BETRAYED!
How do you feel when you’re successful, fifty and
Jewish, and your 21-year old daughter tells your she
believes in Jesus? A review of Stan Telchin’s
international best seller Betrayed.
When Judith, a 21 year-old student at
Boston University, came to believe in Jesus as the Messiah
of Israel, the Son of God and her personal Saviour, for her
family this was nothing less than a betrayal of her Jewish
heritage. Her grandparents, immigrants from Russia and
pious Orthodox Jews, had suffered at the hands of
"Christians" in the pogroms before escaping to the "free
world" of the USA.
"Jews
just don’t believe in Jesus ..."
To her parents, Stan and Ethel Telchin,
their daughter’s acceptance of Christianity not only
appeared to be a betrayal of her family, but also of her
Jewish people and its religious tradition. "But Judy,
you’re Jewish ... Jews just don’t believe in
Jesus. How can you be Jewish and believe in Jesus?
It’s impossible!" (p.22). However, for her parents
Judith remained a child whom they could not disown because
they loved her and they knew that she loved and respected
them. How could their daughter’s new faith fit into
the context of a Jewish family?
That became a question to which Judith’s father
believed he had to find the answer. For that reason he took
his daughter’s challenge seriously: "Look Dad, you
have just got to find out more about this. You don’t
have to believe what I believe or believe me, but
you’re an intelligent man. Read the Bible for
yourself and find out whether it’s true or not. All
of you do it. It’s either true or it’s false.
If He isn’t the Messiah you’ll know it. And if
He is, you’ll know it. But read the Bible for
yourselves and come to your own conclusions"
(p.22).
Looking
for answers
Stan began to read the Bible with the
intention of finding enough arguments to win his daughter
back to the traditional faith of their people. However,
things took an unexpected course when he eventually reached
the New Testament accounts of the life of Jesus. In
Betrayed
he records, "I was stunned
because I ... realised how little I knew about this man.
And yet He had come, he said, to help the Jewish people"
(p.36).
"After reading and analysing the four gospels in the New
Testament, I worked through my notes and came up with five
basic questions, I felt had to be resolved.
• Do I
believe that God really exists?
• Do I believe that the Jewish Bible
(The Tanakh) is the divinely inspired word of
God?
• Does this Bible prophesy about a
coming Messiah?
• Is Jesus the
Messiah?
• If he is, what does that do to
me?
"For in my mind and heart I had come to
one inescapable conclusion. Finding the answers to these
questions was the most important work of my life." (p.47).
"What do
I believe?"
Beyond this, Stan Telchin was confronted
with the serious question, What do I actually believe?
Answering honestly led him to
consider anew the faith of his people, his family, and the
history of Israel from the call of Abraham to the present,
in which God’s covenant with the Jewish people is the
driving force. "A thought suddenly rammed into my mind. If
a covenant between two parties usually called for a
‘cutting’ between them, and God had asked His
people to be circumcised as their ‘shedding of
blood’, then what was the ‘cutting’ on
God’s side?
"The image of Jesus being pierced and bleeding ... swam
before my eyes. I tried to set it aside. But it
wouldn’t go away" (p.74).
From here the reader follows with great suspense the path
which leads Stan Telchin to the conviction that Jesus is
the Messiah of Israel. At the end of his journey he not
only finds Judith again, but also her sister Ann and his
wife Ethel who, through their own independent study, have
come to believe in Jesus.
The big
issue
The final chapters concern themselves
with the question of Jewish identity and faith in Jesus.
The following quote is noteworthy:
"How do I explain the last 2,000 years? I cannot. But I
know this: the real issue is not the secular history of
this period. Nor is it the ‘Jewishness’ of
those who believe. The real issue is Jesus. Is He or is He
not God’s anointed? Is He who He says He is? Is He or
is He not the Messiah?
"God is! The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is. The
Messiah is. Jesus is the Messiah. Oh, the freedom that
wells up within me. I need not dance to the old drumbeats
of ‘custom’ or of ‘tradition’, or
of ‘old hatred’ or the ‘fear’. My
God reigns! And in Him I live and move and have my being
... This is the good news that awaits all who seek to find
and know God!" (p.119).
Review by Alfred Burchartz