 You know, tonight's talk, I called how a Christian missionary brought me back to Judaism. And I want to start obviously with where the most natural place to start, which is my childhood. So I grew up, as one might guess, by my last name, Walker. I grew up a product of an intermarriage. My father is not Jewish, hence the last name, Walker. Although my parents joked that back in the old country it was Valkovitz, but Alas was not to be. It was not Jewish. My mother is Jewish. And I grew up, certainly very Jewish, but definitely quite disconnected. I had a bar mitzvah at a Reformed synagogue, but we went to synagogue twice a year. But there wasn't necessarily a lot of engagement. Even when we went to synagogue, certainly we didn't keep kosher or Shabbat or anything like that. I didn't go to, I went to public school, not Jewish day school. And suffice to say that I did not grow up with a particularly sophisticated or particularly advanced view of Judaism. So when I was 18 years old, I went away to university. I went to the University of Ottawa, which was about four hours away from my home in Toronto. And I went away to school, to be away from school, to be away from home rather. You know, first chance to spread my wings. And it was very interesting, this was the first time that I encountered individuals who were advocating for various beliefs. Whether it was save the whales, or shave the whales, or pro-Israel, or anti-Israel, or, you know, a Christian, or whatever it was. Every belief system, every ideology, every religion, every political view was being advocated. And it was something completely novel, coming from a high school experience, where it's very sort of provincial. And it was interesting, and I was all of a sudden exposed to new ideas that were completely new to me. It's not that it was threatening per se, but it was just the first time I ever really met people who took beliefs seriously. Whether it was religious, or political, or other beliefs. And it was just an interesting experience to see that. Fast forward, university was really the time when I started to get involved with Judaism a little bit more. I started to go to synagogue a little bit more. And it was a time when I started to explore, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder, as they say. So I go from a big Jewish community in Toronto, went to a smaller community in Ottawa. And it was there, really, that I started to connect a little bit with local shuls, and, you know, tremendous gratitude for those individuals who really got me involved. But really what was interesting was when I returned to Toronto, started working for a year or two, and I continued along my path, you know, trying to grow, trying to go to synagogue more often. You know, I had gotten my first pair to fill. And so I started to grow in my religious observance, but not just observance. I started to grow in my learning, in daily prayers. It was something that really was completely new to me. And my background was not coming from a perspective of religious belief, you know, in anything else. It was coming from a perspective of lethargy. Of not even, you know, die-hard secularism. My parents are not die-hard secularists. They might not be, like I said, my father is not Jewish and my mother is not observant. But it certainly did not grow up in a, you know, in a die-hard secular home. My parents were divorced when I was quite young. So I grew up in, you know, I don't love the term, but some might call it a broken home. But, you know, I think as far as divorce families, it was quite a good relationship I had with my parents. I have a younger sister, three years younger. But really I grew up in a home where Judaism wasn't taken seriously. And I would say that, you know, religion really wasn't active in our daily lives. You know, it wasn't a place where we took necessarily things very seriously. And I think that that's probably representative of a lot of the people who I know today. You know, they didn't grow up particularly religious, particularly secular. You know, they sort of just grew up, there's a term for it, coronary Jew. I'm a Jew in my heart, right? I know I'm Jewish, you know, I'm Jewish in my heart. But there wasn't, you know, necessarily much connected to it. It's not a critique, it's just the way it was. But what was interesting was how much that left me unprepared for when I graduated and I came back and I started working. So I started working, like I said, tried to keep connected to my, you know, to this path and trajectory of growth which I had had. And one day I was just sort of goofing around on YouTube because YouTube was still a pretty newfangled thing at the time. And YouTube had this video, I guess I had clicked previously on Jewish music or Israel or something that was, you know, relevant to the algorithm. And there was a video that came up of a debate between a Christian missionary or a Messianic Jew and an Orthodox rabbi. And I had never really been interested in this before. I think I had volunteered with Jews for Judaism in the past. I'm not even sure why. I didn't have a personal relationship with it at the time. Or perhaps I hadn't volunteered, but the idea was there wasn't much going on. And I saw this, it was a 50 or 55 minute long video. And now with three young kids I wonder how I ever had the time to do such things. But nonetheless, so I said, you know, this will be good. This will be fun. I would love to watch this Orthodox rabbi just totally wipe the floor, you know, with this Messianic Jew with this Christian missionary. It should be interesting. And I watch it. And let's just say I was crestfallen. Because what I thought, and I said, I wasn't looking to be entertained. I wasn't, this wasn't coming from a sense of mockery. I kind of thought that I was going to watch a debate akin to is the world flat or not. You know, a debate between a world preeminent scientist and a member of the World Flat Earth Society. I thought that's what was going to happen. And then up watching this. And while I thought that the Orthodox rabbi made some interesting points, it was very clear that the debate was lost. And it was pretty scary to me because this is something that I never really put much thought into. This is never really something that I thought was, I never put any thought into. I never thought it was even worth considering. You know, Jews have our religion. We know Jesus is not the Messiah. And Jews have the religion. And Christians have the religion. And Muslims have the religion. And, you know, never the twain shall meet. But I remember watching this video. And I think it was a Friday afternoon. And I was sitting in the dining room table watching this. And I was sort of speechless when it ended. Because like I said, although this rabbi who, you know, certainly would not be called the most articulate or the most, let's say, cerebral rabbi in the world, more of a, you know, let's not say more than that. But it was very jarring to me that how could this debate, which is so open and shut, so clear, be seemingly defeated? Long story short, I became obsessed, obsessed with reading, with watching YouTube videos, which going on message boards. I consumed, I can't even imagine hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours reading about Jesus the Messiah, Jesus God, what's the Jewish perception of it? How do we know what it is? The Christian proof text? Isaiah this and Isaiah that and Jeremiah this. And it went to the point where it was hard to do any work. It was hard to focus on anything else. It would not have been an exaggeration to say that there was not a five-minute period during my waking hours, a five-minute period during my waking hours when I did not think about this. To the point when I would pray to God every single day to give me clarity. I didn't know what to do. I was scared. I was confused. I didn't want to abandon my ancestors. I didn't want to go to hell. I didn't want to, you know, commit idolatry, which is just as bad. I didn't know what to do. I was overwhelmed, scared. You know, it's hard to even put into words how overwhelming it was. You know, I thought I was getting heart attacks. I mean, it was hard to breathe. And to talk about how obsessive I was, I would say, Okay, God, give me a son. Give me a son in the next five minutes. How do I know? And if I heard, you know, I remember at the subway once, I thought I heard somebody, some woman talk. And I said, oh, did she say God? She said Jesus. She said yes or no. If I looked at the clock and it was 6.13, I said, well, maybe that's a sign that Jesus isn't God. I mean, talking about looking at signs in everywhere, right? Looking at the clouds and so on, the only thing I didn't do was looking at tea leaves. But you know, I say it sort of jokingly, but it was not funny. It was crippling. And until one point, it was one night. And again, this was a point where I'm now putting on Tefillin every day. I'm Shomer Shabbat to the best of my knowledge. I am an active member of the Jewish community. I am not wearing a kippah every day, but I am now. But at that point, certainly people would have looked at me and most people would have seen, that's a Jewish guy, a religious guy. And to the point where one night I was in bed and I said, you know what, I'm just going to, I was lying in bed about to go to sleep. And I said, you know what, I can't do this anymore. Pascal's wager, right? Blaise Pascal, famous Christian philosopher, basically said in a nutshell, better safe than sorry to, you know, bastardize it to the most simple version, better safe than sorry. You know, he wasn't talking Judaism versus Christianity. He was saying belief in God versus non-belief in God. In other words, if you don't believe and you're wrong, there's big stakes. But if you do believe and you're wrong, there's no God at all. Okay, so you've lived a righteous lifestyle. Maybe you've missed out on, you know, certain things, but it basically hit me and I said, you know what, Judaism's quote unquote punishment seems to be less harsh. You know, it's talking about, you know, disconnecting. It sounds pretty bad, but the Christian missionaries and the Messianic Christians who I saw on YouTube were painting some pretty scary pictures, you know, of the faith that awaits somebody who doesn't believe their particular ideology or dogma. And so one night I remember lying in bed and saying, you know what, maybe it's not true. Maybe I don't even know if it's true. I'm at 50-50, but you know what, I'm going to say that I believe in Jesus because I don't want to go to hell. Even if he's wrong, okay, with God, I can explain if it's not. I can tell maybe God why I'm committing idolatry, why I'm, you know, worshiping a man who would be God, who, as God, who's not. I can justify that. But you know what, the other side is so scary. The punishment is so severe, I'm not going to risk it. It's, you know, Pascal's wager. I'm just going to say, you know what, better safe than sorry. And, but what's interesting is I did not live, nothing changed, right? Every day I would still spend hours looking and debate. Not even, I would debate with Jews. I would debate with Christians. I would read online. I would watch videos. I mean, it was, like I said, it was obsessive. And although I had pledged and I said, I, this is what I believe, I didn't really believe in it. I sort of said, like, okay, uncle, I'll do it because I don't want to go to hell. But I don't really believe in it. I did it sort of as a get out of jail pass, get out of jail free pass. But nothing really changed. You know, I continued to, continued to read, continued to examine. But like I said, it was never really, I was never really convinced of it either way. But what Messianic Jews had done was merely plant the seeds of doubt. They hadn't made, in my mind, a compelling argument. They hadn't, in my mind, convinced me, certainly with on, without, or beyond the, you know, the doubt, the shadow of a doubt that, you know, Jesus was, you know, God or the Messiah or any of the things that are claimed. It just planted a seed of doubt, which was, what if you're wrong? What if you're wrong? And I once saw a bumper sticker. I had flames. I can't imagine someone driving around with this, but it had flames. And it said, don't believe in God. You're taking a risk or something like that. It was big flames. It sounds like a pretty judgy thing, but it's what was scaring me. So it was never the claims or the arguments which convinced me. It was the fear of being wrong. And at some point, probably a year later, a year and a half a year later, I started, and again, I'm consistently reading here. But I started to sort of think about things in a little bit different way. And that was, who really has the burden of proof here? You know, who really, one group is trying to say, and again, I make a distinction here between, you know, Christians and Messianic Jews, between Messianic Jews who are claiming that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, that Jews are duty bound to believe in it. You know, many different sects, some believe that Jews. There's thousands of sects and denominations of Christianity. So I'm speaking specifically of Messianic Judaism, the counterfeit plagiarized Christian faith dressing itself up in Jewish terms and Jewish clothing in order to give itself a Jewish appearance while having evangelical Christian beliefs. And it was at the time that I started to just be unnerved by the lack of arguments. I couldn't piece together. I said, okay, I'm scared, I'm afraid, but what's the reality here? How do I actually make peace with this? I can't live the rest of my life. I have to choose. I can't, you know, I can't start a Jewish family and believe in this. I'm certainly not going to live as a Messianic Jew, because even if I believe it, I'm not going to perpetuate the destruction of my people. Even if I believe that they're hell bound for not believing it, I'm certainly not going to convert to Christianity because I didn't know what I was going to do. But I started to think about things a little bit different. And it was very interesting that it was one of the people who was very impactful were the YouTube videos and the writings of Rabbi Blumenthal, Yusuf Haim Blumenthal. And he thought about things a little bit different. In other words, one of the common claims of Messianic Judaism or Messianic Jews is that throughout the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, there are hundreds and hundreds, nobody can agree on quite how many, 100, 200, 300, but hundreds of proof texts which pointed indisputably to Jesus being the Jewish Messiah, whether it was in the book of Isaiah, the book of Jeremiah, the book of Leviticus. I mean, every single, you know, theology or theological aspect demanding that Jews worship Jesus was to be found in the Jewish Bible. And what obviously that suggests is, well, somebody has to make, somebody's making a pretty chutzpahdic claim, if you will. Somebody's making a claim that the Jewish Bible in Hebrew, which Jews have been reading for thousands of years, somehow includes hundreds of clues, some so overt you'd have to be a blind person to see it, to not see it, you know, or speaking out. And I said, okay, something seems a little bit funny here. So what Rabbi Blumenthal helped for me understand was changing the dynamic a little bit. And what that means is just follows. It's very easy to say, well, you know, if anybody, you know, if you're a lawyer, have legal background, I'm not a lawyer, but I think there's a bit of a burden of proof here because what these missionaries would say is, they would say, what about this proof text? And they'd say, well, then I would hear the anti-missionary, the counter-missionary, Jews for Jews, and say, well, actually it means this. And they'd say, ah, but what about this proof text? And then the counter-missionaries would say this. And they would say this. And it occurred to me that this was a bit like whack-a-mole. In other words, there was always another argument. And even though every single argument on its own couldn't really stand up to the scrutiny, cumulatively, there were just so many that it just seemed like it was going to overwhelm the Jewish side. But Rabbi Blumenthal described it a bit different way, which really resonated with me, because even though every single proof text I heard, whether it was Isaiah 714, Isaiah 53, whether it was Leviticus 7, or 1117, excuse me, it didn't matter what they were, none of them really could survive scrutiny on its own. But what he said was sort of flip it on this flip side. You are trying to come to us and telling us that this document, that this correspondence between God and the Jewish people, again, the assumption is that for those who believe that this, the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, is a correspondence between God Almighty and the Jewish people. This is many times, this is inheritance for the sons of Jacob, right? And he compared it to receiving a wedding invitation or a love letter addressed to your next-door neighbor and reading it and addressing it to yourself. And then reading it and saying, dear my beloved, and saying, even though it's a typo meant to go to Unit 103 and Year 101, reading it as if it communicated for yourself. And I think that that's critical because these proof texts on their own can't survive scrutiny, but when we take a step back, we understand that it's a lot more fundamental than that. How do we even know how to read Hebrew in the first place? How do we know which books are in the Jewish Bible? How do we know Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, rejected the book of Esther? He said it was a Jewish invention, right? The book of Esther, it was too Jewish. But how do we know for 99% of the Christian world which accepts the book of Esther on what basis do they accept that the rabbis who came together and codified the Jewish Bible who maintained and transmitted, not just the language, but the theology. Rabbis were the ones who knew that the book of Maccabees were not in the Bible. Isaiah was, and they didn't corrupt it. They had the Divine Spirit, the Holy Spirit to know, you know, exactly Ruch of Kodesh to know what was divine and what wasn't. They maintained this up until the point they rejected Jesus and it was thrown out. And they all of a sudden lost this for cut off forever. And it struck me as very logical because, like I said, it's beyond all the proof texts, but it was more a question of how can you believe everything about the Jewish people's transmission? You believe that they intact, right? Infallible, that the entire Bible, the Hebrew Bible was completely sacrosanct by God Himself. I realize many Christians have different views, but this is the Messianic Christian view that this is not just divinely inspired, but every word is the literal word of God Almighty Himself. And you believe that the Jewish people, long before Christianity ever happened, they knew that Isaiah was a prophet and they did not corrupt one word, one letter, one centila of what he believed. And yet, when Jesus came, you don't trust anything the Jews say. They don't even know who their God is anymore. Not only that they couldn't identify the specific ideologies or the specific theologies of their faith, but all of a sudden the people who brought monotheism belief in one God to the world suddenly couldn't identify their own God. That's a pretty big claim. And because you believe in those divines, again, this is not an atheist making this claim. This is someone who accepts the veracity and the historicity of every single word of the Bible. So how on therefore could we jive that? So that definitely shook a lot of things and put the burden back. Not to us to say, well, we have to prove that every verse does not mean Jesus. It meant to say, not only do you have to show that that actually means what you say it means, but you have to on a grand scale show me how we've missed the boat, why you trust the Jewish people, why you trust the rabbis so much and yet here the rabbis don't know anything. They don't know who their own God is. That was a big part. And the other part was when I started to look at these quote-unquote proof texts, right? These hundreds, again, dozens, hundreds, some say 90, some say 100, 200, 300, proof texts which prove, you know, various aspects and elements of Christian theology in the Jewish Bible saying that Jews have to follow it. You started to see a consistent trend and that is as follows. And this really spoke to me is that one of them was these particular texts were inconsistent, for example. You know, it might say that, you know, there might be a particular verse saying, you know, ABC, but you have three or four other verses saying something else. So there wasn't a consistent message being given. You had to explain why one passage proved, you know, Christian theology and why Jews were duty bound to follow it. But you had to explain many more passages which said the opposite. And typically those other passages, there were more of them. They were clearer. They were more direct. And contextually it made more sense. I mean, you know, the example, we can give, you know, hundreds of examples and I won't even, I'm loath to select one or two because there are so many. But I'll pick, you know, Isaiah 53, possibly, you know, the granddaddy of Christian proof texts. And Isaiah 53, you know, purports to show that the 53rd chapter of the book of Isaiah that the Messiah is going to be scorned by the Jewish people. The Messiah is going to be beaten. The Messiah is going to be rejected. And this talks about the suffering Messiah, which the Talmud allegedly talks about and so on and so forth. But what's very interesting when you read it, if you look at Isaiah 53, I could see that's persuasive. The first time I read it, I got chills. I said, wow, these Christians, the missionaries who say that Jews own Bible. The only reason Jews can't see it is because the devil has blinded us. We cannot read our own Bible. It's a very convenient excuse, but maybe it's true. Maybe it's true, right? Maybe it's true that the devil's blinded us and that's why the rabbis couldn't understand the plain truth in front of them that Isaiah 53 spoke about Jesus, the Messiah. And therefore that's why the rabbis, even though it was in our Bible, the rabbis were blind, leading the blind. But it's very obvious when you start to read Isaiah 52 and Isaiah 51 and Isaiah 54 that the context is on a much larger, certainly on a primary focus. It is talking about the state, the nation of the Jewish people, that they are to be rejected, that they are to be scorned. But there were other texts that were very hard for Messianic Christians to explain, like Zechariah that says in those days, 10 men will grab the cloak of every Jew saying, Take us with you, for we know the Lord is with you. How do you explain that? In other words, you can look at one verse and it might mean this and it might mean this, there's 1500 different explanations. But what you see is the arguments and the proof texts countering these Messianic claims were across the board, clear, direct, consistent, contextual, no disagreement whatsoever. Take us with you in those days, in the Messianic days. Everybody including Christian texts say that. Christian commentaries would say that obviously that means in the end of days, in the Messianic days, every 10 people grab the cloak of a Jew saying, Take us with you. So even though the Jews are blinded and that devil blinded us and the Jews don't know anything and we don't know our own God even though all of that's the case and we can't figure out our own Bible in the end of days, the non-Jewish world is still going to say, Please come, take us with you, for God is with you. For every Christian, a Messianic proof text that was given, there was five or six others which said the opposite in a much more clear, direct and consistent way. And one of the other areas was, so there was inconsistency, there was lack of clarity. When you look even at Isaiah 53, you will see that even the preponderance of Christian contemporary biblical scholars, and I'm not talking liberal Christian scholars, certainly them, but I'm saying very die-hard religious evangelical, not just evangelical, but particularly would say yes. I mean, I have many, many sources for this. In the Christian Bibles, there are Christian commentaries themselves saying, yes, no, no, this is absolutely talking about Israel. And so it started to, the house started to fall and fall and fall because not only were these proof texts could not stand scrutiny by themselves, you saw that the corollary on the anti-proof texts were at least, not just at least were consistently stronger, there were more of them, there were more direct and so on, but on a more fundamental level, the concept that the Jewish people could not be trusted with identifying their own God but who could be trusted with disseminating and transmitting the word of God without a single heir to the world simply beggars belief. And so the combination of those two things was significant. It was significant and I can't pinpoint the exact time, but I spent many, many hours reading, as I mentioned, Rabbi Blumenthal and watching his videos and meeting with Rabbi Skobak of Jews for Judaism and I started to connect and started to see so, so many other Jews, particularly young Jews who were in the same position as me. These were people who grew up secular, some of them grew up intermarried. In fact, I'll never forget I once corresponded with this young woman on one of these message boards and her message which spoke to me said, please help me, I'm Jewish, but one side makes an argument, and the other side, I'm afraid, I just don't know what to do. And that was exactly how I felt. But the more that I not only studied the text and took a step back and took a breather and said, you know, in my kishkas deep down, what do I really believe? Do I really believe that God Almighty, the creator of heavens and the earth, would basically pull the wool over the Jewish people's eyes purposefully, not only put, you know, some vague proof texts in there surrounded by dozens and hundreds of other clear, consistent, direct, unambiguous ones that Christian scholars themselves didn't believe in, that, you know, calls into question the entire because it was again and again, I said, that can't be right. Because if Messianic Judaism is correct, then God forbid, God Almighty would be a trickster. This is what that is suggesting, that the Jewish people have been blinded supernaturally, that the Jewish people cannot lack the ability for critical thinking because we have been supernaturally blinded by the devil. If I believe that there is any justness, and in fact the Bible, you know, in Deuteronomy, justice, justice shall you pursue. God is just. If God is just, and the Bible says God is just, which Messianic Jews also believe, that on no planet, in no universe would God Almighty commit a trick so horrible upon the Jewish people, calls into question the entire thing. And if it calls into question the entire thing, then neither Judaism nor Christianity is correct. So, and what kind of a God is that? And that's certainly not the God that neither Jews nor Christians believe. And so it thus began a process that certainly, you know, brought me back to Judaism in a much more sustained, much more serious way. You know, today, you know, I married to a lovely Jewish woman, three children, you know, going to Jewish day school. And I sometimes wonder, you know, when I graduated from university and I was checking out schools and, you know, going here and going there and reading, you know, I was growing, but it could have gone anywhere. And to some degree I think that, you know, Messianic Jew on YouTube for bringing me back to Judaism and allowing me to be a board member and a donor of Jews for Judaism and allowing me to whatever degree I'm capable to inspire and educate others to help us bring other Jews home as well. So thank you.