I have spent 40 years studying the Hebrew Bible.

I have debated missionaries.

I have written papers defending traditional Jewish interpretation.

I have stood before congregations, students, and colleagues and told them with full confidence that Isaiah 53 has nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth.

Tonight I am standing before you to tell you that I was wrong.

Isaiah 53 points unmistakably undeniably to Jesus.

And 3 years ago in my home office at 2 in the morning surrounded by books I had read a hundred times, I surrendered my life to him.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother continues his story, we’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.

Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony.

This is my story.

I want to start by telling you about my father’s hands.

He had large hands, rougher than you would expect for a man who spent most of his adult life working in a tailor shop in Brooklyn.

The roughness wasn’t from the tailoring, though.

It was older than the work.

It It came from somewhere else entirely, from somewhere he rarely spoke about directly, though its shadow fell across everything in our home.

across the food we ate, the way he locked the door at night, the way he flinched at certain sounds, the particular manner in which he held the Torah scroll on Shabbat morning with both arms pulled close to his chest, the way a man holds something he almost lost and is not prepared to lose again.

He was 16 years old when the war ended.

I want you to sit with that number for a moment.

16.

By the time the liberation came, he had lost nearly everyone he had started life with.

His parents, two younger sisters, one of them barely old enough to have started school.

A grandmother who, he told me once, in one of the rare moments he allowed himself to speak about her.

I had the kind of voice that made whatever room she was in feel larger and warmer than it actually was.

He said she used to sing while she cooked and that you could hear her three apartments away.

He told me her name once early in my childhood.

I cannot remember it now and that forgetting is one of the small griefs I carry.

I think for him saying her name was something he could only afford to do once.

He came to America with almost nothing.

A cousin’s address sewn into the lining of a coat that was much too thin for a New York winter.

A faith that by any rational calculation should not have survived what it had been put through.

And yet it had survived.

Not without damage.

You could see the damage if you looked closely, in the way he startled at raised voices, in the way he never fully relaxed in open spaces, and in the way certain dates on the Jewish calendar would descend on him like weather.

But the faith itself had survived.

It had come through the uncservivable with him, battered and scarred, but intact.

And that faith, his faith, the faith of a man who had witnessed what human beings could do to one another at their worst, and had still chosen deliberately and at great personal cost to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

That faith was the first and most consequential inheritance my father gave me.

I was the eldest of three sons.

We grew up in a part of Brooklyn that in the way of all specific neighborhoods of a specific time no longer quite exists in the form it took then.

It was a dense a living Jewish world, synagogues and kosher butchers and bakeries that smelled of chala on Thursday afternoons and Shabbat tables crowded with neighbors who were in every practical sense family.

The Yiddish you heard in the street was not a curiosity or an affectation, but a first language, a mother tongue.

Being Jewish was not in that neighborhood an identity you chose on Sunday morning or performed at high holidays or explained to co-workers.

It was simply the water you swam in, as natural and unself-conscious as breathing.

I love that world without fully knowing I loved it the way you love the place you’re from before you’ve been anywhere else and had the distance to understand what you had.

My father was not a wealthy man, but we were not poor in any way that mattered.

What we had was richness of a different kind.

the richness of a community that knew itself, of a tradition that explained where you came from and where you were going, of a table on Friday evening that was always set before sundown with a seriousness that I understood even as a small child was not just about the food.

The Shabbat table was in my father’s house an act of resistance and an act of faith simultaneously.

You could not destroy us.

Those candles said, “We are still here.

We are still lighting the lights.

” I went to the yeshiva two blocks from our apartment beginning at age five.

I loved it almost immediately, and I want to be honest that the love was not in those early years particularly pious in character.

I was not an unusually devout child.

What I loved was the texts themselves, the way the Hebrew felt.

I the particular music and density of it, the way a single word in the Torah could open into centuries of argument and counterargument, the way the rabbis had been in conversation with each other across a thousand years as though the distance of time were no obstacle to a good argument.

My father used to say that every letter of the Torah had a universe hiding inside it.

I believed him then as an act of inherited faith.

I believe him now as an act of personal discovery, though what I understand that universe to contain has changed in ways my father did not foresee and would not, I think, have chosen.

By the time I reached my late teens, it was clear to the people around me, to my teachers, to my father, or to the rabbi of our synagogue, who had known me since I was small enough to fall asleep during the Cole Neidra service and be carried home, that the texts were going to be my life, not as a rabbi, as it turned out.

The rabinate requires a different set of gifts than the ones I possessed.

And I understood this about myself early enough to save everyone some difficulty.

as a scholar, an academic, a person who would spend his professional life in the company of these ancient documents, asking the questions that only become possible when you sit with the text long enough and carefully enough that it begins to give up what it has been quietly holding.

There were people in my community, good people, people I loved, who never entirely understood the difference between a rabbi and an academic scholar of religion.

They were not wrong to be uncertain.

The academy can be a colder place than the synagogue.

The questions that scholars ask are not always the questions that communities need asked.

And the distance required for rigorous analysis can, if you are not careful, drain the living warmth out of something that was meant to be lived and not merely studied.

I was aware of this danger throughout my career and worked against it consistently.

The texts I spent my life studying were never for merely objects of analysis.

They were also always underneath the footnotes and the methodology love letters from a god I believed in and wanted to understand.

I did my undergraduate work at a university in New York.

My doctoral work at a major research institution.

I am choosing not to name it are for reasons that will become apparent as this story continues.

I joined the faculty of that institution after my doctorate and spent the next 30ome years teaching courses on the Hebrew Bible, on the history of Jewish interpretation, on second temple Judaism, the rich complex world of Jewish thought in the centuries immediately before and after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.

This period roughly 200 B.

CE CE to 200 CE had always fascinated me particularly because it is the period during which so many of the ideas and texts and practices that define Judaism as we know it were being formed, debated, contested and crystallized.

It is a period of extraordinary intellectual and spiritual ferment and spending a professional lifetime inside it never became routine.

My specific area of expertise, the thing I was known for among colleagues, the thing my name was attached to in the literature was Isaiah and specifically the figure that modern scholarship refers to as the suffering servant.

This figure appears most concentratedly in four passages within chapters 40- 55 of Isaiah, what scholars call the servant songs, and most dramatically and extensively in chapter 53, the passage that has generated more interpretive controversy, more interfaith tension, and more genuine scholarly disagreement than perhaps any other chapter in the Hebrew Hebrew Bible.

It was in many respects the text around which I built my professional life.

My doctoral dissertation touched on it.

My first major book was substantially about it.

Two subsequent books returned to it.

The journal articles I wrote that were most widely read and debated were the ones that engaged Isaiah 53 directly.

I had read that chapter by the time everything changed more times than I can count.

Hundreds of times, perhaps thousands if you include the partial readings, the verse byverse analysis, the comparative work against other versions.

I knew it in Hebrew, in the ancient Greek of the Septuagent, in the Aramaic of the Targum.

I had read every major commentary written on it in the last two centuries and most of the significant medieval ones.

I had taught it to undergraduate students and doctoral candidates.

I had lectured on it in synagogues and at academic conferences.

I had argued about it in print with scholars whose interpretations differed from mine.

I was in the most complete sense available to a human being.

I familiar with this text and I was I now understand completely wrong about what it meant.

But before I get to that, I need to tell you about Miriam.

You cannot understand my story without understanding her.

And you cannot understand her without me telling you something true, which is this.

She is the finest person I have known in my life.

This is not the sentimental overstatement of a husband describing his wife.

It is the considered assessment of someone who has spent his career in the company of brilliant, accomplished, intellectually serious people, and who has found consistently and without exception that the person across his breakfast table surpasses them all in the qualities that actually matter.

We met in our mid20s.

I was finishing my doctorate deep in the miserable final stages of dissertation writing, existing on coffee and the specific anxiety of a person who has committed four years to a project and is no longer sure the project is worth what it cost.

She was teaching elementary school in a neighborhood not far from where I had grown up with a particular quality of attention and patience that good teachers of young children develop an attentiveness to the human being in front of her that was not professional technique but simply who she was.

We were introduced at a Shabbat dinner by a mutual friend who understood us both better than we understood ourselves at the time.

And from the first conversation, which ran considerably longer than Shabbat dinners are generally supposed to run, something was clear to me about her that has never become unclear in all the years since.

She was not an academic and had no ambition to become one.

She had no patience for the particular vanities of academic life, the status games, the citation battles, the elaborate performances of intellectual authority that scholars deploy in conferences and faculty meetings.

What she had instead was wisdom.

Not the academic kind, not the kind you acquire through graduate training and peer review, but the deeper older kind that some people are simply born toward and that, if they are fortunate, develops through a lifetime of paying real attention to real people.

She could read a room in 30 seconds.

She could understand what was happening underneath a conversation while it was still happening on the surface.

She was almost never wrong about people, and when she was, she acknowledged it without defensiveness, which is rarer than it sounds.

She was also a woman of genuine unscentimental faith, not the performed faith of communal obligation, not the faith that consists primarily of following rules because the rules have always been followed.

The faith of someone for whom the reality of God was a lived experience woven into the texture of daily life in the blessing over bread in the candles on Friday evening in the way she moved through Yam Kipur with a quality of inwardness that was not theater for anyone’s benefit.

She lit the Shabbat candles every Friday of our marriage with the same careful attention and watching her do it, watching her hands move through the particular motion of drawing the light toward her face, watching her eyes close, knowing that whatever passed between her and God in those moments was real and private and not for public display.

That sight never became ordinary to me.

It was one of the things I loved most about our life.

We built something together that I can only call full.

two children who grew up at a Shabbat table that was always a little crowded and a little loud, where the arguments were as vigorous as the laughter, and the food was always better than the occasion required, because Miriam cooked the way she did everything thoroughly and without half measures.

a home full of books, mine stacked on every horizontal surface, in a manner that Miriam found exasperating, and that I found entirely reasonable.

The smell of coffee and old paper that I associate with every good memory of my working life.

Colleagues I respected deeply.

Students whose development I watched with genuine investment.

A synagogue community that had known us for decades.

Where I was a familiar face at the adult education classes and a trusted voice on textual questions.

I was by any honest accounting a man whose life had worked out.

I was aware of this.

I was grateful for it in the particular way of someone who grew up in the shadow of a father’s losses and understood without being told that survival and flourishing were not to be taken casually.

I did not take them casually.

Now let me tell you about the other thing.

The thing that ran alongside the rest of my life for all those years and that I understood very differently then than I do now.

Throughout my career and with increasing frequency in its later decades, I encountered the Isaiah 53 debate in its popular form.

Not just in academic journals where the conversation was controlled and footnoted but in synagogues in community lectures he in interfaith panels in conversations with students who had Christian friends or Christian partners who had asked them the question.

The question was almost always essentially the same arriving in different phrasings.

Doesn’t Isaiah 53 describe Jesus? Isn’t this a prophecy pointing to him? How do you explain that the description matches so closely? I had answers, careful, well-developed, academically grounded answers that I had been refining for decades and believed sincerely.

The servant in Isaiah, I would explain, is not an individual messianic figure, but a corporate one, Israel itself, the nation, suffering among the nations of the world, bearing the weight of history’s violence, and ultimately to be vindicated by God in the sight of those who had dismissed and persecuted them.

I would point to the chapters surrounding chapter 53 where Israel is explicitly and repeatedly called God’s servant.

I would trace the history of interpretation, explaining carefully and fairly how the individual messianic reading had been substantially abandoned by mainstream Jewish scholarship in the early medieval period, in part as a necessary and understandable response to the aggressive christoologgical use Christians were making of the text.

I was always fair to the complexity.

I acknowledge that early Jewish interpretation had been diverse on this question, but the conclusion was always the same.

This text is not about Jesus of Nazareth.

I taught this in my synagogue with the confidence of someone who had published on the subject.

I presented versions of it at academic conferences.

I engaged it in print or and every time someone challenged me, every time a Christian student or a curious questioner or a Messianic Jewish acquaintance raised an argument I hadn’t specifically addressed, I had a response ready.

I was not hostile in these exchanges.

Hostility would have been professionally unbecoming, and more than that, it would have been personally inaccurate.

I was genuinely not a hostile man on this subject.

I was something more settled than hostile.

I was certain.

There was one moment from a synagogue adult education class perhaps 12 or 13 years before everything changed that I have returned to many times in the last three years.

A young man, barely 20, I think, raised his hand near the end of the session and asked me with a directness I found genuinely refreshing how I explained the phrase pierced for our transgressions if the servant was meant to represent the nation of Israel.

He said that in his understanding, the nation of Israel wasn’t pierced.

Individual Jews were pierced.

Individual Jews were killed, but the nation as a whole was not.

And if it was individual Jews being pierced, then who was being healed by their wounds? The Jews themselves or someone else? It was a good question, a structurally good question, the kind that reveals a genuine engagement with the text rather than a rehearsed challenge.

I answered it smoothly, I thought, drawing on the collective nature of second Isaiah’s imagery.

The way the poems in these chapters move fluidly between individual and corporate, the specific history of the verb translated as pierced, and the range of its meaning in biblical Hebrew.

I gave him three or four layers of response.

The room seemed satisfied.

The young man nodded, though something in his face suggested that the nod was acknowledgment rather than full agreement.

I drove home feeling the comfortable confidence of a man who has done what he came to do.

I think about that young man sometimes now.

I do not know his name.

I hope he kept asking questions.

I hope wherever he is, he eventually found better answers than the ones I gave him.

In the period leading up to everything changing, I was working on what I expected would be my final major scholarly project, a comprehensive commentary on the four servant songs in Isaiah, the definitive treatment of a subject I had spent my career circling.

It was contracted with a major academic press.

I was several chapters into it.

I was, as I told Miriam on more than one occasion, finally in a position to say everything I had wanted to say about these texts, with the full weight of the accumulated scholarship behind me.

It was a good feeling, the feeling of a craftsman in the late stage of a long project who can finally see the shape of the finished thing.

And then one afternoon I opened my email.

It came from Daniel, not his real name, but the name I will use for him in this testimony.

Daniel had been one of my doctoral students perhaps eight or nine years before this.

He was one of the most genuinely gifted students I supervised in 30 years of doctoral training.

Not just intelligent, which many students were, but capable of the particular kind of sustained I honest engagement with a difficult text that distinguishes the real scholars from the merely clever ones.

His dissertation on prophetic literature was excellent work.

We had stayed in occasional contact after his graduation, a note when he published something, a brief exchange at a conference.

I thought of him as someone who was going to do important work in the field.

What I didn’t know, had not known was that several years after finishing his doctorate, Daniel had undergone a transformation that his academic training had not prepared me to anticipate.

He had come to faith in Jesus as the Messiah.

He had become, in the terminology he would use himself, a messianic Jewish believer.

He was attending a messianic Jewish congregation, was active in a community of Jewish believers in Jesus, and had, as I would discover later, I’ve been praying for me specifically for years before he finally wrote.

His email was short.

It was also, I recognized immediately, one of the most carefully composed messages I had received in years, because Daniel knew exactly who he was writing to.

He knew my work.

He knew my arguments.

He knew the particular combination of scholarly pride and communal loyalty that would make an aggressive or clumsy approach not just ineffective, but instantly dismissable.

So he didn’t do anything aggressive or clumsy.

He wrote simply that he had been thinking about me, that he remained deeply grateful for my mentorship and what our years of working together had meant to him.

He said he had been wrestling with something for a long time and felt he needed to share it, though he understood if I preferred not to engage.

He mentioned a scholarly article from an organization I might not be familiar with, he said carefully, that compiled pre-Christian Jewish sources interpreting Isaiah 53, as referring to an individual Messiah.

He wasn’t asking me to agree with those sources, he said.

He was asking with the respect of a former student for a teacher he still admired whether I had engaged with them fully and what I made of them.

He included the link.

He said nothing else.

I almost deleted the email.

I want you to understand that clearly because it matters to what comes next.

My first instinct, automatic, trained, immediate, was that this was missionary material, well packaged perhaps, written by someone with enough academic background to make it look scholarly, but missionary material nonetheless.

I had seen this kind of thing before.

I knew the genre.

I knew how to handle it.

delete or at most a brief kind response explaining that I appreciated the thought but was familiar with the arguments and had addressed them in my published work.

I didn’t delete it.

I have sat with that fact many times in the years since.

Why didn’t I delete it? I have never arrived at a fully satisfying answer.

Part of it was Daniel’s name, a student I had trusted and respected, not someone I could dismiss as intellectually careless.

Part of it was the timing arriving as it did in the middle of my own deep immersion in the same text.

Part of it was something else.

Something I couldn’t have named or identified at the time.

A small quiet pull that I now understand differently than I did then.

Whatever it was, I left the email in my inbox.

I told myself I would look at it when I had a spare hour, probably to confirm what I already suspected.

I went back to my commentary draft.

I had dinner with Miriam that evening.

I read for a while and went to bed, but I kept thinking about the email in the way you keep thinking about something that doesn’t quite belong to the category you’ve put it in.

3 days later, I opened the link.

I want to pause here and be careful about something because this moment tends to get dramatized in conversion stories in a way that can make the whole account feel less credible rather than more.

I was not when I opened that link a man in spiritual crisis.

I was not searching for something I had lost.

I was not dissatisfied with my faith or my community or my interpretation of the text.

I was a contented man, a professionally successful and personally settled who was about to read an article he expected to disagree with.

That is the honest description of the moment.

What makes the story significant is not the drama of the moment itself, but what happened when an intellectually honest man read something he had already decided was wrong and discovered with considerable discomfort that it was more right than he had allowed himself to know.

The article was better than I expected.

I need to say that plainly because saying it costs me something even now and the things that cost something are usually the ones worth saying.

It was not a perfect piece of scholarship.

I could see the places where the argument was overstated, where a source was being stretched slightly further than it could bear, or where a point was made with more certainty than the evidence warranted.

But the core of what it was doing, presenting genuine pre-Christian Jewish sources that had read Isaiah 53 as referring to an individual Messiah, was not fabricated, not distorted beyond recognition, not academically fraudulent.

The sources were real.

The Talmudic references were real.

The medieval rabbitic commentators were real.

their words accurately represented.

Some of them I knew well.

Some of them I had cited in my own published work carefully and selectively in ways that I now for the first time began to examine with discomfort.

I closed the article.

I went back to my work.

I told myself I would address these sources in my commentary.

Of course I would.

I had always intended to engage the full range of interpretive history.

Nothing had changed, and this was simply professional preparation.

But something had shifted, something small and precise, like the adjustment of a lens that brings into focus something that had always been there, but slightly blurred.

I could not locate the shift exactly.

I could not have articulated that afternoon what was different, but it was different.

And in the weeks that followed, the difference grew rather than faded, in the quiet, persistent way of a truth that has been given an opening, and is in no hurry, because it has all the time in the world.

I did not sleep well the night after I read the article and the night after that and the one after that.

My father’s hands.

I keep coming back to them because I think they are the beginning of everything even though I did not understand that until very recently.

those large, rough, marked hands, I held out over the Shabbat candles every Friday evening of my childhood in a gesture that I now understand was prayer of the most honest kind.

The prayer of a man who had no words adequate to what he had survived and what he still believed, who could only hold his hands out toward the light and let the gesture say what language could not.

What was he reaching toward? What was he asking for? I think he was asking for the same thing we are all asking for underneath every other question.

That the suffering meant something.

That the losses meant something.

That the darkness he had walked through had not been empty of God.

Had not been abandoned by the one in whom he had placed his life.

I understand now in a way I could not have articulated then what I believe those hands were pointing toward.

But that understanding came slowly or and at great cost and not without a night when everything I thought I knew was required to give way.

That night was coming.

I did not know it yet.

It was well past midnight when I finally settled into the chair.

The house had that particular quality of silence that arrives after everyone else is asleep.

Not an empty silence, but a full one occupied by the sound of your own breathing and the occasional creek of the building adjusting to the temperature and somewhere far below the audible, the persistent hum of a city that never entirely stops.

Miriam had been asleep for 2 hours.

I had lained in bed for a while, unable to quiet my mind, and had eventually done what I always did when the mind would not quiet.

Got up, went to the office, turned on the lamp over my desk, and sat down with the work.

But tonight, the work was different from what it usually was.

Tonight I had Isaiah 53 open in front of me.

My personal copy of the Hebrew Bible, not my annotated academic edition with its forest of notes in the margins, but the older one, the one I had owned since the early years of graduate school, whose margins held a different kind of notation, less systematic, more personal.

the book that had been in my hands through the whole of my professional life.

I want to be very precise about what I intended when I sat down.

I was preparing for a lecture series I had been asked to give at my synagogue on the suffering servant.

A series I had been developing for weeks, working from my commentary draft and my accumulated years of engagement with the text.

I I was reviewing the passage the way a surgeon reviews an anatomy before an operation, not because he doesn’t know it, but because the act of deliberate, unhurried attention before the moment of real engagement has value in itself.

Professional preparation, nothing more dramatic than that.

But something happened that night that I have spent 3 years trying to find adequate words for and I am still not sure I have found them.

What happened was not dramatic in the conventional sense of that word.

There was no lightning, no vision, no sudden emotional upheaval.

What happened was that a text I had read hundreds of times, a text I knew in the way that a musician knows a piece he has performed for decades, the way his fingers know the notes before his mind has consciously directed them.

Refused for the first time ought to behave the way my familiarity with it required it to behave.

It fought back, not against my skill or my knowledge, against my prior conclusion, against the invisible assumption I brought to every reading, which was that I already knew what this text said and was reading it to confirm what I knew.

I started, as I always did, at Isaiah 52:13, which is where the passage scholars call the fourth servant song actually begins.

Three verses of introduction before chapter 53 opens.

God’s announcement that his servant will act wisely, will prosper, will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.

Then the sharp nearly violent turn, the servant whose appearance was so marred, so altered by suffering that many were appalled at him, so altered that he was barely recognizable as human.

And then the astonishing reversal.

kings would shut their mouths before him because they would see something they had never been told and understand something they had never heard.

I had read these three verses hundreds of times.

I knew every word.

But that night, reading them slowly, something in the sequence struck me with a freshness that I had not expected and could not easily explain.

The structure of the passage is an arc of extremity.

Not a moderate arc, not a gentle movement from difficulty to resolution, but an arc of the most extreme contrasts imaginable.

The most disfigured and appalling suffering followed by the most complete and universal exaltation.

Humiliation so total it strips away recognition of humanity.

Vindication so complete that the most powerful people in the world are struck silent.

What kind of suffering does that to a person? What kind of event produces that specific combination of maximum humiliation and maximum vindication? And why are the kings silent? Not dismissive, not contemptuous, but silenced.

What would silence a king? I moved into chapter 53.

And here I want to take you with me through the reading slowly.

The way I move through it that night because I think the only way to understand what happened to me is to understand what the text actually says when you stop managing it and start reading it.

The chapter opens, as I mentioned earlier in this testimony, with a question, not a statement of certainty, not a proclamation, a question.

Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed.

The speakers are bewildered by their own report.

They are about to tell us something they themselves find astonishing.

Something about the servant that confounded every expectation they had of how God’s power and vindication were supposed to look.

Then the description of the servant himself.

No form or majesty that we should look at him.

Nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

Despised and rejected by people.

a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

People hid their faces from him.

In the standard rabbitic interpretation, the interpretation I had defended and taught, these descriptions are applied to Israel as a corporate body suffering among the nations through centuries of persecution and exile.

The nations despised Israel, rejected Israel, hid their faces from Israel’s suffering.

This is a coherent reading with real textual support.

And I want to be honest about that even now.

It is not a foolish interpretation.

It draws on genuine features of the passage.

But here is where the grammar begins to press back.

Because the we who speak about the servant, the we who confess that they despised him, that they hid their faces from him, that they esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.

Who are they? In the traditional reading, if the servant is Israel, then the we must be the nations of the world.

Finally coming to recognize and confess that Israel’s suffering was vicarious, that Israel bore something for the nations.

The nations are the speakers.

But then the Wii says this, “We all like sheep have gone astray.

Each of us has turned to our own way.

And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

And here something becomes difficult to resolve.

The language of straying sheep, of turning each to one’s own way, of iniquity requiring a bearer.

This is not the language Isaiah uses for the nations of the world.

It is consistently and repeatedly throughout Isaiah the language he uses for Israel.

When Isaiah speaks of straying and iniquity and the need for God’s intervention, it is Israel that strays.

Israel whose iniquity requires addressing.

So if the we who stray are Israel and the servant is Israel, then we have Israel bearing the iniquity of Israel.

The same group is simultaneously the suffering servant and the straying flock whose iniquity is laid on the servant.

The poem requires a single group to occupy two mutually exclusive positions within the same extended metaphor.

I had always handled this tension with careful qualification.

But that night alone, reading slowly, I I could hear how much work those qualifications were doing, how hard they were straining to hold the traditional reading together.

I moved forward.

He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth.

He was led like a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before its sheerers is silent.

So he did not open his mouth.

I have read this verse so many times that it had become nearly invisible to me.

The way the most familiar sentences of our lives can become transparent, present, but unseen.

That night it arrived with what I can only call its full weight.

The servant is silent, not just patient, not just enduring, actively, deliberately, completely silent before those who are leading him to his death.

The silence is not passivity.

The silence is something chosen, something that is itself part of the meaning of what is happening.

I’d pushed the thought away when it came.

The thought I was not ready to have yet.

I pushed it away deliberately and moved on.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

Yet who of his generation protested? for he was cut off from the land of the living.

For the transgression of my people he was punished.

The phrase cut off from the land of the living is not metaphorical in biblical Hebrew.

It is the language of death of someone whose life has ended not of someone who is suffering or in exile.

The servant dies.

He is not expelled or imprisoned or exiled.

He dies and then the burial.

He was assigned a grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death.

I stopped here for a long time, longer than I had stopped anywhere else.

Both.

A grave with the wicked and with the rich.

Not one or the other, both simultaneously.

The specificity of this detail had always been something I had handled carefully in my academic work.

too carefully.

I now began to understand.

The detail is not easily absorbed into a corporate metaphor.

The Jewish people collectively have not been assigned a single grave with both criminals and wealthy individuals simultaneously.

The image is too precise, too particular, too specific in its strange doubleness to function as collective metaphor without straining the language past what it can bear.

It reads like repotage.

It reads like someone describing an actual event.

An event that actually happened to an actual person.

A death that was classified with criminals and yet a burial that was provided by someone wealthy.

A specific historical datable locatable event.

And then the poem turns after the death after the grave vindication.

Not the corporate vindication of a nation restored from exile, the vindication of this individual servant specifically who has specifically died and will specifically see life again.

After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied.

By his knowledge, my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.

After death, life.

after the grave, seeing the light, and then the cosmic consequence.

Because this individual poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with transgressors, and bore the sin of many, because of all of this, he is given a portion among the great.

I closed the chapter.

I sat in the quiet of my office for a long time, not moving, not reaching for another book or another cup of coffee, just sitting with what I had read.

And I became aware.

I in that sitting of something I can only describe as a hairline fracture running through the foundation of a building I had been living in for 40 years.

It was not a collapse.

It was not a sudden ruin.

It was something more precise and more frightening than that.

The discovery that something I had believed to be solid was not in every place, as solid as I had believed.

Then I went to my bookshelf and pulled down the Talmudic texts I knew well.

I opened the Babylonian Talmud to trackate Sanhedrin to the passage I had cited in academic papers.

The passage where the rabbis discuss the name of the Messiah and one opinion offered is the lepous one of the school of rabbi citing Isaiah 53:4.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.

Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God.

the Messiah in this rabbitic discussion.

It is one who bears grief and carries sorrow in a way that looks to outside observers like punishment from God.

Exactly the dynamic described in Isaiah 53.

This is the Babylonian Talmud.

This is the central document of rabbitic Judaism.

This is not a Christian source.

I pulled down the commentary of Rabbi Mosha Elshik, a 16th century scholar writing in the Ottoman period before the modern era of Christian Jewish palemics had fully shaped Jewish exugesus into the form in which I had inherited it.

Elshake reads Isaiah 53 as referring to the King Messiah, not to the nation, to an individual messianic figure who suffers and who is rejected and who bears the sins of others.

Writing before the pressures of modern interfaith debate had fully solidified the collective interpretation as the only acceptable Jewish reading.

He follows an older interpretive tradition.

I had cited these sources before.

I want to be clear about that.

I had not hidden them or pretended they didn’t exist.

I had cited them as evidence of the diversity of preodern Jewish interpretation, noted them as minority opinions, and moved on to explain why the collective reading was the more textually defensible one.

I had done this professionally, responsibly, by the standards of my discipline.

But sitting alone in my office at 2 in the morning, with no audience to satisfy and no argument to win, reading these sources without the invisible but real pressure of prior conclusion, they felt different.

They felt heavier.

They felt like evidence I had been measuring on a scale that was not quite level.

I went to bed at nearly 4 in the morning.

I I lay on my back in the dark and tried to let my mind go still.

Miriam was breathing quietly.

Outside the city made its distant sounds.

The dark of the room was the ordinary dark of the room, the familiar dark of 30 years of sleeping in this house.

But I was not the same man who had got into bed the night before.

Something had come loose.

Some internal architecture that had seemed permanent had been shown to rest on foundations that in at least one place were less certain than I had understood.

And the place where it was less certain happened to be exactly the place that bore the most weight.

I did not pray that night.

I was not ready to pray.

But the question that arrived in the quiet of the room, not formed in words, but present the way await is present.

The way the first light before dawn is present before you can see it was something I had never allowed myself to genuinely ask.

Not in 40 years of reading the text.

Not in 40 years of scholarship and argument and publication.

Who is this person? Not what does this passage mean understood within its literary and historical context? Not how should this text be situated within the broader interpretive tradition, but simply who is the one this passage is describing? I had never asked that question before, not with my whole self, not without already knowing the answer I was going to arrive at.

The question stayed with me into sleep.

It was there when I woke up.

It has never entirely left.

There are stretches of time in a life that resist being turned into narrative.

They are too slow, too interior, and too full of contradiction and reversal to compress cleanly into story.

They don’t have the shape that stories require, the forward momentum, the clear sequence of cause and effect.

They are more like weather than plot, pervasive, atmospheric, present in every moment without being reducible to any single moment.

The months following that first night were like that.

I can tell you things that happened.

I can describe conversations and discoveries and specific evenings in my office.

But I cannot fully convey what those months felt like from the inside.

The particular quality of carrying something you cannot put down and cannot share.

of being engaged in the most significant intellectual and spiritual struggle of your life while simultaneously teaching classes, attending faculty meetings, having dinner, attending synagogue, lay and maintaining the full ordinary surface of a life that looked from the outside exactly as it always had.

What I can tell you is that I was not the same man I had been before that night.

And the gap between the man I had been and the man I was becoming was growing rather than narrowing.

And the gap was invisible to almost everyone around me.

I went back to Isaiah 53 obsessively, not every night, but often in the late hours when the house was quiet, with the specific compulsion of a person returning to a wound that won’t stop commanding attention.

Each time I tried to read fairly, I gave the traditional interpretation every advantage I could manage.

I was intimately familiar with its strongest form.

I had spent 30 years developing it, and I presented it to myself with as much force as I could summon.

And each time I pressed the text the same way I would press any other text on which a student was arguing an interpretation I thought needed more rigorous examination.

I applied to my own longheld position the same scrutiny I had applied to other scholars positions throughout my career.

It did not hold up the way I needed it to hold up.

Not because there was nothing to it.

There was but because it required in the places where it mattered most a level of exoggetical maneuvering that I would not have accepted from a student.

the pronouns, the specificity of the burial detail, the substitutionary logic of the servant suffering, not suffering alongside, but suffering instead of suffering so that others would not have to.

The vindication after death that was not merely metaphorical restoration, but something the text described as the servant himself seeing the light of life.

The more rigorously I examined the traditional reading, the more I felt the places where it strained.

And the more I felt those places, the more an alternative reading, one I had spent my career resisting, began to present itself not as missionary overreach, but as a genuine, textually defensible, historically rooted possibility that I had not been fair to.

I also during this period began working my way carefully through what the passage demanded in terms of timing.

This led me to spend several weeks with Daniel’s prophecy.

Chapter 9 of Daniel, the famous passage projecting a timeline from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem to the coming of the anointed one, the Messiah.

The mathematics of this passage have been disputed for centuries and I do not intend to rehearse all of that here.

What I will tell you is that when I work through the timeline with the same rigor I brought to any other chronological calculation in ancient neareastern history, the window it pointed toward ended somewhere in the first century of the common era before the destruction of the temple in 70 CE before any further possibility of fulfillment within the terms the text itself establish.

establishes because the text specifies that the anointed one would come and be cut off while the temple was still standing while the sacrificial system was still operative.

This meant something I had avoided the implication of my entire career.

If Daniel’s prophecy was genuine prophecy and meant what it said, the Messiah had to have come and been cut off, had to have died before 70 CE.

There was no later window.

The temple was gone.

The timeline had closed.

And if the Messiah had come before 70 CE, who was the most prominent Jewish figure of the first century, who had died in precisely the manner Isaiah 53 described, rejected by his own people, executed by the governing authorities, killed in a manner associated with criminals, buried in a wealthy man’s tomb, and whose followers subsequently claimed that he had been raised from the dead and exalted.

Exactly as Isaiah 53 projected.

I am an academic.

I am not prone to overstatement.

But I sat with this convergence.

Isaiah 53, Daniel 9, 1st century Jewish history for a very long time, and I could not make it point anywhere else.

My relationship with Miriam during this period had a quality I had not felt in our marriage before.

a sustained, gentle, unresolved tension that lived in the space between us without either of us naming it directly.

She knew something was wrong, or more precisely, that something significant was underway in me.

She is too perceptive for it to have been otherwise.

But she also trusted me enough and understood me well enough to know that this was not something that could be resolved by simply asking me to talk about it before I was ready.

We had one conversation about 4 months into this period that I think about often.

She had found me at my desk past 2:00 in the morning again and had stood in the doorway of the office in the particular way she had of making her presence known without intruding on it.

We talked not about the specific content of what I was wrestling with, but about the fact of the wrestling itself.

I told her I was working through something in the text that was more complicated than I had anticipated and that I needed time to think it through properly.

She sat with me for a while in the quiet of the office, not reading or working, but simply present in the way she had of offering her presence as a form of companionship that required nothing in return.

Before she went back to bed, she said something I have thought about many times since.

That she trusted me and that whatever I was working through, she believed I was working through it honestly and that she would still be there when I came out the other side.

I did not tell her what I was really working through.

The trust she expressed made that harder, not easier.

But it also anchored me.

The knowledge that she was there, that the foundation of my personal life was not in question, gave me enough stability to continue the interior wrestling without falling apart entirely.

My colleague Yoel, the secular historian, sensed something as well, though he could not have known what specifically.

We had coffee together most weeks, and over the course of several months he became progressively more watchful in our conversations, more attentive to whatever was beneath the surface of what I was saying.

One afternoon, after I had said something about the interpretive history of Isaiah 53, that was slightly more uncertain in tone than my usual declarations on the subject.

He looked at me in a way that was not quite a question but functioned as one.

What he said when I came close to articulating what I was actually thinking was a warning measured private.

The warning of a friend who understood the sociology of what I seemed to be approaching.

He was not speaking from faith.

He was speaking from decades of watching Jewish academics navigate the particular territories of communal expectation and professional consequence.

Don’t, he was saying in the specific way that people say don’t when they mean be very certain before you do.

I heard him.

I was not ready to answer him.

It was during this middle period that I made the decision to read the New Testament.

Not for the first time technically.

I had read portions of it over the years as an academic necessity.

I’m surveying the primary sources of the movement I was studying in its historical context.

But I had never read it the way I read it now.

I had never read it as a reader.

a person sitting with a document and receiving it rather than analyzing it for professional purposes.

I started with the passion narratives, the accounts of the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and burial in the four gospels.

I read them in Greek first, then in plain English translation.

I was looking with everything I had for evidence of retrospective construction, for the signs that these accounts had been shaped after the fact to fit the prophecy of Isaiah 53 rather than having independently recorded events that happened to correspond to it.

This is a legitimate historical question.

I approached it as a historian would.

What I found was more complicated than I expected.

And the silence before the accusers is in all four accounts with a consistency and detail that is difficult to attribute simply to the desire to match a prophecy.

The burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arythea, a wealthy member of the council, accounts for the rich in his death detail.

The crucifixion alongside two criminals accounts for the grave with the wicked.

The substitutionary logic of the death, one dying so that others need not, is not retrospectively imposed on the crucifixion narrative, but appears to be present in the accounts of what Jesus himself said about the meaning of his death well before the passion itself.

And then there was this, the accounts of the resurrection.

I want to handle this carefully because I am aware that it is the most contested element of the entire story and I have no interest in being less than rigorous here.

What I will say is that when I read the resurrection accounts as a historian asking the historical question of what best accounts for the evidence, the evidence was not as easily dismissed as I had always assumed it would be.

The accounts are diverse enough and consistent enough simultaneously to be interesting.

The transformation of the disciples from people hiding behind locked doors to people willing to die proclaiming the resurrection is not easily explained by a fabricated story.

People do not die for claims they know to be invented.

The conversion of Paul who had been actively persecuting followers of Jesus is not easily explained without some account of his Damascus road experience.

The conversion of James, Jesus’s brother, are who apparently had not believed in his brother’s messianic identity during Jesus’s ministry is most naturally explained by what James himself claimed that he had seen Jesus alive after the crucifixion.

None of this is proof in the mathematical sense.

I am not offering it as such.

I am telling you that when I read the evidence as a historian rather than as a defender of a predetermined conclusion, it was considerably more substantial than I had previously allowed myself to see.

There was one night during this period, perhaps five or 6 months in, when I reached a kind of internal exhaustion that I had not anticipated, not despair, not breakdown, but the particular depletion of a man who has been fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously for a very long time, and is running out of what is required to maintain the fight.

I sat at my desk very late.

I could not have told you the hour.

And I sat for a long time without reading, without opening any book, without doing anything at all.

Just sitting in the chair in the lamplight, aware of the silence.

And I prayed, not lurggically, not in Hebrew, not with any formal structure, just spoke haltingly into the quiet of the room.

I told the God I had believed in my whole life that I did not know what I was seeing.

I told him that something in the text I had devoted my life to was pressing on me in a way I could not manage or explain.

I told him I was afraid.

I asked him without using any particular name to show me clearly what was true.

It was not a dramatic prayer.

It was not answered that night with anything I could point to, but something about the act of praying it, of stopping the internal argument long enough to simply ask, shifted something in me.

The exhaustion was still there, but underneath it something else, not peace exactly, more like a willingness that had not been there before.

a small, cautious, terrifying willingness to follow the truth wherever it led, even into the territory I most feared.

That willingness is the thing that made the next night possible.

The meeting with Daniel took place about 10 days after I had written back to him.

I had written carefully, several drafts, I think, before I settled on the right words.

I told him I had read the article he sent.

I told him I had been working through some of the sources and had questions.

Questions I described as scholarly ones, which was true, though it was not the whole truth.

I I said I would value a conversation if he was willing.

His response came within hours and was warm and brief, and I noted, not triumphant.

There was nothing in it of a man who thought he had won something.

There was something more like relief, the relief of someone who had been waiting a long time for a door to open slightly.

We chose a cafe in a neighborhood where neither of us was likely to be recognized by the people who knew us.

I arrived first and sat with a coffee, noticing the particular quality of my own nervousness, which was unusual for me.

I had sat with challenging interlocutors my entire career, and had never been particularly nervous.

This was different, and I understood it was different, though I was not fully ready to articulate why.

I Daniel arrived and we greeted each other with the warmth of people who have genuine history together and the careful courtesy of people who understand that the conversation they are about to have is not ordinary.

We covered the preliminary ground how he was doing what he was working on how my own work was going and then I brought the conversation to where it needed to go.

I told him what had been happening.

I told him about the months of reading and wrestling, about the specific textual problems I had encountered, about the grammatical issues with the pronouns, about the burial detail, about the Daniel timeline.

I told him about the pre-Christian Jewish sources and my increasing discomfort with the way I had managed them in my published work.

I told him all of this in the careful a measured language of a scholar presenting his working notes because that is how I speak when I am most uncertain, most exposed, most in need of the protection of professional register.

He listened without interrupting.

He did not take notes.

He did not reach for a Bible or a list of counterarguments.

When I finished, he sat quietly for a moment, and then he said something that I could not have anticipated, and that I have thought about in the years since, more than almost anything else in this entire story.

He said he couldn’t outargue me.

He said it plainly and without embarrassment, that my knowledge of these texts was vastly greater than his, and that anything he could produce as an argument I could probably identify the weakness in before he had finished making it.

And then he said that the arguments had been important to him at the beginning of his own journey, had opened a door, had made faith seem intellectually possible, but that the thing that had ultimately changed him was not an argument.

It was an encounter.

He had asked into his own silence whether Jesus was real and whether he was present and whether the text of Isaiah was describing him.

And something had happened in response that he had no category for and no explanation of and that he had been living in the reality of ever since.

Those words I encountered him.

They were not a theological argument.

They were not a scholarly claim.

They were a report from someone who had been somewhere who had experienced something who was telling me what the experience had been or and the reason they stayed with me.

The reason I drove home with them, still in my mind, and sat with them through dinner, and could not put them down at bedtime, was that they pointed to something I had not allowed myself to consider in all my months of textual analysis.

The text was about a person, not about a concept, not about a theological category, not about an interpretive tradition, a person.

And persons unlike concepts can be encountered, can be present, can be addressed.

And if the text was right about who this person was, then the possibility existed.

The terrifying, thrilling, lifealtering possibility existed that I could simply ask.

Miriam was away when I got home.

She had gone to spend several days with our daughter and the grandchildren.

a visit planned weeks before and I had the house to myself in a way I had not had it for a long time.

I made dinner alone and ate alone and sat for a while afterward in the quiet of the kitchen.

Then I went to my office.

I turned on the lamp.

I sat down in my chair.

I opened the Hebrew Bible to Isaiah 52.

What I did differently that night, the essential thing, the thing that made that night different from every other night of reading in all the months of wrestling, was that I stopped protecting my conclusion.

I am going to say that again because I think it is the most important sentence in this entire testimony.

I stopped protecting my conclusion for 40 years.

Every time I had opened Isaiah 53, I had opened it as a man who already knew what it said and was reading it to confirm, to sharpen, to arm.

Even in the months of honest wrestling, I had still been coming to the text with a covert defensive agenda.

genuinely trying to be fair, yes, but still hoping that fairness would ultimately vindicate what I already believed.

Still wanting to be right.

That night, I laid it down.

I opened the text and I made an interior decision, not a dramatic one, not announced to anyone, not accompanied by any outward change in how I sat or what I did.

to be willing to be wrong, to receive what the text said without filtering it through what I needed it to say, to follow wherever it went, regardless of the cost.

I began at 52:13, raised, lifted up, highly exalted.

The same language the book of Isaiah uses only one other time in the throne room vision of chapter 6 where Isaiah sees God himself high and lifted up, the hem of his robe filling the temple.

I had noticed this before um academically.

I had noted the verbal parallel in my research files, but I had not let myself sit with its full implication, which was that this servant, this suffering, disfigured, rejected servant, is introduced by the text of Isaiah in language reserved for the divine.

The servant is being described in terms that in this specific book belong to God.

I moved into chapter 53, the man of sorrows, the one acquainted with grief, the one from whom people hid their faces, despised and not esteemed.

Though we who confess, surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering.

Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities.

The punishment that brought us peace was on him.

And by his wounds, we are healed.

I read this out loud in Hebrew.

And the sound of it in the quiet room, the particular music of the ancient language, the compressed weight of what it was saying arrived differently than it had ever arrived before.

Not because the words were different, because I was different, because the man reading them was no longer managing them.

He was pierced for our transgressions.

The Hebrew word is mechulal.

Pierced, wounded by an external agent, not ill or afflicted by nature.

Someone pierced him.

And the reason was our transgressions, not his, ours.

The punishment that brought us peace was on him.

This is not poetry describing parallel suffering.

This is logic describing substitution.

The punishment that was owed to us was placed on him.

Because it was placed on him, we have shalom, wholeness, peace, restoration.

This is not a difficult interpretive move.

It is what the text plainly says.

By his wounds, by the singular word chabra, the woundstripe, the mark of a specific act of violence, we are healed.

Not despite the wounds, by them.

The healing and the wounding are inseparable.

The wholeness comes from the place of the breaking.

I came to the silence before the accusers.

I came to the death, the burial with the wicked and the rich simultaneously.

the strange and specific doubleness of a detail that fit no corporate metaphor and read like a historical report.

And I came to the vindication after death.

I put the Bible down.

I sat in my chair in the lamplight in the quiet of my empty house, and I was still for a long time.

The city outside was making its distant nighttime sounds.

The lamp was making its small circle of light.

I the books around me were the books I had lived with my whole professional life.

And I asked it was not a polished prayer.

It was not theologically precise.

I did not have the vocabulary for it yet.

I didn’t know what vocabulary to use.

I spoke into the quiet and I said something that amounted to this.

If this passage is about you, if you are the one described here, if you are the one Isaiah saw, if you were the one who was pierced and crushed and silenced and killed and vindicated, then I need you to be real to me right now because I am out of arguments.

I have run out of the ability to argue my way around you.

And if you are real, I am asking you to make yourself known.

What happened next? I have described perhaps a dozen times in three years and each time I am aware that the words I have available are inadequate to what actually occurred.

There was no vision, no voice, no physical sensation of the dramatic kind.

What there was, and I am choosing every word, with the care of a man who has spent his life believing that words matter, was a presence, an arrival, a warmth that came into the room without a natural source, and that was not an emotion I generated, but something that arrived from outside myself, and with it a certainty, not the intellectual certainty of an argument one, Not the satisfaction of a conclusion reached after sustained analysis, but the certainty of recognition.

The certainty of a man who has been looking at a face in a crowd and suddenly realizes he knows who it is.

I knew in that moment that the one described in Isaiah 53 was alive.

Not historically alive.

Not alive in the sense that his influence persisted or his teachings endured, alive, present in this room, in this lamplight, at this desk with me, and that his name was Jesus.

I wept.

I am not a man who weeps readily.

The upbringing I described at the beginning of this testimony, the shadow of a father who had used up his tears on things that deserved them, had left me with a high threshold for open emotion.

But I wept that night.

Long, steady, unhurried tears that came from somewhere deeper than sadness.

They were not tears of loss, though there was grief in them.

grief for the years, for the arguments, for the students I had taught not to look at this text honestly, for all of it.

What they were more than anything else were tears of recognition, of something found on of a door opened that had been shut so long that I had stopped being aware I was standing in front of it.

At some point in the midst of this, I began to speak to him, not in Hebrew, not in the formal language of liturgy.

In ordinary words, the words of a man caught completely offguard by where he has ended up and who has no prepared remarks.

I told him I believed.

I told him the text had been telling the truth about him all along and that I had fought it for 40 years and was done fighting.

I told him I was sorry for the arguments, for the papers, for the certainty I had performed for congregations who trusted me.

I told him that I did not know what would come next, that I could see enough of the cost from where I was standing to know it was going to be significant, but that I was giving him whatever I had left, whatever remained of my career, my reputation, my remaining years, because there was no longer any honest alternative.

The prayer ended.

The room was quiet.

I sat for a while longer in the warmth that had not left, and I was aware, in the way you are aware of things that have become permanent rather than temporary, that the man who was sitting in this chair was not the same man who had sat down in it 2 hours before.

I called Daniel.

It was past midnight.

He answered on the second ring.

I could not find a sentence that held what had happened.

I said something I cannot now reconstruct exactly what that was enough for him to understand.

He began to cry.

I was still crying.

We were on the phone for several minutes, not saying much.

We inhabiting a silence that was full enough that words would have diminished it.

When Miriam came home, I told her everything.

I told her from the beginning, the email, the first night of reading, the months of private wrestling, the specific things I had found in the text, the Daniel timeline, the New Testament accounts, and finally the night alone in the office.

I told her slowly, clearly, with the same care I would take, explaining something significant to someone whose understanding I genuinely valued, because her understanding genuinely mattered to me more than any other person’s.

I watched her face as I talked.

She was completely still.

She asked no questions while I was speaking.

She simply received.

When I finished, the kitchen was quiet for a long time.

I could hear the refrigerator humming outside.

It was beginning to get light.

We had been talking through the night.

I realized her face held things I recognized and things I didn’t.

There was grief in it.

Real grief.

the grief of someone whose world has just been asked to reorganize itself around a fact she hadn’t chosen.

There was fear, the specific fear of a woman who understood, as I did, what our community would make of what I had just told her and what it would cost our family.

There was love, unchanging, settled, the love of four decades that was not going to be unmade by this, whatever it ultimately meant.

And there was something else, something harder to name, a quality of attention, of deep, careful listening, as though she was filing everything I had told her away in a place where she would continue to examine it.

She told me she needed time.

She told me she was frightened.

She told me she didn’t know what this meant for our life.

She did not tell me she was leaving.

She did not tell me she understood.

We sat at the kitchen table as the light came up with the Hebrew Bible lying open between us at Isaiah 53.

Her hands were near it, not touching it, near it.

That nearness, I understood, was everything.

3 years have passed since that night.

I am standing here, wherever you are watching or listening from.

As a man who has lived inside the consequences of that kitchen morning for three full years and who wants to be as honest with you about those consequences as I have tried to be about everything that came before.

The honesty of the aftermath matters as much as the honesty of the journey because anyone can tell you about a turning point.

The truth of whether the turning point was real shows up in what you live through afterward and whether it holds when everything around it is pulling at it, testing it, asking it to prove itself under conditions that are not comfortable.

It has held.

I want to say that first before I tell you what it cost, because I think you deserve to know the ending before I describe the road.

The cost came in layers and the first layer was professional.

I want to be careful here because I have no interest in overstating what happened institutionally and I have even less interest in positioning myself as a victim of persecution which would be both inaccurate and unbecoming.

What happened professionally was more subtle than persecution and in many ways harder to address because of that subtlety.

Yeah.

Before I had told anyone outside my family what had happened to me, before I had made any public statement, something in the texture of my professional life began to shift in ways that I could feel but not point to directly.

A colleague who had always been colleial became careful with me in the way that people become careful when they are uncertain of someone’s stability.

An invitation I had expected to receive was quietly given to someone else.

The review of a paper I submitted came back with a sharpness that was not quite the sharpness I knew from that journal’s editors.

These things were deniable individually.

Together they told me something.

The formal disclosure came about 4 months after that night.

I submitted a letter to my institution.

I will not reproduce its specific language or because it was a private professional communication.

But its substance was this, that my views on Isaiah 53 had undergone a fundamental revision, that this revision was connected to a personal theological journey, and that I had come to believe that Isaiah 53 pointed to Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfillment of the Hebrew prophetic tradition.

I told my department chair in person before the letter was submitted.

That conversation was long and difficult and conducted on both sides with the care of people who had genuine respect for each other and were navigating something that neither of them had any template for.

He was a decent man.

He handled it as decently as the situation permitted.

But his face when I finished telling him, I told me clearly that the professional landscape I was going to be navigating from that point forward had changed.

What followed was not a firing.

Tenure protects against that.

And I want to be accurate.

What followed was the institutional equivalent of being moved to the edge of a room.

still technically present, still officially a member of the faculty, but no longer centered.

Committees I had served on were reorganized in ways that left me out.

Graduate students who had expressed interest in working with me were redirected by advisors whose concern for those students professional futures I understood and did not resent.

My course offerings were adjusted.

The informal invitations to participate in the intellectual life of the department, the colloquia, the visiting speaker dinners are the departmental reading groups tapered off and then stopped.

I resigned before the end of the following academic year.

The book contract, the commentary on the servant songs that was to have been the capstone of my professional life, was dissolved by mutual agreement with the press.

I left behind a career of 30 years, a position I had loved, a community of scholars I had respected and learned from, and a professional identity that had been so central to how I understood myself that losing it was in some ways like losing a language I had been thinking in my whole adult life.

I want to sit with this for a moment because I don’t think it should be moved past too quickly.

What I lost professionally was real.

It was not a small thing.

I had given 30 years of serious honest.

I dedicated scholarly work to an institution and a discipline that I genuinely loved and the manner of my departure was not the manner I would have chosen.

The commentary will never be written, at least not in the form it was intended.

There are papers I will not publish, arguments I will not make in the venues where they would have had the most impact, conversations with colleagues that will not happen because the professional relationship that would have made them possible no longer exists.

I have grieved this.

I am still grieving it in the way that real losses are grieved, not continuously or devastatingly, but in recurring waves that arrive without scheduling, and that require each time a conscious returning to what I know to be true.

The community layer of the cost was in some ways harder than the professional one because it was more personal.

My rabbi called me for a meeting perhaps 3 weeks after my letter to the institution became known in the community as these things inevitably do.

He had known me for 30ome years he had married Miriam and me.

He had sat with me through the deaths of both my parents.

He had praised my teaching, valued my scholarship, trusted my voice in the congregation.

The meeting he called was not a meeting of pastoral care.

It was a boundary meeting, a conversation that both of us understood without needing to say so explicitly was about the terms under which I could continue to be part of the community.

I will not tell you the details of that conversation.

Some things that pass between people in moments of genuine shared grief belong to them and not to public testimony.

What I will tell you is that he was not cruel.

He was genuinely grieved.

The grief was real and unperformed and I shared it completely from the other side of the distance that had opened between us.

We were both grieving the same thing.

The loss of something that had mattered to both of us.

A relationship and a shared life that was not going to survive in the form it had taken.

I did not return to that synagogue after that meeting.

The community I had belonged to for 30 years.

The people who had known my children as children, who had sat at my table and whose tables I had sat at, who had celebrated and mourned with us through all the occasions that require the presence of people who know you.

That community was no longer mine to belong to in the way I had belonged.

This is not a loss that can be summarized.

It has to be lived.

I I have lived it.

The family dimension of the cost arrived in stages and is still in some respects ongoing.

Our son was the most difficult.

He is a man I love without reservation, a man whose own integrity and seriousness I respect as deeply as I respect anyone’s.

And his response to what I told him was not anger exactly, though there was anger in it.

It was more like the response of someone whose foundational map of the world has had a significant feature removed without his consent.

The father he had known, the father who had represented in some ways the intellectual and spiritual anchor of his own Jewish identity had become from his perspective someone different.

someone who had crossed a line that he had not expected his father capable of crossing.

We did not have proper conversations for the better part of a year.

Or we spoke practically briefly about family logistics and necessary matters.

But the real conversations, the conversations of fathers and sons who were in genuine contact with each other were not available to us during that period.

I did not push.

I wrote him one letter longhand that laid out what I had found and why I could not have found differently without being dishonest.

And that told him I loved him and was not going anywhere and that when he was ready to talk, I would be ready to listen.

I gave him the time he needed.

When we came back to real conversation slowly over many months through careful phone calls and eventually a visit that was one of the most important days of my recent life.

I did not try to convince him of anything theological.

I tried only to be his father fully and honestly let him see that the man he had known was still the man who was present.

that faith in Jesus had not turned me into someone unrecognizable.

He has not come to faith.

I do not expect him to, and I hold no pressure toward that end.

What we have now is a real relationship marked by what we have been through, honest about the distance that still exists on certain questions, but real.

He calls me every week.

We argue about other things the way fathers and sons argue, and those arguments are among the things I am most grateful for.

Our daughter surprised me more than I can say.

She had always been the less predictable of the two, the one who processed things inwardly before she expressed them, who waited until she understood something before she spoke about it.

She called me perhaps 2 weeks after I had told the children and and the questions she asked were not the questions of someone reacting.

They were the questions of someone who had been quietly thinking for a long time before she called.

She asked about specific verses.

She asked what the night in the office had actually been like, not for drama, but because she wanted to understand.

She asked how I was living differently as a result of what had happened to me.

She is on a journey of her own.

I will not say more than that because it is her story.

But I pray for her.

And then there is Miriam.

Miriam is the center of this story in a way that I hope has come through in everything I have shared.

Without her steadiness during those months of my private wrestling, I do not know if I would have had the stability required to follow the questions honestly.

Without her willingness to stay, to remain present in our marriage during the long uncertain period after I told her what had happened, I would have faced the professional and communal losses in a loneliness that might have broken something.

She was the anchor.

She was the constant.

She was, as she had always been, the most important human presence in my life.

She did not come to faith immediately.

I did not expect her to and I did not ask her to.

What I tried to do, the only thing I tried to do, because anything more intentional would have been a form of manipulation that our marriage did not deserve, was live honestly in front of her.

Pray where she could see me praying, not as a performance, but as a reality.

read the texts with the same care I had always brought to reading.

Be the man I had always tried to be, or and let her observe whether faith had changed that man in ways she recognized as genuine.

She began asking questions about nine or 10 months in.

Careful, specific questions, about textual details, about the historical evidence, about what I understood Jesus to have said and done and been.

I answered everything as carefully and honestly as I could.

I did not overstated certainty I did not have.

I did not hide the places where questions remained open for me.

I tried to share with her exactly what I had found and exactly how I had found it.

And then I let her carry it wherever she needed to carry it.

About 14 months after my own surrender, on a Tuesday afternoon in our living room, while I was reading in the next room, Miriam prayed.

She told me about it afterward, standing in the kitchen, and the telling was characteristically Miriam, quiet, precise, without drama, grounded in the specific reality of what had happened rather than in the performance of emotion.

She said she had found she could not not speak to him anymore.

That the accumulation of everything she had been reading and thinking and watching in me in the texts in her own private wrestling had reached a point where the only honest response was to address it directly to him to Jesus.

And that when she did something happened that she recognized as real.

I held her in the kitchen and we stood together in the afternoon light and I could not speak for a while.

There are some moments that deserve to be received in silence and that was one of them.

Now let me tell you about what I have found because the story is not only about what was lost and I would be doing you a disservice if I let it end there.

I have found in the three years since that night in my office a faith that is unlike anything I had before.

Not because it replaces the faith I grew up with, but because it completes it in ways I had not known it needed completing.

I am still a Jew.

This is important to me and I want to say it clearly.

My Jewishness is not something I set aside when I came to faith in Jesus.

It is, if anything, more alive in me than it has ever been.

Because I now understand the Hebrew prophets not as texts to be analyzed and interpreted, but as witnesses to someone I know.

When I read Isaiah, I am reading about a person I have met.

The shadow has found its substance.

The pointing has found its object, and the completion of that pointing has made the texts, including the texts I spent my life studying, more luminous than they ever were.

The peace I have is not the peace of having resolved every question.

I am a scholar.

I will always have questions.

There are things I do not understand about the nature of what happened to me, about the theology of the incarnation and the atonement, about the relationship between the faith I grew up with and the faith I have now come into.

I do not pretend otherwise.

What I have is something beneath those questions.

Something more fundamental, more settled, more resistant to disturbance than any intellectual position I have held.

A relationship with a person who is alive and present, and who has not left since the night I first spoke to him.

That relationship is not an abstraction.

It is not a feeling that comes and goes with my emotional weather.

It is a daily reality in prayer, in the reading of the texts, in the ordinary decisions of ordinary days.

It is in the most precise language I can find, a relationship with someone who knows me fully and has not withdrawn from what he knows.

I think about my father’s hands more than I ever have.

those large, rough, marked hands held out over the Shabbat candles every Friday evening, reaching toward a God who was real to him in the aftermath of everything that had tried to make God impossible.

My father and I would have disagreed about the content of what those hands were reaching toward.

That disagreement would have been painful, and I do not minimize it.

But I believe with the same conviction that I believe everything I have shared with you tonight that the God those hands were reaching toward is the one I found in my office at 2 in the morning.

That the God who sustained my father through the uncservivable is the same one who walked into human suffering and bore it and came out the other side taking us with him.

I believe I will tell my father this one day.

I believe I will see him and that when I do, I will have the chance to tell him that the God he held on to through everything was holding on to him all along.

and that his name, the full name of the one who was holding on, is the name that Isaiah saw 2 and a half thousand years ago, marred beyond recognition, and then raised and lifted up and highly exalted above every other name.

Let me end where I began with the text.

Audi not with argument, not with defense, just with reading.

In the Hebrew, Elohim Muavalanu.

And in English, surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering.

Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities.

The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray.

Each of us has turned to our own way.

And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

I have read these words 10,000 times.

I understand them finally are for the first time.

The shadow always pointed to the substance.

I just finally stopped protecting myself from what it was pointing to and let myself look.

My father survived the Holocaust holding the Torah.

I hold it still.

I just finally understand what and who it was always pointing to.

Thank you.