I NOW BELIEVE JESUS IS THE NEED GOD ( THE MESSIAH)” RABBI CONFESSES
For 30 years, I stood before my congregation and taught them that the Messiah had not yet come.
30 years of studying Torah, debating Talmud, and guiding souls through the ancient wisdom of our fathers.
I wore my tallet with pride, kissed the muza on every doorpost, and kept Shabbat as my ancestors had for millennia.
But today, I’m going to tell you something that cost me everything I built, yet gave me everything I was searching for.
I’m going to tell you why I now believe that Yeshua, Jesus of Nazareth, is the Messiah we’ve been waiting for, and why the proof was hidden in plain sight within our own Hebrew scriptures all along.
Before we go any further, I need you to do something for me. If this story touches something deep inside you, if you’ve ever questioned what you were taught, or if you’re simply curious about where this journey leads, type the word shalom in the comments right now, and hit that like button.
I personally read every single comment because I want to hear your story, too. I want to know if what I’m about to share resonates with the questions you’ve been afraid to ask out loud.
So go ahead, type shalom and let’s walk this path together. My name isn’t important, but my story might change how you see everything you thought you knew.
I grew up in a deeply orthodox home in Brooklyn, where the sounds of Hebrew prayers were as familiar as my own heartbeat.
By the age of 13, I had memorized entire books of Torah. By 20, I was studying at one of the most prestigious yeshivas in Jerusalem, spending 18 hours a day bent over ancient texts, my fingers tracing the Aramaic letters of the Talmud until my eyes burned.
I wasn’t just learning religion. I was learning how to defend it, how to explain away every Christian claim, how to show definitively why Jesus could not, would not, and should not ever be considered the Jewish Messiah.
I became a rabbi because I loved my people and I loved the truth, or at least what I believed was the truth.
The moment everything changed wasn’t dramatic. There was no lightning bolt, no voice from heaven, no mystical vision in the night.
It happened on a Tuesday afternoon in my study, surrounded by the same books I had consulted a thousand times before.
I was preparing a lecture on Isaiah for a group of university students who had been asking difficult questions about Christianity.
I wanted to equip them with answers to show them how Christians had misinterpreted our prophets.
So, I open to Isaiah chapter 53, that controversial passage about the suffering servant, fully intending to explain once again why it couldn’t possibly refer to a personal Messiah, but rather to the nation of Israel as a whole.
But this time, as I read the Hebrew words I had read countless times before, something stopped me cold.
He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
The words seemed to pulse on the page, and we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. I had always taught that this suffering servant was Israel personified, the Jewish people, bearing the sins and hatred of the nations.
But as I read on, the text itself seemed to argue against me. It said, “The servant would be sinless, that he would bear the sins of others willingly, that his suffering would bring healing to many, and that after his death, he would see the light of life and be satisfied.”
How could this be national Israel when the passage itself distinguished between the servant and the people, speaking of him dying for our transgressions, for my people’s sin?
I felt my hands begin to tremble. This wasn’t the first time I had encountered this passage, but it was the first time I allowed myself to read it without the filter of centuries of rabbitic reinterpretation designed specifically to counter Christian claims.
I pulled down volume after volume from my shelves, searching through medieval commentaries, looking for the interpretations I had been taught.
And that’s when I discovered something that shook me to my core. Many of the ancient rabbis before Christianity became a threat to Jewish identity had actually interpreted Isaiah 53 as referring to the Messiah himself.
Rabbi Moshe al-sh, Rabbi Moshe Elshik, even portions of the Talmud in Sanhedrin 98b spoke of a suffering Messiah.
Somewhere along the centuries, we had changed our interpretation, not because the text demanded it, but because we needed it to be different.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept thinking about Psalm 22, which I had read at countless services.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The psalm goes on to describe hands and feet being pierced, bones out of joint, lots being cast for clothing, and the sufferer being mocked by crowds.
I had always understood this as King David’s poetic expression of distress, but David’s hands and feet were never pierced.
He never hung on display while people gambled for his garments. Yet someone in history had experienced exactly this and the details were written down a thousand years before crucifixion was even invented by the Romans.
The mathematical probability of this being coincidence felt impossible. Then I turned to Daniel 9:es 24- 27, a passage I had studied extensively for my rabbitic exams.
The angel Gabriel tells Daniel that from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the prince, there would be 69 weeks of years, which equals 483 years.
Using the decree of articles in 444 B.CE as the starting point, exactly as Daniel described, this timeline lands precisely in the first century, right around the time of Jesus.
But here’s what made my blood run cold. The passage says the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing that he will come before the temple and Jerusalem are destroyed.
Our temple was destroyed in 70 CE. If the Messiah didn’t come before that date according to Daniel’s prophecy, then the prophecy failed.
But our tradition says prophecy doesn’t fail. So either Daniel was wrong or the Messiah did come in the first century and somehow we missed him.