When I was nine years old, we moved to the United States
from Jerusalem, and the number one song in
the country was Anne Murray, "One Day at a Time,
Sweet Jesus." And I'll never forget, my mom comes into the car
and I'm like, ♪ One day at a time,
sweet Jesus ♪ My mom says,
"What did you say?" And I said,
"I'm singing the song." She's like, "We don't say Jesus." But why? In Hebrew she says, "He's Yeshu." I grew up not being able
to say that name. My son at the age of five was
diagnosed with Asperger's. He was not verbal,
he was very distant. He was the cause of me
going back to school and becoming a
special education teacher. I knew a lot about science. I studied a lot
about everything. But I really never even
opened the Bible. Ironically, I was teaching
Hebrew school as a side job. Teaching the prayers,
teaching the liturgy. I mean, I knew everything. I had seen my father pray the
prayers and put on the tallit, and I know all of the
rhetoric and everything that, you know, goes along
with being Jewish, but I didn't feel
any connection to God. I would sit at synagogue and I'd try to feel something,
I'd try to feel God. And it was like the Chagall
stained glass windows and everybody around me,
and the bema, and the arc, and the Torah being taken out. And I felt,
I remember feeling nothing. At my school I worked at
an after school program and there was a woman that
had written a book called "Jesus, Can I Talk to You?" So she said to me, "I don't
have a money to hire an editor, "would you help me edit my book?" And I said, "Well, I don't
know anything about Jesus." I do know about writing,
I know about English, I know about commas, I
know about semicolons, I just don't know
anything about Jesus. It was a lot of stuff
from the Old Testament. And I would see things
like, you know, this is from Ecclesiastes or
this from Samuel or Kings, and I was like,
these are our books. This came from
the Jewish Bible. I've never read the Bible. I read about the fact
that He would be pierced, and that's exactly
what happened to Jesus, and for the first time the
Bible came alive to me. And it's Isaiah 53 and I
said, how can you miss this? It's like right there, it's
right there in the scripture, in our book. Saying the prayer and asking
for him to come into my life and I accepted Him as my Savior. Even though I just became a
believer in the Jewish Messiah but in Jesus whose name
I can't even say at the private Jewish school. Wow, this is too weird. The grandson of the head
of our Judaic program, in the first year
that he was there he would talk to me
and I would say, "Oh it's time
to go to tefillah." Students were required
to go to prayer and you must go to tefillah. He's like, "I hate tefillah." I'm like, "Your grandfather's
the head of Judaic program "of the school." And so he comes up and he
puts a kippah on my head and he is like,
"You're like a rabbi." 'Cause rabbi in Hebrew
means teacher. He goes, "I can just see it, "one day you're gonna
become a Hasidic." And I said,
"No no no, Joshua." Totally the furthest
thing I'm going to become. Turns to me and goes,
"I don't understand you. "Do you keep Shabbat? "What kind of a Jew are you?" What do you mean
what kind of a Jew am I? And he goes, "There's
something different about you. "I don't know what it is, "there's something
different about you." And I said,
"Joshua, sit down. "I really respect you
and I'm gonna tell you "what's different about me is "that I believe that
Jesus is the Messiah." And his eyes got wide and he
stood up and he pointed at me, he's like, "I knew it, I knew it. "You're always talking
about love and stuff." And the students know,
they know. I can talk about God all day. See, I couldn't do that
in public shool. Public school,
you can't talk about God. But at a private Jewish school, I could talk about God all day. And you know,
sometimes they'll go, they test me and sometimes
they get really close and they really question
what am I really saying. But if they ever come to me and say, "What do you really believe?" Like Joshua does, or did, I would tell them. I believe that
Jesus is my Messiah. Coming out of the
Messianic closet, that's pretty much a
good way to put this. I've gone completely
against the grain. When you go against the
grain, you get splinters. It's not easy. It's not been an easy path for me, especially knowing what I
know and hearing what I hear, how the rabbis talk about Him,
how the students mock Him. And I say, okay, I'm here for you. I wanna stay here. And people ask me,
"Aren't you afraid "if they find out at your school "that you believe that
Jesus is the Messiah "that you'll get fired?" So? God will always provide,
he has through everything, and He always delivers. He took it on
the cross for me. Jesus died so that I
can be born again. The greatest pain is to
give up your own child. How much God must have loved us to give up his only Son for us?
