Panic in Jerusalem as Respected Jewish Scholar Declares Jesus Is God, Says Isaiah 53 Points to Him
I have spent 40 years studying the Hebrew Bible. I have debated missionaries. I have written papers defending traditional Jewish interpretation.
I have stood before congregations, students, and colleagues and told them with full confidence that Isaiah 53 has nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth.
Tonight I am standing before you to tell you that I was wrong. Isaiah 53 points unmistakably undeniably to Jesus.
And 3 years ago in my home office at 2 in the morning surrounded by books I had read a hundred times, I surrendered my life to him.
Hello viewers from around the world. Before our brother continues his story, we’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.
Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony. This is my story.
I want to start by telling you about my father’s hands. He had large hands, rougher than you would expect for a man who spent most of his adult life working in a tailor shop in Brooklyn.
The roughness wasn’t from the tailoring, though. It was older than the work. It It came from somewhere else entirely, from somewhere he rarely spoke about directly, though its shadow fell across everything in our home.
Across the food we ate, the way he locked the door at night, the way he flinched at certain sounds, the particular manner in which he held the Torah scroll on Shabbat morning with both arms pulled close to his chest, the way a man holds something he almost lost and is not prepared to lose again.
He was 16 years old when the war ended. I want you to sit with that number for a moment.
16. By the time the liberation came, he had lost nearly everyone he had started life with.
His parents, two younger sisters, one of them barely old enough to have started school.
A grandmother who, he told me once, in one of the rare moments he allowed himself to speak about her.
I had the kind of voice that made whatever room she was in feel larger and warmer than it actually was.
He said she used to sing while she cooked and that you could hear her three apartments away.
He told me her name once early in my childhood. I cannot remember it now and that forgetting is one of the small griefs I carry.
I think for him saying her name was something he could only afford to do once.
He came to America with almost nothing. A cousin’s address sewn into the lining of a coat that was much too thin for a New York winter.
A faith that by any rational calculation should not have survived what it had been put through.
And yet it had survived. Not without damage. You could see the damage if you looked closely, in the way he startled at raised voices, in the way he never fully relaxed in open spaces, and in the way certain dates on the Jewish calendar would descend on him like weather.
But the faith itself had survived. It had come through the uncservivable with him, battered and scarred, but intact.
And that faith, his faith, the faith of a man who had witnessed what human beings could do to one another at their worst, and had still chosen deliberately and at great personal cost to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
That faith was the first and most consequential inheritance my father gave me. I was the eldest of three sons.
We grew up in a part of Brooklyn that in the way of all specific neighborhoods of a specific time no longer quite exists in the form it took then.
It was a dense a living Jewish world, synagogues and kosher butchers and bakeries that smelled of chala on Thursday afternoons and Shabbat tables crowded with neighbors who were in every practical sense family.
The Yiddish you heard in the street was not a curiosity or an affectation, but a first language, a mother tongue.
Being Jewish was not in that neighborhood an identity you chose on Sunday morning or performed at high holidays or explained to co-workers.
It was simply the water you swam in, as natural and unself-conscious as breathing. I love that world without fully knowing I loved it the way you love the place you’re from before you’ve been anywhere else and had the distance to understand what you had.
My father was not a wealthy man, but we were not poor in any way that mattered.
What we had was richness of a different kind. The richness of a community that knew itself, of a tradition that explained where you came from and where you were going, of a table on Friday evening that was always set before sundown with a seriousness that I understood even as a small child was not just about the food.
The Shabbat table was in my father’s house an act of resistance and an act of faith simultaneously.
You could not destroy us. Those candles said, “We are still here. We are still lighting the lights.”
I went to the yeshiva two blocks from our apartment beginning at age five. I loved it almost immediately, and I want to be honest that the love was not in those early years particularly pious in character.
I was not an unusually devout child. What I loved was the texts themselves, the way the Hebrew felt.
I the particular music and density of it, the way a single word in the Torah could open into centuries of argument and counterargument, the way the rabbis had been in conversation with each other across a thousand years as though the distance of time were no obstacle to a good argument.
My father used to say that every letter of the Torah had a universe hiding inside it.
I believed him then as an act of inherited faith. I believe him now as an act of personal discovery, though what I understand that universe to contain has changed in ways my father did not foresee and would not, I think, have chosen.
By the time I reached my late teens, it was clear to the people around me, to my teachers, to my father, or to the rabbi of our synagogue, who had known me since I was small enough to fall asleep during the Cole Neidra service and be carried home, that the texts were going to be my life, not as a rabbi, as it turned out.
The rabinate requires a different set of gifts than the ones I possessed. And I understood this about myself early enough to save everyone some difficulty.
As a scholar, an academic, a person who would spend his professional life in the company of these ancient documents, asking the questions that only become possible when you sit with the text long enough and carefully enough that it begins to give up what it has been quietly holding.
There were people in my community, good people, people I loved, who never entirely understood the difference between a rabbi and an academic scholar of religion.
They were not wrong to be uncertain. The academy can be a colder place than the synagogue.
The questions that scholars ask are not always the questions that communities need asked. And the distance required for rigorous analysis can, if you are not careful, drain the living warmth out of something that was meant to be lived and not merely studied.
I was aware of this danger throughout my career and worked against it consistently. The texts I spent my life studying were never for merely objects of analysis.
They were also always underneath the footnotes and the methodology love letters from a god I believed in and wanted to understand.
I did my undergraduate work at a university in New York. My doctoral work at a major research institution.
I am choosing not to name it are for reasons that will become apparent as this story continues.
I joined the faculty of that institution after my doctorate and spent the next 30ome years teaching courses on the Hebrew Bible, on the history of Jewish interpretation, on second temple Judaism, the rich complex world of Jewish thought in the centuries immediately before and after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.
This period roughly 200 B.CE CE to 200 CE had always fascinated me particularly because it is the period during which so many of the ideas and texts and practices that define Judaism as we know it were being formed, debated, contested and crystallized.
It is a period of extraordinary intellectual and spiritual ferment and spending a professional lifetime inside it never became routine.
My specific area of expertise, the thing I was known for among colleagues, the thing my name was attached to in the literature was Isaiah and specifically the figure that modern scholarship refers to as the suffering servant.
This figure appears most concentratedly in four passages within chapters 40- 55 of Isaiah, what scholars call the servant songs, and most dramatically and extensively in chapter 53, the passage that has generated more interpretive controversy, more interfaith tension, and more genuine scholarly disagreement than perhaps any other chapter in the Hebrew Hebrew Bible.
It was in many respects the text around which I built my professional life. My doctoral dissertation touched on it.
My first major book was substantially about it. Two subsequent books returned to it. The journal articles I wrote that were most widely read and debated were the ones that engaged Isaiah 53 directly.
I had read that chapter by the time everything changed more times than I can count.
Hundreds of times, perhaps thousands if you include the partial readings, the verse byverse analysis, the comparative work against other versions.
I knew it in Hebrew, in the ancient Greek of the Septuagent, in the Aramaic of the Targum.
I had read every major commentary written on it in the last two centuries and most of the significant medieval ones.
I had taught it to undergraduate students and doctoral candidates. I had lectured on it in synagogues and at academic conferences.
I had argued about it in print with scholars whose interpretations differed from mine. I was in the most complete sense available to a human being.
I familiar with this text and I was I now understand completely wrong about what it meant.
But before I get to that, I need to tell you about Miriam. You cannot understand my story without understanding her.
And you cannot understand her without me telling you something true, which is this. She is the finest person I have known in my life.
This is not the sentimental overstatement of a husband describing his wife. It is the considered assessment of someone who has spent his career in the company of brilliant, accomplished, intellectually serious people, and who has found consistently and without exception that the person across his breakfast table surpasses them all in the qualities that actually matter.
We met in our mid20s. I was finishing my doctorate deep in the miserable final stages of dissertation writing, existing on coffee and the specific anxiety of a person who has committed four years to a project and is no longer sure the project is worth what it cost.
She was teaching elementary school in a neighborhood not far from where I had grown up with a particular quality of attention and patience that good teachers of young children develop an attentiveness to the human being in front of her that was not professional technique but simply who she was.
We were introduced at a Shabbat dinner by a mutual friend who understood us both better than we understood ourselves at the time.
And from the first conversation, which ran considerably longer than Shabbat dinners are generally supposed to run, something was clear to me about her that has never become unclear in all the years since.
She was not an academic and had no ambition to become one. She had no patience for the particular vanities of academic life, the status games, the citation battles, the elaborate performances of intellectual authority that scholars deploy in conferences and faculty meetings.
What she had instead was wisdom. Not the academic kind, not the kind you acquire through graduate training and peer review, but the deeper older kind that some people are simply born toward and that, if they are fortunate, develops through a lifetime of paying real attention to real people.
She could read a room in 30 seconds. She could understand what was happening underneath a conversation while it was still happening on the surface.
She was almost never wrong about people, and when she was, she acknowledged it without defensiveness, which is rarer than it sounds.
She was also a woman of genuine unscentimental faith, not the performed faith of communal obligation, not the faith that consists primarily of following rules because the rules have always been followed.
The faith of someone for whom the reality of God was a lived experience woven into the texture of daily life in the blessing over bread in the candles on Friday evening in the way she moved through Yam Kipur with a quality of inwardness that was not theater for anyone’s benefit.
She lit the Shabbat candles every Friday of our marriage with the same careful attention and watching her do it, watching her hands move through the particular motion of drawing the light toward her face, watching her eyes close, knowing that whatever passed between her and God in those moments was real and private and not for public display.
That sight never became ordinary to me. It was one of the things I loved most about our life.
We built something together that I can only call full. Two children who grew up at a Shabbat table that was always a little crowded and a little loud, where the arguments were as vigorous as the laughter, and the food was always better than the occasion required, because Miriam cooked the way she did everything thoroughly and without half measures.
A home full of books, mine stacked on every horizontal surface, in a manner that Miriam found exasperating, and that I found entirely reasonable.
The smell of coffee and old paper that I associate with every good memory of my working life.
Colleagues I respected deeply. Students whose development I watched with genuine investment. A synagogue community that had known us for decades.
Where I was a familiar face at the adult education classes and a trusted voice on textual questions.
I was by any honest accounting a man whose life had worked out. I was aware of this.
I was grateful for it in the particular way of someone who grew up in the shadow of a father’s losses and understood without being told that survival and flourishing were not to be taken casually.
I did not take them casually. Now let me tell you about the other thing.
The thing that ran alongside the rest of my life for all those years and that I understood very differently then than I do now.
Throughout my career and with increasing frequency in its later decades, I encountered the Isaiah 53 debate in its popular form.
Not just in academic journals where the conversation was controlled and footnoted but in synagogues in community lectures he in interfaith panels in conversations with students who had Christian friends or Christian partners who had asked them the question.
The question was almost always essentially the same arriving in different phrasings. Doesn’t Isaiah 53 describe Jesus?
Isn’t this a prophecy pointing to him? How do you explain that the description matches so closely?
I had answers, careful, well-developed, academically grounded answers that I had been refining for decades and believed sincerely.
The servant in Isaiah, I would explain, is not an individual messianic figure, but a corporate one, Israel itself, the nation, suffering among the nations of the world, bearing the weight of history’s violence, and ultimately to be vindicated by God in the sight of those who had dismissed and persecuted them.
I would point to the chapters surrounding chapter 53 where Israel is explicitly and repeatedly called God’s servant.
I would trace the history of interpretation, explaining carefully and fairly how the individual messianic reading had been substantially abandoned by mainstream Jewish scholarship in the early medieval period, in part as a necessary and understandable response to the aggressive christoologgical use Christians were making of the text.
I was always fair to the complexity. I acknowledge that early Jewish interpretation had been diverse on this question, but the conclusion was always the same.
This text is not about Jesus of Nazareth. I taught this in my synagogue with the confidence of someone who had published on the subject.
I presented versions of it at academic conferences. I engaged it in print or and every time someone challenged me, every time a Christian student or a curious questioner or a Messianic Jewish acquaintance raised an argument I hadn’t specifically addressed, I had a response ready.
I was not hostile in these exchanges. Hostility would have been professionally unbecoming, and more than that, it would have been personally inaccurate.
I was genuinely not a hostile man on this subject. I was something more settled than hostile.
I was certain. There was one moment from a synagogue adult education class perhaps 12 or 13 years before everything changed that I have returned to many times in the last three years.
A young man, barely 20, I think, raised his hand near the end of the session and asked me with a directness I found genuinely refreshing how I explained the phrase pierced for our transgressions if the servant was meant to represent the nation of Israel.
He said that in his understanding, the nation of Israel wasn’t pierced. Individual Jews were pierced.
Individual Jews were killed, but the nation as a whole was not. And if it was individual Jews being pierced, then who was being healed by their wounds?