I was raised traditionally Jewish. We celebrated shabbat and lit candles every friday night and had a big shabbos meal. We celebrated the holidays and I had a bat mitzvah.

In college I continued to be connected to the Jewish community and attended Hillel events on campus. I dated a Jewish guy, got good grades, worked part-time, volunteered at the Jewish Home for the Aged. Basically my life was pretty normal.

One year I became friends with Helen*, a nice girl from the suburbs of San Francisco who had become a Christian while in high school. No one in her family was a believer and she had the fevor common among baby Christians.

Helen spent hours telling me about the New Testament. I began to read the copy she gave me and attend a Campus Crusade bible study. She and the woman who led the Bible Study argued that Jesus was the Messiah, that he fulfilled all of the old testament prophecies concerning the messiah who was to come, and that I had to believe in him and believe that his death on the cross fulfilled all the rules to make sacrifices in the Temple that are outlawed in the Torah.

I went to my rabbi for answers but he was as stymied as I was. His response to my questions was "Jews don't believe in Jesus. This is a completely different faith system. You can't be Jewish and believe this; if you believe this you're converting to another religion and praying to Jesus is idol worship and that's a sin."

But eventually I became convinced that even if I gave up my Jewishness it would be worth it because I would have eternal life.

Needless to say, I prayed the prayer.

Shortly afterwards I met Tom* a staff missionary with Jews for Jesus. He began to call me on the phone occassionally and eventually Tom asked if I would come serve with the ministry of Jews for Jesus, joining in their mission to "make the messiahship of Y'shua an unavoidable issue to our Jewish people worldwide."

While working with Jews for Jesus I experienced some of the most "unchristian" behaivor possible. While I don't believe the ministry is a cult, as some in the Jewish community would argue, I do think that it's an abusive organization. I was yelled at for being 30 seconds late to a meeting, had a stack of postcards thrown at me, and was belittled and humiliated on a regular basis.

At one point the executive director of Jews for Jesus asked me explicit questions about my sexual experiences and thoughts -- even though I am a woman and he's a much older man (a married man no less!).

My final low point was on the summer witnessing campaign in New York City. I was handing out broadsides (tracts) in the subway, getting spit on by obnoxious orthodox Jewish teenagers and ignored by everyone else, when my team leader came up to check on me. I had just backed up to the wall and set my tract bag down so that I could have a drink of water. Susan screamed at me that I was wasting time and that if I wanted to be a real missionary this wasn't the way to do it. I was given an extra sortie (two and a half hours of passing out tracts, added to my schedule of four sorties a day already)as punishment for not meeting goals.

I felt like saying "screw you" and walking out then and there. But instead I stuck with it and finished the campaign.

The fall I returned to school and said I would never had anything to do with Jews for Jesus again. But the JFJ staff wouldn't leave me alone. Tom kept calling me and saying I had to apologize to Susan because I complained about her to the Campaign Leader. When I refused Tom said I was in sin and contacted the pastor of my Southern Baptist church and he agreed that I had to apologize!

I left the church and went church hopping for a few weeks. Finally I ended up in a messianic congregation. While there several members left and converted to orthodox Judaism. They were all real converts, meaning they were gentiles before. I didn't really want to be orthodox but I began to miss a lot of the parts of being Jewish that I had enjoyed growing up.

I began to attend events sponsored by YAD, the young adult division of the Jewish Federation. They were mostly social or political events but I found I really liked being around lots of normal jewish people again.

Eventually I decided to contact a rabbi and ask him how I could be part of the community and still believe in Jesus. To his credit the rabbi didn't just hang up on me. Instead he invited me for shabbos and began to build a relationship with me. We talked about a lot of stuff and learned the torah portion of the week together every thursday at a local starbucks. But we never talked about Jesus.

After a year I told him I wanted to know why he didn't believe in Jesus as the Messiah. He began by explaining the Jewish concept of a messiah that is a man, not God, who will bring world peace. And then he challenged me to take a look a messianic prophecies suposedly fulfilled by Jesus and read them in the original Hebrew.

This wasn't easy because my Hebrew was pretty bad. I couldn't even read without vowels even though I'm much more fluent today. I got out a dictionary, my NIV, a JPS version of the Tanakh and a big stack of paper. I translated each verse on my list of 116 prophecies fulfilled by Jesus. In the end I was totally convienced that Jesus was not the mesiah.

It appeared that the Chrisitan version of the bible had mistanslated words and phrases. One of the most glaring and obvious mistranslations was of Psalm 2:12. I found this article which explains it better than I can:

"The Jewish rendering of Psalms 2:12 states: "Do homage in purity [nash-ku bar], lest He be angry, and you perish in the way. . . ." The Christian translation of the Hebrew phrase nash-ku bar is "kiss the son."

"The Christian translation is based on a misinterpretation. The meaning of the Hebrew word bar is "pure" or "clear." Only in Aramaic does it have the meaning of "son." However, in Aramaic, bar is used only as a construct "son of" (Proverbs 31:2; Ezra 5:1-2, 6:14), whereas the absolute form of "son" in Aramaic (which would have to be used in verse 12) is ber'a. Thus, according to the Christian conception, the verse should have read nash-ku ber'a, "kiss the son," not nash-ku bar, "kiss the son of." Even though "son" could refer to David in verse 12, it is not the proper translation.

"There is no compelling reason to employ an Aramaism in view of the use of the Hebrew noun bayn, "son," in verse 7. The phrase is best rendered as, "do homage in purity," because kissing is generally an expression of homage, as found, for example, in 1 Samuel 10:1: "Then Samuel took the vial of oil, and poured it upon his head, and kissed him." Bar, meaning "purity," occurs in the phrase "pure in heart" (Psalms 24:4, 73:1).

"The intention implied in verse 12 is: with sincerity of heart, acknowledge me, David, as God's anointed, and thereby avoid incurring God's anger. Thus the Hebrew phrase nash- ku bar simply means "do homage in purity," and superimposing any other interpretation will distort the meaning of this psalm.

So basically after a long, drawn out process I was convienced that the faith I had ascribed to was no longer true. I stopped going to the messianic congregation and took a breather from religion for a while. Today I'm just me. Just Jewish, doing some mitzvot, learning every week with Partners in Torah, volunteering at a Jewish food bank, and celebrating shabbat with friends a couple times a month.

It might sound lame, not to be so involved in an organized religon, but this is more "me" anyway. If I pray now it's because I want to, not because I have to. If I feel like doing something religious or spiritual I have a ton of options to choose from, like going to a torah discussion, studying Hebrew with a friend, having coffee and a chat with one of my orthodox friends, reading a book, going for a walk in the woods, celebrating a holiday (there are lots of holidays in judaism). The key is that if I do something now, it's because I want to and I'm moved to, not because I'm being forced, shamed or manipulated.

(*name changed)

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