As a schoolgirl, who was growing up attending a Reform synagogue, my favourite hymn we sang in school assembly was My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. I was totally ignorant of the meaning, particularly the part about the Lord trampling down the grapes of wrath. I did not have any Christian friends at school, with my impression of Christianity taken from a Church of England boarding school, Christ’s Hospital, Hertford, which I attended for just over a year when I was 11. We had to go to chapel each weekday and on Sundays. I can-not recall ever hearing or being challenged by the gospel of salvation. Subsequently, in my teenage mind, Christianity had to be dull, boring and grey! However, some aspects of the faith jarred with this impression. In my A-level English Literature course, we studied the poem “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats. Our teacher told us that Christians believe Jesus will come again. I was astounded that the very people I assumed had such an insipid faith would be audacious enough to believe this! Additionally, I had the deepest of respect for Christians brave enough to go off to far-away lands as missionaries. Finally, I loved white church weddings which I saw on television! Immediately after completing my A levels, during the summer break, I had an intense desire to find God. I looked into Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism and found them too complex to get my head around. I had a strong feeling that if God was knowable, then He would make it straightforward for us to understand the path to Him.
I spent much of my gap year in Israel as part of a Jewish young persons’ programme based in Kibbutz Galed. This is a kibbutz on the Menashe Heights, which is a range running south-east from Mount Carmel parallel to the Jezreel Valley. It was only eight miles or so from Megiddo. I knew that the postal district was Megiddo, and like with the hymn at school, I had no idea of the eschatological significance. The scheme was called Shnat Sherut, meaning a year of service. The kibbutz had been founded in 1945 by German Zionists. The programme included working on the kibbutz and being taught the rudiments of the Hebrew language. The intention of those who ran the programme was to provide the youthful participants with a life-long connection to the Land.
As I stood ironing in the vast kibbutz laundry complex back in 1975, the ladies working around me were chattering away in German. I had never paid attention in German lessons at school, but if I had, perhaps I would have learned something of their story and how they arrived in Israel following the war. One of the first people I recall meeting out in the kibbutz pastures was a very cultured older German kibbutznik. He was interested to discover my name and where I was from. I told him my name was Rosamund, and, as we shook hands, he said Ah, Schubert! Being ignorant of the world of classical music, I thought that he was telling me that his name was Schubert, and it was some time before I realised that he was referring to the composer of the Rosamunde Overture!
Not all the members of the kibbutz were of German origin. I remember the head chef, who had terrible eyesight and thick glasses because, during the Holocaust, he had to be hidden in a cupboard in the Netherlands. Then there was Khava, the lady in charge of kitting out the volunteers. Khava greatly impressed me as she spoke many languages, including Hebrew, Swedish, Danish, and English. Her story was that, as a girl, she was part of the Jewish group smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Denmark to neutral Sweden. I also recall a flamboyant Spanish-speaking Kibbutznik working in the kitchen stirring delicious ratatouille in a huge open pot with one hand, and smoking her cigarette with the other. No one seemed too bothered where the ash fell! Back home, my friends did not generally take their Jewishness seriously. However, in Israel, among the other volunteers, for the first time I rubbed shoulders with fellow Jewish young people who let their faith affect their thinking and living, and they were more Orthodox in their outlook.
I returned from Israel with a love of the language and a determination to continue my search for God through my Jewishness. I went up a day late for my first term of university, as I decided for once to attend my home synagogue and fast on the Day of Atonement. The people in the synagogue were kind to one another about the challenge of fasting, but there was no talk nor sense of God being there. I was so disap-pointed not to find God on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
The following day when I arrived at university, I knocked on my neighbour’s door in the hall of residence and sensed from looking around her room that she believed the Bible. I had the impression of Bibles, hymn books and even a Bible puzzle book. I had searched for God through Eastern religions and then through my Jewishness and wondered what kind of faith my neighbour had. So, I asked her if she was religious and the reply was that she would not say she was religious, but that she was a Christian. I then asked her what she believed. She told me that one day I would have to stand before God and give an account of everything I had ever done. I was absolutely stunned and felt convicted deep inside that I would not be able to argue my way out of this judgement as I used to attempt with my parents. As we spoke over the days, she challenged me to read the Old Testament for myself. What I did not know at the time was that this faithful young woman had spent the summer vacation reading through the Old Testament and praying for the person she would be living next door to at university!
I was jealous that my new friend knew the Jewish Scriptures so much better than I did! I was deeply struck in my readings by the verses which predicted the regathering of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, because I had so recently been there among Jews from many nations. Another verse that really hit home to me was Isaiah 29:13, which says “Because this people draw near with their words and honor Me with their lip service, but they remove their hearts far from Me and their reverence for Me consists of tradition learned by rote.” This struck me deeply as being exactly what I had just observed in the synagogue for myself.
I was fascinated by prophetic passages as they related to the Messiah such as Isaiah 53:5, Jeremiah 31:31-34, Micah 5:2 and Zechariah 13:1. My friend passed on to me a Bible study presenting the Gospel using entirely Old Testament verses, and I could see that there was not a soul who did not sin, and I read about God providing a fountain for sin and uncleanness. When I finally took the plunge and opened the first book of the New Testament and started to read the genealogy of the Lord Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, I just knew that this New Covenant was for Jewish people. A little later, I read in the book of Romans that a true Jew was one whose heart was circumcised. It made sense to me. My friend invited me to attend All Souls, Langham Place in December 1976. She was very struck by the appropriateness of the hymn that was sung that day, O Come, O Come Emmanuel. I prayed there to receive the Lord Jesus as my personal Saviour. You may find the lyrics of that Advent hymn particularly moving in light of the subject matter of this book. Soon after praying, I had these words ringing in my ears, which I had not realised that I knew: Because you have done this thing, and not withheld your son, your only son. Whilst I did not completely understand its meaning at the time, it brought to mind Abraham sacrificing Isaac, a wonderful bridge between my Jewish heritage and my subsequent trust in the Messiah of Israel....
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Scripture quotations taken from the NASB © The Lockman Foundation. www.lockman.org