 you were told, my name is Penina Taylor, and I was born into a secular Jewish household. Now what that means is that what my Judaism meant to me was it explained why I had a big nose, why I talked with my hands, and why I liked Chinese food. But other than that, yeah, Chinese food seems to be a recurring theme. I wonder if it has something to do with the date today. But anyway, my Judaism had absolutely no relevance to me. It was something to be remembered, but nothing to be desired, and it was within this context that I grew up. Now I also had a traumatic childhood. My parents were divorced when I was four years old, and I was subjected to a tremendous amount of abuse by a friend of the family. By the time I got to high school, I was starting to ask some very existential questions. What's it all about? What's the point? If there is nothing out there greater and more meaningful than all this pain, what's the point in living? And as I began to ask these questions, one of my fellow students in high school said to me, you know, Penina, your question is no different from that of any other normal American high school teenager. We all have these questions. She said, but there is an answer to your question. There's a solution to your dilemma. She said, what you need is to have a relationship with God. Now I told you that I grew up in a secular home, but when I was in fourth and fifth grade, my paternal grandparents decided that I needed to learn something about being Jewish. So they had arranged for me and my sister to attend an Orthodox Jewish day school for those two years. But I quickly learned that what happened at home stayed at home and what happened at school stayed at school. So nothing that I learned there really stuck. Maybe some of you can identify with this. My first day in the Jewish day school, I learned about something called Shabbat or Shabbat. And I got so excited and I came running home to tell my mom about this thing called Shabbat. And you know what my mom said to me? She said, don't you tell me how to live my life. A little while later, one day, it was a Monday, we were all back in school and my friends were all talking about what they had done over the weekend. And I was so excited because my mom was a single mom and we rarely got to do anything. But this particular weekend, she had saved up the money to take us to an amusement park. So while my friends were talking about what they had done over the weekend, I got excited and I started to share with them about how we had gone to the amusement park on Saturday. Well, my teacher caught wind of what I said, grabbed me, pulled me out of the classroom and said to me, stop being so chutzpadek. I didn't even know what the word meant. But I figured, you know, it was something kind of contagious disease or something, I don't know. But it was definitely something I didn't want, right? So I quickly learned that what happens at home stays at home and what happens at school stays at school. But now here I am all these years in the future. And my classmate is telling me that what I need is to have a relationship with God. And I thought back to that time when I was in the Jewish day school and I said, you know, that sounds right. That rings true for me. Maybe I need to have a relationship with God. And so at the age of almost 16, I was introduced to God and to Jesus. Because it turns out that my classmate was a born-again Christian. Now you'll have to excuse me, when I travel, I tend to get very dry. And water is not only good for quenching the thirst, but it's really good for planned moments of suspense. So I was introduced to God and to Jesus, right? Well, this newfound faith of mine gave me the power to make all sorts of changes in my life. Until this point, I was doing drugs, I was smoking, I was drinking, I was skipping school. I had a really bad crowd of friends at school. And my mom was watching as I was slowly slipping away. So now I became a born-again Christian and I had made all these changes in my life. I stopped drinking, I stopped smoking, I stopped doing drugs. I started actually attending classes in school. And when I went to share my newfound faith with my mom as all good born-again Christians will do, she thought to herself, if something could have such a profound effect on my daughter's life, it must be the truth, right? And so my mom and my sister, I brought my mom and my sister to Christianity as well. Well, I started, I had a best friend and I went off to college. I went to a Bible college. Miami Christian College now, it's called Trinity University. While I was there, I got certified in something called evangelism explosion. Maybe some of you have heard of it. And I served as a counselor on the Billy Graham Crusade and I started dating my best friend's older brother who had also gone to Bible college. He went to a school called Moody Bible Institute which is a very well-known college for training missionaries and missionary pilots. And we started dating and we started getting serious. We started talking about marriage. And I thought to myself, you know, I've always had this dream that my father would walk me down the aisle when I got married. Now that wording may sound a little strange to you but I didn't know my father. Remember I said that my parents had been divorced, got divorced when I was four years old. And I had only seen my father one time in 15 years. How was he gonna walk me down the aisle when I got married if he didn't know me? So I went to my mom and I asked her if I could write a letter to my dad because of course that was back in the days before the internet and email and all of that. And if I could write a letter to my dad to invite him to come and visit us. At this point we're living in Miami, my dad's living in New Jersey. So my mom, to my surprise, said sure. So I wrote a letter to invite my dad and he agreed. So he came down to visit us during Christmas break and while he was with us, he started to get to know me and my sister and he also started to get to know my mom again. After a little while he says to my mom, you know, I think I'm falling back in love with you. Would you remarry me? And my mom said, well, I'm falling back in love with you too, but we've got a problem. I'm a born again Christian, you're a secular Jew. That's not gonna work. I said, hold on a second, stop the presses. I know what to do, I'm certified in evangelism. So I went to the Christian bookstore, I went and got a Christian Bible for my dad. I started to share with him from the Bible. I took him to church and wouldn't, you know what? My dad became a Christian too. So now my mom and my dad were able to get remarried and after 15 years they were. Seven months later my dad walked me down the aisle when I married my boyfriend Paul. Now even though Paul was a minister at the time he was not working as one and he was stationed, he was in the Air Force and we ended up getting stationed in England. And while we were in England, one day I was praying and I started to get this feeling like God was telling me to light candles on Friday night. And I thought, well, I'm not sure where this is coming from. I mean, I had gone to the Jewish day school so I knew that Jewish women lit candles on Friday night but my mother didn't light candles on Friday night. My grandmother didn't light candles on Friday night. My great grandmother probably did but I don't know if I ever saw her do it. So I went to my husband and I said, you know, I have this strange feeling like God is telling me to start lighting candles on Friday night. What do you think I should do? And my husband said to me, well, if you believe that this is how God wants you to serve him, then go ahead. So I decided to start lighting candles but in order to light candles, well besides needing candles, what do you need? You need candlesticks, right? So I went over to the buffet and I opened the drawer where I had my candlesticks that I had inherited from my great-grandmother and I pulled them out and I also pulled out what was sitting next to them in the drawer which was a Maxwell House Passover Haggadah. How many of you have ever heard of a Maxwell House Passover Haggadah, right? So I pulled it out because, you know, every year Maxwell House along with, they run a kosher for Passover line of coffee and they would often give this, well, you know, buy two coffees, get a Haggadah free or something like that. And why did I have this Haggadah? Well remember, I told you my family was secular, right? But we did do one Jewish thing every year and that was Passover. Although it wasn't the kind of Passover that most people would identify as a Passover Seder, perhaps some of you can identify with this. We would go over to my grandparents' house and my grandfather would open the door and my great-grandmother would greet us with good yantif which I had no idea what that meant but that was what Bubby would say. And we would come in and my grandfather would pull out this stack of Maxwell House Passover Haggadahs that he had collected over the years. Now I was little so to me that stack seemed huge but anyway, so he'd pull out this stack of Maxwell House Passover Haggadahs and he would hand them out to everybody and we would all sit down at the table and then he'd say something like, okay, everybody open to page 30. So we'd all open to page 30. He'd read a paragraph from the Haggadah. We would sing the chorus to Diana and then we would eat. Now we did have a piece of matzah because it was Passover after all but we also ate a lot of other foods you might not consider kosher for Passover. But this was our family's observation of Passover and I had a very fond family memory of this. So when I got married, I asked my grandmother if it would be okay for me to take one of these Haggadahs which of course he said yes. Now what does this have to do with lighting candles? Well I remembered that inside the front cover of the Passover Haggadah was the blessing for lighting candles because Jewish women light candles at the beginning of every Jewish holiday. And at the bottom was the line for lighting the candle on Friday night because sometimes Passover begins on Friday night. And so with the help of the Maxwell House Passover Haggadah and thank God for Maxwell House because not only was it in Hebrew and in English but it was also in translated Hebrew so I could read it in the English letters. I began to light the candles on Friday night. Meanwhile I'm going to church on Sunday. A little while later one day my husband comes running down the stairs all excited and he says penina, penina. Of course that's not what he called me then but he says penina. He says I was reading in the Old Testament. Now for those of you who may not know the Old Testament is what non-Jews call our Tanakh, the Jewish Bible. They've taken it, they've rearranged the order, they've retranslated certain verses but in general it's our Tanakh. And he says I was reading in the Old Testament and I came across a passage that says that there are certain things that God told the Jewish people they are supposed to do forever. He says and if forever really means forever then my Jewish wife and my Jewish children should be doing these things. Some people are absolutely amazed at how aware of my Jewishness my husband was. More so even than me. I mean not that I didn't know I was Jewish but there's a difference between knowing something and being aware of it, right? And so being somebody who was searching for truth and this is something I need to make sure you understand. There's no way in 45 minutes or an hour I can tell you the entire process of what we were going through in a way that reflects the amount of time that it took. And people have sometimes said to me, you know, Pnein, you are all over the map religiously. Well the truth is is that we weren't. If you step back and you look at the overarching picture what you see is a couple who were searching for truth. That's something that my husband and I were about from the very first day that we got married even before we got married we wanted to serve God in truth. So now here my husband is telling me that there's something that God wants the Jewish people to do forever. So I said, okay, go ahead, shoot. He said, well, it says in the Old Testament that Jewish people aren't supposed to eat pork or shellfish. And I said, wait, no ham and cheese sandwiches? And he said, no. I was like, okay, I need to think about that one for a minute. But if that's what God wants me to do then that's what I'm going to do. And so I agreed. And so I stopped eating pork or shellfish. So now here I am, I'm lighting candles on Friday night. I'm not eating pork or shellfish but I'm going to church on Sunday. Well, a little while later I'm reading in the New Testament which is the Christian part of the Christian Bible. And I came across a passage that talked about head coverings. And I was very curious because in the English it was not so clear is it saying that men have to cover their head and women don't or women have to cover their head and men don't. And so we called the pastor of our church at that time which was not my husband to come explain the passage to us because he was a Greek scholar. And Greek is the language that the New Testament was written in. So he comes in and he sits down and he says, well, you know, it's very complicated passage. And I was like, yeah, I know that's why we invited you here. He said, no, really. He said, even in the Greek it's very complicated. It's hard to tell which word is modifying which word. I said, okay, pastor, what do you think this passage means? He said, well, what I think it means is that married women should cover their head when they pray. But I can't teach that because women nowadays don't wanna hear it. Now, regardless of whether or not you agree with that statement, if you are somebody who is seeking truth, is the excuse that people nowadays don't wanna hear it enough to stop you from doing what you believe to be right? Of course not. And so I decided to start covering my head. Now, I had no example, but so I took a hat and when I wanted to talk to God because that's what prayer is, right? Prayer is talking to God. I would put the hat on my head and then when I was done, I would take it off. The problem is, I'm really ADD if you couldn't tell by the way I tell my story. And so when I was done talking to God, next time I wanted to talk to God, I had to first go find the hat, right? So I was like, hang on a second there, big guy. And I would go and try to find the hat. But by the time I found the hat, I had forgotten what it was I was gonna say to God. So I decided there had to be a better solution and I decided to buy a scarf. I figured a scarf I could wear around my neck and when I wanted to pray, I would put the scarf on my head and when I didn't want to pray, I would take it off, right? But I discovered something interesting. I discovered that I pray throughout the course of the day. Hopefully you all do as well. And so on went the scarf and off went the scarf and on went the scarf and off went the scarf. And finally I just said, forget it. And I decided to cover my head all the time. So now here I am. I'm lighting candles on Friday night. I'm not eating pork or shellfish. I'm covering my head all the time. And that's right. Come on, wake up guys, it's not that warm in here. Going to church on Sunday. Well, something began to happen inside of me. At the time I didn't know what it was. Now looking back I call it my spiritual identity crisis. I believe that my Jewish Neshama, my Jewish soul was having this battle with my Christian beliefs. All I knew though was that I had this restlessness going on inside of me and I didn't know what to do about it. So a little while later I was about to have my second child, we were still in England and my parents decided to come visit us. I have to time this just right, right? My parents decided to come visit us in England. Now last I had left my parents, they were attending a nice little assembly of God Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And I'm helping my mom unpack her suitcases. And one of the suitcases is full of Judaica items. Yamakas, tzitzit, shofar, sitters, you name it. And I looked at my mom and I said, mom what's with the Jewish stuff? And she said, well while we were in Pittsburgh we discovered a group of people who were born Jewish who believe in Jesus and have figured out a way to synthesize their Jewish heritage with their Christian beliefs and they call themselves Messianic Jews. Now I don't know how many of you have ever heard of Messianic Jews, I actually hadn't. But I began to think maybe this is the answer to what's going on inside of me. And so a year later when we came back to the United States my husband and I sought out one of these Messianic congregations. Now up until this point, even though my husband had never had his own church, we served in various positions, lay leadership positions. He was a deacon in the church and I served on the women's ministries. And so we got involved in this Messianic congregation and began to be involved in the leadership of the Messianic congregation. And one day my dad approached my husband and I and said, you know, it's an hour's drive to the Messianic congregation that we're going to. Why don't we start our own Messianic congregation here where we live? After all, Paul is an ordained pastor and Panina I used to sing and play the guitar and lead worship in women's ministries. And he said, mom and I are very administrative so we'd make a great team. So my husband and I decided to pray about it and decided that it was God's will that we start this Messianic congregation. But I began to think, I do that a lot and it usually gets me in trouble, I began to think, you know, if we're going to do something Jewish, right, because it's Messianic Judaism, maybe we should know a little something about Judaism, don't you think? And so I decided to go to the Jewish bookstore to find a book on Judaism. Well, it turns out that the Jewish bookstore had lots of books on Judaism. But I found one that had a title that intrigued me and it was called How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household. It was written by a woman named Blue Greenberg who's a very modern Orthodox woman. And instead of using the word Orthodox throughout the book, she used the term Torah Observant. And I thought, you know, I like the sound of that. Maybe that's what we should be. Maybe we should be Torah Observant Messianic Jews. So, I went back to the Jewish bookstore and I got a book called the Kitzer-Schulchan-Aruch for those of you who don't know, that's the condensed code of Jewish law. I got it in English. I read throughout four times, I went back and I got books on keeping kosher and the laws of family purity. And basically, I learned everything there is to learn about Orthodox Judaism from a book. Now, you may or may not know this, you can't learn everything about Orthodox Judaism from a book, but everything that you can learn from a book, I did. And we began to make changes in our lives. I began to dress modestly, me and my daughter and my husband and my son started wearing a kippah and tzitzit. And if you had walked into us on the street, you would have thought we were an Orthodox Jewish family, just like any Orthodox Jewish family in Muncie or Jerusalem or wherever we are, Thornhill or, you know. So, you would not have known that we also believed in Jesus. Well, we started this congregation and we did it with my parents for about three years. But as you can imagine, running a doing a joint leadership program with your parents or children for three years can be a little stressful. And we decided that we valued our relationship with my parents more than our positions in the congregation and so we decided to leave. Meanwhile, my parents continued to run the congregation. Because of where my husband worked, and I don't even know if you all know the geography of the Washington DC area. But we ended up attending a Messianic congregation in Northern Virginia. However, one day there was an event at the Messianic congregation in Baltimore, which is only about an hour, hour and a half north. And after the event, we were standing around there was food and I mean, let's face it, right? You have Jews, you have an event, you have food, right? Jews plus event equals food. It doesn't matter if the Jews believe in Jesus, you have Jews and food event. So we're standing around afterwards and there's this really nice blonde-haired lady who is trying to convince me that the food is kosher because she can tell by looking at me that that might be something that would be important to me. And she stops mid-sentence and she says to me, how would you like to buy a nice big five bedroom house in Upper Park Heights in Baltimore? Now, I don't know if you're familiar with Upper Park Heights in Baltimore but that is the heart of the Orthodox Jewish community in Baltimore. And she says, in fact, I know that God wants you to buy this house. Now, I was used to Christians speaking this way but I did think that the woman was a few french fries short of a happy meal and not being one to engage in confrontation, I figured, okay, how am I gonna get out of this conversation? And I knew what I needed to do was tell her I had to talk to my husband, right? Marriage 101, you gotta get out of a sticky situation, you blame it on your husband, right? So I went over to my husband. Now, I knew. My husband was going to say, are you crazy? I work in Northern Virginia, we worship in Northern Virginia, eventually we're gonna move to Northern Virginia. Baltimore is not on the map. And then I would go back to the woman and say my husband says no and that would be the end of the conversation. Well, that was what was written in the script. So I go over to my husband and I tell him about this whole conversation and the fact that she's even offering to hold the mortgage for us. And instead of telling me I'm crazy, which is what was written in the script, he says to me, well, we could take a look at it. Now, I have it on good authority that that was the first and last time I was ever speechless. But after picking myself up from shock, I went over to the woman and I said, you know, we could take a look at it. And so we made an appointment and we went to the house. Now, when we arrived in the house, I started to get this funny feeling, very much like the feeling when I felt that God was telling me to light candles on Friday night, this time it said, you're home. Now, I promise you, I'm not schizophrenic, but I started to have this feeling that I was home and I don't know why. I don't, to this day, I don't know if it was the proximity of all the other Jewish souls or what it was, but we went inside and we looked at the house and we fell in love with the house. I had a lot of character, it was really big because at that time I was in a very tiny house, about a third the size of this house, homeschooling my four children and the walls were beginning to close in on me. So, we fell in love with the house and then we did what any good Christian or Messianic couple in our situation would do. We went back to our congregation and we asked them to pray, concerning whether or not it was God's will that we buy this house. In fact, they held a special prayer meeting for that purpose. And wouldn't you know it, all 250 members of the congregation unanimously agreed, of course I could stop there and that would be miraculous in and of itself, right? They unanimously agreed that it was God's will that we buy this house. Why? Because who better to convert Orthodox Jews to Messianic Judaism than Messianic Jews who look and act like Orthodox Jews, right? And so we made arrangements to buy the house and we moved in. Now, it was interesting when we first moved in, we were kind of not sure why we received a little bit of a cold shoulder. We didn't find out until many years later that the woman who had sold us the house who wasn't Jewish and that we knew, when she had bought the house three years before she had taken it upon herself to go knocking door to door to all of her Jewish neighbors to inform them that they were hopelessly lost and going to burn in hell because they didn't believe in Jesus. Just in case they didn't know. So you can imagine how they felt about this woman, right? And you can imagine how ecstatic they were when she said that she had sold the house until she told them that she had sold it to a nice Messianic family, at which point they didn't know what to do. Now, living in the Western world, Jewish people are familiar with living with non-Jewish neighbors. That's not a big deal. But how do you deal with a Jewish family whose sole purpose, pun intended, is to convert you and your children to some form of Christianity, right? And so that's why they didn't know quite how to deal with us. But we moved in and my husband and I started talking and we realized we had a problem. What was the problem? Well, the Messianic congregation in Baltimore was not in walking distance of our home. And if we got in the car and drove on Shabbat, there was no way anyone was ever going to listen to a word we had to say, right? And so we decided that what we would do is on Shabbat, we would go to one of the more than a dozen Orthodox synagogues in walking distance of our house. And during the week, we would drive to the Messianic congregation to get our fill of Jesus. So the first Shabbat, after we had made that, actually it was the first Shabbat we were in Baltimore, we went to one of the congregations, one of the synagogues in our neighborhood. Now, how did we decide which one to go to? Well, it turns out that the rabbi who owned the bookstore that we had visited all these times also happened to be the rabbi of a shul in the neighborhood. So that's how we decided where we were going to go. Now, luckily for us, it was about a quarter of a mile from our house. So that meant that most of the people there didn't know who we were. Well, we went to the synagogue on Shabbat morning and we had the most amazing experience. Everybody there was warm and welcoming. They showed me where we were in the Torah reading. They helped me follow along in the prayer service, in the dawning. And it's interesting that sometimes when people tell their story of return to Judaism, they'll talk about how the only person that came up and spoke to them was the one that came up to say, hi, how are you doing? You're sitting in my seat. Oh, you're familiar with this? But it wasn't like that at all. It wasn't like that at all. They were all very warm and welcoming. And what happens on the other side of the Mechitza? You know the Mechitza is the divider between the men's section and the women's section, right? What happens on the other side of the Mechitza when there's a new guy in town? Anybody? That's right, he gets called to the Torah. He gets an aliyah to the Torah. So there's my husband wearing a kippah and tzitzit and he has a sitter in his hands and he looks like he's praying and he's got these three little boys with him all with their kippahs and tzitzit and so he gets an aliyah to the Torah. And when the Gabbai gives him this offer of an aliyah, he says to him, I'm not Jewish. Now this is a very important point to my talk because you may or may not be aware, although since you've heard of Jews for Judaism, hopefully you are aware, that in messianic congregations all over the world, there are non-Jews, and that's fine, they can go wherever they want, but there are non-Jews who go to these messianic congregations and they learn not only how to look and act like Orthodox Jews, how to make the blessings for being called up to the Torah, but they also learn how to read from the Torah and they make up fake Hebrew names and then they go and they visit places like Orthodox synagogues or the Kotel in Jerusalem or whatever and they're counted in a minion and when they're given an aliyah, instead of being honest, they give these fake Hebrew names and they're committing a crime against the Jewish people. Some people say, wow, Panina, that's kind of harsh. Well, at the very least, it's not right because they're not being honest, but my husband is a man of tremendous integrity so he said I'm not Jewish. Now, a little while later, my husband, the man of tremendous integrity, says to me, you know, Panina, we need to tell the rabbi what we believe because it's going to come out at some point and we certainly don't want him to feel that we've been lying to him or we have betrayed him and I said to my husband, you know, I don't think that's a very good idea. I don't see that ending well, but he insisted and so I relented and we called the rabbi and invited him to come over to talk. Now, knowing that my husband wasn't Jewish and I was, what do you think the rabbi thought we were going to talk to him about? Conversion, right, makes sense. So the rabbi comes in the door and my husband starts telling him what we believe and after a minute or two, the rabbi stops him and he says, wait, wait, you don't believe that anymore, do you? To which my husband says, yeah. Well, in the moment it took for absolute shock to register on the rabbi's face, I started to see my world implode. I mean, we had just bought this big expensive house so we couldn't turn around and sell and I was homeschooling my children and if the rabbi kicked us out of the synagogue, who were my kids gonna play with? Maybe they were gonna get beaten up. Maybe they were gonna take pictures of our family and put them on posters down the street saying, warning missionaries. And so I began to cry. Well, the rabbi turned to me and he says to me, well, what do you believe? Now, I'm here to tell you that at this point in my story, I had been a Christian in one form or another for 17 years. I had been responsible for bringing hundreds if not thousands of people to Christianity. It's not like I didn't know what I believed but in that moment of emotionality when the rabbi turned to me and asked me what I believe, I just responded rabbi! And I begged him please, please don't kick us out of the synagogue. Is everybody awake? Yes, good, okay. I begged him please don't kick us out of the synagogue. And he sat there for the longest time saying absolutely nothing to me. I wasn't sure if he was ever going to speak to us again but when he did speak, he said the most important words that anyone has ever said on my Jewish journey. He said to me, you are a Jew no matter what you believe. He said, now, let me be clear. What you believe is not Judaism. It's not kosher and it's not okay but you are a Jewish woman who is responsible before God to fulfill the commandments that God has given the Jewish people. He said, therefore I will allow you and the children to continue coming to the shul. He said, but one caveat. He said, I want you to talk to a guy from an organization called Jews for Judaism. Now I had never heard of Jews for Judaism before but I'm not stupid. Jews for Jesus, Jews for Judaism, they probably don't like people like me very much. But I knew I had no choice if I wanted to keep coming to the shul. So I agreed. But I agreed kind of like the way that you agree when you're downloading software to your computer. Anybody familiar with this, right? You download a piece of software and up comes this box that says terms of agreement. It's got all these little words in it and then it has a box underneath that says I agree to the terms of agreement and you're supposed to check the box if you want to continue downloading the software, right? And most of us don't bother reading the words in the box. We just check the box and we move on because otherwise we couldn't download the software. And so I thought to myself, well, I'll agree to talk to this guy from Jews for Judaism. But in my head I thought, you know, the rabbi, he'll forget about it. We'll just be able to keep going as things are. And so I just kind of ignored it. So a little while later, the rabbi calls me and he says, have you talked to this guy from Jews for Judaism? And I was like, no, I haven't had time, whatever. This went on several times and I'm hoping that the rabbi is going to forget. That's what was written in my script. However, the rabbi didn't read the script either. I don't know what it is with you guys and not reading the script, but anyway. So finally, the rabbi called me at one point and he made it very clear that if I didn't call this guy from Jews for Judaism that I was probably not going to be able to maintain my same status of going to the shul. So I picked up the phone, which is a very hard thing for me to do. And I called Jews for Judaism and made an appointment for this guy to come to my house. That one was suspenseful, I hope. Anyway, so this guy's name was Mark at the time he was the director of Jews for Judaism in Baltimore. And Mark comes over and he comes inside and he says, okay, let's talk about why you think Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. And I thought to myself, you start every conversation this way? And he came in and he sat down and my husband threw out a verse to him. My husband was very happy to do the talking and I was very happy to let him do the talking. So Mark says, well, let's take a look at that. And he opens the Bible to the book of Isaiah where this verse comes from. And then he turns to me and he says, now, Penina, you've read this verse in its context before, right? And I said, of course I have. I read my Bible every year from cover to cover. Now, I'm going to stop for just a second. I'm going to give you two challenges during my talk today. And this is the first challenge. Just out of curiosity, how many of you, and I would expect that since this is a program by Jews for Judaism, the hands will be a little bit higher than usual. How many of you have ever read the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, all of it from cover to cover, not necessarily in order, and not just the Parsha's, in a language that you understand, which for most of us is English, at least once in your life, raise your hand. Okay, this is a well-educated Jewish audience and I would still say 10% maybe. Normally when I ask that question, I get one or two hands raised. Even when I'm speaking to an audience of boys in Yeshiva and their rabbis are present, the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, is our history. It's our heritage, it's our inheritance, and it's our future. But we've left it sitting on a shelf collecting dust. We used to be called the people of the book. Well, what book are we the people of, people? The Tanakh. So my first challenge to you tonight is if you have never read the Tanakh, all of it, in a language you understand, at least once, that you will make a commitment today to read it at least once in your life. You don't have to read it in a year, although if you want to, I have created a reading guide so that you would be able to do that and you would be able to check it off as you read through it. Because you owe it to yourself as a Jewish person to know what it says inside your book. There are people who would say, remember I told you that the Old Testament is mostly our Tanakh? Yes, they've changed the order of the books. Yes, they've retranslated some things which we're gonna talk about in the second part of our lecture today. But there are those who would say that they know our Bible better than we do. You owe it to yourself to read the Tanakh. Use a Jewish translation, please. But other than that, read it, know it, become familiar with it, it's yours. Well, anyway, back to my story. So Mark says to me, have you ever read it before? And I said, yes, I read it every year from cover to cover, and he says to me, well, okay. But when you read the Old Testament, you see Jesus on every page, don't you? And I said, of course, it's all about him. He said, well, I want you to do me a favor. Just this once, I want you to read this passage with me without the lenses, without the bias that it's talking about Jesus. I want you to put yourself in the shoes of the people who would have lived during the time that Isaiah was writing this, which was 700 years before the destruction of the temple, 700 years before Jesus ever walked this earth. He said, would you be willing to do that for me? And I said, sure. And so for the first time in 17 years, I read this passage in Isaiah without the bias that it's talking about Jesus, and wouldn't you know it? Guess what I discovered? It wasn't talking about Jesus. And in fact, the passage isn't even messianic. And in order for that verse to say what they say it says, it had to be completely mistranslated and taken out of its context. Well, we only covered one additional corollary issue, and Mark left. But he left me with an awful lot to chew on. Because if this one core belief that I had held for all of these years was a lie, what else did I believe was a lie? And so over the course of the next few weeks, I kept coming back to Mark's office, and I kept saying, okay, well, what about this verse? And what about this verse? And Mark would always say, okay, well, let's take a look at that. But then I wouldn't even take Mark's word for it. I went back to my Christian friends, my messianic leaders. I even went on the Jews for Jesus chat room, which doesn't exist anymore. But at that time, I got myself kicked out because they couldn't believe that somebody would be asking the questions I was asking. And one by one, the bricks of the foundation of my faith were being pulled out. Eventually the entire structure had to collapse. And then I was faced with the daunting task of trying to figure out what I did believe. I mean, did I still believe in God? And if I did, what did that mean? Is the Bible, the Tanakh God's word to the Jewish people or not? And if it is, what does that mean for me as a Jewish woman? Do I need to be Orthodox or can I be something else? Well, since I'm standing here talking to you today, you can probably guess what my conclusions were. I decided to convert to Buddhism. Just kidding, no. I embraced Torah true Judaism. But at this point, I am married and I have four children who are six, eight, six, eight, 10 and 12 years old. Well, my 12 year old son, he's only less than a year away from Bar Mitzvah. And I realized that there was no way that the rabbi was going to Bar Mitzvah my son if he still believed in Jesus. Now, fortunately for me and unfortunately for him, I was his homeschooling teacher so I was able to give him, I would say to him, this is what Christianity teaches about this verse and this is what Judaism says, what do you think? And one by one, my son went through each of those passages which is what eventually turned into my white book which is called Scripture Twisting, which is out, there's one copy of it out there if anybody wants to buy it. But he went through each of these verses and he decided that Judaism was the truth. And so a year later, he was Bar Mitzvah. Now, leading up to that point, I was talking to my husband and my parents and with my father, as I would present something with him, he was bound and determined to prove that Judaism was wrong. So when I said, hey dad, have you taken a look at what the Judaism says about the virgin birth and he would go back and he would try to hammer it out and he was going to prove that Judaism was wrong and that Christianity was right, except he didn't. With each challenge that I gave him, he came back saying, you know, I think you're right. And so his preaching in the congregation began to change and one by one or two by two, the congregation started to drop off. And meanwhile though, I'm also talking to my husband about what I believe and we used to have the most amazing marriage on earth. We never argued, not that we didn't disagree because that would be weird. But we never fought and now we were fighting all the time because everything that I said to him offended him and everything he said to me offended me and everybody was convinced that we were going to end up divorced because of all of the fighting that was going on. Well, here we are a year after I've come back to Judaism a little bit less and it's my son's bar mitzvah and we invited Mark to the bar mitzvah party. Now, fortunately for my son, his birthday is in June, so we had a backyard barbecue and at one point, fairly early on, I go and I look out the window and I see Mark talking to my parents. A few hours later, I look out the window again and Mark and my parents are still talking. What happened was my dad was asking him questions about all of the little things that were still left un-clarified from all of our discussions and by the end of the bar mitzvah party, my mom and my dad had decided to come back to Judaism as well. So now all four of my kids are coming along. I mean, six and eight year olds, they just believe whatever their mom believes anyway, right? Or whatever you tell them to believe, kind of. Hang on one second, sorry. And another year goes by and my husband and I are still fighting up a storm. And one day we had one of these fights that got me really tipped and I said to him, you know, you just say that because you're a Christian. To which my husband says, well, actually, no, I'm not. I said, what? He said, well, over the past two years, you have given me enough evidence that the New Testament is not true. I don't believe in the New Testament and so I cannot believe in Jesus anymore. He said, but I'm not about to convert to Judaism because I'm not convinced that Judaism is the truth with a capital T and I don't want to trade one flawed religion for another. But at that point, our status in the community changed because now no longer being a Christian, he was what we call a Noahide or a Ben-Noach. And that is a non-Jew who believes in the God of Israel and the validity of the Torah but doesn't necessarily feel called to convert to Judaism. But because of that change in our status, we started to be able to attend classes in the community and to make a long story short, another two years later, so four years after I came back to Judaism, my husband decided that Judaism was the truth with a capital T and he converted to Judaism and Paul Michael Taylor became Pinchas Moshe and we were married under the Chuppah in Baltimore at the Yatzchayim Center with our children and our small community of friends. So thank you. I'm actually going to end this part of my talk with a story and then I'll be happy to take questions. So the story is told of a man who is walking along the beach and he discovers a cave and inside the cave is a bag full of rocks and he looks inside the bag and he takes out one of the rocks and he thinks, you know, they're not even interesting looking rocks but he's got all of this time and what's he going to do? And well, the bag's a little heavy but you know what? I'll just, it's sand, I'll just take it with me and so he's dragging this bag of rocks and he takes out a rock and he tosses it into the water and he takes out another rock and he tosses it into the water and he does this for a couple of hours. At one point one of the rocks falls out of his hand and it hits a rock in the ground and it splits open and he discovers that it actually wasn't a rock but rather it was a ball of clay and inside this ball was a precious gemstone. So he takes out another one, I wonder if there's more where this came from and he breaks that on the rock and he opens it up and there's another gemstone inside and so he does that with the rest of the balls inside the bag and he's standing there admiring his treasure oh, so proud of himself until it hits him. Oh my God, if I had known what was inside those rocks to begin with I wouldn't have thrown them away and I would now be a multimillionaire instead of having this small treasure that I have. Well, I liken Judaism to that bag of rocks. So many of us see Judaism as this big heavy burden full of mitzvots that are not very interesting, certainly no fun and we just spend our life going through life tossing them into the water. If you see your Judaism more like that bag of rocks than the treasure that you have been given as a Jewish person my second challenge to you today is to find someone or someones who will be that rock in the ground for you. You know them. They're people who are excited about being Jewish. Go to them and ask them, hey, why are you so excited about Judaism? You know, I teach this whether I'm teaching a spiritual talk or I'm talking to business owners the principle that you need to surround yourself with people who have what you want and people who want what you have. You surround yourself with people who want what you have because it reminds you of the value of what you've got. But we need to surround ourselves with people who have what we want because we can learn so much from them and enthusiasm really is contagious. So go to them and say, hey, you know, I'm just curious why do you love being Jewish so much? Or can I come and learn with you once a week or once a month? Can I come to your house for a Shabbat meal? Make it take the opportunity to get to know and understand about the treasure that you have been given as a Jewish person. Thank you.