I recently received an email from a person, a Christian who has finally come to the fork in the road of his faith. He expressed to me his deep desire to get to the truth, to make a decision about which faith is true – is it Judaism, the faith of the Jewish people, or is it Christianity, the religion he has lived and breathed most of his life. He has been strongly leaning toward Judaism as being the world view with the keys to humanity’s purpose, meaning and its source of divine revelation. He asked me to give him my understanding as to why I consider Judaism to be truth.
Here’s my answer:
I am assuming that you don’t question G-d’s own existence. So, let’s start beyond that. I will be brief. Judaism is truth to me, because it’s the only faith that has revealed to the mankind the One Creator of the Universe, where as all other faiths before had a multiplicity of bizarre gods and idols made with human hands, worshiped their ancestors, animals, or rocks.
Judaism is truth to me, because G-d has preserved the Jewish people despite near constant persecution by the nations of the world and near-universal antisemitism.
Speaking of antisemitism – why have the Jews been hated so much throughout their long history, to the point that the greatest and bloodiest war humanity fought on this planet revolved around one madman’s quest to eliminate the Jewish people, specifically, from the face of the earth. And this considering the fact that Jews have contributed so much to humanity in virtually every human endeavor, just as G-d Himself predicted they will when he promised Abraham that “through you shall be blessed all the families of the earth and through your seed.” (Genesis 28:14)
Judaism is truth to me because it has influenced this world more than anything else, despite Jews constituting a tiny percentage of humanity. While some people are impressed with the numerical superiority of Christianity and Islam, they seem to forget that those two religions acknowledge, even if they distort or hate, Judaism and Jews as the very root of their belief systems. Indeed, Judaism will do very well without either Christianity or Islam, but neither one of those faiths would exist apart from Judaism – they are totally dependent on Jews and their history. If you remove Jews from the stories of those religions, they would collapse into a heap of useless rubble. [Which, by the way, helps explain why both of these religions have been and still very much are so antagonistic toward Judaism and its practitioners.]
Judaism is truth to me, because unlike either Islam or Christianity, its prophecies actually come to pass. (where’s as Jesus’ own prophecies have failed). The rebirth of Israel in 1948, at the very time when the existence of the Jews as a people was teetering on collapse due to wholesale murder of 1/3 of all of worlds Jews, and the subsequent regathering of the Jewish people after 2,000 years of painful exile and multiple spectacular defeats at the hands of the new nation of numerically and technologically superior Arab armies is one breathtaking example. Just as the G-d of the Jews has predicted:
Therefore say: ‘This is what the Sovereign L-rd says: I will gather you from the nations and bring you back from the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you back the land of Israel again.’ (Ezekiel 11:17)
“and I will bring my people Israel back from exile. “They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit.” (Amos 9:14)
There’s a lot more to say, if it weren’t for the lack of time.
As for why I think that Christianity is a bad choice for anyone, I’ve written extensively about this on my blog. You can start here.
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