מסעה של אישה יהודיה דרך הנצרות ובחזרה - פנינה טיילור HD

hi my name is panina Taylor and I was raised in a secular Jewish household now what that means is that what Judaism meant to me was it explained why I had a big nose why I talked with my hands and why I like Chinese food but other than that my Judy had absolutely no meaning to me it was something ancient and archaic something to be remembered maybe but certainly nothing to be desired and it was within that context that I grew up now I had a traumatic childhood my parents were divorced when I was four years old I suffered a tremendous amount of abuse at the hands of a friend of our family and

by the time I got to high school I started to ask a lot of existential questions I started to ask you know if life is so painful and so difficult and there's nothing out there greater and more meaningful than all of this pain and what's the point and as I started to ask these questions one of my classmates came up to me and she said you know panina your questions are no different from that of any other typical American High School student we all have these questions she said but there's an answer to your questions there's a solution to your dilemma she said what you need is to have a

relationship with God now I had been raised like I told you in a secular Jewish home but my paternal grandparents had arranged for me to attend an orthodox Hebrew day school for a couple of years during fourth and fifth grade because they wanted me to know something about well about being Jewish now when I started Hebrew school there was one there was a problem because I very quickly learned that what happened at home needed to stay at home and what happened at school needed to stay at school my first day of Hebrew school I learned about something called Shabbat and I was so excited excited

about this thing called Shabbat and I came running home to tell my mom about Shabbat and you know what my mother said to me she said don't tell me how to run my life a little while later I was sitting in school one day and all of my friends were talking about the amazing things that they had done over the weekend and I was so excited because I was being raised by a single mom and we hardly ever got to do anything but this particular weekend my mom had managed to take my sister and I to an amusement park and I was really excited excited so as my friends started talking about what they had done

I began to share about how I had gone to this amusement park on Saturday well my teacher caught wind of what I said pulled me out of the classroom and said stop being so hpic I didn't even know what the word meant I thought maybe it was some kind of a contagious disease or something but clearly it was something that I didn't want to be and so I very quickly learned that what happens at home stays at home and what happens at school stays at school well now here I am all these years in the future and this classmate of mine is telling me that what I need is to have a relationship with God and I

thought to her myself you know what she says really sounds true and so at the age of almost 16 I was introduced to God and to Jesus you see my friend told me that what I needed was to have this relationship with God and so I embraced Christianity in fact my newfound faith gave me the strength to make all sorts of changes in my life I began to I stopped doing drugs I started to hang out with a good crowd of kids at school I actually started to attend school I stopped drinking I stopped smoking and my mother was watching remember she had watched me slowly slip away and now she was watching as

all these incredible things started to change in my life and I became really a brand new person well my mother was thinking about those things when one day I came to her and I began to share my new Faith with her as all good Christians are want to do and my mother thought to herself wow if something could have this much of an impact on my daughter's life it must be the truth and so I brought my mother and my sister to Christianity as well well shortly after that I graduated high school I went on to Bible College I got a certificate in evangelism explosion don't worry if you don't know what

that means and I started to date a young man who was my best friend's older brother well it turns out he had also been to Bible College and he was a pastor and he and I began to get serious and after a while started to talk about this thing called marriage and at the time I didn't think of it as intermarriage because we both belied the same thing and the idea of me being Jewish and him being not was not something that even entered onto my radar and so as Paul and I began to get serious we started to talk about marriage and I started to think you know it would be an amazing thing if my father

would walk me down the aisle when I got married but how is my father going to do that we don't even have a relationship in fact I hadn't seen him but one time in 15 years how was he going to walk me down the aisle when I got married so I went to my mom and I asked my mom if it would be okay to write a letter to my dad inviting him to come visit us for a couple of weeks at this point we were living in Florida and my father was living in New Jersey to my surprise my mom said sure and so I wrote a letter this was back in the days before the internet and you know messaging and email and all of

that and I wrote a letter to my dad and my mom sent it to my dad and my dad said that he would love to come and visit us and get to know us better so we made the arrangements and my dad came to visit us he spent two weeks with us and while he was there getting to know us better he also got to know my mom again and he decided that he was falling back in love with my mom so one day he asked my mom you know I'm falling back in love with you and uh I I would really love to remarry you and spend the rest of my life with you what do you think and my mom said you know I'm also falling back in love

with you but we've got a problem she said because I'm a born again Christian and you are a secular Jew it's not going to work we can't get married and I said wait a minute hang on a second I know how to solve this problem I've got a certificate in evangelism I know how to get people to become Christians so I went to the Bible bookstore and I bought a Christian Bible and I began to share with my dad from the Christian Bible I took him to church and wouldn't you know it my dad became a Christian too well then my mom and my dad were able to get remarried and they did remarry after being divorced

for 15 years and 7 months later when I married Paul my father walked me down the aisle well Paul was now enlisted in the United States Air Force and we ended up getting stationed in England so we went over to England and while we were there one day I was praying and I began to get this very strange feeling like God was telling me to start lighting candles on Friday night and I thought to myself wow this is like really strange I'm not exactly sure where this is coming from I mean I knew that Jewish women lit candles on Friday night um but my mother didn't like candles and my grandmother didn't

like candles and I'm sure my great-grandmother my bubby did like candles but I never saw her I had no clue but I really felt like God was telling me to light candles on Friday night and so I went to my husband and I said I feel like God is telling me to light candles on Friday night what do you think I should do and my husband said to me well if you believe that this is what God wants you to do in your service to him then go ahead and so I thought for a minute I was like okay um where do I start well I remembered that I had inherited my great-grandmother's Candlestick so I went over the

buffet and I opened the drawer and I took out the candlesticks and next to the candlesticks was a Maxwell House Passover hagua I don't know if you're old enough to remember the Maxwell House Passover hagas but Maxwell House is a coffee company and every year when they put out their kosher for Passover line of coffee they would often give away if somebody bought I guess two jars or or something they would often give away these hagas that they had printed and when I was growing up remember I told you I was raised in a secular home but we did do one Jewish thing each year and that was Passover

of course our Passover didn't look like what most Jewish people would recognize as a Passover seder perhaps you can identify with this but this is what our Passover seder looked like we would come over to my grandparents house and my great-grandmother would greet us with a good Yanti I didn't know what that meant either but that's what Bubby would say and we'd walk in and we sit down and my grandfather would bring out this stack of Passover hagas that he had collected over the years and he would pass them out and he would tell us to turn to page 25 or something like that and he we'd all open

up the hagas and we'd turn to page 25 and he would read a paragraph from the hagata then we would sing the chorus to diu and we would eat now of course we had matah because it was Passover off after all but we also had a lot of other things that you would not consider kosher for Passover nonetheless this is what we did every year and I had a fond family memory of doing Passover so when I got married I asked my grandmother if it would be okay for me to take one of these hagas with me and of course she said yes now what does this have to do with lighting candles well it turns out that inside

the front cover of the hagata was the blessing for lighting candles because Jewish women light candles at the beginning of every holiday not just Shabbat but sometimes Passover begins on Friday right and so not only did the hagata have the words for lighting the holiday candles but it also had a line of what to say when the holiday begins on a Friday night thank God for Maxwell House and the fact that the BR the that the prayer was transliterated which means it wasn't just in Hebrew and in English but it was in Hebrew and English letters I began to use this and to light candles on Friday

night meanwhile I'm still going to church on Sunday sometime later my husband gets all excited and he comes running down the stairs and he says to me panina panina of course that's not what he called me but he says panina I was reading in the Old Testament you have to understand the Old Testament is what the non-jewish people call our Hebrew scriptures our Tanakh our Jewish Bible they call it the Old Testament and he says I was reading in the Old Testament and I came across a verse that says that there are certain things that God asked the Jewish people to do forever he said and if forever

really means forever and I'm to be right before God then my Jewish wife and my Jewish children need to do these things too now you have to understand something sometimes when people hear my story which condensed into a 45 minute talk or even a 20 minute talk cannot possibly give all of the details they think wow panina you are kind of like all over the map religiously and the truth is if you step back and you look at the story what you really see is a progression of two people on a journey to discover truth all we wanted was to serve God In Truth at the time we didn't understand that that did

not include Christianity but I wanted to serve God in truth and so when my husband told me that there was something that God wanted me to do I said go ahead shoot he said well it says in the Old Testament that God told the Jewish people that they are not supposed to eat pork or shellfish I stopped for a second and I said wait a minute let me get this straight no more ham and cheese sandwiches he said mm I had to think about it for a minute but I decided that if this is what God wanted me to do then this was what I was going to do and so I stopped eating pork and shellfish so here I am I'm

lighting candles on Friday night I'm not eating pork or shellfish and I'm going to church on Sunday a little while later I'm reading in the Christian part of the Christian Bible which is called the New Testament and I come across a verse that talks about head coverings and I'm thinking to myself you know it was very confusing too oh I wasn't sure if the verse was saying that women should cover their heads and men shouldn't cover their heads or men should cover their heads and women shouldn't cover their heads so we decided to call in the pastor of our church who was not my husband at the time

and to ask him the question you know what is this talking about because our pastor happened to be a Greek scholar and the New Testament is written in the Greek language so the pastor comes in and he sits down and he says well now I have to tell you this passage is very difficult to understand in the original Greek he said because it's not so clear it's a very complicated passage I said yeah I know but that's why we called you he said no no really you're not it's not very clear which words modifying which word and what it is that Paul the author of this passage really means I said well okay

pastor what do you think it means he said well what I think it means is that married women should cover their head when they're in prayer he said but I can't teach that because women nowadays they don't want to hear it now if you're a person who's seeking the truth the argument that women today don't want to hear it is no reason for you not to do something if you believe it to be right right and so I decided along with my husband that I would start covering my head now at first I was just I got a hat see the problem is is that I I have a little bit of uh attention deficit and I found that I

would put my hat on and I when I wanted to talk to God talking to God is prayer right that's what prayer is it's talking to God right so when I wanted to talk to God I would put the hat on and I would talk to God and then when I was done I would take off the hat and I would go and I would put it down somewhere the problem is is that the next time I wanted to talk to God I would have to you know hang on a second there big guy wait wait a second let me and I'd have to go find the hat and so I decided there had to be a better solution so I decided what I would do is I would wear a scarf because

a scarf I could drape around my neck and I could wear it like that all day and then when I wanted to talk to God I would put the scarf on but what I discovered was that I talked to God throughout the course of the day now I could give you some silly examples of times that we talk to God you know when we say oh God please help me or please stop the children from screaming or whatever but silly examples but prayer is talking to God and so I found that I prayed throughout the course of the day so on went the scarf and off went the scarf and on went the scarf and off went the scarf and finally I

just said forget it and I started to wear the scarf all the time so now here I am I'm lighting candles on Friday night I'm not eating pork or shellfish and I'm covering my head all the time and I'm still going to church on Sunday but something began to happen inside of me back then I couldn't have told you what it was but looking at it now I call it my spiritual identity crisis because I believe that my Jewish Nisha my Jewish Soul began to be at war with my Christian beliefs and this restlessness that was going on inside of of me was something that I could not make heads or taals of in fact I

I firmly believe that when a Jewish person begins to take on mitzvot a Mitzvah even if they don't realize that that's what they're doing it opens a conduit for their soul their Jewish nshama to communicate with God and as my soul began to communicate with God I began to have this restlessness inside of me while we were in England my parents decided to come visit us now last I had left my parents they were attending a nice little Assembly of God Church in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and they came to visit because I was about to have a child and I'm helping my mom unpack her suitcase and one of her

suitcases is filled with all sorts of Judaica items chofar TI SE kot sitters you name it and I turned to my mom and I said Mom what's with the Jewish stuff and she said well while we were in Pittsburgh we discovered a a group of Jewish people who were born Jewish who had become Christians and had found a way to synthesize their Jewish Heritage with their Christian beliefs and they called themselves Messianic Jews now I had never heard of Messianic Jews before but I had heard of Jews for Jesus and I thought to myself maybe that's the solution to what's going on inside of me you know maybe we

need to seek out one of these these Messianic congregations and so when we came back to the United States a year later we sought out one of these Messianic congregations now throughout our history because of our training and our background and our personalities my husband and I had been serving in Lay leadership in the churches that we had been every church that we had been involved in uh from the time that we got married and Beyond well and up until this point so we started to get involved in this Messianic congregation we were now in Maryland which is where my parents live my husband got

stationed there and we were attending a Messianic congregation but it was a long drive from our house and one day my father says to to my husband and I maybe we should start a Messianic Congregation of our own after all the closest one is so far away and we've got some unique beliefs of our own and maybe we should and you know Paul is trained as a pastor and and panina plays the guitar I sing and I led worship and led prayer and and uh he said and and your mother and I are are very Visionary and very administrative so the four of us would make a great team what do you think so my husband and

I went and we prayed about it and we decided that this was what God wanted us to do so we started a Messianic congregation with my parents but at the time I thought to myself you know if we're going to be doing something we're calling Jewish because Messianic Jewish maybe we should know a little something about Judaism don't you think so I went to the Jewish bookstore to find a book on Judaism of course it turns out that there's a lot of books on Judaism at the Jewish bookstore but I found one book that really caught my attention it was a book called how to run a traditional Jewish household

now the book was written by an orthodox woman a very modern Orthodox woman named Blue Greenberg and in the book instead of using the term Orthodox she preferred to use the phrase Torah observant and I thought to myself wow I like the sound of that Torah observant maybe that's what we need to be maybe we need to be Torah observant Messianic Jews and so I went back to the bookstore and I got books on keeping kosher I got out art Scrolls big book on keeping kosher I got out the kiter schan AR which is the condensed code of Jewish law in English of course read through that several times I went

back and I have some funny stories about that too but I went back and I got books on the laws of family Purity how to keep shabb how to keep kosher you name it anything that you could learn about being an orthodox Jew from a book I learned of course you can't learn everything there is to learn about being an orthodox Jew from a book but everything that you could I did devoured the books and began to make changes in our lives in fact now Not only was I covering my head but I was dressing modestly and my non-jewish husband but my Jewish children my boys were all wearing aipa and SE SE and if

you had run into my family on the street you would have thought we were an Orthodox Jewish couple just like any Orthodox Jewish couple in burrow park or lakwood or Jerusalem you would not have known that we were also Christians well we went on to lead this congregation with my parents for several years but as you can imagine sometimes when you're in a joint program with your parents it can be a little bit tense a little bit stressful and so we decided that as we were starting to feel a little burned out that we Valu our relationship with my parents more than we valued our position in the

congregation and we decided to leave now my parents kept the congregation going for several more years but my husband and I went to one of the Messianic congregations in the area now we lived in the Washington DC area and we were attending a Messianic congregation in Northern Virginia which is just south of that area but one day there was an event at the Messianic congregation in Baltimore which is north of Washington DC and while we were there after the event there was food because let's face it you have Jews plus an event you have what food right doesn't matter what the Jews believe or even

if they're Christians if you have Jews and you have an event you're going to have food so afterwards we're standing around at the event and there's this really nice lovely blond haired lady who's trying to convince me that the food is kosher because you can tell by looking at me that that's something that that might be important to me and she stops mids sentence and she says to me how would you like to buy a nice big five-bedroom house in Upper Park Heights in Baltimore she says in fact I believe that God wants you to buy this house now to a lot of listeners that sounds totally crazy but I

was used to Christians speaking this way because Christians do speak this way frequently but I thought this woman was just a few french fries short of a Happy Meal if you know what I mean and I'm not one for confrontation so I had to figure out how do I get out of this conversation I know what I'm going to do I'm going to blame it on my husband because I figured what would happen is I'd go back to my husband and I'd tell him what this woman said and he'd say what are you crazy we're not headed to Baltimore we're headed to Virginia that would be the end of the discussion and then I would be

able to break free from this lady so I said hang on I have to ask my husband so I went over and I asked my husband you know I told him about the lady's offering I said she even offered to hold the mortgage for us so we she'd be the bank and instead of telling me I was crazy which was what it said in the script what he was supposed to say to me he says to me well we could take a look at it I have it on good authority that that was the first and last time I was ever speechless but after picking myself up from shock I went over to the lady and I said to her my husband says that we can take a

look at at him so we made an appointment and we went and we looked at the house now as it turns out we totally fell in love with the house because first of all it was three times the size of the house we were currently living in that I was homeschooling my four children in and the walls were beginning to close in on me this was a big house and it had a lot of character and we fell in love with it but something even more remarkable than that when we drove up to the house in this Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore something inside of me very similar to that voice many years before and I

promise you I'm not schizophrenic really but this voice inside of me said your home now I'm not sure what that was either it may have simply been being in a place in such close proximity to other Jewish Souls but I suddenly felt like this was home and we fell in love with the house so we did then what any good Christian couple or Messianic couple would do in our situ situation we went back to our congregation and we asked them to pray for us concerning whether or not it was God's will that we should buy this house they even had a special prayer meeting for the purpose and wouldn't you know it

all 250 members of the congregation unanimously agreed that it was God's will that we buy this house why because who better to convert Orthodox Jews to Messianic Judaism than Messianic Jews who look and act like Orthodox Jews right and so with the blessing of our congregation we made arrangements and we bought the house now something that we didn't find out about until many years later was that this nice blonde Jewish woman who wasn't Jewish that we knew uh when she had bought the house three years before she had taken it upon herself to go knocking door too to inform all of the Orthodox

Jewish neighbors and they were all Orthodox in that neighborhood that they were hopelessly lost and going to burn in hell because they didn't believe in Christianity so you can imagine how they felt about her and then when she told them that she had sold the house you can imagine how ecstatic they were until she told them that she was selling them to selling it to a nice Messianic family I mean in America and other countries in the west we know how to live next door to non-jews that happens all the time but how do you live next door to somebody whose sole purpose pun intended is to convert

you and your children to some form of Christianity and so when we moved in we had kind of a difficult beginning it wasn't that our neighbors meant to be rude they just didn't know what to do with us well anyway we moved in and we settled in and we started to think you know we've got a problem because the Messianic congregation is not within walking distance of our house and if we get in our car and we drive on Shabbat nobody's going to listen to a thing we have to say so what are we going to do about it well what we decided to do was we were going to on Shabbat attend one of the more than a

dozen Orthodox synagogues that were in our neighborhood and during the week we would go to the Messianic congregation to get our fill of Christianity and to have a Bible study so what congregation what sh what synagogue do we go to well it turns out that the rabbi who ran the bookstory that I had gone to to get all of these books about Judaism also happened to be a congregational Rabbi in the neighborhood so we decided that that's where we would go so our first Shabbat we went to this congregation we went to this synagogue and we had the most amazing experience everybody there was delightful

they were so helpful they helped me to know we where we were in the prayer they helped me to know where we were in the Torah reading in fact it's funny because sometimes you hear these Bal Chua stories of people who have returned and their first experience in the synagogue wasn't necessarily so wonderful but ours was amazing everybody was wonderful and they they were so helpful and so kind and so sweet well what happens on the other side of the Mita in the men's section when there's a new guy in town he gets called to the Torah right so my husband who was wearing aipa and SE and a talit and

he had a sitter he looked like he was praying he was offered an Aaliyah to the Torah to go up and to make a blessing over the reading of the Torah but my husband is a man of tremendous integrity and he told them I'm not Jewish now this is an important part of the story because there's a lot of people who are not aware of a phenomenon that's going on out in the world and that is there are Messianic congregations all over the world really uh but especially prevalent in the United States although unfortunately he also growing here in Israel so in these Messianic congregations there are non-jews

and that's fine they can go wherever they want right but they're learning not only how to act and look like an orthodox Jew they're learning how to make the blessings on being called up to the Torah in fact some of them are learning how to read from the Torah and then they go and they visit the cotel in Jerusalem or other or Orthodox synagogues and they're counted in a minion and when they're given an Aaliyah when they're called up to the Torah they make up a fake Hebrew name so that no one is the wiser and what they're doing is they're committing a crime against the Jewish people now some

people say panina wow that's really a harsh thing to say and and I agree but at the very least what they're doing is not the truth and it's not right it's not okay but my husband's not like that my husband is a man of tremendous integrity and so when he was given an Aaliyah to the Torah he said I'm not Jewish well shortly thereafter my husband and I were having a conversation one day and he said you know we really really need to tell the rabbi what we believe because at some point it's going to come out and we don't want him to feel betrayed and feel that we've been lying to him and I said to

my husband you know I'm not so sure about this I cannot see this ending well but my husband again a man of tremendous Integrity insisted and I relented and we invited the rabbi to come to our house now he knew because of what had happened in the synagogue that my husband wasn't Jewish with I was and so therefore the children were so what do you think he thought we were inviting him to come talk to us about conversion right right well he comes in and my husband begins to tell him what he believes and after a minute or two the rabbi stops him and he says well wait a minute you don't believe

that anymore do you to which my husband said yeah well in the moment it took for absolute shock to register on the rabbi's face I began to see my world implode I mean if he kicked us out of the synagogue what were were we going to do I was homeschooling my kids if they're not allowed to play with the kids on the street and you know who are they going to play with and what if they take our pictures and put them on posters and post them on layup posts going down the street saying warning missionary threat maybe my kids will get beaten up I don't know what's going to happen and I started to cry

well the rabbi looked at me and he said to me what do you believe now I'm here to tell you that at this point in my story I have been a Christian for 17 years I have been responsible for converting hundreds if not thousands of people to Christianity now granted only a small percentage of them were Jewish but still I knew exactly what I believed but in that moment of emotionality when the rabbi said to me what do you believe and I saw my whole world implode all I could do was cry and say Rabbi I don't know what I believe and I said please please don't kick us out of the Shel don't kick us out

of the synagogue I don't know what we'll do the rabbi sat there for the longest time saying absolutely nothing at all in fact I didn't think he was ever going to say anything again but after a while he turned to me and he said to me the most important words that anyone has said to me anywhere along my spiritual journey my Jewish Journey he said to me you are a Jew no matter what you believe believe even though what you believe is not Judaism he said let me be clear on this it's not Judaism it's not Kosher it's not okay but you as a Jewish woman are responsible before God to fulfill the mids

vat to carry out the Commandments that God has given Jewish people and therefore I'm going to allow you and the children to continue to come to the synagogue he did ask for a little while that my husband not not come because he didn't know what to do with him he said but there's one caveat he said I want you to talk to a guy from an organization called Jews for Judaism now I had never heard of Jews for Judaism before but I'm not stupid Jews for Judaism Jews for Jesus they probably don't like people like me very much but what was I supposed to do I mean if I wanted to keep coming to the

synagogue it was pretty clear that I was going to have to talk to this guy from Jews for Judaism so I reluctantly agreed but I figured you know the rabbi would forget after a little while and I you I'd be able to put him off and we'd just be able to carry out the status quo for a while well I was wrong he didn't read the script either I don't know what it is with guys and not reading the script but anyway he didn't forget and he kept calling me and saying panina have you talked to this guy from Jews for Judaism yet have you talked to this guy from Jews for Judaism and he saying not yet not

yet you know uh but eventually he made it pretty clear that if I didn't call the guy from Jews for Judaism that things might change and so I picked up the phone and I called Jews for Judaism and the director then of the Baltimore office of Jews for Judaism named Mark came over to our house one evening Mark came into the house and he turns to me and he says so let's talk about why you think he's the Jewish Messiah and and I turned to him and I thought to myself what you start every conversation this way anyway he came in and he sat down and my husband was perfectly glad to start the talking

and I was perfectly glad to let him start talking and so he threw out a verse and Mark said well let's take a look at that and so Mark took out a Bible and he opened it to the chapter of the book of Isaiah where the passage that my husband had quoted comes from and then he turned to me and he said to me panina have you ever read this verse in its context before and I said of course I have I read my Bible every year from cover to cover now I don't know if you know this but most Evangelical Christians make it their habit to read through their Bible three qus of which includes our Tanakh they

call it the Old Testament they've taken the um they've taken the books and changed the order and they've retr ated certain passages to say what they needed to say in order to prove what they believe but for the most part it's still our tanak our Jewish Bible and they've combined it with the New Testament in order to make the Christian Bible so he said to me when you read through the Tanakh through the Old Testament you see the Messiah in every page right and I said of course it's all about him he said I why don't you to do me a favor we're going to read through this the entire chapter and I

want you to to put yourself in this isues of the people who existed at the time that the prophet Isaiah was writing this book which was 700 years before the destruction of the second temple 700 years before Christianity ever existed he said can you do that for me and I said sure I can do that and so we read through this chapter in its context and guess what I discovered I discovered that it's not about him at all it's not about Christianity it's not even a Messianic passage and when we went back and we looked at that particular verse in the original Hebrew what I discovered was in order for

it to say what Christianity says it says they have to mistranslate and take out of context this verse so we only touched on one other chary issue during the time that Mark was with us and he left at my house he wasn't even there that long but he left me with an awful lot to chew on if this core belief that I had held for 17 years was based on a lie what else did I believe was based on a lie and over the course of the next few weeks I kept going back to the office over and over again asking him what about this verse and what about this verse and Mark would say okay well let's take a look at it

and you know I didn't take his word for it either I went back to my friends to my Christian friends and and to all kinds of stuff on online and and you know I said to them I said now we always believed that this says this and and Judaism says that it it means this and how do you reconcile the two and I found out something very interesting there's a verse in the book of proverb that says that the first person to make a case seems right until another comes and argues against him and I discovered that Christianity was banking on the fact that Judaism would not have an answer to their claims for

the Messiah and so one by one as I began exploring these verses the bricks of the foundation of my faith began to be pulled out eventually there was so little there that the entire structure collapsed and I was faced with the daunting task of trying to figure out what it is that I actually believe I mean if everything that I have believed for the last 17 years was a lie did I still believe in God and if I did still believe in God what did that mean well was the Tanakh the Jewish Bible still the word of God to the Jewish people and if it was what did that mean for me as a Jewish woman do I

have to be Orthodox or can I be something else well since I'm standing here talking to you today I'm sure that you can figure out what my conclusions were I decided to convert to Buddhism no I'm just joking uh no I realized that Torah true Judy Judaism was the truth and so I came back to Judaism I embraced the Judaism that I never knew of my forefathers but now I had a problem because at this point in my life I was married to a man a Christian man he was not Jewish and I had four children who were 6 8 10 and 12 years old and they also believed in Christianity as did my parents and so I began

to think well my son who's 12 is supposed to be Bar Mitzvah in less than a year and I know that the community is not going to Bar Mitzvah him if he still believes in Christianity so what am I going to do I began to share with my son the verses that I was coming across the things that I was learning and I began to share with him and I said to him I want you to take a look at this this is what we always understood this verse to mean this is what Judaism says it means and I want you to decide for yourself because obviously the best way to get a pre-teen or a teenager to believe what you want

them to believe is not by shoving it down their throat right so I began to share with him and I said I want you to decide who's telling the truth well long story short my son of his own accord decided to embrace Judaism and my daughter who was 10 years old was standing around watching as this was happening and she decided that Judaism was the truth as well now my other two boys who were six and 8 years old well you know how six and 8 year olds are right they believe whatever their mommy and daddy tell them so they're like oh we don't pray to him anymore okay well anyway you may be wondering

how I'm getting away with sharing all of this with my children when my husband is still a Christian well it turns out that he had asked some of the pastors that were involved in our lives what he should do because now I'm teaching the kids that what we've always taught them wasn't the truth and the pastor who was a very smart man said to him look let her be he said one of two things are going to happen he said either this is going to be a passing fat will all be over before you know it he said or when the children get older you'll be able to talk to them again about Christianity he said but

if the two of you are arguing about God with the children the children are going to end up believing nothing at all you want them to at least have a faith in God right so he backed off and he let me do this and I began to speak to my children and all four of them came to Judaism meanwhile I'm sharing with my father about the verses that I'm come coming across and my father's decided that he's going to take it upon himself to totally prove the Jewish view is wrong the only problem is it isn't and as he took each verse and he went back into the writings and he was trying to prove that Judaism

could not be right and that Christianity was the truth one by one all of his Christian beliefs began to fall apart and slowly the members of the congregation ation began to drop off so here we are 9 months later we're at my son's Bar Mitzvah we had a backyard barbecue because it was the easiest way to allow the most amount of people to be able to join us and while we're at the barbecue I look out the back window and my dad is talking to Mark now we invited Mark because he had had such a big part in our life even though my husband was still a Christian at the time meanwhile I'm looking out the

window and I see my dad talking to Mark couple of hours later I go out the window again to look and see what's going on and I see that my father is still talking to Mark you see over the course of the previous year I had given him a lot of explanations and arguments but he still had some questions and so Mark clarified those questions for him and by the end of the bar mitzvah party my father and my mother had decided to come back to Judaism as well well it wasn't so easy for my husband because let's face it he was born and raised a Christian and unlike so many of the conversion stories that

we hear where Christians will say but I always doubted this or I never quite believed that or this never sat right with me you know whatever um my husband was a True Believer he had no questions until I went and pulled the carpet out from under our entire life and so over the next few years life was very difficult in fact my marriage which up until that point had been the most amazing marriage we never ever fought sometimes we just disagreed because if not that would be kind of weird but we never argued we never fought with each other and now everything that I said offended him and everything

he said offended me and we were fighting all the time and the children were convinced we were going to end up divorced not because of the difference in our faith but because of all of the fighting all of the time and so two years after I had come back to Judaism one day my husband and I are having one of our typical arguments and he said something that made me very angry angry and so I just went oh you just say that cuz you're a Christian and he looked at me and he said well actually the truth is I'm not a Christian anymore I said what he said no really over the course of the last two years

you've given me enough reasons to doubt the validity of the New Testament I no longer believe in Christianity he said I'm not a Christian anymore but I'm not ready to convert to Judaism because I'm not convinced that Judaism is the truth with the capital t he said and I don't want to trade one flawed religion for another so over the course of the next two years we began to study together because now he was what we call a Ben no Ben Noah or noahide he was a non-jew who believes in the god of Israel he wasn't sure what else he believed but he didn't believe in any of Christianity and he was

just serving God and so he was much more accepted into the community and we began to take courses together and he began to take a lot of the classes that people who are studying for conversion will take after an additional two years so four years after I came back to Judaism my husband one day said you know instead of asking what Judaism has to offer me I really need to start exploring why it is that God gave me a Jewish wife and Jewish children clearly God gave me a Jewish wife and Jewish children for a reason and I need to find out what that is and so he began to study in Earnest and four

and a half years after my I came back to Judaism my husband decided that Judaism was the truth with the capital T and he converted to Judaism and we were married together under the HBA at the center in Baltimore along with our entire community and our children and now we were a complete Jewish Family Paul Michael Taylor became Pinas mosha and we were a whole family together after that I went to Jews for Judaism and I said to them you know I've been speaking since I was 16 years old I'm I'm trained in evangelism which is not that different from Outreach I don't suppose and um I said and I have

a personal tun to make I have a fix a repair because I've been responsible for converting hundreds maybe thousands of people to Christianity and I want to spend the rest of my life helping Jewish people who have gotten trapped in that to come back to Judaism but more than that I want to inspire Jewish people to have a meaningful relevant and deep relationship with God within the context of Judaism so that when they seek spirituality as all of us do at some point in our lives they won't feel the need to look Beyond Judaism but will choose to get more involved with their Jew with their Judaism

and so Jews for Judaism decided agreed to take me on and I began to work for them until a year and a half later when we made Aliah to Israel and I started my own organization and I began speaking in well all over the world sharing my story but one of the things that I decided was that more important than sharing with people why we don't believe these other beliefs is helping to strengthen and to build up the Jewish Souls the Jewish nishas so that as I said before they will have a deep and meaningful and relevant relationship with God within the context of Judaism and so I began to share the

insights that I have gleaned over the past many years of my life um and now I talk about well I teach on the paraa but I also talk about how to know that God loves you and if he loves us then why do bad things happen why are we so afraid of the word God right and different things that uh different issues that people bring up within Judaism because what I hope to do is to be able to inspire people to have a deep meaningful and relevant relationship with God within the context of Judaism if anybody would like to contact me I'm available at panina Taylor PE n i n a t a y l r gmail.com you can

visit my website at panina taylor.com uh and uh if you're interested in Booking me for a speaking engagement you can also contact me through the website thank you so much all English lectures are available online at hob.com