Israeli Jew Who Follows Jesus Has A Message To Christians

Shalom from Yad Vashmona, a small messianic cooperative village near Jerusalem. My name is Gershon Ner'el. My talk today is around the theme, An Israeli Jewish Yeshua Believer Faces the Christian Church. This topic is indeed vast and profound, both historically and theologically. I want to share some of my personal experiences, thoughts, difficulties, and challenges with which I have been struggling as an Israeli Jewish believer in the Lord Yeshua. Yeshua is the authentic Hebrew name that means the Savior, the only one who brings divine redemption from several things, first for Israel and then also for all those who truly follow him. The salvation of the Lord Yeshua has several important dimensions. Throughout six decades, my Savior and Lord, the Son of God, has been presented to me in different Christian ways, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. All kinds of missionaries, evangelists, preachers, and teachers, among them not a few Christianized Jews, shared with me their testimonies. I heard diverse interpretations about the content of both the New Testament and the Tanakh, the canonical scripture of Jewry. I had many opportunities to personally meet with missionaries from America, Finland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland. Many of them were nice people, and some of them even impressed me as sincere servants of the Lord Yeshua and true lovers of the Bible. But some came to Israel just to experience an exotic adventure in the land of the Bible and then to move to another project. Retrospectively, however, when I am looking back, most of those emissaries were unable to separate between the basic and simple, not simplistic, message of the Lord Yeshua on the one hand, and the dogmatic doctrines of the historic churches on the other. I have embarked on my spiritual journey when I was 13 years old. My very secular, atheist, and worldly parents decided to arrange for me a bar mitzvah ceremony at the synagogue close to where we resided in Beersheba, the capital town of the Negev region. The Hebrew term bar mitzvah literally means son of the commandment. It refers to a person who is duty-bound to observe the commandments of Judaism applied to a Jewish boy reaching the 13th birthday. For example, because now the boy is considered a young adult, he is included in the minyan, 10 male adults, the quorum required for public prayer. I am a 73 years old Jewish believer in the Lord Yeshua. Since the late 1960s, I reside with my family, wife, and five children at Moshe Aviyad Hashmona, located about 15 kilometers west of Jerusalem. I am an experienced historian of the modern movement of Messianic Jews in the land of Israel. I have published and lectured extensively on this stirring subject. In 1997, my Ph.D. dissertation was approved by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The thesis was on the theme, I quote, Messianic Jews in Eretz Israel, Trends and Changes in Shaping Self-Identity. In 1960, my family made aliyah, immigrated to Eretz Israel, the land of Israel, from Transylvania, the Hungarian region of western Romania. I was then eight years old and like many others, I needed to get adjusted to a new country, a new language, and a new oriental mentality. My parents arranged the bar mitzvah ceremony only because this was the custom among our family relatives and neighbors, not at all because they wished to please the almighty God of Israel. They wanted to keep this Jewish tradition simply because it is a long rabbinical custom. Tradition actually had compelled itself upon my faithless parents. However, the ceremony of reading a portion in the Holy Hebrew Torah, the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses solemnly in the synagogue with the proper cantillation notes, was a huge experience. I was sincerely searching for God and wanted to believe in the But in my own home, I didn't find the way for spiritual answers about the absolute truth. The immediate outcome of the bar mitzvah ceremony was that I unhesitatingly informed my parents that from now on I want to eat only kosher food. My parents were shocked in my home eating pork and other treif or treifa, namely unclean, unkosher food, including even blood sausage, was a matter of routine. So my parents just ridiculed me for trying to become an Orthodox Jew, just as they had understood this concept. They repeatedly teased me and said, this behavior is just a temporary teenage craziness. Finally, my culinary struggle to observe at home the Jewish dietary laws was far from being successful. My profound desire to get nearer to spiritual matters connected to the God of Israel and to the Jewish tradition had only increased. I started to read more about the Bible and began to read Hebrew chapters from the Torah, the Psalms, and the Prophets. In 1964, my mother got acquainted in Be'er Sheva with an American missionary when they met at a small hairdressing shop for women. The missionary was Linda Graham, who with her husband Warren represented the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the CNMA, in the fast-developing Be'er Sheva. The town was full with olim, new immigrants, coming mainly from North Africa, from Eastern Europe, and from India. Then Be'er Sheva was a very colorful melting pot in the dusty desert area, surrounded by yellow sand dunes. My mother did accept the invitation of the missionary to attend the Shabbat services at the old Turkish compound with a chapel built of yellow stones. In this place, I heard for the first time about the New Testament and the Lord Yeshua. I was indeed fascinated by the teachings of the Messiah. In particular, I loved the content of the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of the Lord Yeshua. I started to read in the Franz Delitzsch Hebrew translation with a biblical style and vocabulary. The ancient biblical syntax of the translation allowed an easy attachment of the New Testament to the Tanakh, and in this way, manifest a natural unity between the two. Gradually, I began to believe in the Messiah Yeshua as the way, the truth, and the life. It was a very slow process. It took several years until I started to truly follow the Son of God. I did not experience a fantastic or impressive encounter with the Savior as did the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. Just on the contrary, I had to go through a long struggle of inner questions, hesitations, and dilemmas. Within myself, I had to deal with some serious problems, such as the ridiculing words of my parents. Not very long ago, you first wanted to become an Orthodox Jew. Now, you want to become a Christian? What a paradox! You are unstable. How can I believe in the religion of the Gentile Christians that, together with their established churches, persecuted the Jewish people for 16 centuries? And also, why should I prefer and choose the teachings and traditions of Protestantism over those of Catholicism? I was thinking, if I seriously do believe in the Lord Yeshua and I am going to be Gentilized, the immediate outcome will be to lose my Jewish identity. And also, I well knew now I am going to be called a converted Jew, a mumar, namely a All these negative appellations, which traditionally mean a traitor in my Jewish people and heritage. I realized that if I fully dedicate my life to the Lord Yeshua, I will have to pay a heavy price. The cost of alienation, much scorn, and the attitude of being a person who lost his mind. There is a saying in Hebrew, Literally, this means, he left his religion, he has gone crazy. What I shared today in this talk is just the very beginning of a very meaningful spiritual and intellectual voyage. The Lord Yeshua was more than faithful to me. He strengthened and encouraged me and gave me a wonderful Yeshua-believing wife and six children. He protected me in the Yom Kippur War and also currently, two years after the October 7th, 2023 Gazan Muslim massacre of Israeli Jews, he is safeguarding my son and my son-in-law in the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces. To him, to the Lord, I wish to wholeheartedly give all the glory and all the thanks. It is my prayer that he will help me to remain loyal to him till the very end, as well as to be ready and worthy to face him when he returns very soon.