June 23, 2021 - Brother Nathanael
07:56
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I was raised as a Jew of two Jewish parents. | |
| I attended synagogue from my early childhood. | |
| Hebrew school every Wednesday. | |
| Sabbath services every Friday night and Saturday morning. | |
| And Sabbath school before the morning service. | |
| I was a religious kid, whereas my older brother and sister were just going through the motions. | |
| I took Judaism seriously. | |
| My first pivotal moment was at my cousin's bar mitzvah. | |
| It was an older synagogue and smelled musty and moldy. | |
| As we sat down, I saw Jewish stars decorated on every wall. | |
| Nausea welled up within me. | |
| I was only nine, and I sensed a smell of death. | |
| I was ready to vomit, got up from my seat, but my mother grabbed me while I was ganging away. | |
| Where is this death coming from? | |
| I asked myself, is it from all these Jewish stars? | |
| My cousin was now up on the Bema, ready to recite his Haftorah, and started glaring at me as if I was an intruder. | |
| For the first time, growing up in the synagogue, I felt I didn't belong. | |
| As for the Jewish stars, I learned later that the symbol so cherished in Judaism was not the shield of David at all, but an occult symbol revived by the Zohar, the Kabbalistic prayer book of the 13th century. | |
| Aha! That was the smell of death. | |
| The next critical juncture was when I was approaching 13 in our Sabbath school's bar mitzvah class. | |
| The teacher was Mrs. | |
| Schechter and was built like a bull. | |
| Squat, round husky shoulders, square face, short hooked nose with combative hostile eyes. | |
| I still see Mrs. | |
| Schechter in my mind to this very day. | |
| The Bar Mitzvah class was to examine all the major religions of the world so as to show that Judaism was better than them all. | |
| We studied Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Rastafarianism, Druze, Baha'i, Shinto, and of course Judaism. | |
| Finally, at the end of the course, Mrs. | |
| Schechter gets up from her seat, stands like she's ready to enter a bullfight, and says, Children, we are not going to study Christianity. | |
| It's just a fairy tale, she said, invented by a self-hating Jew named Saul, who hated his Jewishness so much that he changed his name to Paul. | |
| Well, I was a pretty smart kid, so I raised my hand and asked, Mr. | |
| Schechter, if Western civilization was formed not by all the religions we've been studying, but by Christianity, are you saying that our civilization is built on a fairy tale? | |
| Schechter turned red and replied, Close enough, since Saul, who changed his name to Paul, was a manic depressant and invented a dysfunctional religion. | |
| Class dismissed. Well, the first thing I did when I got home was to ask my dad, what is a manic-depressant? | |
| It was 1962, and he did have a clue. | |
| The term was unheard of then. | |
| Why do you ask? | |
| He questioned. Because Mrs. | |
| Schechter refuses to teach Christianity because she says it was invented by a manic-depressant. | |
| My dad settled his countenance upon my young, questioning eyes and said, Give up this Christianity. | |
| You were born a Jew, you will die a Jew, and walked away. | |
| But my heart and mind did not walk away. | |
| Instead, a fight welled up within me to find out what Christianity was all about. | |
| But we were forbidden to even read the New Testament and could only use the name Jesus Christ as a curse word. | |
| We couldn't even say Jesus, but used a Hebrew acronym, Yeshu, which means, may his name be obliterated. | |
| Not long after, I went to visit my grandmother in the hospital recovering from a routine operation. | |
| As I walked in the foyer, I saw the rabbi coming out of the elevator and I walked right up to him. | |
| Rabbi, I said, Mrs. | |
| Schechter refuses to teach us Christianity, but instead every religion under the sun. | |
| Rabbi, if the class was to teach us why Judaism is the best religion, we should at least learn about Jesus Christ. | |
| The rabbi immediately spit on the hospital floor and said, Don't you ever use that name unless you use it as a curse word and spit again. | |
| I was appalled. | |
| Here on the hospital floor, where sanitation is a must, the rabbi spits on the floor, germs and all. | |
| What a crass ignoramus, I said to myself. | |
| I walked up to my grandmother's room, muttering under my breath, I'm going to find out for myself who Jesus Christ really is, and may the rabbi dunk his head in his spit. | |
| This was the defining moment in my life as a Jewish kid. | |
| I was now in a flight from my childhood religion of Judaism, of which I experienced narrow-mindedness and death. | |
| Finally, when I started college in California, miles away from my home, I got a hold of a New Testament. | |
| I began with the Gospel of Matthew. | |
| I thought I would be reading a handbook on how to pray rosary beads and a Catholic handbook of rituals, but was surprised to see how Jewish it was. | |
| That's because the Gospel of Matthew traced in the opening chapter the genealogy of Jesus Christ from a list of Hebrew names. | |
| It had characteristic Jewish passages, too. | |
| Once a Jewish mother came up to Jesus and asked that he would give her two Jewish boys a good job in his kingdom. | |
| Well, I was hooked. | |
| Then I came to the passage where Jesus got out a whip and chased out the rabbis from the temple for making money there and then censoring them for their narrow-mindedness. | |
| Oh, I got real excited and said out loud, get him Jesus, get my rabbi, and get Mrs. | |
| Schechter too. My flight from Judaism was taking shape and headed for its destination. | |
| After then reading every single gospel, I was convinced that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. | |
| I made my own confession of faith in Jesus Christ right there on my knees that night, right before going to bed. | |
| I awoke sensing a scent of life, not a scent of death. | |
| I called the rabbi and told him, We miss the Messiah. | |
| He's Jesus Christ. | |
| My rabbi said he'd call me right back. | |
| But instead, ten minutes later, my mother calls. | |
| You're coming back home now, she said. | |
| The rabbi says you're having a nervous breakdown. | |
| Well... What can I say? | |
| To this day, whenever I talk to rabbis or any Jew about Jesus, they either say it's a fairy tale or I'm mentally disturbed. | |
| Can a Jew just have an honest discussion without reverting to brainless statements and slander? |
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