Called to Controversy (13 page)

Mrs. Wago visited Ceil regularly, delighted to find that her young pupil absorbed Bible lessons like a sponge. She explained to Ceil that she was supposed to profess her faith in Jesus publicly. This could be done in a church, where, after the sermon, an invitation would be given for any new believers in Jesus to formally announce their faith. Moishe was not at all happy about what was happening but he agreed that Ceil could go to church as long as it was a one-time event and she went as inconspicuously as possible. Mrs. Wago accordingly arranged a ride for her on Easter Day.

Ceil recalled, “In those days, women wore hats to church, so if anyone in our Jewish neighborhood saw me wearing a hat on Sunday morning, especially Easter, they could easily guess where I was going. When my ride came, I ran to the car with my hat in a paper bag; I did not put it on until we were far from my neighborhood.”

When the invitation came, Ceil walked down the center aisle of Trinity Baptist Church. After the service, many people welcomed her and promised to pray for her and for Moishe, that he, too, would come to know Jesus.

After that, Ceil respected Moishe's wishes not to tell people about her new beliefs, with one exception: she kept trying to tell
him
about Jesus, trying to get
him
to read the tracts. Irritated, Moishe said that he would rather Mrs. Wago not come to their home anymore. Ceil did not protest. Why not continue their lessons over the telephone?

Moishe became increasingly upset. She obviously wasn't getting over it as he'd hoped she would if he didn't make a fuss. The longer it went on, the more he feared that sooner or later, the secret would leak out. One day he tried calling home from work repeatedly, and the phone was continually busy. She must be talking to Mrs. Wago. Moishe came home and ripped the telephone from the wall. The next day the repairman came, and Ceil continued to study with Mrs. Wago over the phone—but they kept the lessons brief.

Moishe began applying other pressures. He pointed out what she already knew: if their families found out, they would be disowned and disinherited. They would be shunned by the Jewish community. He might even lose his job. How could she continue down this road?

Ceil never considered herself especially courageous, but though her heart was pounding, she replied calmly, “I asked God to show me what was true, and he did. I can't deny what he showed me. If I had to choose between you and God, I'd have to choose God. Don't make me choose!”

Moishe backed down; Ceil clearly meant what she said, and he did not want to lose her. On the other hand, maybe he already had lost her. He knew that it was wrong for Jews to believe in Jesus. What was he supposed to do? He downed a couple of shots of whiskey for courage—something he never did—and went to see his father.

“Dad,” Moishe began, “I have a real problem.” He hesitated before blurting out, “Ceil says she believes in Jesus. She reads the New Testament. She prays. I can't convince her to give it up. Do you think we should get a divorce?”

“Shame on you,” his father said, “You've been drinking.”

“You know I don't usually drink. It's just that I'm really worried.”

“You can't be serious about divorcing your wife,” his father said. “She's a nice Jewish girl. She's the mother of your child and my granddaughter. And she's a
good
mother. You're not going to do any better than the wife you've got. You shouldn't drink if it gives you such silly ideas.”

Despite his father's chastening, Moishe went home relieved. He didn't want a divorce. He just wanted to do whatever a good Jew was supposed to do under these circumstances. 'Then it occurred to him that he had an untapped resource—the rabbi.

Moishe just
knew
that there had to be a good case for why Jesus could not be the Messiah. All Moishe had to do was educate himself, hear the rabbi's case so that he could explain it to Ceil. That would give him the ammunition to blow all this “Jesus stuff” out of the water.

Moishe visited the rabbi who had performed their wedding ceremony and explained his dilemma. “Ceil is an intelligent person,” he said. “I just need you to give me the intellectual reasons that will convince her she made a mistake.”

Rabbi Bryks began to explain how Christians had gotten the Hebrew Scriptures all wrong. “For example,” the rabbi said, “the Christians say our prophets predicted that a virgin would conceive—become pregnant—and that Jesus fulfilled that prophecy. But the verse that they think predicts Jesus is only talking about an
almah,
or young woman, giving birth. The Hebrew word for ‘virgin' is
betulah
.”

This sounded promising, but Moishe wanted to be certain: “Is
almah
ever used to mean ‘virgin'?” To his dismay, the rabbi replied, “Yes. Sometimes.”
*
Each time the rabbi explained that the Christians misunderstood or mistranslated the Hebrew prophecies, it was the same. There was more than one possible meaning.

Finally Moishe shook his head and said, “Rabbi Bryks, these arguments will not convince Ceil, and frankly, they don't even convince me. There must be better reasons why we don't believe.”

The rabbi smiled mischievously. Then he said, “Well, think on this. It takes two to tango.”

Moishe wasn't sure what dancing had to do with it. The rabbi explained that when it came to the virgin birth, it simply was not possible.

Moishe later recalled, “What Rabbi Bryks didn't know was that in that one statement, he completely undermined the case—not only for Christianity—but for Judaism and any other kind of theism.” For Moishe, the rabbi's reasoning created more problems than it solved. If God could not manage this one miracle, how did he manage to create the world, part the Red Sea, or do any other miracles? And if God couldn't perform miracles, then the Bible must be wrong, in which case being Jewish meant no more or less than being Italian or Greek or African or Mexican—so why should it matter whether or not Jews believed in Jesus? Moishe felt he had been cut adrift.

For weeks, Ceil prayed for her husband. She had given up discussing her new beliefs with him since she had already done her best to explain them and did not want to provoke him any further. She didn't realize that there was a new softness, a new sweetness in her demeanor that continued to speak to him of Jesus, even when her words did not.

As for the tracts that Ceil often left around the house, Moishe recalled, “Some were serious and talked about messianic prophecy from the Jewish Bible. I could not ridicule our own Scriptures, so I ignored those pamphlets or threw them away. But if I found a pamphlet that I could ridicule, I would read it out loud in a sarcastic tone of voice so that Ceil would know that I was making fun of it.”

Ceil continued to pray, and she stopped leaving so many pamphlets around the house. But one day she deliberately left a little booklet about heaven lying on a table.

It was a Saturday night when Moishe picked up that booklet. It wasn't one of the “serious” pamphlets, but for some reason, he did not read it out loud. Seeing the hyperliteralist interpretation of heaven—where people would enter through pearly gates and walk on streets of literal gold—he almost laughed out loud. He thought,
Heaven's not like this at all—uh-oh!
The “uh-oh” was the shock of realizing for the first time that he actually believed heaven was real.

Moishe began to unpack his thinking and was surprised to find faith. He not only believed in heaven, he believed in the Bible. He believed exactly what he'd fought so hard to disbelieve! There was no big sign or miracle. There was no closing argument. It was just that Moishe suddenly knew that he no longer had a choice. Deep inside his heart of hearts he saw that Jesus was the Messiah, and he knew just as certainly that if he didn't admit it, he'd be a liar. And he reminded himself of his mother's maxim:
the man who lies to himself is the biggest liar in the world
. He had chosen to look away from Jesus for as long as he could. But once he caught a glimpse, he could not deny what he saw.

Ceil recalled, “That night, Moishe turned to me in bed and said, ‘I believe all this stuff that you believe about Jesus. What do I do now?'” Though she and so many others had been praying for that moment, she could hardly believe it. She managed to say, “You're supposed to tell God that you know you have sinned and need the forgiveness Jesus made possible by dying on the cross. Then you're supposed to go admit that publicly. I did it by going to the front of the church when the minister asked who wanted to declare their faith in Jesus for the first time. That's when you formally tell people that you want to start a new life by following Jesus. And then . . . ,” she hesitated because she hadn't yet done what she was about to tell him, “you're supposed to get baptized.” She added, “Getting baptized doesn't mean you become a gentile. It's not like the Inquisition where Jews were forced to be baptized and turn their backs on our people.”

Once Moishe knew what he was supposed to do, he didn't want to lose any time. He said, “Well, tomorrow is Sunday. Let's go to that church you went to a couple of months ago.”

The next morning Ceil returned to Trinity Baptist Church, this time with her husband. It “just happened” to be Pentecost Sunday. Christians celebrate Pentecost as a special day in the history of Jesus' followers, even though it is actually a Jewish holiday, Shavuot,
*
which falls seven weeks after Passover.

The church service was certainly unlike anything Moishe had ever experienced in synagogue. There is no denying that he felt some culture shock, and that culture shock would continue in the days to come. Nevertheless, at the end of the service, Moishe walked down the same aisle that Ceil had walked. United in their new faith, they began to attend church regularly. In July, 1953, both were baptized.

*
The Septuagint—the Hebrew Scriptures translated into Greek by Jews in the Diaspora, long before Christ—uses a Greek word in this passage,
parthenos
, that implies virginity. That is significant since those who chose the word to relay the meaning of the prophet clearly were not reading Christian theology into the text. Moishe later discovered there is a Hebrew Scripture verse (Joel 1:8) in which the word
betulah
is used to describe a woman mourning the husband of her youth. A widow was presumably not a virgin.

*
The Torah records how God gave this as one of Israel's harvest festivals, and in particular, it was a time when the Israelites were to offer the firstfruits of the spring harvest. Giving God the first and best part of the harvest showed gratitude to him as the giver of all good things and also trust that he would provide the rest of the harvest to take care of the Israelites' needs.

According to Jewish tradition, Shavuot also marked the anniversary of Moses' receiving the Law on Mount Sinai. Christians believe that on the Shavuot after Jesus was resurrected, God fulfilled his promise to write his law on people's hearts (Jeremiah 31:31–33). You can read more about this in
Christ in the Feast of Pentecost,
by David Brickner and Rich Robinson, published by Moody Publishers.

ELEVEN

All colors look bright when you have enough light.

—MOISHE ROSEN

I
t's no wonder the Bible describes this as being born again,
Moishe thought.
There's so much to learn!
He was somewhat overwhelmed, not only by the seemingly endless information, but also by all the cultural differences he had to navigate simply to avoid making a spectacle of himself at a Sunday morning church service.

There were also physical differences between the church and the synagogue. At church, there was no holy ark for the Torah at the front of the sanctuary, and no
ner tamid
(eternal light) hanging by a chain from the ceiling. The racks on the backs of the church pews held big hymnbooks and some Bibles, but no prayer books. Many people brought their own Bibles from home; Moishe and Ceil had brought theirs as Mrs. Wago had instructed. But these details could barely begin to account for how strange Trinity Baptist Church seemed in comparison to the Orthodox synagogues Moishe had known.

Saturday morning synagogue services had lasted—from the very beginning to the very end—about four and a half hours. However, it was understood and accepted that people could arrive after the services began and/or go home before they ended. People greeted one another as they entered and left the services, and sometimes they even engaged in brief conversations. As for the actual service, there were no musical instruments, except the
shofar
(ram's horn) for the high holy days. Much of the worship was read aloud, at times responsively, from the
siddur
(the prayer book). Everyone started and finished at roughly the same time, but they all read at their own pace.

Moishe was surprised to find that Sunday morning church services were only an hour and a half. They started and ended punctually. Latecomers appeared to be very embarrassed and apologetic as they found their seats, and no one left before the close of the service. Worshippers entered the sanctuary quietly and sat, face forward, without saying much to one another until it was time to leave. When the congregation read a Scripture passage responsively from the back of the hymnal, everyone seemed to know just where to pause so that they were exactly in sync.

He hadn't been prepared for any of this the first time he'd come to church. He expected it to be a one-time experience. Probably, he thought, they would return for holidays and special occasions. He soon realized that he was expected to attend church every week: Sunday morning, Sunday evening worship, and Wednesday night prayer meeting.