Matthew, USA
Note from webmaster: This is a true account of an American man named Matthew, who was once an orthodox Jew, and his long search for spiritual truth and eventually finding it. Unless you are a sincere searcher yourself of spiritual realities, or already a born again child of God, you may not appreciate or understand this article.
It's been over three years since a remarkably accurate and compassionate account of my encounter with The Family was published in an article entitled "Orthodox Jew Converts".
Since then, I've been consistently joyous and energized by my new found purpose in life, but somewhat frustrated by my inability to fully actualize that purpose, for now at least. I've also reflected countless times on the question of why it took so long for the Lord to hook me up with Dad (David Brandt Berg).
When I first encountered Dad's writings through The Family's Web site, I was nearing my 48th birthday, a successful executive with a major corporation at the heart of the System, a student of Talmud and Jewish mysticism, a pillar of the Orthodox Jewish community where I am a devoted husband and loving father of five children.
To the outside world, I'm still all that. But just on the outside. On the inside, now add this: a devoted servant, child, and lover of our Lord, Jesus Christ. An innermost disciple of Dad, Mama, and Peter. Your friend and a member of your Family. A person who prays for your health, your well being, your success materially and spiritually, many times each day.
Of course, some day very soon, when the Lord returns to us, the whole truth about the course of my life will be revealed to me. Why did it take so long for the Lord's truth to be made known to me? I don't know, but I can only hope in the meantime that I can use whatever wisdom and experiences I've gathered along the way to serve the Lord, and to help others serve Him.
To that end, I've been asked to share a bit of my own spiritual journey, in my own words. So here we are.
I was born in 1951 in New York City and raised in a middle-class Jewish home in Brooklyn. My father was a World War II veteran, my mother an immigrant from Russia. Like most members of my generation, I went to public school most of the day and then to Hebrew School for an hour each afternoon. The Hebrew Schools of my day were little more than unsuccessful factories for ethnic identification and racial bias, with little or no religion and near-zero spirituality.
They taught us to read some Hebrew and fed us some stories from the Old Testament. We uninspired kids would have rather been out playing ball, or at home watching TV, of course. The same goes on nowadays, with the overwhelming majority of Jewish children being raised and there is no other way to put this without God.
Like virtually every member of my generation in middle-class Brooklyn, all of the signals I received from public school and television told me that the universe was an evolutionary accident, that science was the only source of truth, that religion was antiquated superstition. And my teachers and rabbis did nothing, said nothing to contradict that. I think that's because most of them believed it as well.
This is important. There was a time when most Jews actively rejected the Living God and True Messiah as a matter of their own misguided religious faith. Today, most Jews, and certainly the younger generations, know nothing at all of any God, or hope for any Messiah. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has no more meaning to the average Jew today than do the deities of the Hindus. Actually, most of my Jewish friends know more about Eastern religions than they do about their own heritage, about the God of their ancestors. And that, until a few years ago, went for me as well.
As I entered my teens I became a hippie of sorts while remaining a good student. I smoked lots of grass, took lots of LSD. I loved women, peace, freedom; I hated the System, Nixon, Vietnam. Although I protested some, my heart was into sweet pleasure. I can honestly say that I was a loving, spiritual young person who had no real channel to express and experience that love. And that became the central fact of my spiritual life. Lots of fire and no real place to put it.
I know with utter certainty that if I had known of you and of Dad then, my whole life would be so different. I've thought of writing an autobiographical novel with two parallel lives, one where I find the truth during my teens, and one where I lead the life I've lived. Someday perhaps.
My first real encounter with the Lord came when I was 18 years old. I was spending the summer traveling through Europe, and was staying one beautiful day at a youth hostel in Lausanne, Switzerland, where I happily washed pots for room and board. One morning I woke early (or may have been up all night) and climbed up the side of a mountain where I sat awestruck, looking over a giant valley surrounded by mountains miles in the distance.
At that moment, I just knew that God had to be. I remember feeling deeply the impossibility that the greatness of the mountains, the greenness of the trees, the songs of the birds, the blueness of sky were the result of some unplanned evolutionary accident.
But even if I believed that some accident had produced this grandeur, I told myself, there was absolutely no way that I could believe that my 4 consciousness of it, that my ability to appreciate its beauty and magnificence, that my spirit and mind and soul could have been the result of purposeless atoms randomly bouncing against each other for a few million years. No way. There had to be a Creator of all this, and He/She/It had to love the world. I also knew, at that moment, that the Creator of all that I beheld loved me in an absolutely individual, personal way. I knew that in a single flash, and that certainty has not departed from me for one moment from that day until this one.
What I did not know, and what took so many years to learn, was what exactly it was that my Creator wanted of me.
After a few months I returned to the United States, finished college, and landed a job at the company where I still work, working for the chairman and CEO as his office assistant. I shared a luxury apartment in Manhattan with friends, saw on a daily basis what the rich and powerful were really like, and decided that while I certainly did not want to be like them as people, I definitely wanted what they had. Of course I would put it to better use once I got it. Sure.
It's so interesting for me now to look back on that period and to see how quickly spirituality can dissipate in a young person, how rapidly that connection with God can go from immediate presence to a dim, faded memory. It's hard for me even today to blame myself, or blame anyone for my loss of spiritual desire. It really is a System.
And I was certainly a willing and ready victim. It's so very difficult for any person to totally ignore the barrage of materialistic messages that we are surrounded by everywhere we go. Sometimes I think that it's relatively easy to consider poverty a virtue when you are poor to begin with, and see no real chance of having a more prosperous life. But what if you are convinced by the media, your managers at work, and by every one of your friends that sex and power and money are so very easy for you to get?
How can one escape that? Not many do, and the result, in my case at least, was that decades of potentially useful, godly life were wasted on vain, useless pursuits of pleasure and power.
Completely abandoning any desire for a more spiritual life, I quickly bought into the proposition that a life well lived was based not on my closeness to the Lord or on the acts of kindness I performed, but on how much money, how many sexual partners, how much power over other human beings I was able to accumulate.
"He who dies with the most toys, wins."
Yes, I had some good times along the way, and there are only a few acts of active cruelty that I truly regret today.
But I do have regrets. Not about the things I have done, but I cannot help but look back on those decades and regret, deeply, the goodness that I did not share with others, the acts of kindness that I was not able to perform, the connection with the Lord that I did not seek or find.
I went through my 20s and 30s moving up the corporate ladder, and bouncing from relationship to relationship. No real thought of God, religion, or spirituality. Eventually I met my first wife. She was from as non-Jewish an American family as you can find. She was a member of the Junior League [a woman's organization committed to promoting voluntarism, developing the potential of women, and improving communities] and her mother was a card-carrying Daughter of the American Revolution. She grew up in the Navy, where her father was a big shot with NATO in the Mediterranean.
It was not a mixed-faith marriage at all, since neither of us had any faith worth mentioning. Her father objected to the match simply on the grounds that as a Jew, I would not be admitted to the Princess Anne Country Club in Virginia. My wife was raised Presbyterian, but was an avowed atheist, not hostile to religion, just not believing any of it.
A few months after we met we moved in together. Then the time came for the Jewish holidays, and I made my annual pilgrimage to my parent's home in Brooklyn where I would spend the high holidays, attending synagogue and wondering what I was doing there. My wife-to-be was fascinated. Why did I bother? She soon became far more interested in my own religion than I was. She began to take some courses at Columbia University on Jewish history and religion. I thought it was absurd, but she insisted. Before long, she proudly announced that she wanted to convert, and I was aghast. Why on earth would she want to do that? But she did, over my insistence that we would never, ever observe any rituals.
Things began to change for me, spiritually speaking, when my oldest son was born, 20 years ago. I was 31 years old at the time and I realized that as he was growing up he would have many of the same questions that I did about my faith, my people. Why didn't Jews pray? Why were the synagogues not filled with sublime song? Why were Sabbath services nothing more than fashion shows packed with chatter about the stock market and football games? Did the Creator of Heaven, Earth, subatomic particles, and billions of human beings really care if I ate a cheeseburger?
I knew that my son would have these questions as he was growing up, just as I did, and I wanted to be able to tell him that the accumulated wisdom of his ancestors was sincere but outdated nonsense. But I wanted to tell him that because I knew it. And I knew nothing. So I dragged myself to the local library and read dozens of volumes about Jewish philosophy, history, culture, and religion. I got nothing. It was amazing. After all of my reading and research I did not have a clue about what kept the Jewish people going, what kept us together for 3,000 years.
I realized that of course it probably had something to do with that Creator that I had encountered on that Swiss mountainside many years before, yet I could not find Him in any of those books. But I kept looking.
Eventually I was led to a small volume on Jewish mysticism. As soon as I began to read this, I said, "Aha! This is it!" No one had ever told me or taught me about these astonishingly beautiful, deep and complex mystical texts, some of them thousands of years old, which discussed everything from the reasons for the Creation and the essence of the soul, to the nature and role of the Messiah.
The Jewish mystical tradition remains hidden from most Jews today for many reasons, but I'm sure I know the most important among them. It's hidden by Systemites who don't want us to have access to the spiritual worlds, and it's hidden from us by the rabbis because they do not want us to have access to the Messiah, and to have us possibly conclude that based on those mystical texts, the Messiah just had to be Jesus.
One mystical text led me to another. I learned Aramaic as well as Hebrew, and found a teacher who was willing to share many ideas that can only be transmitted orally, and are never put to writing.
It was a wonderful time for me, but I could not believe that there were people who were living according to the mostly beautiful principles I was learning about. Eventually I found that there were small groups of people who were indeed trying to live by those principles. But they lived apart from the rest of us, in so many ways, some in the slums of 6 Brooklyn not far from where I had been raised.
My marriage was dissolving at the time. My ex-wife grew tired of Judaism and hooked up with some Eastern guru (I guess she really did become Jewish), while I became increasingly captivated by the Hasidic/mystical Jews I was meeting. I became like a cultural anthropologist who believes that the only way to understand the natives is to live among them and live like them. So I stopped shaving (a must), bought the right hats (big and black), and moved in with the Hasidim in Brooklyn.
This was more than a bit of a shock to my colleagues at work, who felt that I had lost most if not all of my marbles. They would have been less shocked (and more accepting) if instead of coming into work one day wearing a yarmulka, I had arrived as a blond transvestite, wearing a black leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings. Religion is the most difficult thing in the world for many people to understand or accept.
But a few years of decent upstanding behavior and a life sincerely devoted to spiritual pursuits convinced them that at least I was harmless. Also, I was remarkably productive at work, which is all they really cared about anyway. So they kept promoting me, despite the fact that I was a religious person.
After a few years I remarried, this time to a woman who herself had adopted this form of mystical Orthodoxy. My wife had two children from her first marriage, whom I've raised as my own. We've since had two children together as well. We've been married for nearly 17 years and we've shared many things, and I love her, and love my children very, very deeply.
But spiritually, I always knew that I was settling. I had chosen a life that, while better than any I had known, was fundamentally flawed. But I resigned myself to it while continuing to explore other spiritual paths, through books and later through the Internet. And that's where I found Dad. (David Brand Berg)
It was awe at first sight.
There's obviously a much longer, deeper story here, but suffice it to say that there is great beauty in the life I have lived and the life I have raised my children to live. But there's a price. In short, it's the price of having to accept a racism and sexism that you just know is ungodly, of having to see oneself as member of an exclusively chosen people when you know that God chooses every person, and of accepting a faith that does not ask you to relinquish the desire to acquire things and people. Jesus had the answer to all of that.
And ultimately, there's the price of trying to live by the rules, and ignore the reality of the Lord. I don't want to go any further, since what I have found is a higher truth, and there is no need for me to trash and burn the rungs that I have used to climb to where I am. Possibly there are others who need to climb those same rungs themselves.
To sum up my religious experience as an Orthodox Jew, I believed that God wanted more than anything else to be with each and every one of us, in the world. I still do. Sure, it would take time, and bitter struggle involving individuals and nations, but ultimately He wants today what He wanted at the very beginning: He wants to live in the world, with us, His beloved people. I believed that each of us is called on to live lives based on love, respect, and divine service. I still believe that.
The problem I had, though, was not in the theory of Judaism, or in certain flawed aspects, but in the practice. While I met many who were trying to live a spiritual life, I met few if any who were actually succeeding. Sooner or later, everyone managed to drift into a safe spiritual harbor, where you just did what you were told each day, when you could, and did not have much if any direct connection with God. I saw family after family where children were rejecting the ways of their parents because the parents were simply unable to inspire them.
But more than anything else, I knew (without having the words to put to it) that there was a higher Law, a Law of Love, if you will. I just did not know what to call it or how to articulate it. For that I needed Dad, and when I found it, I knew I had found my Master and Teacher.
As you can tell, I've spent many years on a long spiritual quest, sometimes active, sometimes dormant. The one thing I've concluded about all this is that there was only one real chance for me, either as an idealistic teenager or in later years as a materialistic victim of the System.
It is the same single opportunity that a few billion people on the planet today may or may not be given. And that is the chance, the hope that comes when someone honest, someone sincere, someone humble witnesses to you about how they experience the Lord in an immediate and personal way, in their very real lives.
Unfortunately I was not witnessed to, or at least not in the proper way, not by the right people, not by you. I met so many people in my journeys, but I never met anyone who took the risk of sharing their own personal story with me, and doing it from the bottom of their heart. When people spoke to me about Christ, or Buddha, or Moses, they were at best spewing forth doctrine, citing verses and chapters, but not sharing the stories of their own personal struggles for faith and enlightenment and experience of God's presence and His love. There's a saying that "What comes from the heart enters the heart." That's what I needed, but did not get.
This, by the way, is what drew me most to Dad, and draws me today to Mama and Peter, and has drawn me to those of you whom I've been privileged to meet. Honesty. Sincerity. From the heart. Deep personal experience of being with the Lord in the most routine and sublime acts of daily life. From the boardroom to the bedroom, from the fields to the altar. The Lord wants to be everywhere with us.
Sometimes a prophet says things you don't understand. No, change that: It's guaranteed that a prophet will say things that you don't understand. Sometimes a prophet experiences things that you are not ready to experience yourself. It's also a certainty that a prophet will say things that you are just 8 not ready to hear. But that's his job, isn't it? The acid test, for me at least, is in my own God-given abilities to listen to someone's words, to read their writings, and to ask myself in the context of everything I have learned before: Is this person being honest with themselves and with me? Or are they passing along a truth that they have received from above? Does what they are saying make better sense of everything I've learned before? And the answer for me, when it comes to everything I have read and heard about the ongoing revelation that has been granted to each of you is: Yes, yes, yes. And I had never experienced that before.
That's what I hear from Dad. Honesty. Sincerity. Much of it I understand; some of it I don't understand, but it's not my understanding or my prior agreement that counts. Otherwise, I'd only be listening to myself. And the Lord wants me, so much, to listen to Him.
But until recently, I didn't have that. I didn't have a person, or people who were willing to risk everything because they had the truth to tell, because they had real life experiences with the Lord that they felt obligated to share. This is not to say that I was not exposed to "religious" people during my 20s and 30s. I met many synagogue- and church-going people, and some were my closest friends, including a number of well-intentioned Christians. I worked next to an evangelical Christian for four years, really a sweet guy, but he didn't make a dent. None of them did, and to tell you the truth, even today, an army of the most well versed Bible thumpers could not bring me an inch closer to the Lord.
My experiences as a Hasidic Jew implanted within me a deep desire to be closer to God and to know His will. That is certain, and I am so grateful for that, especially now that I've found it. But the experience was never there. You always felt that if you could only do what you had to do perfectly, then you would experience God's love and care. It was very frustrating to say the least. But I had to be introduced to Jesus for that.
That took Dad, Mama, Peter, and all of you who follow their ongoing prophecy, and all of you who been blessed with the gift of prophecy yourselves. And that's what it is: a single, seamless, ongoing prophecy. Every word of it, and don't let anyone ever try to tell you anything else.
I can point out dozens of places in the Old Testament that seem to totally contradict each other. Not just ideas, but facts, dates, names. But then you study further, you look more closely, you attend to the wisdom of the sages and you ask the Lord for guidance and you find that there are no contradictions, not a one. Just one, long extended symphony. That's what I'm listening to here, when I listen to you: the grand final movement of God's master symphony, still being written and played, if only we would listen.
But a prophet can't do it alone. It takes your witnessing, your example, your prophecies, the way that those of you who have seen the truth and stuck with it. It's your truth, your symphony, an inheritance that has been given to you to share, the truth that God has given you, and that you have accepted as a blessed gift. That's what turned me around. You did.
As I said at the beginning of this essay, I'm fairly well versed in the Bible, the Talmud, and Jewish mysticism. But this is not the place for me to demonstrate that all of the prophecies you've received are true and completely consistent with everything that has come before, in the Old and New Testaments, in the written and unwritten God-given works of mystical splendor. Much of my time nowadays is spent going over chapter and verse of the Scriptures and the Letters with the aim of joyously understanding every one of them in the light of your revelations. It's a deep joy and privilege to be able to do that. But that's not the point here. The point is that I never would have come to this place if it had not been for you, every one of you. And for that, I thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
Just one final note: If you were to run into me on the street, or at the mall, you'd see someone who seemed to need saving. What would you do? Would you say: "Orthodox Jew. No way, let's not waste our time."
If you only saw me briefly, and we didn't have a chance to speak and you then found out that in the past I'd been in contact with The Family, some of you might look at me and say: "Didn't work, wasted effort." You'd be wrong.
There is no question in my mind that there are millions of souls whom you have reached over the last 30 years, with your witnessing and by your example, who now know the truth, who have seen the beauty only because of you. To the untrained observer, many of us may not seem to have changed very much. But wherever we are, we are facing our own tests and trials but now armed with the truth and the hope and the promise that you have gifted us with. We know, and can never forget. Trust me, we have changed, thanks to you.