How did this happen to me? I found myself working for a Christian telemarketing company in the Fall of 1987. I had just gone through a divorce, my ex and my three sons moved away, I was diagnosed with MS and my father had just died. I had lost my job with the Phoenix Jewish Federation where I had been a Pharisee like the Apostle Paul and loved persecuting Christians like Jews for Jesus. People say that I was drawn into Christianity because I needed some stability in my tumultuous life and therefore sought solace and restitution from Jesus, but that was not the way it happened. I was screwed up and messed up but things actually went from bad to worse as I found myself with these overbearing, moronic Christians.

They kept witnessing to me but I ridiculed them. Me, a Jewish Prof, a leader in the Jewish community, who had lectured about anti-Semitism and the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust, and they had the nerve to tell me that I was going to Hell? I yelled back that I would rather be in Hell with my parents than in heaven with the likes of them. Our boss put Jews for Jesus brochures in the lobby and I picked them all up and threw them away. When I was called into the boss's office for a reprimand, I had the chutzpah to shake my finger at him and tell him not to proselytize to my people. He should have fired me but he did not.

Well, this went on for a one solid year. Everyday, they would harass me and I would harangue them. Everyone called it the Gaza Strip because it was so loud and volatile. One guy who was a former Marine from Texas and who had been a numbers runner in bars before God got a hold of him told me that he was so frustrated with me that he had felt like throwing me off of the third floor balcony of our office. I had responded with a smirk, "Oh that's Christian!" Finally in the fall of 1988, I told them that if I saw the burning bush for myself I (i.e. saw God) I would believe. Nothing that they could do or say would suffice. They mocked me for believing that God would bother to reveal Himself to me, an overeducated Jewboy with a PhD which they said stood for 'piled higher and deeper'. I had answered, 'oh well, so then just leave me alone.'

Shortly later on October 2, 1988, I was sitting as usual in my cubicle and I saw a vision hovering in front of me like a cloud in a comic strip. It was Jesus on the cross. It was nighttime and there was lightening all around and his head was down. I looked all around me but no one else saw it. This is not an image that a nice Jewish boy would ever think of seeing and the night and lightening references were actual biblical but how could I have known? Then it disappeared and I figured maybe it was the booze from the night before. But the next day it was back, but this time it was daytime and Christ lifted his head up and light poured from his eyes. He broke His bonds and began walking all over the Earth with that light beaming from His eyes. I did not know then that Jesus said that He was the light of the world. I was undergoing a radical paradigm shift. That same night I had a dream that I would have to crucified for all of my friends to live. I had anticipated the nails through my hands and the flogging on my back, though it never actually happened. Suddenly, I knew what Christ had done for me. I awoke next to my roommate girlfriend all the while looking at my hands. The next morning at work I turned my life over to Christ. I knew that I knew. I had undergone a radical paradigm shift and have never looked back.