A little testimony:

I am Jewish through my mother, born and raised in Germany, near the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. Mother always told us kids not to ever tell anyone we were Jewish “because they KILL Jews!” I had no clue what that meant until I had to read “The Diary of Anne Frank” in High school. It was difficult to acknowledge this as a true story because WHO would want to kill anyone because of their religion or ethnicity, etc.? But I soon discovered that human beings can be excruciatingly stupid, arrogant and vicious….

Thanks to a horrendously abusive background, in part, due to an adoptive father who happened to be a raving pedophile (while believing himself to be a “good Christian”), I shunned “religion” – and I definitely didn’t want to have anything to do with Christians! But our ELOHIM pursued me throughout my life, and through some really strange circumstances, at age 44, I ended up in a small town Missouri Baptist church where I “got saved” when the pastor explained who “Jesus” was.

I had never really read the Bible until then; but after that, my life changed drastically and I became obsessed with reading the whole thing, cover to cover, every word. (Yes, I had attended different churches (denominations) and even Jewish synagogues a few times during the course of my life, but they had always “left me cold” because they all “seemed incomplete” and “off the mark” somehow. I felt they were all “missing something” but I had no clue what, because I really didn’t know who or what GOD was. All I knew was, their ideas about God “didn’t feel right” to me.) 

Long story short, my life changed on that proverbial dime when YHWH caused me to end up in that little Baptist Church, where I began to learn about "Jesus" - who he was and what he did. But within months after ravenously devouring the Bible, I realized "something was definitely missing" in the church, and I began to question why, since we were "one in Christ," didn't WE keep the Seventh Day Sabbath and the Feasts. And why did the pastor constantly send me to the writings of Paul to answer my myriad questions? Why did he never refer me back to, for instance Leviticus or any of the other “GOD Himself said such and such” Books? Why always to the writings of an Apostle (whose teachings were very confusing to me at the time because they seemed to go against the things GOD said and what Jesus taught….).

Well, I soon came to understand that the pastor (and every other pastor I had ever met) was “misunderstanding” what Paul actually MEANT! Paul was a JEW who never, ever veered from Torah! (See Am I understanding the writings of Paul properly?, Explaining Romans 2 from a Hebraic perspective, Explaining Galatians ) This hit me after I read Romans 3:31 - “Do we then nullify the Law through faith? May it never be! On the contrary, we establish the Law....” BOOM! There it was. Why didn’t anybody get it?

And after doing some diligent study, I discovered that “the Law” actually referred to Torah – God’s Divine Instructions in Righteousness without which we would have NO blueprint for moral, holy living….HOW could that possibly have been “abolished at the cross?” Since Jesus was God’s Son (not to mention, he was a JEW ) WHY would he ever preach against Torah? Well, it soon dawned on me that he didn’t! He constantly UPHELD Torah and Tanach! Even when confronted by Satan, he did NOT quote himself; He quoted from the Tanakh (Luke 4:1-12)! 

Matthew 5: 17 Don’t think that I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete. 18 Yes indeed! I tell you that until heaven and earth pass away, not so much as a yud or a stroke will pass from the Torah – not until everything that must happen has happened. 19 So whoever disobeys the least of these mitzvot and teaches others to do so will be called the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. But whoever obeys them and so teaches will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness is far greater than that of the Torah-teachers and P'rushim, you will certainly not enter the Kingdom of Heaven! (CJB)

Even as a “baby Christian” I recognized that "ALL" hasn't happened yet, and heaven and earth have not passed away, which meant that His Torah was obviously still valid. Torah wasn’t just for “the Jews” as my Baptist pastor kept insisting (after all, we are ONE in Messiah - Galatians 3:27-29). (I also began to wonder how that Jewish guy in our church could have stopped doing Torah once he “met Jesus”….Didn’t he “just know in his gut” that that whole Bible pertained to all of us, and that the last third of the Bible (which doesn’t contain any “thus saith the Lord” scriptures) in NO WAY negated the first two-thirds?)

Armed with that realization, I begged God to please show me exactly what He teaching me through my home studies… And within three years from the day I “got saved” He caused me to end up in a Messianic Torah study where I finally received ALL the answers to ALL my questions. FINALLY, everything came together to make some real sense! The bottom line was “YHWH/Y’shua/Torah” – they CANNOT and SHOULD NOT be separated!

And so I finally knew why God allowed me to endure the horrors of my childhood that caused me to end up shunning “religion” and “religiosity”… It was to keep me from becoming confused with the “world’s religions” so that I could eventually end up in that little Baptist church at “just the right time” where I learned about His Messiah… And then He immediately gave me the discernment to realize there was more to knowing Him than “just believing in Jesus.” He had some Rules to follow – Rules that the churches were calling “a curse”; while, on the other hand, the Jews were calling Jesus a myth and an idol....

It didn’t take me long to realize they were BOTH wrong! The Bible verifies this fact, over and over again, yet many people just don’t get it. They either ignore, or over- or under-analyze Scripture using their limited, human logic to try to understand the Spiritual Realm. How sad for them that they can’t “see the forest for the trees.”