 It is said that before God offered the Torah to the Jewish people, God went to the nations, the other nations in the world, and offered it to them. And for various reasons, it didn't work out. So you can imagine God going to the Egyptians. Would you like the Torah? The Egyptian says, what's in it? It says, monotheism. I'm God. That's it. The Egyptians would say, no. We have hundreds of gods. We worship everything that move and a lot of things that don't. And polytheism, it's what we do. It's who we are. It goes to the Greeks. Would you like the Torah? What's in it? Sexual morality. Adultery, nothing like that. The Greek says, we're Greeks. We worship the human form. We have Bahanelian debauchers and Dionysian rebels. And that's who we are. It's what we do. That's our very nature. God goes to the Romans, the people who would become Rome. Would you like the Torah? Rome said, what's in it? What's that? Don't murder. And I said, are you kidding me? Rome is going to be one of the greatest empires in the world. It will last for a thousand years. We're not going to be successful by having comparative politics classes. Rome will be spread on the edge of a sword. Killing is something we're very good at. It's what we do. It's who we are. It's important to know that those votes, those decisions were not unanimous. There were people in the different nations who wanted the Torah. Who wanted to accept the Word of God. But they were outnumbered. They were outvoted. They were shouted down. It's handed down that when God gave the Torah to the Jewish people at Harsenei, the souls of all future Jewish generations were there. It's also said that those people who voted for the Torah, God said, okay, you had a chance to get the Torah for free. If you want it, you're going to have to work for it. I'm going to take your soul and I'm going to put it in a Gentile body. And your challenge, if you want the Torah as badly as you say you did, is to work your way. Try to find the truth. Try to find your way to me. And if you live a Jewish life and if you can convince a Besdan, you can have the Torah. You can be a Jew. So 63 years ago, one of those souls was placed into a little boy who was born to Italian immigrant parents who came over after the war. And from my earliest memories, I was always a very religious kid. I can honestly say that in all my life, not a moment has passed where I doubted the existence and the presence of God. It was just a fact. I knew it like I knew my own name. And I took my religious life very seriously. I grew up Catholic. A lot of people say you were born Catholic. No one's born a Christian. You have to accept it, either through baptism or later on as an adult. But I grew up with Italian Catholic parents. And I wanted to be a really good religious kid. I was sent to a Catholic grade school. I became an altar boy. And I wanted to know and I wanted to understand because that would help me be a better religious person. And even as a little kid, there were certain fundamental concepts in Catholicism and Christianity in general that as a child you struggle with. It doesn't make sense. For example, eternal damnation, burning in hell forever for the sins of a lifetime. Let me explain forever. Take a thousand billion years times 5,000 billion years square that it never ends. For the sins of a lifetime, that didn't seem fair. And kids have a fundamental sense of fair. It's not fair. It's not right. So I wanted to understand. I wasn't being a smart alec. I wanted to understand because this didn't seem right and I wanted to know another one. You could only get to God by believing in Jesus. Actually, at that age, you can only get to God by being a Catholic. But let's just say you couldn't get to God unless you believed in Jesus. And again, that didn't strike me as being right because if anyone knew what people were like, it would be God who created us. And God knew you couldn't get 50% of people to agree on where to go for lunch. And you're going to get the majority of people to believe in Jesus. The majority of people, the vast majority of people, are going to burn in hell forever. And again, when you're 8, 9, 10, 12 years old, it didn't make sense. At the school I went to, we were taught by nuns and priests and also lay teachers. And we were very fortunate in our parish. Our parish priest was a Jesuit. A Jesuit, Monsignor Fernando, a superbrainy guy, very, very astute, intellectual. So I was about, I guess, 12. I made an appointment to see Monsignor Fernando. And I put these questions to him. You have to believe in Jesus to see God, the eternal damnation. I need an explanation because I'm not challenging for fun. I want to be a better believer. I want to be a better godly person. And Monsignor Fernando, bless him, gave me an explanation. That was so far above my head, he could have been speaking another language. I'm sure it meant something, but to someone in the seventh grade, it wasn't clicking. But when you're young, nothing makes sense. So I figured, okay, eventually I'll catch on about the age of 13, 14 when a lot of kids stopped going to church or synagogue. I, too, stopped going to church. I, in effect, stopped being a Catholic. But I still believed in God. I was still very religious. I just didn't go to church anymore. It just wasn't who I was. Later on in high school, I became a born-again Christian. This is a different kind of Christian than a Catholic. And to go through a born-again conversion experience is probably one of the most powerful things I've ever gone through. Unless you've gone through it, it's almost impossible to describe it. It's like describing a reading about being hit by a bus and then being hit by a bus. It was very powerful. It struck me to the core. And I figured with this euphoria, finally, finally I get what it is to be a Christian. Also, it's at this point that I started reading the Bible. Something you should know in Catholicism. At least the Catholicism as it was back in the early 60s and in the mid-60s. I don't know how much of it pertains to today. But Catholics were discouraged from reading Scripture. And I have to tell you, I have a certain degree of sympathy for this. Because if you were to pick up Scripture, Hebrew or Christian Scripture, just read it like you would a book, it is very confusing and very misleading. And so Scripture is something you're supposed to be taught. But here I am picking up and just for fun, how many people here have read the Bible? And I say read the Bible. I mean read the Bible cover to cover every chapter, every sentence, every word. See, that confuses me. The Tanakh, as we believe, was basically written by God through the Spirit and prophets. Directed to the Jewish people. If God wrote you a book, wouldn't you want to understand or wouldn't you want to read what it said? I'm astonished at how many people, how many Yeshiva guys have never read the Bible. They've read Mission and Gomorrah. They read what's in the Haftar readings and things. Again, I find that confusing. But I read the Bible. I wanted to be a very serious Christian. When the initial euphoria of the born again experience started to settle down and level off, these same questions I had remained. Eternal damnation. The way to get to God is through Jesus and Jesus only. There's no third way. And being now in high school, a teenager, by the way, virgin birth. So let's throw that one in. Now the minister at the church that I went to, I figured, well, let's ask around. Now my born again friends, I started asking them. And they said, well, you need to pray more. And the Holy Spirit will give you the answer. Now I've been reading religious stuff at this point basically all my life. And I found that answer a little unsettling. And I also realized that the people who are now my friends, my born again friends, had very little, if any, theological background. None. Fine. The minister, the pastor, whatever he called himself. I had a meeting with him. One way to get to God through Jesus. Eternal damnation, virgin birth. I need some help here because I'm a born again Christian and I want to be a good one. And so he sat there and was very pensive. And he says, well, you know, you need to pray more. You need to pray more and the Holy Spirit will show you the answer. Judge my disappointment. So my Christianity basically left me shortly thereafter. I couldn't very well say I was anything other than a nominal Christian, but I was still a religious person. I still believed in God. I'm now in my 20s. I'm living in Toronto and I live downtown. And I don't know if it's still there. It may be still, maybe it still is. The world's biggest bookstore was not far away from where I lived at the time. And being a reader, what I like to do is walk through the bookstore and look at the different books and buy different books. And of course, being a religious person, I would sometimes buy books on religion. Some of the books I bought were about Judaism. I knew virtually nothing about Judaism. Only Jewish friends I had were the Jews I worked for and they were all non-observant. They were basically secular. They had traditional upbringings. And by this time in my mind, I pretty well figured out what it was. We have God, the Creator. He sets out the rules. He expects us to follow the rules and follow the laws and live a good life. And if we do, things will generally go well. And if we don't, things will generally not go well. So I start for the first time in my life. I'm in my 20s now reading about Judaism. And I liked what I was reading, so I read more and more and more. And I realized, and remember when I said in my mind I had figured out how things were? To my shock, I realized this was it. This is what I believed. So it wasn't a case of me changing religions. It was me discovering to my great surprise that there was a religion. I believed in it. I just didn't know it. I'm reading more of a voracious reader about the subject. I read everything to get my hands on. Being a religious person, I just couldn't, you know, let things slide. I had to do something about it. I said, like, what happens if I'm hit by a streetcar? I'm gonna be buried a Christian. I can't have that. So the only synagogue I had ever gone to was Bethsetic. I went to a friend's wedding. I had one, remember the big conversion, powerful experience. Here's the second one. My girlfriend at the time, we were at the wedding and we arrived there. It was night and we entered what I now realize is the back of the lobby. And so what I thought was the back end of the lobby was, in fact, the front. I'm wondering now because, you know, we were on time. No one else was there. And so I'm wandering around and if any of you have been to Bethsetic, there was in those days, and it probably still is, a glass case with a safari, say, for Torah, a Torah scroll in those cylindrical cases. And it was open up. And I saw a Torah scroll for the first time in real life. And I stood there looking at it, and Susan was off doing whatever, looking for, you know, anyone else invited to the wedding. And it hit me like a thunderbolt. I am looking at the Word of God. And it just struck me so profoundly because I've been religious all my life. And I looked at it, and I looked at it, and it just hit me because I was reading a bit about Judaism at this time. So I go over to my girlfriend at the time, and I said, Susan, you're not going to believe this. This is the most incredible thing out back here. This Torah scroll is written in Hebrew. I just found it fascinating. And she says, well, I certainly hope so. You were staring at it for 15 minutes. And I looked at my watch. I thought it was there maybe a minute or two. But apparently, I don't know what happened. I stood transfixed for, Susan says, 15 minutes staring at a Torah scroll. After a while, I couldn't let things stand. I had to do something about it. The only shul I'd ever been to, but said it. I'm brand new at everything. Anything I've ever learned, I taught myself and was from books. So I made an appointment to see the rabbi. And I said, I go into his office. He's very nice. I said, I want to convert to Judaism. And he says, you know what? I get this all the time. People watch Fiddler on the roof. They want to be Jewish. It's not for you. There's a lot of roses. It's not for you. And I was, when you come from a Christian background and you make a decision you want to convert, you expect people to roll out the red carpet. This is a monumental decision. And this is like ho-hum attitude. I was not expecting this. And it was very discouraging. So I made another appointment. And I came back and I said, I want to convert. And this is why. And I came back again and again and again. And you realized that I wasn't going away. So he decides, OK, well, let's take this guy in. Let's convert him, which I did. And in those days, they had conversion classes at the Holy Blossom next door. But the assistant rabbi, Troster, I believe, after speaking with me on one or two occasions, realized there's not much point sending you to a conversion class. You're not at that level. So I asked some friends of mine, where do you get an orthodox conversion? And one of my friends said, well, you go see Rabbi Steinberg, Oliver Sholom, at the Toronto Jewish Congress. OK. So I made an appointment with Rabbi Sholom Steinberg, Oliver Sholom. And I said, hi, I want to convert to Judaism. My hair is still wet from the conservative mix. I want to do an orthodox. And he says, well, this isn't for you. I get people coming in all the time. And by this I'm starting to catch on. And I come back again and again and again. And he says, OK, this kid's not going away. I do an orthodox conversion through the Toronto Jewish Congress the best then at the time, because a friend of mine said that's where it was. I got married. We had two children. I got divorced. And it was about this time that this sort of been, this isn't going in exactly chronological order, some of these things overlap, that I bought a computer and I went online. And at the time, 1990, whenever it was, I thought I was the last person in the world to go online. And I went to this, there's a platform called, in those days called CompuServe. And they had all these forums. There was the religion forum and the Jewish forum. And I went to the Jewish, the Judaism forum. Because I wanted to talk to Jews about Judaism. This is all fun and games for me. This is what I've been waiting for my whole life. I was disturbed by how many people I ran into online who were Christian missionaries, who were striking up conversations with people in the chat room, getting them to, oh, you should come over to this religion forum, which was really a Christian forum. And this burned me. It really did, because coming from a Christian background, I knew, and especially a born-again background, I knew all the tricks and I knew all the things and all the flaws and I knew a lot of the arguments. So I started picking fights with these people, but it just bothered me that this was going on. Later I found out there were Muslim missionaries, but that's another story. And it was, I wanted to get involved. Again, I didn't want to sit there and do anything. I wanted to get involved. And it was about that time that I heard about a character by the name of Julius Sis. And that he had an organization called Jews for Judaism. And one of the things that they did, which was to combat the effort of Christian missionaries to target Jews for conversion, to keep Jews Jewish. So I said, I have to get involved somehow. And I found out shortly thereafter, I was living in Hamilton at the time, that Julius was speaking, as we talked about earlier, at the Jewish Community Center, which was an encaster, a small town nearby. And I went to see him and I introduced myself. How do I get involved? And so that was about 20 years ago. And so I started getting involved, doing as much volunteer work as I can, in addition to being online and talking to people and helping people, not just with respect to missionizing Tastic, but also people who wanted to become more religious. I wanted to help them. And I wanted to be the person who wasn't there for me when I started to become Jewish and I started to be interested. And so I was helping people as best I can. My daughter, about five, six years ago, made aliyah, she now lives in Ashgod. She married, has children. And in the traveling and the marriage and the divorce and the moving back and forth, the documents to my Orthodox conversion were lost. I didn't have any paperwork. It didn't bother me. Everyone knew I was Jewish. Everyone knew I converted. But I thought to myself, if I was going to make aliyah, or if I even had to prove I was Jewish, I wouldn't be able to do it. By the way, almost 30 years had passed and all of the witnesses to everything, to the Kutuba, to the Besdan, to the conversion, to the Geras, everyone had died. And there was no paperwork. So someone said to me, he says, you know what? You need to contact the Toronto Besdan. I said, I don't think it operates anymore. He says, no, no, no, no. The Toronto Besdan. I said, what are you talking about? He says, no, no, no. That was like a renegade Besdan. You need to go to the real one. I said, what do I do? Contact Rabbi Vail, which I did. I talked to Rabbi Vail, told him the story. He says, well, it's a little complicated and the witnesses and the stuff like that. And I said, there's something called a Girol-Homerov. There's a technical deficiency you could fix it up. It wasn't nearly as enthusiastic about this as I was hoping he would be. So I emailed him. I emailed him every week for six months until I think he agreed to let me meet the Besdan just to shut me up. By this time, I was coming to Toronto, as I still do, every Shabbos and every Yentaf. I live in the Niagara region, about an hour and a half drive away. Every Shabbos, every Yentaf, I come to Toronto because from the United States border to Hamilton, there were two, there are now three, someone had a bar mitzvah, three Orthodox Jewish men. That's it. That's all. So I come here. Julius was very kind to me. Rabbi Skobak was very kind to me. And I slowly started making inroads and I had the great good fortune to fall in with a very good group of people. And so when it came time for me to meet with the Besdan, I let people know that I was going to meet with them. This is meeting them for the first time. And so along came Julius Siss, Rabbi Skobak, Rabbi Bartfeld. I was governing Rabbi Bartfeld's shul for several years at this point. And they stood up for me. And I may very well hold the Toronto-Besdan land speed record for conversion because from the time I met the Besdan for the first time, to the time I had my mitzvah, it was approximately five months, maybe a little more than five months, but you know, conversions these days and from an Orthodox Besdan, it's not unusual for it to take two years. So I'm in Toronto, two days a week, back and forth. And what I wanted to do was I wanted to help people. I wanted to help people who were considering converting. I wanted to help Balitriva, people who were born Jewish, but wanted to become religious. And a concept that I had recently, of which I've recently become aware, b'nei noach, noaheids. These are Gentiles who don't necessarily want to convert, but they want to believe in the God of Israel, the Creator. That became a big passion of mine. And about a year or so ago, there was someone in Israel, a very charismatic speaker, a Brezlover, Chosed, by the name of Rav Dromosh Guzuto. And he has an outfit called the Amunna.com, the Amunna channel. He approached a friend of mine who's going to be speaking later on in a couple of weeks, Yohanan. Yohanan comes from Nicaragua. He speaks Spanish. And he was told there's a big movement in Latin America about Spanish-speaking people who want to know God, the God of Israel. And Rav Dromosh said to him, I want you to do a series of videos aimed directly at the Spanish-speaking people. Put it on YouTube, put it on Amunna.com. Fine. He then comes to me. He says, you know, people who are starting for the first time to become religious, a guy who's a rabbi or who has a Yeshiva background, we can't talk the same language they do. We don't come from what they come from. You do. How would you like to make some videos? Just directed specifically at converts, no-hides, and returnees. Baleshuva. I says, how many do you want? Just keep doing them. At last count, I think I've done about 155 videos. And then, Julia Sess said, we're going to be doing some videos on YouTube. They're going to be scripted, not off the top of your head. And so, I've had the great pleasure and the great privilege of having Julius have me record several of it. I've lost count of how many videos we've done. And again, the same in my life, the same thing holds true. When I was becoming, I won't say becoming religious, I was always religious. When I started becoming Jewish, there was no one really there to help me. And I want to be the person who wasn't there for me, if a person wants to become a religion. If a person has never prayed before in their lives, and people have come to me, how do I pray? How do I talk to God? And I take them by the hand, and I show them, and I help them as best I can. And thank God for Julia Sess and Rabbi Skoback who's given me this opportunity. And this is something that I will hopefully continue to do for a very long time. And thank you for your patience, thank you for your time, and thank you for listening.