My Journey From Jew To Christ Follower

My Story: Jew to Christian

September 12, 2021

Today I’m not going to tell you something you need to do, or something you aren’t doing. That’s the good news! I’m not going to preach at you. Today, I’m going to share my story with you, maybe give you a little thought about Judaism, some broad generalizations, how some Jewish people look at Christians . . . and go from there.

The bad news!? This may take a little longer than 20 minutes, but I want you to gain an appreciation of where and how I grew up and what led me to Jesus and what impact that makes in my life.

Why am I doing this? Well . . . I was asked by a few people to share my story and today seemed like the right time.

I was raised in the suburbs of Chicago. Actually, it was in a village. When you think of most villages, you think small, however, the village I was raised in at the time I was considered the largest village in the world.

It’s not just my opinion, but they had the signage to prove it. Skokie was a village of about 73,000 people, located just north of Chicago, only about 30 minutes from downtown on a clear driving day, which was rare. And only about 20 minutes to the beaches of Lake Michigan.

Skokie’s claim to fame was having the notorious bank robber, Baby Face Nelson’s bullet riddled dead body dropped off in Skokie; and a Nazi march was scheduled for Skokie, which went to the supreme court. It caused a great deal of turmoil, and ultimately became a movie, appropriately named, Skokie, starring Danny Kaye.

So, why was the Nazi march such a big deal in Skokie? Because at the time I was growing up, Skokie was approximately 80% Jewish. Along with Skokie, other communities on the North Shore of Chicago were predominately Jewish.

I grew up, not knowing the difference in other religions. I knew we were Jewish and that was about it. For example, I thought Catholic and Christian were synonymous. There was no teaching about other faiths.

I ate Jewish soul food. Eating stuff like hot dogs (never ask for ketchup, have dark green relish), lox and bagels, matzo ball soup, pastrami sandwiches, potato pancakes, gefilte fish and more. We always had no school for the main Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur. When people called Winter vacation, Christmas vacation, frankly, all I cared about was no school.

I grew up as the youngest and only son in my family. My parents had two daughters who were 7 and 9 years old than I was. This birth order is something I will talk about later.

My family was what I would consider a very typical Jewish family. And in some ways, we were no more typical than some families which consider themselves Christian today.

A typical Jewish family didn’t talk about God, unless there was some anti-Semitic program or actor/actress who was on television.

We didn’t pray before meals.

We didn’t read the Bible - and didn’t have one in the house. When I refer to the Bible, for the Jewish person, that would only be the Old Testament.

We didn’t go to Temple to worship on the Sabbath. We only went on the 2 main Jewish high holidays, which I will explain in a few minutes.

For example, after I became a Christian, I was having lunch with my mom, in a Jewish deli of course, and asked my mom about the Old Testament, basically testing her on knowledge of Jewish history. I didn’t think it was too hard. I basically asked her, who came first chronologically . . . Moses, Noah, Abraham or David. I thought those were the 4 biggies of Jewish history. She had no clue. My point to my mom was not to embarrass her, but to point out that if she was Jewish, she needed to know and understand her faith. Her response was that she was born a Jew and she will die a Jew. She didn’t say that with animosity, it was simply who she was.

For many Jews, there is a great deal of ignorance when it comes to knowledge of the Old Testament, and most especially of the New Testament.

A great deal of Jewish life is passed on by tradition. We often live off of traditions in our families and even in our churches. We do things the way we’ve always done them because it feels comfortable and that comfortable way has morphed into becoming a tradition. Remember the movie Fiddler on the Roof and the song “Tradition?” That’s how we lived.

Because we didn’t talk about the 10 commandments or much about the Bible, I learned my Old Testament lessons from movies like . . . Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments.