itself.

I was a serious child.

While my friends played stickball in the streets, I was studying.

I loved learning.

I love the Talmud, the arguments and the reasoning, the way the rabbis would debate the meaning of every word.

I love the smell of old books.

A the feel of the pages, the sense that I was connecting with thousands of years of wisdom.

By the time I was 13, when I had my bar mitzvah, I could read and understand large portions of the Torah in the original Hebrew.

My parents were so proud.

When I was 16, my rabbi approached my father about sending me to Yeshiva, a special school for advanced religious study.

This was a great honor.

It meant that the community leaders saw potential in me, that they believed I could become a rabbi myself one day.

My father cried when they told him.

My mother made a special Shabbat dinner to celebrate.

I spent the next eight years in intensive study.

I studied the Torah, all five books of Moses.

I studied the prophets and the writings, what we call the Tanakh, what Christians call the Old Testament.

I studied the Talmud, the massive collection of rabbitical debates and interpretations.

I studied the midrash, the ancient commentaries.

I studied the medieval scholars, rashi, mimmonades, nakmanites.

I learned Aramaic.

I learned the intricate details of Jewish law, what you can and cannot do on Shabbat, the proper way to observe the festivals, the dietary laws, the purity laws, every aspect of life governed by the Torah and the traditions.

I didn’t just learn these things academically.

I lived them.

I breathed them.

Judaism wasn’t something I did.

It was something I was.

It was in my bones, in my blood, in every breath I took.

When I put on my Teflin every morning, those leather boxes containing scripture that we bind on our arms and foreheads, I wasn’t just following a ritual.

I was connecting with God, with Moses, I’d with every Jewish man who had put on to fillain for the past 3,000 years.

When I kept Shabbat, resting from Friday evening to Saturday evening, I wasn’t just obeying a commandment.

I was participating in creation, remembering that God rested on the seventh day, sanctifying time itself.

This was my life.

This was my identity.

This was everything.

When I was 25, I married Rachel.

She was the daughter of a respected rabbi in Queens, a beautiful woman with dark eyes and a gentle spirit.

Our families arranged the introduction, but we fell in love on our own.

We were married under a chupa, a wedding canopy with our families and friends surrounding us.

We broke the glass to remember the destruction of the temple.

We danced and celebrated and started our life together.

Over the next 15 years, a God blessed us with three children.

Sarah was born first, then Benjamin 3 years later, then Miriam 5 years after that.

We raised them in the faith, the same faith that had been passed down to us.

We celebrated every holiday.

We kept our home kosher.

We sent the children to Jewish day schools.

On Friday nights, I would bless my children, placing my hands on their heads and reciting the ancient blessing.

I would watch them grow and learn and develop their own relationships with God and with Torah, and my heart would nearly burst with gratitude.

When I was 33 years old, I was offered a position as the rabbi of a midsized Orthodox congregation in New Jersey.

It was everything I had worked for, my own congregation, my own community to serve and teach and guide.

I accepted immediately.

I and we moved our family into a modest house near the synagogue.

Those early years as a rabbi were the happiest of my life.

I loved my work.

I loved teaching.

I loved counseling young couples before their weddings, helping them understand the sacred nature of marriage.

I loved sitting with families in their grief when they lost loved ones, offering what comfort I could from our tradition and our faith.

I loved studying with young men who wanted to deepen their knowledge of Torah.

I loved leading services, standing before the ark that held our Torah scrolls, feeling the weight of responsibility and the joy of service.

I was good at it.

The congregation grew.

People respected me.

Other rabbis sought my opinion on matters of Jewish law.

I published several articles in rabbitical journals.

I was invited to speak at conferences.

My life had purpose and meaning and direction.

But there was something else.

Something I didn’t talk about.

Something I barely admitted to myself.

Sometimes late at night when everyone else was asleep, I would lie awake and feel a kind of emptiness that I couldn’t name.

It wasn’t unhappiness exactly.

I loved my family.

I loved my work.

I believed in God with my whole heart, but there was this sense of incompleteness, like I was reading a book and some of the pages were missing, like I was looking at a puzzle with pieces that didn’t quite fit together.

I would pray and the feeling would go away for a while.

I would throw myself into my studies and my work and my family and I wouldn’t think about it.

But it would always come back, usually in the quiet hours of the night.

This vague sense that something was missing on that there was some truth I wasn’t seeing.

I had no idea that God was preparing me for the greatest shock of my life.

It started with a question from a student.

His name was Joshua.

We called him Josh and he was 17 years old, sharp and curious, always asking the kinds of questions that made me think.

We were studying the book of Isaiah together, working through the prophets as part of his preparation for university.

We had reached chapter 53, and Josh was reading aloud in Hebrew, translating as he went.

He got to verse 5 and stopped.

He read it again.

Then he looked up at me with a puzzled expression on his young face and asked me a question that would change everything.

Rabbi, he said, “This passage talks about someone who was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, and it says the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds, we are healed”.

Who is this talking about?

Isn’t the Messiah supposed to come in glory and power?

Why would he suffer for our sins?

I gave him the standard answer, the answer I had been taught, the answer every Orthodox rabbi gives.

I explained that this passage was about the nation of Israel suffering in exile among the nations or it was about the righteous remnant of Israel or it was about the prophet himself.

The Messiah, I told him, would come as a conquering king, not as a suffering servant.

Josh nodded and we moved on.

But that night, alone in my study, I opened my Bible to Isaiah 53 and I read it again.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

And I had always read this as being about Israel, like about our suffering as a people.

But as I read the words that night, something bothered me.

The passage kept saying, “He, not they, not we.

He, one person, one suffering figure.

Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows.

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

But he was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities”.

I read the whole chapter and then I read it again.

The suffering servant was bearing the sins of others.

He was being punished so that others could have peace.

His wounds brought healing.

This was substitutionary atonement.

One person suffering in the place of many.

But that’s exactly what the Messiah was supposed to do.

According to according to I felt a chill run through me.

I pushed the thought away.

number.

The Messiah would come in glory.

The Messiah would restore Israel.

The Messiah would reign on David’s throne.

That’s what we had always believed.

That’s what I had been taught.

I closed my Bible and went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep.

The words kept running through my mind.

By his wounds, we are healed.

By his wounds, we are healed.

It was just a small crack in the foundation of everything I believed.

I didn’t know it then, but that tiny crack was about to split wide open and bring my entire world crashing down around me.

And I would discover that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been trying to show me the truth all along.

I just hadn’t been willing to see it.

The truth that would set me free.

The truth that would cost me everything.

The truth that I would declare to my congregation on that devastating, glorious Shabbat morning.

He’s standing at the podium with my hands shaking and my heartbreaking and my soul finally finally whole.

I tried to forget about Isaiah 53.

I really did.

I told myself it was just one passage, just one question from a curious student.

Nothing to worry about.

I had studied these scriptures my entire life.

I knew what they meant.

I knew what the rabbis taught.

There was no reason to doubt now.

But the question wouldn’t leave me alone.

It started happening during my morning prayers.

I would be reciting the shama, the central prayer of Judaism here.

O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

And my mind would drift to that suffering servant in Isaiah.

I would be teaching a class on Torah and in the middle of explaining some point of law, I would suddenly remember those words.

He was pierced for our transgressions.

3 weeks after Josh asked me that question, I was alone in my study late at night.

Rachel and the children were asleep.

The house was quiet except for the ticking of the clock on the wall.

I pulled my Bible off the shelf and opened it to Isaiah 53 again.

This time I didn’t just read the chapter.

I read the chapters before it and after it.

I read the context and what I found shook me.

The servant in Isaiah 53 wasn’t described as a group or a nation.

The language was personal, individual.

He would be led like a lamb to the slaughter.

He would be assigned a grave with the wicked.

He would bear the sins of many.

And after suffering, after death, he would see the light of life and be satisfied.

after death he would see life.

I sat back in my chair and stared at the page.

This was talking about resurrection on about someone dying and coming back to life, about someone whose death would bring salvation to others.

I opened my notebook and started writing down everything the passage said about this servant.

He would be rejected by his own people.

He would suffer willingly.

He wouldn’t defend himself.

He would die with criminals.

He would be buried.

And then somehow after all of this, he would live again and his sacrifice would be counted as righteous.

Then I did something I had never done before.

I started looking for other passages like this one, other places in the Tanakh, our Hebrew Bible, that talked about a suffering figure, a Messiah who would come not in power but in humility.

I found Zechariah 12 10.

the Lord speaking.

They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child.

They will look on me, the one they have pierced, God himself would be pierced.

How was that possible?

And yet there it was in our own scriptures.

I found Psalm 22.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

The psalmist writing about someone whose hands and feet were pierced, whose bones were out of joint, who was mocked and scorned while dying, whose clothes were divided among his enemies.

I had read this psalm hundreds of times.

I had never really paid attention to what it was describing, a crucifixion.

It was describing a crucifixion written a thousand years before the Romans invented crucifixion.

I found Daniel 9:es 24- 27, a prophecy giving a specific timeline, 70 weeks of years at the end of which the Messiah would be cut off would die before the destruction of the temple.

I did the math.

If you started counting from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile, the timeline pointed to the Messiah coming during the time of the second temple.

But the second temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 of the common era.

That was almost 2,000 years ago.

If this prophecy was accurate, the Messiah should have already come.

I sat in my study until 3:00 in the morning, surrounded by open books, my mind racing.

How had I never seen this before?

How had I studied these passages my entire life and never put these pieces together?

I knew the traditional explanations.

I had been taught them.

The suffering servant was Israel.

But the pierced one was a metaphor.

The timeline in Daniel was symbolic, not literal.

The rabbis had explained all of this.

But what if the rabbis were wrong?

The thought was terrifying.

The rabbis weren’t just teachers.

They were the guardians of our tradition, the interpreters of our faith.

To question them felt like questioning Judaism itself.

And yet, the text was right in front of me.

The words were clear.

I started losing sleep.

I would lie in bed next to Rachel, staring at the ceiling, my mind going over and over these passages.

During the day, I would go through my normal routine, teaching, counseling, leading services.

But inside, I was in turmoil.

I started losing weight.

Rachel noticed and asked if I was feeling well.

I told her I was fine, just stressed with work.

I couldn’t tell her what was really happening.

I didn’t even fully understand it myself.

A few weeks later, I attended an interfaith dialogue event at a local community center.

These events happened occasionally, rabbis, priests, imams getting together to discuss common ground and mutual understanding.

Usually I found them interesting but not particularly challenging.

We would talk about ethics, about service to the community, about the things our religions had in common.

But this time there was someone new at the gathering.

His name was David Rosenberg and he introduced himself as a Messianic Jew, a Jewish believer in Jesus.

I felt immediate revulsion.

Messianic Jews were traitors in my mind.

They were Jews who had abandoned their heritage, who had been deceived by Christian missionaries, who had turned their backs on thousands of years of tradition.

So, we didn’t even consider them Jewish anymore.

They were apostates.

But as the evening went on and David spoke, something bothered me.

He wasn’t ignorant.

He wasn’t some uneducated person who had been tricked into believing a false gospel.

He knew Torah.

He knew Talmud.

He knew the rabbitical commentaries.

When he quoted scripture, he quoted it in Hebrew.

And he knew the context and the traditional interpretations.

After the formal discussion ended, I found myself talking with him privately.

I don’t know why I did it.

Maybe I was looking for someone to prove my growing doubts wrong.

Maybe I wanted him to say something foolish so I could dismiss everything I had been thinking about.

Maybe I was just desperate to talk to someone, anyone, about the questions that were tearing me apart.

Should I asked him how he could believe in Jesus and still call himself a Jew?

He smiled, not in a mocking way, but sadly, like he had heard this question many times before, and it still hurt.

He told me his story.

He had been raised Orthodox just like me.

He had studied at Yeshiva.

He had been on track to become a rabbi, but then he started reading the Messianic prophecies in the Tanakh, and he couldn’t reconcile them with what he had been taught.

So he did something that terrified him.

He read the New Testament.

I interrupted him there.

I told him that the New Testament was a Christian book, a foreign book, nothing to do with Judaism.

He looked at me carefully and said something I will never forget.

He said, “Rabbi, have you ever actually read it”?

I hadn’t.

Of course I hadn’t.

Why would I?

It was a Christian book.

It was about a false messiah or a rabbi who led people astray, who was rejected by our people, and rightly so.

I knew what it said without reading it.

Or at least I thought I did.

David reached into his bag and pulled out a book.

It was a Jewish New Testament, he explained, translated in a way that showed its Jewish context.

He handed it to me and told me that if I really wanted to understand why he believed what he believed, I should read it.

Not with the intent to convert, he said.

Just read it and see if it sounds as foreign as you think it does.

I took the book.

I don’t know why.

Maybe because part of me was curious.

Maybe because the questions that had been building in my mind for the past two months were becoming unbearable and I needed answers from somewhere anywhere.

I drove home with that book sitting on the passenger seat of my car like a live bomb.

I felt guilty just having it.

When I got home, I hid it in my study in the back of a drawer where no one would find it.

For three days, it sat there and I didn’t touch it.

I knew that if I opened that book, if I read it, I was crossing a line.

I was doing something that every Orthodox Jew knew was forbidden.

We don’t read missionary materials.

We don’t expose ourselves to Christian teachings.

These things are dangerous.

They can lead you astray.

But on the fourth night, after everyone had gone to bed, I took the book out of the drawer.

My hands were shaking as I opened it to the first page.

The Gospel of Matthew, it was called the Genealogy of Yeshua, Jesus, son of David, son of Abraham.

I started reading and I couldn’t stop.

Matthew was written by a Jew to Jews about Jewish things.

It started with a genealogy proving that Jesus was descended from King David.

It talked about Torah, about the prophets, about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

It quoted from the Tanakh constantly, showing how Jesus fulfilled prophecy after prophecy.

He was born in Bethlehem, just like Micah 5:2 said the Messiah would be.

He was called out of Egypt just like Hosea 11:1 said.

He spoke in parables just like Psalm 78:2 said the Messiah would do.

I read about his teachings, the sermon on the mount.

And I was shocked to discover that it sounded like like the rabbis, like Jewish ethical teaching.

Blessed are the meek.

Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness.

Don’t murder and don’t even hate in your heart.

Don’t commit adultery and don’t even lust in your heart.

This was taking the Torah and showing its deepest meaning, its heart.

This wasn’t foreign.

This wasn’t pagan.

This was deeply, thoroughly Jewish.

I read how Jesus celebrated Passover with his disciples, how he taught in the temple, how he quoted Moses and the prophets, how he said he hadn’t come to abolish the Torah but to fulfill it.

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