As a Jewish oncologist from New York City, I must have stood out a bit in Arkansas hospitals in the late ’70s. Little Rock was a very Christian city in those days. Many people believed in God and went to church. But I was agnostic and didn’t always go to synagogue.

Maybe my Christian patients could sense this about me, because many of them would try to tell me about Jesus! I distinctly remember one woman with terminal breast cancer. She was in her early thirties with a husband and a young child, yet she seemed more concerned about my spiritual welfare than the fact that she was dying. She saw my separation from God as a greater tragedy than her own illness. She trusted in this Jesus, then and for eternity. She seemed confident about her future and genuinely concerned about mine.

While that touched me deeply, I would always explain that I was Jewish and that Jews didn’t believe in Jesus.

It turned out that the new head nurse of the oncology unit in one of my main hospitals was also a Christian. I later learned that she had specifically taken that job because she felt that God wanted her to tell me—a Jew—about Jesus. I was surrounded!

One evening, our 11-year-old, Jennifer, mentioned that her friend Allison had begun attending church with her family. I knew Allison’s father. He was a physician, and he was Jewish.

I was outraged! From my perspective, this man had turned his back on Judaism. I immediately called to confront Dr. Barg. I had no difficulty finding words for this discussion. Didn’t he understand that as Jews, we were obligated to resist Christians? Didn’t he see that we Jews had no business going to churches where we would be swallowed up, assimilated—no longer Jewish?

Dr. Barg kindly told me that he had deepened his Jewish identity in the God of Israel at this church. He said that for the first time, he was truly proud and excited to be Jewish.

I was shocked but intrigued. I knew that when Dr. Barg married his Gentile wife, she went through Jewish religious training, participated in mikvah (ritual purification), and did her best to keep a kosher home. After all that, he had to go to church to understand what being Jewish was all about?

Yet my curiosity outweighed my anger. Before the end of the call, I found myself asking him if we could attend church with him the following day.

My sudden curiosity surprised even me. But what Dr. Barg was describing was something I had, in a way, been trying to find for a long time.

A Sort of Search

While I was growing up in New York City, my parents were not religious in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, when the High Holy Days came around, we donned new suits, new shoes, and walked the mile or so to the local Conservative synagogue. We didn’t go because we were religious; we went because we were Jewish.

When I was 12, I started preparing for my bar mitzvah. My parents hired a tutor to help me memorize my haftarah portion (a teaching on the Scriptures that each student gives at his bar mitzvah ceremony). They arranged the event at a synagogue that I had never been to before and haven’t visited since. Though I didn’t understand the words, I knew how to pronounce them well enough to sing in Hebrew for 40 minutes. Afterwards, I couldn’t understand why people were so proud of me. Didn’t anyone care that I didn’t know the meaning? I only understood that I was Jewish, and I was proud of that.

I didn’t think much about God or pray until I was 16, when my uncle became seriously ill. I asked God to let him live—but he died soon after. It struck me as selfish that the only time I ever spoke to God was to ask for something. I didn’t know who God was or even if God was. It seemed hypocritical and silly to expect an answer. So, I gave up on talking to God.

I eventually went to medical school, married a wonderful (and agnostic) Jewish girl named Marilyn, and started a successful career in oncology. As my career progressed, the question of suffering distressed me. The more I saw, the less I believed in God. The same profession that enabled me to save lives forced me to watch others slip away. The work that enabled me to provide so well for my family was a constant reminder of those for whom I could do nothing.

According to Reform Judaism, death ended our existence. There was no heaven, no hell, no judgment. I began to wonder about the meaning of life, and I especially wondered why it was supposed to be such a blessing to be born Jewish. What could it mean if nothing awaited us beyond the pain and persecution we endured simply for being Jews?

Eventually, I followed a career opportunity and moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. Marilyn and I wondered how we would fare in a city that only had 1,200 Jews at most. But we soon felt accepted in our new social circle; our success story seemed complete. The hard work had paid off. So why did we keep asking each other, “Is this all there is?” We couldn’t explain why we weren’t completely happy, or what could possibly be missing. We only knew we were restless without whatever “it” was.

Our friends seemed to think that they would “get happy” by having more fun. They invited us to join them drinking, disco dancing, etc. But after several months, we tired of the distractions and felt emptier than ever.

That’s when it occurred to us to try something “spiritual.” We tried going back to our Jewish roots, reasoning we might be missing a sense of identity and belonging to our own people. Marilyn threw herself into volunteer work with the Jewish community, and we joined the Reform temple. But these activities were no more meaningful to me as an adult than they had been as a child. I didn’t know who or what God was, and my doubt occasionally gave way to resentment.

If God existed, I was angry with him. I had seen too much pain in my work. I felt elated over each life we saved, but that quickly folded into depression as I watched other patients suffer and die. Exhausted and drained, I was furious with God for allowing cancer to inflict so much suffering and death.

The Only Jews in Church

All of that was in the back of my mind when I had that phone call with Dr. Barg and invited myself to church with him. He was more than happy to have us join him. “You better be there!” I warned him. “Don’t you dare get there late, because I do not intend for us to be the only Jews in church.”

Deep down I suspected that church somehow made Christians dislike Jews.

I remember that Sunday morning in October 1980 vividly. I remember my discomfort as I walked into the service. It was a new church, and they were meeting in a school gymnasium, so it wasn’t as “churchy” as I had expected. Dr. Barg was good to his word, and we quickly found each other. As impressed as I’d been with the Christians I’d met at work, I suppose deep down I suspected that church somehow made Christians dislike Jews.

I was startled at the beginning of the service to hear the words, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” What was the Shema, the holiest of Jewish prayers, doing in a Christian church? When the minister began his sermon, I was even more startled. His text was Psalm 73, which posed the question of why evil seems to triumph over good. If it does, then why bother to keep God’s laws and his ways?

My heart was pounding. How did he know that I wrestled with those very questions? My attention was riveted as the pastor spoke about the seeming paradox. He said that God sees everything from an eternal perspective, while we see everything from an immediate viewpoint. He said that those who believe God and put their faith in him will enjoy him for eternity. Those who don’t care for God may enjoy whatever they amass for themselves now but will spend eternity without God.

I walked into that church an agnostic/atheist/skeptic and left knowing that God was real and worthy to be worshiped. I cannot explain how that happened during one church service. It could only have been supernatural.

It was as though a light had been switched on! I knew that God was exactly what Marilyn and I had been missing. Not religion—but God. Marilyn knew it too. We didn’t want to be without him any longer, in this life or in the life to come. There was no turning back. I had to discover who God was and how I could have him in my life. I wanted to know God and was determined to follow him no matter where he took me. It would just be so much easier if I didn’t have to become a Christian. I wanted desperately to discover that the God I now sought could somehow be found in mainstream Judaism.

After church we spent several hours with our Jewish-Christian friends, and they told us how the Jewish Bible and the “New Testament” fit together. They suggested that if Jesus (Yeshua in Hebrew) fulfilled the Hebrew prophecies concerning the Messiah, then Christians are worshiping the Jewish Messiah.

The Bargs also pointed out a concept we knew nothing about: sin. The only Judaism I knew had long since stopped teaching that sin separates people from God. After all, that’s what Christians believe. The Bargs showed us that throughout the Jewish Bible, God was quite intolerant when it came to sin, yet merciful to the sinners who had repented.

Separation from God caused a malignant sickness of the soul, and the God-given means of atonement alone could reconcile us and make us whole. Emphasizing good deeds was noble, but not a viable solution to our separation from God. The Bargs believed that the Jewish Bible pointed beyond the sacrificial system to someone who would personify God’s plan of atonement. They believed that Jesus was that one.

Ask Your Rabbi

It all seemed to make sense—so much sense that I spent three hours at an Orthodox synagogue one Saturday morning trying to counteract what I was learning. I hoped that with my newly acquired belief in God, my eyes would be opened, and the service would shed light on my search. I would have been thrilled had that been the case. It was not.

I visited rabbis hoping they could show me the fallacies of belief in Jesus.

Marilyn and I visited with local rabbis, one Orthodox and one Reform, hoping that they could show me the fallacies of belief in Jesus. Those rabbis seemed to feel duty-bound to prevent us from believing in Jesus. But they didn’t want to interact with the claims about Jesus or the Bible. They mostly questioned our motives and talked about Jews who had been persecuted by Christians.

One rabbi opened a New Testament and told me that for every single word in that book, there was a Jew who had been killed in the name of Christ. I didn’t doubt the truth of that, and I wasn’t looking to minimize the suffering of our people. But the topic of suffering wasn’t an answer to my questions. This so infuriated the wife of one rabbi that she began hitting me. I was stunned by her reaction but also amazed that no one addressed God’s plan for the Jewish Messiah, or whether that plan was fulfilled in Jesus.

I knew I was supposed to feel guilty, and I did, but not for the reasons the rabbis had mentioned. I felt guilty because I knew I was a sinner; I knew somehow that God was holy. I didn’t want to be disloyal to my people, but if my quest for answers made me appear disloyal, then so be it.

Around that time, Dr. Barg’s father found out about his belief. His father’s reaction was to send an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in a chauffeured limousine to Little Rock to dissuade Dr. Barg from believing in Jesus. When we heard that this rabbi was coming, Marilyn and I wanted to be there as well and hear all the best arguments.

We spent the evening with the rabbi and talked into the early hours of the morning. But most of his arguments were centered around guilt. He told us why we should feel ashamed for betraying our people.

We kept circling back to the Bible and asked him not only to dispute Jesus, but also to explain modern Judaism as it pertains to Scripture. He became frustrated because these were not the issues he had come to discuss. In the end, he admitted he found us all sane and intelligent people with good marriages. He agreed that we were successful and had healthy children. He even said we were different from other Jewish–Christian converts he had met. The irony was that Marilyn and I had not yet made up our minds about Jesus.

More Jewish Than Ever

The more we studied, read and spoke to Christians, the more we wanted the same fellowship with God they had. They told us that what we were seeking was only possible through Jesus, that God had taken the form of a man, lived a perfect life, and was able to offer himself as atonement for our sin. If we recognized the truth of that, we needed to ask Jesus to be the center of our lives. It meant entrusting our lives to him, forever.

After extensive reading, prayer, and internal turmoil, I finally came to believe in Jesus as my Jewish Messiah.

I won’t pretend that the rejection we experienced from the Jewish community and my fellow Jewish physicians wasn’t painful. But I remembered my own outrage on first hearing of Dr. Barg’s beliefs. So, I understood how they all felt.

I discovered an increased appreciation for my heritage.

Meanwhile, the Christian community accepted us wholeheartedly and welcomed opportunities to learn more about the Jewish roots of their faith. Instead of losing my Jewishness, I discovered an increased appreciation for my heritage and my identity as a Jew. I felt more Jewish than ever.

I was unable to articulate my decision until a visit with a patient by the name of Mildred. I was talking with her during her exam, when she suddenly looked up at me and said, “Dr. Sternberg, there has been something different about you over the last month.”

Her simple observation brought me face-to-face with the fact that God had begun to change me. I found myself explaining to Mildred that I had become a believer in Jesus as my Jewish Messiah.

She simply nodded and said, “I thought so.”