It’s easy to make fun of my Jewish education. I went to Reform Sunday school, where I garnered awards for attendance and excelled at Hangman. When I was bar mitzvahed, I promptly stopped going, as did everyone I knew except one kid—whom we ridiculed. Even today, it frequently falls to my non-Jewish wife to instruct me in basic facts of the Jewish religion. (Mezuzahs, apparently, are to be hung at an angle). But for all I didn’t learn in Hebrew school, there was one thing that I definitely did.
That thing was that I could not believe in Jesus. This was a strange thing to learn because, for almost the entirety of my childhood, I did not know who Jesus was. Once I learned, the idea of “believing in” him seemed patently ridiculous. To believe that this person was, literally, the “Son of God?” No one I knew even believed in God! Now we were supposed to steel ourselves against the seductions of his son? But, though initially laughable, my school did a good job of emphasizing the seriousness of this threat.
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