Called to Controversy

by Ruth Rosen

  The usher had managed to slip away, but Moishe sought him out after the service. “This Communion, how much does it cost?”

  The usher replied, “We don’t charge for Communion. You can put something into the offering if you want.”

  Moishe continued, “Well, should we bring anything?”

  “No.”

  Moishe couldn’t think of anything else to ask about preparing for Communion. Probably it meant to bring a good appetite, or maybe it was a reminder to allow extra time for the event.

  The following Sunday, Moishe arrived at the church with a healthy appetite and a sense of anticipation. Ceil headed straight for the nursery like an old pro. When she returned, Moishe led them to their seat, bypassing the usher. He’d noted the location carefully the previous week and assumed they would be expected to return to it whenever they attended.

  He’d expected to be greeted with the savory aromas that signaled a Jewish holiday meal. But as he and Ceil approached their seats a shocking sight awaited him.

  Down at the front was what he recognized to be a funeral bier. When a Jewish person from Moishe’s synagogue died, the chevra kedushim (holy brethren) washed the body and left it covered with two shrouds. The dead were to be buried within twenty-four hours. Yet what Moishe saw at the church appeared to be something or someone prepared for burial. Under the white cloths, there was a lump where the head should be and a lump where the feet should be.

  He thought, This is terrible taste, to have a funeral and a meal in the same place. But then, he didn’t see any meal or any indication that there was to be a meal. As he kept thinking about the body at the front of the church, the idea of the meal grew less and less appealing.

  The service seemed to go according to the previous week’s routine. The congregation sang a few hymns (he now knew that the words and numbers in the bulletin were the hymns and pages on which they could be found), and the choir performed an anthem. Then the pastor, Donald MacDonald, spoke. His message was longer than most rabbis’ homilies—about forty minutes—but Moishe didn’t mind. MacDonald was an excellent teacher and preacher. Moishe appreciated the way he explained the background of the time and place pertinent to whatever Scripture passages he used in his sermons. He even took notes, soaking up information with characteristic interest and intensity.

  Following the sermon, eight men dressed in black walked down the center aisle. Moishe later learned that they were the board of deacons, but they seemed to him more like the Trinity Baptist Drill Team; all their movements seemed coordinated. They arrived at the table where two deacons were deployed at each end, the others stood on the sides of the table, and the pastor was in the middle. With perfect precision, they grasped the ends of the shrouds.

  Moishe’s stomach lurched as he realized they were going to uncover the body. This was a sin and he felt he should not look—but curiosity overcame him. What he saw was a puzzlement: aluminum pots and pans. The pots had covers, each with a cross in the center. The pans were shallow, like plates. The pastor called on somebody to say a prayer over the bread, and one deacon prayed, thanking God for the bread that represented “the body of Jesus that was broken for us.”

  They began passing the pans throughout the pews, and being so close to the front, Moishe was one of the first recipients. As a pan reached him, he saw that it contained matzo that had been broken into very small pieces. Finally, something that actually related to Passover! Moishe picked out a piece and ate it. Then he noticed that everyone else was holding his or hers, so he pretended to hold his matzo too.

  The deacons returned to the front, and the pastor said, in a very solemn voice, “Take and eat.” Everybody ate a piece of matzo, and Moishe pretended to eat what he had already eaten.

  Next the pastor asked someone to say a prayer over “the cup,” and another deacon prayed, thanking God for “the blood of Jesus that was shed for us.” Then they passed the big uncovered pots. Moishe knew that there wasn’t going to be real blood; at Passover, the wine symbolized the blood of the lamb, just like the matzo symbolized its body. And sure enough they passed around cups of wine, except they were more like glass thimbles than cups. Moishe took one and this time, he held onto it. When everyone had been served, the pastor said, “Drink ye all of it,” and Moishe drank all two swallows of grape juice!

  Then they sang a hymn about the tie that binds as the offering plates were passed. After that, people started filing out. Somewhat bewildered, Moishe went to his favorite usher. “Excuse me,” he said. “When will we be having Communion?”

  The usher, equally bewildered, replied, “You’ve just had it.”

  Moishe could feel his stomach rumbling as he nodded a polite acknowledgment. He thought, They invite you to a Passover feast, they give you a crumb of matzo and a thimble full of grape juice, and then they have the nerve to make jokes about Jews being stingy.*

  Despite the culture shock, Moishe dove into his new life of faith with zeal. This was not so much a sign of great spirituality. In large part he was so dazed and amazed by God’s reality in his life that he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Moishe later described being a new believer in Jesus as “a very heady experience.”

  He had no family or friends who knew how to “do” Christianity, so for the first few years, Moishe was highly influenced by people and institutions who’d had a part in introducing him to Jesus. He learned by imitation as well as by instruction. He began each prayer, “Our dear gracious heavenly Father we come unto thee in prayer . . .” because that was how he heard other, more mature Christians pray. He also noticed that no one at church smoked cigarettes before or after the service. On inquiring about this, he was told, “The Scriptures say that one’s body is the temple of God.” This was not a particularly compelling argument to Moishe at the time, but he decided he better quit anyway. It wasn’t easy, because he had smoked heavily since he was sixteen, but he did quit—and put on forty pounds. Smoking had somewhat curbed Moishe’s appetite, and without cigarettes he was hungry a great deal of the time. Moreover, as with most people, his interest in food went beyond satisfying hunger; he found pleasure in particularly good food. Ceil recalled, “He had been so skinny, he actually needed most of that weight.”

  It wasn’t that Moishe was enamored of Christian culture or eager to meet the expectations of his new mentors. Truthfully, Moishe often found Mrs. Wago irritatingly pushy with her Bible studies and her insistence that he and Ceil not only read but also memorize certain Scriptures. Still, he respected her and faithfully studied the Bible under her tutelage.

  But there was more to this new life than acquiring information. Moishe recalled, “You have this impulse that you just want to tell people; you want to sing about what God has done. You don’t always think through the order or the consequences of how you tell people.”

  If there was one thing for which Moishe later felt remorse, it was that he’d told a great many people about his new beliefs before telling his immediate family. It was easy enough to blurt out to his cousins Donald and Dorothy, “Can you believe it? All this time, we’ve been wrong about Jesus. He really is the Messiah!” As far as his parents and brother, Moishe had every intention of telling them, but, as he recalled, “I was waiting for a good time to tell them about my faith, and I regret that they first found out about it from others.” By the time they did find out, about four months had passed, and Moishe and Ceil had already been baptized.*

  The family usually got together twice weekly, on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons. When Moishe’s brother telephoned one day to say that their father had requested that Moishe come over at a specified nonroutine time (Wednesday night), Moishe knew that something was up. He later explained that it was rare for his father to ask to see him and even rarer to be invited to talk in the living room. The living room was for insurance salesmen and other people who wanted to sell something. Moishe said,

  I sat down, a bit tense, so my father broke the ice: “What’s this I hear, that you’ve been telling peop
le you believe in Jesus?” I couldn’t have asked for a better icebreaker, so I stood up and took the family Bible off the shelf. It needed a good dusting. I sat down, but my father remained standing.

  I began flipping through the pages, talking much too fast yet somehow unable to slow down: “Well, you see, Dad, over here it says that when the Messiah would come, he would be born in Bethlehem.” And then I was off, flipping to another passage, telling how it had been in our Bible all along and we’d missed it. Finally, looking somewhat bewildered, my father sat down.

  Then his mother and brother joined them.

  Moishe recalled,

  My father was very patient. He didn’t say anything as I rushed from one text to the next, sometimes fumbling to find the reference I wanted. Finally, I stopped, like a wind-up toy that had run down. At that point, my father reached over and closed the open Bible. He said, “This book has come between me and you, and until you can give it up, you can’t be my son.”

  That was it. Whether or not the Hebrew Scriptures seemed to point to Jesus as the Messiah was completely beside the point. Ben was committed to the Jewish community’s position, which meant that believing in Jesus as Messiah was not an option. To veer from that position was considered the worst kind of disloyalty. His father’s reaction came as a shock; it was painful and hard to believe it had actually happened.

  Moishe later reflected,

  Some people might think that what he said was unreasonable. But I knew he was doing what he thought was right, though it was difficult for him. All I could say was, “Well, Dad, I want you to know that I love you more than ever, and I really do respect you.” To me, those were the key issues. And my father answered, “Well, if you respect me; if you see me walking down the street cross over to the other side so that I don’t have to.”

  In recounting this story Moishe emphasized that his parents never treated him or Ceil as though they were villains. They never acted as though either of them had deliberately wronged the family. As for his brother, Moishe had the impression that he simply wanted to keep the family together.

  Moishe’s uncle Dave, however, was infuriated when he heard the news.* Moishe recalled, “With the colorful life he’d lived, Uncle Dave wasn’t at a loss for a swearing vocabulary. I’ll never forget how he turned red in the face as he shook his finger at me and finally said, ‘You . . . you . . . you . . . Christ lover, you!’ It was astonishing to realize that the most shameful thing he could think to call me was actually a compliment. After what Jesus had done for me, I wanted to be a ‘Christ lover.’”

  The sad truth was, being a Christ lover meant something very different to Moishe’s family than it did to him. For centuries, Jews had been persecuted in the name of Jesus. Belief in him was anathema to Jewish people, and Jews who embraced him were seen as traitors who had crossed a line. They were no longer considered part of the community. What Christ did has never been so much of an issue to most Jewish people as what has been done in his name.

  Moishe continued to tell everybody and anybody he could about Jesus, including people at the sporting goods store. Nate Gart slowed him down by reminding him, “It’s your job to sell sporting goods, not Jesus.” He then showed Moishe that he more than understood the gospel, describing to his young protégé Christian beliefs at least as well as Moishe could have described them. Nate calmly explained that he would not forbid Moishe from talking about Jesus at the store, but that if he wanted to keep his job, he would have to keep his sales up. He commented that he wasn’t surprised that Moishe had become “a Christer” as he put it—that it was usually people like him who became fanatically involved.

  By then, Moishe was the buyer in the camera department and assistant to the corporate manager. It was a lot of responsibility for someone his age, but Nate Gart had invested a lot in him and appreciated his work. In fact, he withstood significant pressure from Ben Rosen, who wanted him to fire Moishe.

  Ben really wanted his son back and somehow believed that if things weren’t going so well for him, he’d be forced to give up this Jesus mishegas.* Moishe was a young man with a wife and baby to provide for, and his job was clearly a vulnerable spot.

  What did Moishe think about his father trying to get him fired? “My father was not the type of person who would fire anyone because of his religion,” Moishe said. “I am sure if someone asked him to do what he wanted Nate Gart to do, he would have seen immediately that it was unfair. Plus he was not in the habit of threatening people. He must have found it distasteful, but I guess he hoped it might pressure me into doing what he thought was right.”

  Moishe had heard stories about other Jewish people who struggled over whether to accept the gospel, knowing that they would be rejected by parents or friends. His experience was very different. Unlike Ceil, he hadn’t been seeking the truth when he found it or, as the case may be, when it found him. He had never wanted to know if the gospel was true, was not open-minded about it, and never pretended to be. But once he saw the gospel as true, he never considered acceptance as a choice. He said,

  To me, it was simple: if something was true, it was true. If people disliked you for believing it, there was not much you could do about it. Things were not true or false because you wanted them to be. . . . I don’t know if I missed a great implication, or if God somehow just salved my heart and mind with some kind of anesthetic to help with the potential pain. I like to think that I simply knew God would take care of us.

  When my family disowned me, I felt a terrible loss and I missed them—but I couldn’t ignore the truth or apologize for what I believed. I had enough sense that I would not try to argue that I was right and they were wrong. I knew the rift was very painful for them—as much as for me. I never doubted their affection for me; they were simply doing what [they thought] was required of them.

  Sadly, Ceil could not say the same thing for the Starrs. She and Moishe had acquiesced when the Starrs asked them to see a rabbi—it was to be one visit out of respect for Ceil’s parents. When she had first pointed out the messianic prophecy in Isaiah 53 to her adoptive parents, it had shaken her father, who had never seen the passage. He was eager for the rabbi to prove that Jesus was not the suffering servant described in the Hebrew Scriptures. Upon meeting the rabbi, Mr. Starr became impatient and asked the rabbi in Yiddish, “What about Isaiah 53? What about Isaiah 53?”

  After much hemming and hawing, Rabbi Bennett explained that having just moved, he did not have his commentaries unpacked. He would be glad to speak with them about the passage when he could refer them to those writings.

  The interview had not gone as the older couple wished, and they had wrongly assumed that the young couple would be willing to return. Mamie Starr threatened that unless her daughter and son-in-law were willing to continue sessions with the rabbi, she and her husband would have nothing more to do with them. When this threat did not produce the desired effect, a furious Mamie ended the relationship. Ceil was grieved, particularly at having lost her adoptive father.

  Moishe reflected, “The Bible says that when your father and mother forsake you, then I [the Lord] will take you up (Ps. 27:10). We found that to be true. We had a new family in the church. Not a substitute family because no one can replace your family—but a different kind of family.”

  The cynicism Moishe once felt about God was gone. He was delighted in being able to believe in miracles, being able to believe in prayer. Mrs. Wago had stressed the importance of prayer and reading the Bible, and Moishe used his break times at work to read the Bible and pray. He noticed that the Pillar of Fire Church, about seven blocks from the store, had a sign out front that said, “Open all day for prayer.” At that church Moishe found a place of quiet solitude to read and pray.

  One day during his break, Moishe was reading chapter 20 in the book of Acts. He came to verse 21, which described the apostle Paul as he was “testifying to Jews, and also to Greeks, repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.” Moishe thought how great it would be
if someone like Paul would bring the gospel to Jews in modern times, and he prayed that God would send someone.

  What happened in that moment was difficult to describe. As he reflected on the verse, Moishe knew that he was reading about someone else. He knew that these events were from a different time and had nothing to do with him. Yet the verse seemed to be illuminated in his heart and mind so that he knew that God was speaking to him through it. He didn’t hear a voice or see a vision, but the message was clear: Why not you? Why not spend your life telling people about Jesus?

  Moishe did not know what form this would take. He only knew that something very significant had happened; God had communicated to him through that verse in a way that went beyond his usual understanding of the Bible.

  Herein lies a pretty piece of symmetry. As it turned out, the very street preacher that Moishe and Ceil used to pass every Sunday on their way to the movies—the one that prompted Moishe to wish out loud that he could believe something with so much devotion that he’d be willing to face ridicule as that man was doing—was one of the clergy from the Pillar of Fire Church. That was where God called Moishe to preach the gospel.

  * Decades later Moishe and Ceil wrote an in-depth book on the subject titled Christ in the Passover published by Moody Press (now Moody Publishing).

  * The “Communion story” became a standby in later years when Moishe spoke to students at Bible colleges and seminaries. He’d greatly embellish it with perfect timing, exaggerated gestures, and facial expressions that delighted students. At the same time the story helped hearers understand the serious reality of how cultural rituals that they took for granted could be very confusing to others. Because the story became such a fixture in his testimony, this third person narrative does include some of the embellishments Moishe added through the years. For example, while most Jewish people find ourselves objects of racial stereotyping at some point, the reader is not to suppose that anyone at Trinity Baptist Church joked about Jews being stingy.