In my freshman year of high school my friend Karen, who wasn’t Jewish, watched her parents go through a bitter divorce. She was devastated at first. But I began to notice some differences in Karen. She seemed peaceful—even joyful. I saw that she was carrying a Bible with her schoolbooks and reading it between classes. I asked her what was going on. “Well, now I am a Christian!” I didn’t get it.

I wasn’t looking for Jesus or God or anything ontological. I kept my nose to the grindstone. My goal in life was nothing big: I wanted to earn a good living and be able to afford a middle-class lifestyle. But even if I wasn’t looking for Jesus, He was looking for me.

When I started college and was among people of other cultures, races and religions for the first time, I realized that I was really not so different from them. At age twenty, I married an Orthodox Jewish man. As time went on, I realized that even though I believed in God, I felt very distant from my Creator. Deep down, I knew there was something missing in my life.

One day I told my wife it was ridiculous to believe that God would actually judge people, or that we needed a savior. That night, I dreamed that my favorite radio talk show host—whom I greatly respected—told me, “Oded, read the story of Lot’s wife in the Bible.” When I awoke, I had no idea what it meant, but when I read the passage, it made perfect sense. I saw that God is serious about sin, and about faith and obedience. To this day, my wife and I remember how God loves me so much, He was willing to come to me in a dream disguised as a talk show host to get me to listen!

The most perfect demonstration of God’s love throughout all of history is the offering of the Messiah. So my father read the story, and for the most part he accepted that Jesus was a Jew and that there was good reason for me to be drawn to him. Then he got to the place where it says, “…forgive us as we forgive those who trespass against us.” He closed the book and said, “I can’t do this, I can’t.” He looked at me and said, “I would rather go to hell, knowing I could take the Nazis with me, than forgive them.” I said, “Dad, they still win that way.” He said, “I can’t.”

I was attending high school at the School of Performing Arts at the time I made the trip to see him. It was very intense work, and I was looking forward to spring break. Since Steve wasn’t coming home for Passover, I would go to him. And now that I knew he was having Passover with Jesus-believing friends, so would I. I kept reminding myself that Jesus is simply not for the Jews!

When I was 14 my parents split up, and my life began to go “downhill.” To make a long story short, when I was in my 20s I spent a year in prison, and afterward began attending 12-step programs to break the bad behaviors that had landed me there. The 12-step programs talked about a “higher power” which I recognized as a candy-coated way for saying God, or for the Christians, Jesus. As a Jew, I never gave much thought to Jesus. Yet I had a strong urge to live a spiritual life. Many people recognized that and gave me books to read and study. Unknown to me, one such friend passed my name along to Jews for Jesus.

On Sunday mornings I went to religious school. My classmates came from various schools in San Jose, so it was fun getting to know kids outside of my immediate social circle. In public school we were always the outsiders—the ones who didn’t celebrate Christmas or Easter. But at Hebrew School my friends and I were a community.

I guess that’s why I had little patience for the Christians I was about to meet. Mostly out of curiosity and through the invitation of a new friend, I went to a Christian meeting. I remember being amused that everyone there seemed to project that same euphoric glow. “Didn’t they know what the real world was like? Didn’t they know that there were kids up in Harlem that were being bitten by rats? Didn’t they know that it was people, not prayers, that made a difference?”

In my first semester at the University of Illinois I wound up writing a research paper on why the Jews at the time of Jesus did not believe he was the messiah (and this was for a Jewish professor). I had to examine those passages of the Bible that our rabbis had said spoke of the Messiah. As I read books by Jewish, Christian, and secular authors — all who attempted to explain these passages — my questions seemed to multiply; and so I met with two rabbis and two Christian ministers in town to hear both sides. They each tried to be helpful in their own way.

As a young boy I did not really understand the Holocaust. I just knew Hitler killed my grandparents. I knew that we were Jewish, and that my father had been beaten up when he was my age just because he was Jewish, even by some of his teachers. I used to dream of being an underground hero who would rescue everyone should the Holocaust happen again.

For one and a half years, Yoel and Adel attempted to live a “religious” life. Despite their best efforts, they were disappointed. “I felt I hadn’t found what I was looking for,” says Adel. “Something was wrong. I thought that if I could find a combination of New Age and Judaism, my search would be over.