Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E299: From Kosher to Christian: The Journey of The Jewish Catholic | Lila Rose Show

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E299: From Kosher to Christian: The Journey of The Jewish Catholic | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

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  I wanted to embrace MyHeritage. That led me into wanting to
• 0:03
  embrace Judaism. However, in the middle of all
• 0:05
  the searching, I could not deny Christ.
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  Those seems pretty in conflict. A practicing Jew today does not
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  believe that Jesus is the Messiah.
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  Correct. This is so embarrassing but I'm
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  going to say this here with you. Sorry you've never been asked
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  that on a podcast yet. And then I realized, wait a
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  second, I'm looking only to these Christ denying rabbis.
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  What did the early followers of Christ believe?
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  OK, I'm going to study the early church followers, St.
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  Irenaeus, St. Polycarp, St.
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  Clement of Rome. I noticed things that really
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  stood out to me #1 they spoke in a language that made sense to me
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  as a Jew because they didn't scrap the whole sacrificial
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  system. They are saying no, it's now
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  continued and fulfilled in Christ.
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  I started becoming enamoured and I'm like, I want this.
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  There was one problem. Political Zionism is very
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  complex because what exactly do you mean?
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  As much as you want to say it's political or religious, there's
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  always going to be the religious undertone.
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  In my heart. It sounds like the devil trying
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  to buy me. I know this sounds really bad.
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  I'm not trying to say she's the devil, but it sounded like I was
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  getting. Hey everyone, welcome back to
• 1:06
  the Lila Rose Show. A huge thank you to everybody
• 1:08
  who has been subscribing to the show.
• 1:09
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  here. If you're not already
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  subscribed, make sure to hit that subscribe button and leave
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  this video a like if you enjoy this episode.
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  Your pick. I hope that you enjoy.
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  Daniel Swazo, welcome to the podcast.
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  Thank you Lila for having me. It's so good to have you here.
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  Thanks for coming all the way in from Japan I.
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  Know it's crazy it was a wild trip but I'm here and it
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  actually wasn't too bad 10 hours I'm kind of used to it now so.
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  So where should we start? We've got so many places we can
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  start. We were just talking about your
• 2:02
  beautiful wife and kids. Yes, well, we can.
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  We can start with a little a bridge, shorter version of my
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  life to show you how I got here. So for me, MyHeritage is Jewish,
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  as you noted, but for a lot of people, it's interesting what
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  that actually means. My ancestors come from the
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  Iberian Peninsula, northern Africa.
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  They moved to Central America, where my family loses the faith,
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  but then they become Protestant Christians when they go to New
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  York. And that's where I'm born, in
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  the Bronx. Then from there I continue in
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  the way of Christianity for a while until I get to about 17
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  years old and I'm questioning everything.
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  Why do I believe what I believe? Is this right?
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  It's got even real. And through a lot of searching,
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  it led me to the point where I wanted to embrace MyHeritage,
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  recognizing that I came from Jewish heritage, I wanted to
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  know everything. I asked my parents, you know,
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  tell me what it was as a kid. Tell me what it means to be from
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  our family. And I learned about our family
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  history through our last name, DNA tests, all of these
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  different things that led me into wanting to embrace Judaism.
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  However, in the middle of all the searching, I could not deny
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  Christ. So the happy medium, if you
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  will, was Messianic Judaism, which is a form of Christianity
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  and Judaism mix in which people seek to walk according to what
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  we call Torah, the commandments, the from the Sinai covenant, but
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  still retaining believing Christ.
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  As time progressed, I continue to grow in in the way of
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  Judaism, so much so that it would be considered an Orthodox
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  observance. That means three things.
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  Number one, you believe in the Oral Law, the written law, and
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  in the Jewish tradition, what which is called halacha.
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  It's similar to in the Christian world as Catholics, that we
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  believe in the Holy Scriptures, in the Sacred Tradition and in
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  the Magisterium. So it's kind of parallel in that
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  road. I continue to still believe in
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  Christ, but just be more observant in my Judaism.
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  So you would see me in the street wearing my kippa.
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  I had seat CEO, which I like strings that you might see
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  different Jewish people wearing. I was eating kosher, going to
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  the feast, going to synagogue, the whole the works, as they
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  say. And it was in that process of
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  living out the faith that I eventually started to question
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  even Judaism. OK, so before we get to that,
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  because I know there's so much more to the story, can we walk
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  back a few chapters? All right, so you are ethnically
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  Jewish and you were explaining, we were talking earlier about
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  two kind of categories. You could, you know, minute you
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  could place ethnic Jews and there's more than two.
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  But can you just share what that is just for people's knowledge
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  that they don't already know? Sure.
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  So when it comes to the actual Jewish world, it's not a
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  monolith. A lot of people think it is.
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  But to give you a, a very easy example, we have Ashkenazi Jews.
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  So you could think of the, the Jews in Brooklyn, the ones that
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  you see wearing the black hats, they have these things called
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  peyote, which are like little strands of hair on the sides.
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  They're wearing all black, Very easy to recognize.
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  You also have Sephardic Jews, which is where my family would
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  come from, that those are the ones that are not the European
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  Jews per SE, they're the Northern African Jews.
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  That's where MyHeritage comes from.
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  And like you said, there are other types.
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  There's also different types of observance you have like the
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  Reformed Jews, Conservative Jews, and the Orthodox Jews.
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  So in that world of Judaism there are different types.
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  I would say that for me because biologically and through
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  heritage I am Sephardic and in my observance I was more towards
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  the Orthodox. Walk me through the religious
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  categorization. Now, so levels of observance,
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  you will have typically the Reformed Jews, Conservative Jews
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  and Orthodox. And I'm going like this because
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  the Reformed are the most liberal of the of the bunch.
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  So basically this is where you would see women rabbis or women
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  wearing clothing that would traditionally be seen for men,
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  like wearing the the key pot or wearing the tally that's usually
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  seen in the Jewish world as a man's garment.
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  So when you see women wearing, it's considered quite liberal.
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  Now when it comes to the Conservative, they are going to
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  be more open to using technology on Sabbath.
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  They might drive on the Shabbat to go to to synagogue, but
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  they're a little bit more conservative in their
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  observance. Whereas the Reformed would see
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  Torah just as a part of the heritage.
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  They don't see it necessarily as divine.
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  A Conservative would see it as yes it comes from God, but it
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  was jotted down by man, so it doesn't necessarily mean it has
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  to be solid and in stone. We can adjust with the times.
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  The Orthodox are going to be way more convicted of the reality
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  that the Torah, oral and written, and the magisterial
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  works in their world, which would be the rabbis.
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  That is the authority to live by.
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  So yes, you will have in the Orthodox world the more
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  observant type right? To them, the devotion to the
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  Torah is so important that a lot of them might not necessarily
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  take up a career, whereas their daily bread would be just
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  studying Torah all day long. And this mean mainly means the
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  Oral Torah not necessarily reading the scriptures like we
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  are used to. So those are the basic 3 levels
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  of observance. So when you're a message when
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  you you were raised basically Protestant, right correct.
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  And you had this doubt in your later teens and they're like
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  thinking well, I want to discover MyHeritage more deeply.
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  I want to start practicing Judaism, but then you couldn't
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  shake Jesus Christ. Those seems pretty in conflict
• 7:51
  because a practicing Jew today does not.
• 7:54
  Believe that Jesus is the Messiah that's part of they're
• 7:57
  waiting in their view still for the Messiah.
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• 9:32
  Can you explain what is Messianic Judaism, how it
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  originated? And also I'll have a bunch of
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  follow up, so we'll just start with that, yeah.
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  So Messianic Judaism, the Super simple terminology is defined
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  this way. It is people that are coming in
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  from Jewish background, but they believe Jesus to be a Messiah.
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  If you are that, you're a Messianic Jew.
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  So me as a Catholic, technically I would be a Messianic Jew
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  still. Now, when you're talking about
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  Messianic Judaism, the actual following of that belief system,
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  it includes you believing in Jesus as Christ, as Lord, but it
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  also means that you're trying to observe the commandments of the
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  Torah as much as you can. But even within that world, just
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  like in the wider Jewish world, there are different flavors and
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  variations. I'll give you 2.
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  You have the more rabbinic side of Messianic Judaism and the
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  more non rabbinic. That means that for the rabbinic
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  ones they still look at the Rabbi's as the authorities.
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  So they would still use the Talmud to gain some information
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  or the Mishnah which is Jewish writings.
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  Whereas you would have the non rabbinic side which says Christ
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  is the Messiah, our apostles, those are our rabbis.
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  So we're going to stay away from all of this rabbinic stuff and
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  we're going to try to follow it as much as we can.
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  In practice, it creates a lot of conflicts which made seem weird
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  and silly to a lot of people because it's matters like this
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  keeping kosher. What does that mean?
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  Do we follow what the rabbi's say?
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  Does it mean no mixture of meat and dairy?
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  Or does it mean we follow what we find in Leviticus 11, where
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  it just gives us a list of animals that we can and cannot
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  eat, for example pork? So you have this debate that
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  happens. Should we follow the rabbi's
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  opinion, or do we go strictly only by what we see in
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  Scripture? But for a Messianic Jew, how
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  does this how does it make sense when you're can you consider
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  Scripture? I think it's an axe, right?
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  That's. Acts chapter 10 you.
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  You probably haven't memorized. I'll just let you speak to it.
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  How does a Messianic Jew understand?
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  And can you explain what Acts chapter 10 says?
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  How does a Messianic Jew understand that passage?
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  So it's I'm glad that you bring this up because it shows the
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  difference of not having a magisterium to help you define
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  as a Messianic Jew. The type of apologetics we would
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  use would be you go to Acts 10A, Christian would say, but look
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  here, Peter has a vision and in this vision he sees a sheet come
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  down with unclean animals and he hears some voice, God telling
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  him kill and eat happens three times.
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  And what does Peter respond with?
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  How can it be? Nothing unclean has ever touched
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  my lips. Why is that strange?
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  Because it's already been about 10 years after the crucifixion
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  and resurrection of our Lord. So why is Peter still eating
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  kosher? This is the defense of why we'd
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  still be eating kosher. On top of that, Christ, when he
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  talks about, there's a verse in Matthew where he talks about all
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  things have been declared clean. But the way that we would
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  interpret it in the messianic world would be any food that is
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  clean is clean, but pork is not food.
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  So he's not saying that pork is clean because we've never even
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  considered it food. It's for example, let's say I
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  grabbed your your phone, I'm not going to consider it food.
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  So if God, if Christ says all food is clean, it doesn't mean
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  that now I can eat the phone. But then how do they interpret
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  the dream? Because the dream, it's very,
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  it's very explicit, what God seems to be saying to Saint Paul
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  or Saint Peter. Excuse me?
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  Well, that's usually where it ends.
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  And this is their discovery that I ended up making when I would
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  read it just at face value, and this is what a lot of messianics
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  would do. They would focus on the fact
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  that Peter was looking at it and saying, see, it means that he
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  was still eating kosher. It wasn't until later on that I
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  understood that the fulfillment of this vision and why it had
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  still been 10 years is to show to Saint Peter that there really
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  was a distinction between the people that were in covenant
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  with God and the Gentiles. The goeme, right?
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  So when he has this vision, he's told three times to kill Anit.
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  After he has that vision, three men show up, three non Jews that
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  want to take him to the House of Cornelius, another non Jew.
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  And when he gets there he says I've never even stepped foot in
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  the House of a gentile. So he still had that mentality.
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  It's the same reason why Paul later an.
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  Ethnically an ethnic Gentile, right?
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  Because at this point he's a Christian Jew.
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  I mean, he's a Christ following Jew.
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  Exactly, exactly. And even then, still eating
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  kosher still has not entered the House of a of a gentile.
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  And even Paul later checks him where because he tells them,
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  Hey, I see you eating with these people, but you you're not
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  sitting with the gentiles. What's going on here?
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  So he says it that Saint Paul says, I brought it up to his
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  face. And it's shocking to see that
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  Saint Peter, who would be the leader, he's the leader of the
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  apostles was still keeping this very Jewish mentality.
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  So he had to get this very strong vision where it's
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  revealed to him the importance, the truth, the fulfillment of
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  the kosher laws, which are what that in Christ the Gentiles are
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  separated. That's what it means to be holy,
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  to be separated. You are made kadosh holy.
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  So when you are separated from the Gentiles, you become one
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  with God. You are now Israel, you are
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  clean. When you're in Christ, you are
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  clean. But then in the vision he also
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  hears whatever I have called clean, do not call unclean.
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  So if Cornelius gets baptized and he's pronounced clean in
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  Christ, don't you dare call him unclean because he has now been
• 15:29
  purified. He is clean.
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  He is part of us. This is the same reason why we
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  see Saint Paul later talking about how the importance of
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  seeing the Jews and the Gentiles one in Christ, the one new man.
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  No Jew, no gentile, no man, no woman, no slavery free.
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  We're all one in Christ. So you're saying as a Messianic
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  Jew, the way you sort of justified continuing date kosher
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  as a religious precept was that you would interpret that vision
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  that Saint Peter had as that's about that's actually about the
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  gentiles, the goyim, that's about the non Jews being
• 16:01
  welcomed into the family of God and becoming part of Israel.
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  It's not about actually don't eat this kind of food, right?
• 16:08
  So that's what. On top of the fact that, yes,
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  that, but on top of the fact that he said that he has not
• 16:14
  eaten anything unclean. So we focused on that more than
• 16:18
  on the Gentile part. Yeah, it would be acknowledged
• 16:20
  that, yeah, Gentiles can be part of the fold.
• 16:23
  But the main focus for the messianic apologetics would be,
• 16:27
  see, he's still eating kosher. That was the defense.
• 16:31
  So do Messianic Jews practice circumcision as a matter of
• 16:34
  religious precept? That would be in the more
• 16:38
  rabbinic side, OK, some of the less rabbinic ones would
• 16:42
  probably say no, baptism still counts.
• 16:44
  But in the rabbinic side, we would say, or we would have
• 16:47
  said, I would. Now I'm not there.
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  So what would be said is yes, it's still required.
• 16:53
  The same way you're still supposed to keep the Shabbat at
• 16:56
  sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday.
• 16:59
  You still have to eat kosher, you still have to keep the
• 17:01
  feasts, you still have to wear the four corner garment with the
• 17:05
  strings on it. It's called the ciciot.
• 17:07
  You still have to do all of these things, but for some non
• 17:12
  rabbinic messianic Jews they'll probably just say you don't need
• 17:15
  to get circumcised. Because they figure they
• 17:17
  consider the rabbinic stuff as more like an interpretive, an
• 17:21
  interpretive prescription as opposed to, oh, we all have to
• 17:26
  do this. You can kind of interpret it
• 17:27
  differently. So you guys can choose that
• 17:28
  more, you know, fund they might consider it.
• 17:31
  Do they consider it fundamentalist?
• 17:33
  Or. Do they kind of have that sort
• 17:35
  of language or that? Legalistic is a term that always
• 17:38
  gets thrown around. What's interesting about that
• 17:41
  it's that that exact conflict was what started leading me more
• 17:46
  towards Orthodox Judaism. Because I was seeing this
• 17:50
  division. I used to love visiting all
• 17:53
  these different messianic congregations and even non
• 17:56
  messianic congregations to try to see how they lived out the
• 18:00
  faith. And I noticed these divisions
• 18:03
  where this rabbi says this, another one says that, this
• 18:06
  scholar says this, That scholar says that there was no unity.
• 18:10
  So I started asking the question of who is the authority?
• 18:13
  At least in the more rabbinic side, we knew that the rabbi's
• 18:16
  were the authority. At least that's what I
• 18:17
  perceived. So I started learning more about
• 18:20
  the Mishnah, which is the compilation of the oral law of
• 18:24
  the Jews. So in here you would have these
• 18:28
  traditions and it would give you a more solid understanding of
• 18:31
  how you live out the faith. Right?
• 18:33
  Where in the Torah he commands, in the written Torah he commands
• 18:37
  circumcision. But when you read it, you don't
• 18:39
  know what that actually means. You could Does it mean you cut
• 18:43
  off you're not part of your ear? Does it mean you cut off part of
• 18:45
  your thumb? You don't really know.
• 18:47
  The Scriptures don't say It's in the oral law, in the Mishnah
• 18:51
  that you would find that the Mishnah then gets expounded on
• 18:54
  with commentary and that becomes a Talmud.
• 18:56
  So the Talmud is actually the heart of it is the Mishnah.
• 19:00
  Then you have the Gemara and then you have extra writings
• 19:03
  upon it. That's why the Talmud is like 20
• 19:06
  something volumes. Is there disagreement too, in
• 19:09
  terms of which parts of the Talmud should be followed or
• 19:12
  agreed with? Right.
• 19:13
  So there's some that say, well, I don't like this.
• 19:15
  It seems like too extreme. I mean, there's parts of it that
• 19:18
  are very hostile to Christianity.
• 19:21
  There's other parts that are fine.
• 19:23
  I mean, so it also depends on the interpretation and the
• 19:25
  acceptance of which parts versus others.
• 19:27
  This is what actually led me then to question even more.
• 19:31
  So it's interesting. To actually read the Talmud.
• 19:33
  Well, this is the craziness. So all of the division Messianic
• 19:37
  Judaism made me want to get more Orthodox in my Judaism.
• 19:42
  But then the more I dug into Modern Orthodox Rabbinic
• 19:45
  Judaism, I'm like, wait a second, it's the same thing.
• 19:48
  Because like I mentioned before, you have the Sephardic Jews, you
• 19:52
  have the Ashkenazi Jews, you have the Yemenites, the Mizrahi,
• 19:56
  and they all have slightly different observations.
• 19:58
  They say we still still hold on to the same Talmud or the same
• 20:02
  law, the same Torah, but it really wasn't the same
• 20:05
  everywhere. On top of that, there were
• 20:08
  debates. This is again another one of
• 20:11
  those things that might seem silly to the outside world, but
• 20:14
  for the Passover there are certain things that you're not
• 20:16
  allowed to eat. There are things that the
• 20:20
  Ashkenazi say that you cannot eat, like beans and rice.
• 20:23
  The Sephardics would say, yeah, we can't eat those things.
• 20:26
  So that's like a small debate of disagreement.
• 20:29
  So I started asking, wait then who has the authority to define?
• 20:34
  Among the Orthodox? Yeah.
• 20:35
  Among the rabbis, exactly which one?
• 20:37
  Which rabbi do I listen to if they disagree?
• 20:39
  Exactly, and that's when I started looking into the early
• 20:42
  version. I should just listen to the Pope
• 20:45
  eventually, right? Eventually.
• 20:47
  OK, So before, before getting into that.
• 20:49
  So another question, there's not a lot of Messianic Jews.
• 20:52
  What's the number? Do we know?
• 20:54
  It's quite minimal. I there's not a specific number
• 20:56
  that I've been able to gather because there's another group
• 20:59
  that is quite similar. OK, but it's not considered
• 21:02
  Messianic Judaism. It's called the Hebrew Roots
• 21:04
  movement. This is another variation of
• 21:07
  people that believe that they should try to observe the
• 21:10
  commandments of the Torah, but they are extremely against the
• 21:16
  traditions of men. So they don't wear Kiba and they
• 21:20
  believe in Jesus and they believe in Jesus.
• 21:23
  But the kosher laws, there's no debate of whether we follow the
• 21:27
  rabbi's or not. They say it's Leviticus 11 and
• 21:29
  that's it. But regardless, whether you
• 21:31
  identify as part of this Hebrew movement or you identify as a
• 21:34
  Messianic Jew, we're not talking anything close to mainstream
• 21:37
  denominations and Christianity, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, like
• 21:40
  we're talking about a very, it's not a huge club.
• 21:43
  Not a huge group of people. So when you are practicing as a
• 21:47
  Messianic Jew and also trying to discover what does it even mean
• 21:49
  to practice as a Messianic Jew, did you sometimes wrestle with
• 21:53
  the reality that most people who said Jesus was their Lord and
• 21:57
  Savior like you did, we're not messianic?
• 22:00
  They were not in any way messianic in terms of practicing
• 22:03
  other forms of Jewish traditions.
• 22:05
  You know, whether it's wearing the keeper or it's, you know,
• 22:08
  eating kosher or whatever it is. I did struggle with it a little
• 22:12
  bit, but not so much when I got people telling me scriptures
• 22:16
  like, you know, Jesus tells you or Yeshua.
• 22:20
  He tells us that the the road to salvation is, is a narrow road,
• 22:25
  right? So the road to perdition is, is
• 22:29
  plenty of wide, but this road to salvation is quite narrow.
• 22:33
  Also. Many are called, but few are
• 22:36
  chosen. When you hear these type of
• 22:37
  things, you're like, OK, yeah, we're small, but that's how it's
• 22:41
  supposed to be. That's how I saw it.
• 22:43
  What about you shall know them by their fruit?
• 22:46
  Did you see spiritual fruit among other Messianic Jews that
• 22:50
  seemed much more developed than what you had seen as a
• 22:53
  Protestant Christian? It depends what you mean by
• 22:56
  that, because for me fruits would be things like being
• 23:00
  gentle and being kind. That is fruit.
• 23:02
  Those are fruits of the Spirit. Yeah.
• 23:04
  And then for other people, it would be like the fruits mean
• 23:07
  that they're successful in their mission and everything is
• 23:09
  expanding and it's looking big. So biblically, yes, you're
• 23:12
  right. But for other people, we might
• 23:14
  have a different definition. For me, we was just that.
• 23:16
  And it's kind of like what you're saying it's that's the
• 23:18
  biblical standard. Being kind, being gentle, being
• 23:21
  loving. The communities that I was able
• 23:23
  to interact with were amazing people.
• 23:26
  I really, really did have such a blessed experience in the world
• 23:32
  of Messianic Judaism, even as I started becoming more Orthodox,
• 23:35
  knowing Orthodox Jews that would interact with me, I also even
• 23:39
  did see it then. So it was not like one group is
• 23:44
  full of bad people and another group is full of really good
• 23:46
  people. It's there just happened to be
• 23:48
  nice people all around. But what called me into that
• 23:52
  world was this devotion to want to live out the faith.
• 23:57
  Like it's not an abstract. We just believe in Jesus.
• 24:00
  No, it's we participate in the faith through what we eat,
• 24:03
  through how we dress with the type of music we we sing, the
• 24:07
  type of prayers we pray. So we would pray in Hebrew,
• 24:10
  Allah and things like that. And just sitting down and
• 24:12
  studying the scriptures together, studying the Mishnah.
• 24:15
  And like I said before, for me, it was visiting these different
• 24:19
  synagogues and getting to know these people.
• 24:21
  That was a beautiful experience for me so.
• 24:24
  So you saw zeal, you saw tremendous passion and
• 24:27
  dedication and a willingness to completely change your life to
• 24:31
  try to follow God, Jesus, as they understood.
• 24:33
  And then you did see it sounds like the fruits of the spirit,
• 24:36
  which I've, I mean, we've, we talk about this on the show
• 24:39
  sometimes because we've had Orthodox on the show, obviously
• 24:41
  many Protestants on the show, Catholics, of course, non
• 24:43
  Christians on the show, you know, so we've, we have
• 24:46
  everybody on the show and the spirit blows where the spirit
• 24:50
  will and God reads the heart only.
• 24:53
  And so like the deepest, innermost parts of the heart.
• 24:56
  And so because you can still make judgements on people's
• 24:58
  character and things like that. And we are called to be
• 25:00
  discerning as, as believers. But, and so this idea that the
• 25:04
  fruits of the spirit are only offered to people, for example,
• 25:07
  in full communion with the Catholic Church.
• 25:08
  It's not Christian teaching. It's not the teaching of our
• 25:11
  church. And I think this might be
• 25:13
  confusing to some people because they say, wow, that I've met
• 25:15
  this person and they're so full of what seemed like the fruits
• 25:18
  of the spirit. And I'm like, that's sincere.
• 25:20
  You know, you don't. And again, not that we know for
• 25:23
  for sure that is the spirit. Like you can't, there's so much
• 25:26
  behind the veil, veil that we can't for sure know.
• 25:29
  But you can recognize that the Lord is moving throughout the
• 25:33
  world with, with souls, including souls that have no
• 25:37
  clue about sacraments or Mother Church.
• 25:40
  You know, the way that we understand and have, you know,
• 25:42
  been received as as Catholics. And that's that's God's
• 25:46
  Providence, that's God's mercy. And I love that.
• 25:49
  I love that we can see that God operates in the world even when
• 25:54
  we're not necessarily trying to work with him.
• 25:57
  Like, right, even when you are, you're not necessarily in full
• 26:03
  knowledge of the truth. You're not necessarily aware of
• 26:06
  all the theology, but God reads the hearts and for those that
• 26:10
  want to seek truth, God will reveal and God can still
• 26:13
  operate. We can't limit God to what He
• 26:15
  can do, right? He can operate through anything
• 26:18
  the scriptures say, even the stones will speak.
• 26:20
  So letting us know that anything is possible for God.
• 26:24
  Yes, and and also I think the meek and humble of heart, right,
• 26:27
  you know that there's like the spirit can do so much with a
• 26:30
  meek heart and an and a movement of meekness of the heart to say
• 26:33
  like God, whoever God is like here I am, I know that I am
• 26:37
  nothing and you are everything like that is already fertile
• 26:40
  ground for the spirit to begin to work and his ways, of course,
• 26:44
  are going to be mysterious period.
• 26:46
  Absolutely so so let's catch up to where you are in your
• 26:49
  timeline. Yes.
• 26:50
  Are you in Japan yet At this point, by the way, no.
• 26:53
  Where are you living? Still?
• 26:53
  New York. So at this point, I'm living in
• 26:56
  Texas. OK.
• 26:57
  So it was a lot of shifting. New York to Texas to Japan.
• 27:02
  I'll give you that the quick springboard.
• 27:05
  Born in New York, in the Bronx, I moved to Puerto Rico.
• 27:07
  Then I moved. Puerto Rico.
• 27:08
  Yeah. And then I lived in Brooklyn.
• 27:11
  Then I lived in Maine. I'm sorry, why Puerto Rico?
• 27:14
  I don't know. How old were you?
• 27:16
  I was about three years old. Three years old, okay.
• 27:20
  Yeah, yeah. So I don't, I don't know why I'm
• 27:22
  on. The plane at 3 and we're like,
• 27:23
  I'm going to Puerto Rico. I know your.
• 27:24
  Parents meant to Puerto Rico. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 27:26
  OK. But it was crazy to me because
• 27:28
  even to this day, people ask me like, why did your family move
• 27:31
  around so much? And I really don't know.
• 27:33
  Even to this day. We just happened to.
• 27:35
  I asked, but they seem to just not answer.
• 27:39
  They they just tell me, oh, yeah, we went here.
• 27:40
  We went there. So we started in in New York.
• 27:43
  Sorry, what was your dad's work? Can you share?
• 27:45
  For some time he worked in like construction type of stuff.
• 27:50
  Interesting. Yeah, yeah.
• 27:51
  And your mom was stay at home mom or she?
• 27:53
  Yeah, she was a stay at home mom.
• 27:54
  And then how many siblings? Older sister and three younger
• 27:57
  brothers, Five, yeah. So New York, Puerto Rico, New
• 28:01
  York, ME, New Jersey, Texas, Colorado, Texas, Japan, and all
• 28:07
  of this Jewish stuff for me began when I was in New Jersey.
• 28:11
  That was when I. Was 17.
• 28:12
  That's the 17. But then the the moves after New
• 28:16
  Jersey happened by yourself, without your family.
• 28:19
  Without my family, because they were in living, they were living
• 28:21
  in Maine at that. Point.
• 28:23
  So I was they kind of stayed Maine and then you started
• 28:25
  popping. Yeah.
• 28:27
  And I was super broke. And because of that, it meant
• 28:31
  that I had to live in like the backroom of where I worked.
• 28:34
  I worked in We buy gold stores. You've seen those around there.
• 28:37
  I lived in the backroom. OK, I had no TVI, had no car.
• 28:42
  I had nothing hour I had to go to like was there a shower?
• 28:49
  I don't think there was a shower, but I did take showers.
• 28:53
  You did eventually take a shower.
• 28:54
  No, no, I actually don't remember.
• 28:56
  They left those. They left you.
• 28:57
  You were working there. Like, hey, I just want to sleep
• 28:59
  in the backroom. They're like, no problem there.
• 29:00
  Yeah, yeah. But I still went to the
• 29:01
  university, so we had like the gym there.
• 29:03
  And OK, OK. So there were there were
• 29:05
  definitely showers. You've never been asked out on a
• 29:07
  podcast yet. We only asked the important
• 29:10
  questions on this show, Danielle.
• 29:12
  That really took me, but in during that time it was crazy
• 29:17
  because I had no time to do anything except for just like
• 29:19
  dig into myself and that's why I started questioning.
• 29:22
  You didn't have like, roommates distracting you.
• 29:24
  You were just working, sleeping and studying.
• 29:26
  Yeah, exactly. And that's what led me into the
• 29:28
  whole road, and that's why I ended up in Messianic Judaism.
• 29:31
  But then I moved to Texas. That's when I kind of started
• 29:33
  seeing the beautiful people that I'm telling you about in these
• 29:37
  different congregations. And then I start questioning
• 29:40
  even Messianic Judaism, and that really starts happening after I
• 29:44
  had gone to Colorado and back to Texas.
• 29:47
  That's when I started seeing like, wait a second, Orthodox
• 29:51
  Judy is. Not holding together.
• 29:52
  It's not holding together. So how old are you at this
• 29:53
  point? Oh, I want to say I was about
• 29:56
  25. It's really hard to find good
• 30:01
  content to watch with my kids for when they are allowed to
• 30:04
  have screen time. I'm always on the lookout for
• 30:06
  low stimulating, story driven and values based kids content.
• 30:10
  That's why I'm very excited about Brave Plus.
• 30:13
  Brave Plus is a new streaming platform with content that
• 30:16
  reinforces our values instead of undermining them.
• 30:19
  Every show is vetted by real Christian parents not only to
• 30:23
  screen out messages that are harmful, but to also avoid over
• 30:26
  stimulating video content that's linked to mental and behavior
• 30:30
  issues. When you check it out, you'll
• 30:32
  find classics like Strawberry Shortcake, Babar, Paddington, as
• 30:35
  well as new shows like season 2 of Iggy and Mr. Kirk starring
• 30:39
  Kirk Cameron. And right now, just for my
• 30:41
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• 30:44
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  other unethical services? Most people have no idea that
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  they're footing the bill for procedures that go directly
• 31:02
  against their beliefs. While there are.
• 31:04
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  standard insurance. That's why I'm so excited to
• 31:10
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• 31:14
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• 31:17
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• 31:19
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• 31:25
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• 31:27
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• 31:31
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• 31:34
  healthcare to the rest of the country.
• 31:36
  Go to presidiocare.com. I wanted to move to Japan always
• 31:41
  since I was a kid. But an opportunity, I don't
• 31:45
  know. I don't, I don't know.
• 31:46
  Well, you met your wife there, right?
• 31:48
  Eventually. So the Lord was working in that.
• 31:50
  Yes, yes. But it was always a childhood
• 31:52
  dream. I did.
• 31:54
  I have sushi. I don't even think I had sushi
• 31:56
  until I almost moved when I'm like, oh, I made, I got to start
• 31:59
  getting used to what they eat. Did you think it was like a
• 32:01
  beautiful culture? Yes, yes.
• 32:04
  So from the beginning, when I was a kid, I'm telling you, I
• 32:07
  must have been seven years old, there's a movie that I saw
• 32:11
  called 3 Ninjas. It it struck me and I'm like, I
• 32:14
  love it. I love that these kids are going
• 32:15
  to Japan. I want that.
• 32:16
  And throughout my life, I always had a little bit of something
• 32:19
  that called me, called me back to wanting to embrace Japan,
• 32:23
  whether it was the the history of the samurai, whether it was
• 32:27
  the architecture. I love it.
• 32:28
  Did you see Seven Samurai? Yes, I did.
• 32:30
  It's amazing. The long version.
• 32:31
  The long. Oh, yeah.
• 32:33
  Of course. That's the only one to watch.
• 32:34
  Yeah. As a little girl, that was what,
• 32:36
  my dad. It's like we all watch 7 Samurai
• 32:39
  together. Oh, it really forms the
• 32:40
  imagination. It was powerful.
• 32:42
  Yeah. A little intense, but.
• 32:43
  It is intense, but it really got me.
• 32:45
  And the whole idea of the samurai, just the philosophy
• 32:48
  captivated me. And there's of course, I get,
• 32:50
  you know, the movie. The Last Samurai by any chance?
• 32:52
  Of course. Also started playing a part into
• 32:54
  it. I was eating with chopsticks
• 32:56
  even though my mom was cooking like rice and beans so.
• 32:59
  Eating the beans with. With chopsticks, yeah.
• 33:02
  We also had like, I had a bed, but I would choose to eat in the
• 33:05
  floor because I would think of the Japanese people who sleeping
• 33:07
  in the tatami mats on the floor. So I would do that so.
• 33:10
  Something for this? It was literally all my
• 33:13
  childhood. All my childhood.
• 33:15
  Like literally from almost 7 until now.
• 33:19
  So what ended up happening is that when I got to to Texas,
• 33:22
  something's happened in my life. Things went SI lost my friends,
• 33:26
  my job, everything. And then a friend told me an
• 33:29
  opportunity to work in Japan as a teacher in Japan.
• 33:33
  So I'm like, why not? I'm I'm going to do it.
• 33:35
  I have nothing else. I've always wanted to go to
• 33:37
  Japan and then I go in and then I ended up in Japan still
• 33:40
  practicing Messianic Judaism to the best of my ability later on.
• 33:44
  And you were asking about the numbers of Messianic Judaism.
• 33:47
  I actually ended up finding a Messianic congregation in Tokyo.
• 33:52
  Wow. And I was also attending the
• 33:54
  Jewish Community of Japan, so that one's not Messianic.
• 33:58
  So I was going to both. So I was hanging out with the
• 34:01
  Conservative Jews, and I was also hanging out with the
• 34:03
  Messianic Jews. And I would shift back and forth
• 34:05
  depending on the situation. When you're in Japan now, you're
• 34:08
  teaching. What are you teaching and what
• 34:11
  are you teaching? I was just teaching English.
• 34:13
  That's how basically almost any teacher begins that's.
• 34:15
  Not what are you going to teach English?
• 34:17
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not what I do now, but
• 34:18
  that's how I began got it. And in that process, it was
• 34:22
  really a beautiful experience. I didn't know so much Japanese.
• 34:26
  And this will lead to How I Met my wife.
• 34:28
  OK, tell us. So because I couldn't
• 34:32
  communicate with the children in Japanese, I decided I'm going to
• 34:36
  learn magic tricks so that I can bond with them without having to
• 34:40
  speak. So I learned like card magic and
• 34:42
  coin magic. And then we we begin in this
• 34:46
  journey of me learning and I'm interacting with the children.
• 34:49
  And this is so embarrassing, but I'm going to say this here with
• 34:54
  you. I ended up going on Tinder
• 34:59
  because I'm like, you know what? I don't want to be single.
• 35:01
  They. Have that in Japan.
• 35:02
  Yeah, they have it. They have it.
• 35:04
  It's not as crazy as it is in here from what I hear.
• 35:07
  Apparently here Tinder immediately means.
• 35:09
  I know married couples who met on Tinder, several SO.
• 35:12
  So I go to the app, I find this beautiful girl and then we
• 35:16
  graduate. This is what I call it from.
• 35:19
  From Tinder into conversations in Instagram.
• 35:21
  I see her profile and I'm like wow, she's so pretty.
• 35:24
  I wonder if she'd be down to take some pictures.
• 35:27
  Mind you, I'm still living as a Jew.
• 35:29
  Are you a photographer too? I do photography.
• 35:31
  I wouldn't, I don't like giving myself labels because since I'm
• 35:35
  not the best at any of these things, I'm just like, I just do
• 35:38
  it. So I had my camera.
• 35:40
  I'm like, hey, let's go to the park.
• 35:43
  We can take some pictures. Since you you have a good sense
• 35:45
  of style and taste, I think would be really good.
• 35:48
  So she's like, yeah, let's meet up.
• 35:49
  In my mind, I'm thinking this is going to be a date.
• 35:52
  Now I find out when I talked to her, she's like, what?
• 35:54
  That was a date. I had no idea.
• 35:56
  But we go, we meet up and we we headed off.
• 35:59
  This is the problem that I was so broke that I had to sell my
• 36:04
  camera before the date happened. So when we got there, I had to
• 36:08
  tell her. I told her straight up, I
• 36:10
  actually don't have the camera anymore, I had to sell it.
• 36:13
  You were honest. I was honest and she was kind
• 36:16
  and she's like, OK, no worry, I'll I'll pay for dinner.
• 36:19
  This is crazy. Wow, Daniel.
• 36:22
  It gets worse. I wanted to show her that I had
• 36:26
  been learning Magic to to bond with the kids, so I brought a
• 36:29
  deck of cards. You're like, these were not
• 36:31
  going to make much more than $1.50.
• 36:33
  So I still have my cards. It's.
• 36:37
  So bad so. Were you still?
• 36:39
  You're still teaching, Yes, but they don't pay very much.
• 36:42
  I'm going. To get teaching this in Japan?
• 36:44
  Not really. Not it's like enough to.
• 36:46
  Survive too, right? Well, no, actually.
• 36:48
  In Japan it's cheap. Oh no, it's.
• 36:49
  Cheap, it's just I used to go out a lot to to the center of
• 36:53
  Tokyo because that's how you could get to the synagogue or to
• 36:56
  anything really, because I lived in the countryside.
• 36:58
  Super rice fields everywhere you have you ever seen Ghibli
• 37:01
  movies? Like I don't know if anybody's
• 37:05
  familiar with these here in America.
• 37:07
  It's in Japan. They don't really stick to
• 37:09
  Disney as much as they stick to Ghibli.
• 37:11
  The world of Ghibli. They have like these characters
• 37:14
  called Totoro and whatever in the animation.
• 37:17
  It's all like rice fields most of the time.
• 37:19
  And that's what it looked like where I lived.
• 37:20
  So I would go to Tokyo a lot. So a lot of my money would be
• 37:24
  invested in that. I go on the day I have no money.
• 37:27
  I decided to do a magic trick. I'm shuffling the cards, spill
• 37:30
  all the cards everywhere like a fool.
• 37:32
  I was so embarrassed and I'm like, this is not going to
• 37:35
  happen again. She's not going to want to talk
• 37:36
  to me. But we ended up with a second
• 37:38
  date and 1/3 and I'm like OK, I can actually be myself with this
• 37:43
  girl. And be honest and just.
• 37:45
  Be honest because. All my issues, all my, every all
• 37:48
  of me, my personality, everything.
• 37:49
  Yeah, so we click, not sensing that she's also a very silly
• 37:52
  girl. She loves being silly and funny
• 37:55
  so we both could be ourselves without having to put a mask on.
• 37:59
  That's. Beautiful.
• 38:00
  And I think that's what opened up the way for me to really bond
• 38:03
  with her. And eventually I met her family
• 38:05
  and they loved me. Then I wanted to introduce her
• 38:09
  to my family. So it was only about nine months
• 38:11
  later I took her to meet my family actually was even less.
• 38:14
  It was six months I took her to meet my family.
• 38:17
  They were living in Texas at that point now, and they met her
• 38:21
  and loved her. My sister hates every girl but
• 38:25
  she loved her so I'm like that's the that's the one.
• 38:28
  So her family loves me, my family loves her and we love
• 38:31
  each other. This is perfect.
• 38:33
  And then within less than a year, we got married.
• 38:36
  Amazing. So what did you do for work?
• 38:38
  If the teaching the teaching salary was not good, are you
• 38:40
  still teaching or what are you? Doing I was still teaching, but
• 38:42
  then when I got married I started doing something else,
• 38:44
  which is the only part that I don't share.
• 38:46
  OK. Your day job.
• 38:48
  Yeah, my, my day job, I create content now, yes, So there's
• 38:51
  that. But there's other things that I
• 38:53
  do as well. I see.
• 38:55
  So in this world of, you know, just trying to survive in Japan,
• 38:59
  she's always been a support. So together we've worked up to
• 39:03
  now we, we have a family, we have two children.
• 39:06
  And it's, it's been really a wonderful experience because
• 39:10
  while I was with her, I'm still living in Judaism and she
• 39:14
  decides to be compatible with me.
• 39:18
  How she knew that I couldn't eat things that were not kosher, but
• 39:22
  she said, OK, I'll eat kosher too, OK, You need to go to the
• 39:26
  feasts. OK, we go to the feast.
• 39:27
  You need to go to synagogue. OK, we go to synagogue.
• 39:29
  You got to pray. I'll give you your time to pray.
• 39:32
  She was always very supportive, even in the midst of me when I
• 39:36
  got to that point where I was questioning even the Orthodox
• 39:39
  Judaism, where's the authority? Who do I go to?
• 39:42
  She's still there. In my mind.
• 39:43
  I'm thinking, man, I feel so bad for her that she's seeing me
• 39:48
  kind of crumble because I'm questioning everything.
• 39:52
  I don't know where that where do you feel certain?
• 39:54
  And if I can't grind ground myself, how can she feel
• 39:58
  grounded in me? So that was the debate in my
• 40:01
  mind. But she always remained loyal,
• 40:04
  faithful, loving, compassionate and supportive.
• 40:07
  So I feel truly blessed to to have found my wife.
• 40:11
  She's Japanese, of course, I met her there.
• 40:14
  And you know where we've been together for now almost nine
• 40:19
  years. I I love your thank you for
• 40:21
  sharing your love story, at least a piece of it, because I
• 40:24
  do think it's encouraging. I hope to both men and women
• 40:27
  listening and I know we're going to get into the conversion next
• 40:30
  step in a minute. But I, I think there is a
• 40:34
  narrative today that love is very transactional where a woman
• 40:38
  doesn't want a man unless he has certain status or money or
• 40:41
  power. A man doesn't want a woman
• 40:43
  unless she is going to. I don't know what it would it
• 40:47
  would even be. There's all different like
• 40:48
  interpretations and of course you want him.
• 40:50
  You need to be attracted to each other and fall in love and all
• 40:52
  this. But I think a good woman loves
• 40:57
  the man for who he is, not what he can give.
• 41:01
  And I think about my husband as an example, and I married him
• 41:04
  for him, not for any number of worldly standards that somebody
• 41:08
  could apply, right? Because he is, you know, first
• 41:11
  of all, we could be silly together.
• 41:12
  We could, we had like, you know, this incredible, beautiful
• 41:15
  connection. We were in love with each other.
• 41:17
  But he is so good. He is so wonderful.
• 41:19
  He's so creative. He saw all of these amazing
• 41:21
  things. I was like, I can't not spend my
• 41:23
  life with this person. And of course, it sounds like
• 41:25
  your wife saw that in you. And I think that is how it's
• 41:27
  supposed to be. I think so too.
• 41:29
  And I, I do think there's this tendency today to be like, oh,
• 41:32
  they check all my boxes and I have enough attraction for them.
• 41:36
  So I'm going to go, you know, get married.
• 41:38
  And it's like, well, do you really love them for who they
• 41:40
  are? Such an important.
• 41:41
  Their subjectivity, their personalism, as opposed to like
• 41:44
  boxes they check for you. Yes, I think society expects us
• 41:49
  to want certain things, and it makes everybody want to feel
• 41:53
  like we need to either fulfill what society demands or it's not
• 41:57
  going to work. And I don't believe that's how
• 41:58
  it works at all. It's like you're saying you need
• 42:00
  to learn to love a person for who they are.
• 42:02
  A lot of times there are things that we would like to have them
• 42:06
  to have. Obviously you want somebody
• 42:07
  who's going to be loyal. Virtue.
• 42:09
  You want virtue. But there are things that you
• 42:12
  grow on. For example, my wife and I did
• 42:16
  not have the same sense of humor.
• 42:19
  She doesn't get American jokes. So when I would say Joe, she
• 42:22
  wouldn't laugh, but she would be silly.
• 42:25
  And that's the the type of humor that we shared.
• 42:27
  Now we've spent so much time together that when she jokes
• 42:30
  around, like she'll poke jokes at me.
• 42:34
  She sounds like me and it's so weird.
• 42:36
  And sometimes when I'm talking, I sound like her.
• 42:39
  And it's like in society, if if this person that I met doesn't
• 42:43
  meet my qualifications and what I'm looking for, that's not the
• 42:46
  one. And I'm saying to learn to grow
• 42:49
  together and develop this unique version that is not the standard
• 42:53
  of the world. You're making your own love
• 42:56
  together, your own version of what you together means.
• 43:00
  You don't have to follow the template that they're offering.
• 43:03
  There's so much more to it, and I think the world now overlooks
• 43:06
  it completely. I love that.
• 43:08
  And also like this idea of marry somebody who is established too.
• 43:13
  They have to be making a certain amount of money or have now they
• 43:16
  need to be driven. I think they need to be
• 43:18
  hardworking. They need to be willing to like,
• 43:19
  do what it takes one way. Yeah, it's it's virtues.
• 43:22
  But then to marry someone because of what they can give
• 43:25
  you in a physical sense, I think is a very dangerous thing to do
• 43:29
  because our money is not from God.
• 43:30
  Like, you can lose everything tomorrow.
• 43:31
  You can get everything tomorrow. You marry the person.
• 43:34
  Not the not the list. You don't know what they have.
• 43:38
  OK, so you're in Japan. Are you married yet?
• 43:40
  By the time you. Yes.
• 43:42
  OK, so you're so. We are married, Really.
• 43:44
  Within a year, you're married. Yeah, so we got married quick
• 43:46
  and she's supportive and I'm questioning everything.
• 43:51
  One of the things that I realized as I was in the middle
• 43:54
  of all of this is that I was going to the Mishnah, which is
• 43:57
  the Jewish writings, to try to find out, you know what, what am
• 44:01
  I supposed to do with my life? This is something a question
• 44:03
  that has always been super important to me personally, from
• 44:06
  when I was in the Protestant world, when I was in the
• 44:08
  Messianic world, and when I started and when I started
• 44:11
  embracing the more Orthodox variation.
• 44:14
  I want to live how God wants me to live.
• 44:17
  What I noticed though, is that since there is no authority, no
• 44:21
  living authority, you really don't know.
• 44:22
  Nowadays, every rabbi saying everything different.
• 44:25
  Then I go to the past and I realized that there was the
• 44:29
  Sanhedrin before that it was called the bait.
• 44:32
  Dean Hagadol literally means the great House of judgment, a court
• 44:35
  system that would judge for people.
• 44:38
  And this goes all the way back to Moses.
• 44:40
  And that doesn't exist anymore. And it doesn't exist anymore.
• 44:43
  Why? After this destruction of the
• 44:45
  temple, that whole system collapsed.
• 44:47
  You didn't just lose a temple at 70 AD.
• 44:51
  That was in the demolition of the whole system.
• 44:54
  There's no temple, there's no priesthood, there are no
• 44:57
  sacrifices, and there's no court.
• 44:59
  So I'm thinking, wait a second, if that ancient system is not
• 45:03
  gone, Rabbinic Judaism is just a response.
• 45:07
  I'm lost. And then I realized, wait a
• 45:09
  second, I'm looking only to these Christ denying rabbis.
• 45:15
  What did the early followers of Christ believe?
• 45:19
  So I start reading the whole New Testament from cover to cover
• 45:22
  again, and then I start continuing that reading.
• 45:25
  This writing called the DDK. For a lot of people that might
• 45:28
  not know, it's basically the earliest Jewish writing, not
• 45:30
  earliest Jewish writings. The earliest writings attributed
• 45:33
  to the followers of Christ outside of the Bible.
• 45:36
  It's like their first catechism is the basically.
• 45:38
  Yeah. Exactly.
• 45:39
  And it had a very strong restrictions.
• 45:41
  They do not abort, like don't have abortions.
• 45:44
  I mean, it's very much a moral prescription.
• 45:46
  Yes, that was useful for the people of that time based on
• 45:49
  what was happening in the culture.
• 45:50
  Exactly, and it was a very good catechism and almost the
• 45:54
  language of it reveals almost as if the temple was still
• 45:57
  standing, which is interesting because it can show us how old
• 46:00
  this document is. So I read the New Testament,
• 46:03
  read that and then I wanted to read what the students of the
• 46:06
  apostles were teaching. So these are the early Church
• 46:08
  fathers. Now keep this in mind.
• 46:11
  I was raised in a way that was very anti Catholic and then
• 46:15
  later I became pretty anti Christian in the sense of the
• 46:18
  evangelical world. So when I start looking at these
• 46:21
  things, I wanted to stay away from Constantine and everything
• 46:24
  that happened after the council and I see because in my mind I
• 46:26
  thought it was all Pagan afterwards.
• 46:28
  I mean, in your mind, Constantine version of
• 46:30
  institutionalized Christianity or of permitting Christianity
• 46:34
  effectively was totally messed up?
• 46:35
  Yeah, I thought it was the paganization of Christianity.
• 46:38
  Wow. Or of the actual the true faith.
• 46:41
  Interesting. So what I end up doing is OK I'm
• 46:44
  going to study the early church fathers but everything has to be
• 46:46
  pre nicean so I'm looking. At what year for people
• 46:49
  listening? What year is Nicean?
• 46:50
  It's going to be already in the 4th century, so we're talking
• 46:53
  about the 300. The 1st 300 years.
• 46:54
  So I look at Saint Irenaeus, St. Polycarp, St.
• 46:58
  Clement of Rome, Saint Ignatius of Antioch, and when I start
• 47:02
  looking at these guys and all their writings, I noticed things
• 47:05
  that really stood out to me. Number one, they spoke in a
• 47:10
  language that made sense to me as a Jew because they didn't
• 47:14
  scrap the whole sacrificial system.
• 47:16
  They are saying, no, it's now continued and fulfilled in
• 47:18
  Christ, the priesthood as well. There's a Saint Ignatius of
• 47:22
  Antioch that reveals the fulfillment of the Levitical
• 47:25
  priesthood in the bishops and the priests within the church in
• 47:29
  Christ. They're talking about the
• 47:31
  Eucharist, and this is the one that really bothered me.
• 47:33
  They're talking about the Eucharist not simply being a
• 47:36
  symbol. It was really partaking in
• 47:39
  Christ's sacrifice and if it was really him.
• 47:43
  His real body, blood, soul and divinity.
• 47:45
  So that sounded Catholic to me. And I'm like, cannot be there's
• 47:48
  I'm, I must be misunderstanding this.
• 47:51
  So I start digging more into their writings as much as I
• 47:54
  could get my hands on. And then I wanted to debunk the
• 47:57
  church because I cannot accept, I cannot accept that the church
• 48:00
  was right, the Catholic Church. So I go on this rampage for two
• 48:04
  years trying to debunk the Catholic Church.
• 48:07
  Can I ask you a quick question before you share about the
• 48:09
  rampage? You said you were kind of raised
• 48:11
  anti Catholic and this was as a Protestant.
• 48:14
  And what kind of Protestant was it?
• 48:15
  Evangelical More. Or yeah, it was evangelical.
• 48:18
  What can you explain what that means?
• 48:19
  Like what were you taught about Catholicism growing up?
• 48:22
  It's basically the standard stuff that the Pope is the
• 48:25
  Antichrist that was. Pretty intense because not all
• 48:28
  evangelicals believe that. No, no, no, no.
• 48:30
  But this is what I was raised in.
• 48:31
  It was the Pope is the Antichrist, that Catholics
• 48:36
  worship Mary, they worship the Saints, that the Saints were
• 48:39
  actually replacements of the gods of the natives and things
• 48:43
  like that. I believe that the rosary was a
• 48:46
  form of idolatry and in basically in almost every sense,
• 48:51
  they were just wrong. Did you believe that Catholics
• 48:54
  were like super legalistic and focused on the letter of the law
• 48:58
  as opposed to like a personal relationship with Jesus?
• 49:01
  Yeah, I had an actual encounter in which I realized or where I
• 49:04
  felt that I was in while I was still in the Protestant world.
• 49:08
  This is before I had dug into Judaism in the Protestant world.
• 49:12
  I remember that we would try to do like street preaching.
• 49:14
  And I met this Catholic lady this what a sweet little soul,
• 49:18
  right? I see her and I and I tell her
• 49:21
  because I saw her come out of the Catholic Church.
• 49:23
  You need to learn. You need to learn about Jesus.
• 49:25
  You're not getting him here. And she's so humble and so kind
• 49:28
  and she's just like listening. She's like, you know, I have
• 49:30
  Jesus and you know, oh, but you don't understand the Bible.
• 49:33
  And she was literally holding the Bible afterwards, after that
• 49:37
  whole thing happened. I remember that I was on like we
• 49:39
  were on the youth bus, like driving somewhere other youth
• 49:42
  van and I'm and I had this thought like, wow, if I believe
• 49:47
  that a lot of Catholics are going to go to hell.
• 49:48
  But that Lady, there's no way she's going to end up in hell.
• 49:52
  Something struck me about her, her meekness, her humility, her
• 49:56
  sweetness. I know it sounds so arrogant to
• 49:59
  be like, well, at least this one will be saved.
• 50:02
  But really it, it got to me that spirit of meekness that she
• 50:08
  carried herself with. So it really impacted me.
• 50:11
  And and that's, I mean, I just had a bad vision of Catholics in
• 50:14
  general at that point in my life.
• 50:16
  And I carried it all the way through, even as a Jew, because
• 50:19
  even even if you see now the, the way that most Jewish people
• 50:24
  see Christianity, they'll be OK with the evangelicals more so.
• 50:28
  But the Catholics are the ones that say that no go.
• 50:31
  Some Catholics and we're going to get into that because we were
• 50:33
  talking about that beforehand just like the craziness today,
• 50:36
  especially honestly in online spaces is most of it, which I
• 50:40
  know we both are living, you know in to some degree.
• 50:44
  OK, well thank you for sharing that and I think it's an
• 50:48
  interesting snapshot. I've heard other, I mean, I was
• 50:51
  raised evangelical as well and Catholics were more of just a
• 50:55
  question mark like they, they weren't really talked about.
• 50:57
  We didn't really think about them.
• 50:58
  So we weren't like anti Catholic.
• 50:59
  We weren't really anti anything or just pro Jesus.
• 51:02
  Although occasionally I run into, as I started to learn more
• 51:05
  about Catholicism and everything people think saying, yeah, they
• 51:08
  worship the same thing, they worship Mary, they're idolaters.
• 51:11
  You know they're rules based, workspaced as opposed to great.
• 51:14
  Space. Yes, that one, That one.
• 51:15
  Yeah, that was that. Was in the beginning of the
• 51:16
  Protestant world too, that I had that idea.
• 51:19
  They think they can work their way to Jesus, you know, to
• 51:21
  Jesus, which, no, of course, it's all through the blood of
• 51:24
  Jesus. But we are called to work out
• 51:25
  our sanctification, all of us. And I think even most
• 51:28
  Protestants would agree with that.
• 51:29
  So. OK, So yeah.
• 51:32
  What? When do you meet?
• 51:33
  When do you meet a Catholic in Japan?
• 51:35
  OK, so this is the interesting part because in that journey,
• 51:39
  right when I was starting to want to debunk the Church,
• 51:43
  everything starts in that journey.
• 51:46
  First, I had not met a single Catholic in Japan, or maybe I
• 51:52
  might have, you know, seen him around, but I would have known.
• 51:55
  So for me, that wasn't even in the question.
• 51:58
  The only question in my mind was, why does it sound Catholic?
• 52:01
  When I was studying these things and when I started studying more
• 52:05
  and more, I, I started seeing certain things that stood out.
• 52:08
  Then I'm like, OK, this is actually makes sense.
• 52:10
  Like the papacy. I know a lot of people struggle
• 52:12
  with the papacy. It actually didn't become a
• 52:15
  difficult thing for me because when you look at scriptures like
• 52:18
  Isaiah 22, that was already the pattern of the Stuart, which was
• 52:22
  not the king himself, but he was a steward.
• 52:24
  He was in charge of the Kingdom. He was given the keys and he was
• 52:27
  able to manage the temple as well.
• 52:29
  This were actual physical keys. Then you had the Magisterium,
• 52:35
  which also made sense to me. I'm sorry, going back to that
• 52:38
  thing you just said, that's super fascinating.
• 52:40
  So you're saying you saw as a Jew, as a Messianic Jew, I
• 52:45
  should say, you saw the tradition that Jesus was born
• 52:49
  into and that Jesus, you know, ultimately realized the fullness
• 52:52
  of it, right. And the tradition was there was
• 52:55
  a king and then there was the keeper of the temple who had the
• 52:57
  keys, who kind of made final judgments for how we were to do
• 53:00
  temple, like how to live out faith basically.
• 53:02
  And you know, in the new covenant, Jesus is the king and
• 53:05
  then the the Holy Father, the Pope is there to as Peter was
• 53:08
  given the keys to the Kingdom. Like when the keys were given to
• 53:11
  the Kingdom in the New Testament by Jesus to Peter.
• 53:16
  He was specifically referencing a custom that everyone
• 53:20
  understood and knew to me. Now you're to hold ultimately
• 53:24
  the practice for how to do this thing to help teach the
• 53:26
  brothers. Yeah, and it wasn't even just
• 53:28
  the keys. This is one thing that I've
• 53:29
  nowadays you're hearing more about the the keys.
• 53:32
  But there's another part that a lot of people completely miss is
• 53:35
  the fact that he gave him the name Kefa, which means the rock,
• 53:39
  the foundation stone. That's why he says I will build
• 53:41
  my church upon this rock. And people would just glide over
• 53:44
  this. If you go to the Talmud, he
• 53:47
  talks about the rock, the stone, the foundation stone of the
• 53:50
  temple. It's it's believed to be the
• 53:54
  place where Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac.
• 53:57
  That's the foundation stone of the temple.
• 54:00
  It's called the event Shatia, that rock on which the temple is
• 54:04
  built. That's why Peter gets his name
• 54:06
  also rock on which the church is built.
• 54:09
  So it's it's a very real parallel that he's the rock.
• 54:14
  He's the foundation of the church.
• 54:16
  He receives the keys. He's later told to feed the
• 54:18
  sheep and he now we call him Papa if you go to Isaiah 22, but
• 54:23
  in Hebrew it says that he is an av to the people of Jerusalem.
• 54:28
  Av means Father, Father Pope. Wow, beautiful things.
• 54:34
  I think a lot I've heard even on this show, you know, I've talked
• 54:37
  to beautiful Protestants, evangelicals who say, well, we
• 54:40
  understand that, that, you know, those words Jesus gave to Peter.
• 54:43
  As you know, the rock is about the the profession of faith
• 54:48
  where Jesus realized that this is, you know, God, that Jesus is
• 54:51
  the Son of God and God. And it's the profession of faith
• 54:54
  that all Christians build their faith on.
• 54:57
  And that's what the rock means. It's sort of a subjective thing
• 54:59
  for each Christian who has their own private the profession or
• 55:01
  public profession of faith. Well, the church teaches that it
• 55:05
  can be both and, right? But it doesn't negate the
• 55:09
  reality of what we're talking about here.
• 55:11
  And this is what is known as typology, where you see these
• 55:14
  references of people and of situations that happened that
• 55:19
  become like a foreshadow for what's coming, right?
• 55:22
  We see this in Mary being the Ark of the New Covenant.
• 55:25
  She was the one who bore the bread of life.
• 55:28
  The Word of God manifested in this reality and the true
• 55:32
  priesthood. In the ark you had the mana,
• 55:34
  which is the bread from heaven. You have the Word of God made
• 55:38
  manifest in this reality, which was the tablets of stone.
• 55:41
  And you have the budding rod of Aaron, which was the sign of the
• 55:44
  priesthood. So that reveals to us that Mary
• 55:48
  is the new Arctic. So I started seeing all of these
• 55:50
  different things. What happened with me was that
• 55:54
  all of these things started making sense, right?
• 55:55
  A little. By the way, it took two years
• 55:57
  for me to start making all of these different connections, the
• 56:00
  papacy, the magisterium, Marian doctrines.
• 56:03
  What about incense? What about the use of liturgy
• 56:06
  for prayers? Having a holy calendar, which is
• 56:08
  something that we have as Jews, having feasts.
• 56:11
  And then I started seeing that the parallel of Catholicism.
• 56:14
  I'm like, Oh my goodness, Catholicism seems super Jewish.
• 56:19
  That's how I said said it. Now I would rephrase it.
• 56:21
  I would say it's very much what the ancient Israelites lived.
• 56:25
  Well, it's the fulfillment of the law, not the abolition of
• 56:28
  and this is the thing like your unique story, it's so incredible
• 56:31
  because you actually deeply deep, you know, you deep dive,
• 56:35
  what does it mean to be a practicing Jew, but still hold
• 56:37
  on to, you know, Jesus is Lord, but like, what is this and that
• 56:40
  and this and that. And then when you're reading
• 56:41
  with fresh eyes in New Testament, you're seeing, well,
• 56:43
  all of this is a fulfillment of these practices that I was
• 56:46
  hanging on to because I wanted to obey and I wanted to be close
• 56:49
  to God. You're like, wow, there's a new
• 56:50
  way to practice all of this. God did not abolish these
• 56:53
  practices. That was so beautiful to.
• 56:55
  Me filled them. And that that made me so happy
• 56:58
  because in the world of Messianic Judaism and just
• 57:00
  Judaism in general, it's like you're in this mode of
• 57:03
  expectation, right? You're like doing a rehearsal.
• 57:06
  And, and, and I was in a perpetual rehearsal of like, I'm
• 57:09
  trying to obey God. I want to live how he wants me
• 57:11
  to live. But then when I start seeing the
• 57:13
  fulfillment in the Catholic faith, I started becoming
• 57:18
  enamored and I'm like, I want this.
• 57:20
  There was one problem. Mary here, it made absolute
• 57:26
  sense. She's the Queen Mother.
• 57:28
  I can see how she's the ark. I can understand the assumption
• 57:31
  can. You explain the Jewish Korean
• 57:32
  mother really quick. Yeah.
• 57:33
  What does that mean? So this is what we call the
• 57:34
  gebira in, in the Kingdom of Israel.
• 57:38
  It it didn't last too long really.
• 57:40
  It was just basically the King David and Solomon and then the
• 57:42
  two sons that split the Kingdom. But in that Kingdom, the real
• 57:47
  queen was the mother. It wasn't the spouse.
• 57:50
  As we know, King Solomon had a lot of wives, a lot of
• 57:53
  concubine. So who would be the queen?
• 57:55
  That's why the queen would be the mother and that's why we
• 57:59
  call her the Gabriel, the Queen Mother.
• 58:01
  And it was her that would operate as a like an
• 58:05
  intercessor, if you will. We have a story in the in the
• 58:07
  book. I want to say it's in the Book
• 58:10
  of Kings where it talks about these gentlemen that wanted to
• 58:14
  seek something from the king, but they knew that if they go
• 58:17
  directly to the king, he they might not get heard.
• 58:20
  I mean, it's the king. But they go to the Queen Mother
• 58:24
  and ask her for this and she says, OK, I'll do it.
• 58:29
  When when she goes to speak to the king, King Solomon, he says,
• 58:33
  I will do what you ask. It sounds very familiar to what
• 58:38
  we see later in the wedding at Khanna, where these men say,
• 58:42
  hey, we're running out of wine. They go to the Queen Mother
• 58:45
  Mary. And she says, I'll, I'll talk to
• 58:48
  him. And then he, he ends up at first
• 58:51
  he says, you know, what is this had to do with me basically?
• 58:56
  What, what is this my business but not my time yet.
• 58:59
  Yeah, it's not my time. I don't have to do this.
• 59:01
  But she asked and just following that same pattern of the Queen
• 59:05
  Mother, he concedes and doesn't, and this becomes his first
• 59:09
  public ministry miracle. And it's do whatever he tells
• 59:12
  you. So it's clear the power is from
• 59:14
  God. It's from Jesus, of course, but
• 59:17
  she is requesting on our behalf. She's praying for us.
• 59:20
  She's interceding. Can we go directly to the King
• 59:22
  as Christians? Yes, we can when we love to.
• 59:25
  He's our Lord, you know, he's our king.
• 59:26
  Jesus is King of the universe, but this is the Providence and
• 59:29
  the generosity of God. He gives me my brother in the
• 59:31
  faith. You, you know, he gives me my,
• 59:33
  my family. He gives me, you know, the, the,
• 59:36
  the priesthood that serves us and loves us and he gives us
• 59:38
  sacraments. And you get all of these
• 59:41
  intercessors. You get all of these helpers in
• 59:44
  the faith. And that's always been the way
• 59:46
  of Christianity. And I think even evangelicals,
• 59:48
  Protestants acknowledge this. They know the power of the
• 59:51
  brethren when two or more gathered together in prayer,
• 59:53
  like we are heard, like they see that and they acknowledge that.
• 59:56
  I think the part with Mary is just like, culturally, honestly,
• 59:59
  I think culturally even more than theologically in some ways,
• 1:00:02
  when you really understand theology, you're like, yeah,
• 1:00:03
  that makes sense. Culturally, just like, oh, I
• 1:00:05
  pray to this woman, like ask this woman this, this lady like.
• 1:00:09
  That's that's the issue that I had.
• 1:00:11
  Like I said, it made sense in my mind.
• 1:00:14
  The theology was there. I had no problem with the dogmas
• 1:00:16
  when it comes to the written form of it.
• 1:00:18
  But I see Catholics, she's my mother.
• 1:00:22
  I love her Ave. Maria.
• 1:00:24
  I'm like, whoa, relax. I, I, I could not wrap my head
• 1:00:28
  around it. But since everything was making
• 1:00:30
  sense and I was starting to very clearly see that Catholicism was
• 1:00:34
  the continuation of the ancient faith of the ancient Israelites,
• 1:00:38
  I said, God, if you want me to see Mary, how the church is
• 1:00:42
  telling me that I'm supposed to see her, you have to do
• 1:00:44
  something in my heart because I'm not going.
• 1:00:46
  I can't I can't feel it is just does something is not sitting
• 1:00:50
  right in my heart. So God, if you want me to see
• 1:00:52
  this, you need to make it happen.
• 1:00:55
  What happened next was what changed everything for me.
• 1:00:59
  All of a sudden I get this random desire to want to pray
• 1:01:02
  the rosary. I go to Etsy, I buy 1.
• 1:01:05
  I don't know how to pray. So I started looking at YouTube
• 1:01:08
  channels and trying to learn how to pray.
• 1:01:10
  And one of the biggest people that influenced me there was,
• 1:01:13
  yeah, Gabby, I need to meet him. Does he live in California?
• 1:01:16
  No. No, I don't think so.
• 1:01:17
  He was on the show last year. He's great.
• 1:01:20
  We should do a roundtable. He's Texas, yes.
• 1:01:23
  Man. He's people have mentioned him
• 1:01:24
  all the time on the show, like, and then I found I found Gabby
• 1:01:27
  and then I understood Our Lady. Thank you Gabby for your sorry,
• 1:01:31
  Gabby. Thank you Gabby for your for
• 1:01:34
  your service. Yeah, I mean, honestly, it was
• 1:01:36
  tremendous for me because I began to pray the rosary daily.
• 1:01:41
  And as I started to do that, that's when I felt my heart
• 1:01:45
  melt, when I started to see Mary as my mother, when I started to
• 1:01:49
  understand the dogmas, not just intellectually, but more
• 1:01:53
  spiritually and in my heart. And that's what led me to
• 1:01:57
  finally want to be like, OK, you know what?
• 1:01:59
  I want to become Catholic. Then it gets even more
• 1:02:03
  mysterious to me because when I already made this ascent within
• 1:02:07
  myself, like, OK, the Catholic faith is true.
• 1:02:11
  I see that Mary is my mother. I, I wanted to go to Mass, but
• 1:02:15
  this is during COVID, this like when it all started.
• 1:02:18
  So the churches were shut down. I don't know what to do.
• 1:02:22
  So I had to book a Mass. Like, do you have to sign up to
• 1:02:25
  say that you're going to go to the Mass?
• 1:02:26
  They need to know exactly how many people are coming and all
• 1:02:28
  of that. That night, I have the note in
• 1:02:31
  my phone still because I have a dream in which I saw the Blessed
• 1:02:35
  Mother. She was dressed in blue and
• 1:02:38
  yellow. And I, I'm entering this Mass
• 1:02:42
  and I see children and families and everybody's happy and
• 1:02:46
  running around and it was great. And I felt such peace.
• 1:02:49
  And I hear actually, no, I didn't hear her voice.
• 1:02:52
  I felt her voice, which was a weird thing for me.
• 1:02:55
  I'm happy for you. And I understood that it meant
• 1:02:58
  that she was happy for me for actually finally taking the step
• 1:03:01
  to join the church and plenty of other things.
• 1:03:04
  And hopefully in, in the future, if we get to share more
• 1:03:07
  conversations, I'd like to share more about that.
• 1:03:08
  But it was in that encounter where I saw the beauty of our
• 1:03:14
  mother, where I saw everything kind of tie in, in a, in a nice
• 1:03:18
  bow to say this is what you have to pursue.
• 1:03:20
  And I told God right before this all happened, like, if this is
• 1:03:24
  really where you want to take me, I'm going to go full force.
• 1:03:26
  That's why in my YouTube content, it used to be about my
• 1:03:29
  Jew faith, Messianic Judaism. It used to be called Messianic
• 1:03:34
  me TV. And I decided to change it.
• 1:03:37
  Now all I'm going to do is about sharing the Catholic roots of
• 1:03:39
  the faith, and that's going to become my mission.
• 1:03:42
  So I try to reach out to Jews to let them know about our
• 1:03:45
  messiahs. Here.
• 1:03:47
  I try to show Catholics, look at the richness of your faith, look
• 1:03:50
  at typology, how beautiful it is.
• 1:03:52
  Look at the roots of where you're, all these practices that
• 1:03:55
  you do, where they come from. And also to help Christians that
• 1:03:58
  ended up like me in the messianic world.
• 1:04:01
  They're looking for the ancient and they're nice people, they're
• 1:04:03
  beautiful people and they're really just want to obey God.
• 1:04:07
  But where do you really find the fulfillment is in the Catholic
• 1:04:09
  faith? So that's that's what I try to
• 1:04:11
  do now. So I devoted myself to that and
• 1:04:15
  in, in, in that journey, it's, it's been rocky, it's not always
• 1:04:19
  smooth, but it's been a beautiful journey still.
• 1:04:23
  What's rocky about becoming Catholic?
• 1:04:27
  The three sides from which I feel that opposition came in
• 1:04:31
  that made everything rocky #1 from the Jewish people that felt
• 1:04:36
  that I betrayed them. Like, how can you?
• 1:04:38
  How can you leave this? And it wasn't just Messianic
• 1:04:42
  Jews, it was actual straight up Orthodox Jews.
• 1:04:45
  You are rejecting your people. You're denying our heritage.
• 1:04:49
  To become Catholic. By becoming Catholic.
• 1:04:51
  But then I also had Protestants because they just, you know, the
• 1:04:55
  perceived notion of what Catholicism is, is not good.
• 1:04:59
  And then I also had it from Catholics, where Catholics were
• 1:05:03
  saying that I must be a Judaizer because at this point I was
• 1:05:07
  still wearing a keeper. I'm walking to Catholicism and
• 1:05:10
  with a keeper, right? You're going to mass with a
• 1:05:12
  keeper on. Well, I, I didn't go that far,
• 1:05:14
  but I did think about it. But I started thinking about the
• 1:05:16
  scripture where we're told not to be stumbling blocks to our
• 1:05:19
  brothers. So I'm like, you know what?
• 1:05:21
  I don't want to confuse anybody. I don't want anybody to get the
• 1:05:23
  wrong idea. I'm confused enough.
• 1:05:27
  So like, I'm like, yeah, I'll just go without a keeper.
• 1:05:30
  So but then from the Catholics, it was that I was called a
• 1:05:32
  Judaizer. I was called a fake Catholic, as
• 1:05:37
  in you can't be Jewish and become Catholic for some reason.
• 1:05:40
  So I was getting hate from. Jewish did they mean?
• 1:05:43
  What did those people mean? You can't be Jewish and be
• 1:05:45
  having Jesus Christ as no. That's just how they treated me.
• 1:05:48
  But you know the saying that the Jews killed the killed Christ?
• 1:05:52
  So they were they were anti-Semitic towards you is what
• 1:05:54
  you're saying? Yes, and I know you don't say
• 1:05:57
  that lightly because I know you would think that anti-Semitism,
• 1:06:00
  some some, you know, accusations of anti-Semitism can be taken
• 1:06:05
  too far, but you have personally experienced.
• 1:06:07
  Anti-Semitism for sure. Yeah, like as you mentioned, for
• 1:06:10
  me, I I like to not play the victim card.
• 1:06:13
  Of course not. And I also, I also do believe
• 1:06:16
  that people take words to an extent that becomes as it makes
• 1:06:21
  the words meaningless, essentially.
• 1:06:23
  But for me, they're calling me a fake Catholic.
• 1:06:26
  I'm like, dude, look at me, I'm praying the rosary every day.
• 1:06:29
  I'm I'm one of you. I just got.
• 1:06:30
  Baptized at this time. Yes, this is already I already.
• 1:06:33
  Well, first of all, it began as I started to say that I was
• 1:06:37
  going to become Catholic. But even after I was baptized
• 1:06:40
  and everything continues and it continues to this very day.
• 1:06:42
  I've been Catholic for now almost four years and still you
• 1:06:45
  go to my comment section and you will get people calling me.
• 1:06:48
  I'm Assad agent. I've been called a beside, so
• 1:06:51
  welcome. To the class, they're always
• 1:06:54
  like, what about your 7000? I'm like, I have never received
• 1:06:57
  a solitary penny, but hey, if I'm going to send it, send it my
• 1:07:01
  way, I guess. OK, there's so much to unpack
• 1:07:05
  with what you just said on all levels.
• 1:07:08
  First, I got to ask that you mentioned you were baptized.
• 1:07:09
  Had you not been baptized yet? Well, I thought I was baptized,
• 1:07:14
  but I had no record of it. Yeah.
• 1:07:15
  So you had a conditional. Yes.
• 1:07:17
  So we we had to pull down like all of the the bishops in the
• 1:07:21
  area had to have this conversation.
• 1:07:23
  What do we do with this Jewish guy?
• 1:07:24
  Yeah. What do we do with this Jew?
• 1:07:26
  And you know what's crazy? I wanted to get the name Paul as
• 1:07:29
  my baptismal name because I'm like, oh, you know, he was a Jew
• 1:07:32
  of Jews. And even in Scripture after he's
• 1:07:34
  already a Christian, he says, I'm a Jew born in, in Cecilia,
• 1:07:39
  Felicia, you know, from the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee
• 1:07:43
  according to our tradition. So I'm like, yeah, that's,
• 1:07:45
  that's me. He's a, he's a Jew.
• 1:07:47
  He's not denying it, but he's also not denying Christ.
• 1:07:50
  He's living in it. But then they're like, no, you
• 1:07:52
  can't have that name. Why?
• 1:07:54
  I'm like, oh man, I don't know. I don't know.
• 1:07:55
  But that's, I guess in Japan it's like that.
• 1:07:57
  But also in Japan is really interesting.
• 1:07:59
  You get 2 baptismal names. So my priest did he, he's like,
• 1:08:04
  OK, you know what? You should keep Daniel because
• 1:08:07
  your ancestry, but look for another for your second name and
• 1:08:12
  that's when I learned about Apollos.
• 1:08:14
  That's why you see online my my baptismal name is Daniel
• 1:08:19
  Apollos. Apollos was an Alexandrian Jew
• 1:08:23
  and that's how he's described in in the Scripture.
• 1:08:25
  He was an Alexandrian Jew who, although he was not perfected in
• 1:08:29
  the faith, he would speak boldly what he knew of Christ.
• 1:08:33
  And it wasn't until later that Paul and his students saw him
• 1:08:39
  and he's, Paul says, OK, you guys take him and perfect him in
• 1:08:43
  the faith, teach him well so he understands the fullness of the
• 1:08:46
  gospel. And then he just continued to
• 1:08:48
  preach the gospel, bringing it to the Jews.
• 1:08:50
  That was his main mission. I'm like, that sounds like what
• 1:08:53
  I want. Like I was talking boldly, like
• 1:08:56
  I'm sharing the faith. I'm sharing Jesus even with
• 1:08:59
  Jews, even as a Messianic Jew practicing Torah.
• 1:09:02
  But now I'm Catholic. Now I'm presenting Christ
• 1:09:07
  boldly, more perfected. So that's why I chose that name.
• 1:09:12
  Daniel. Apollo's became my baptismal
• 1:09:14
  name in Japan. Amazing.
• 1:09:16
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:09:17
  And the conditional baptism for people listening, baptized once
• 1:09:21
  baptized always. I mean, that's right.
• 1:09:23
  The baptism is something that God does.
• 1:09:24
  We don't do it. It's that baptism doesn't have
• 1:09:26
  power because we believe it. Although, you know, part of our
• 1:09:29
  sanctification is our our willingness to receive the gift
• 1:09:33
  of faith and practice belief. But baptism is something that
• 1:09:36
  God does. And I think this is a
• 1:09:38
  misunderstanding among some Christians because they're like,
• 1:09:41
  oh, I was Baptist as a baby. And then I got Baptist again
• 1:09:43
  because I really meant that this time I couldn't mean it as a
• 1:09:45
  baby. I'm like, you don't create the
• 1:09:47
  power of baptism. God does.
• 1:09:48
  That's right. And there's, there's just a few
• 1:09:51
  things required for baptism. In the name of the Father Son, I
• 1:09:53
  baptize you. In the name of the Father, Son,
• 1:09:54
  Holy Spirit, water over the head.
• 1:10:00
  You were potentially baptized, but you weren't able to confirm
• 1:10:03
  that those basics were part of the baptism.
• 1:10:06
  Because there's some baptisms like I baptize you in Jesus
• 1:10:08
  name. Or we baptize you.
• 1:10:11
  Or we baptize you. Or water isn't used maybe?
• 1:10:15
  Or there's some defect there in? Some branches of Christianity,
• 1:10:18
  they don't even see it as necessary.
• 1:10:20
  They don't. They don't do it at all.
• 1:10:22
  So because there was no way to verify, that's why we went with
• 1:10:25
  the conditional baptism. So I was baptized as a
• 1:10:29
  Protestant and they were able to verify how the baptism was done
• 1:10:34
  and so I didn't. When I became Catholic, I'm
• 1:10:36
  already baptized. Excellent.
• 1:10:38
  Well, look at that. That's.
• 1:10:39
  An easier so when you were baptized, I know, but when you
• 1:10:42
  were baptized was it the same day as receiving other
• 1:10:45
  sacraments or OK all together? It all happened.
• 1:10:48
  Easter Vigil, Yes, it was amazing.
• 1:10:51
  I've never experienced anything like that prior and I am
• 1:10:56
  baptized, confirmed, and Holy Communion that first day.
• 1:11:01
  You know, when I first received our Lord in the most Holy
• 1:11:05
  Eucharist, I blacked out for a second because I could.
• 1:11:10
  I, I got into this mindset. I'm like, I'm getting super
• 1:11:13
  nervous as the priest is coming down the line.
• 1:11:16
  And then I start thinking I am not worthy, I am not worthy, I
• 1:11:20
  am not worthy. And this nervousness started,
• 1:11:23
  but when I received our Lord, I said, wow, I'm so grateful.
• 1:11:27
  I'm so grateful. And I blacked out enough and
• 1:11:29
  then I came back and I'm like, I'm like sweating bullets.
• 1:11:33
  I'm like, this was amazing. And I started crying, bawling my
• 1:11:36
  eyes out. It was such a beautiful
• 1:11:38
  experience. And, and I try to every time
• 1:11:41
  that I go to Mass for like this past four years, I always try to
• 1:11:44
  recall that very first moment because I'm not worthy.
• 1:11:49
  But I'm so grateful of this gift that Christ allows us to be
• 1:11:56
  unified in him in such an intimate way.
• 1:11:59
  So yes, how beautiful it is. It is.
• 1:12:03
  It is. When you were understanding the
• 1:12:06
  Eucharist, how did that connect back to what you understood of
• 1:12:10
  Jewish traditions regarding Passover?
• 1:12:14
  Passover, yeah. So I think this is where it also
• 1:12:18
  really helped me to have come, not just in Protestantism, but I
• 1:12:21
  had to go through that phase within Judaism.
• 1:12:26
  Every time that we celebrated the Passover, which we call
• 1:12:28
  Pesach, we read from this thing called the Haggadah.
• 1:12:33
  It's basically like a liturgical piece of writing that helps you
• 1:12:36
  follow along the order of the Pesach.
• 1:12:40
  It's called the the Seder, The Seder.
• 1:12:43
  So when you're going through it, one of the things that you end
• 1:12:45
  up reading is where the rabbi's tell us that when you are
• 1:12:49
  partaking of this, that you're not supposed to separate
• 1:12:52
  yourself from the first Pesach. That you're supposed to see
• 1:12:55
  yourself as if you're. They don't say any exactly in
• 1:12:58
  this language, but this is what they say, that you need to see
• 1:13:00
  yourself as if you are with them at that moment when that is
• 1:13:03
  happening in the very first, when they're liberated.
• 1:13:06
  So it's like you are a time traveler.
• 1:13:08
  It becomes a reality. And you're not to see yourself
• 1:13:11
  as, yeah, I imagine it. No, you are there.
• 1:13:15
  The parallel is that as Catholics, we don't just say
• 1:13:21
  we're we're remembering Christ. We are partaking in a very real
• 1:13:26
  way in his sacrifice in the cross.
• 1:13:29
  That's why we say it's not a representation.
• 1:13:32
  It's a representation like we are bringing ourselves to the
• 1:13:36
  foot of the cross at that moment.
• 1:13:39
  It's not just symbolic, it's really time traveling, really in
• 1:13:44
  the spiritual realm, linking ourselves to that very moment.
• 1:13:47
  So when I saw that link, it was amazing.
• 1:13:50
  The other one is just recognizing that in the ancient
• 1:13:53
  Passover, which is what the rabbi's are calling you to do,
• 1:13:55
  to remember that ancient 1, you remembering that this sacrifice
• 1:13:59
  was something that you had to consume.
• 1:14:01
  It wasn't just that the lamb was slaughtered, it was something
• 1:14:04
  you had to eat. This is why the I understood
• 1:14:09
  that the Eucharist could not simply be a symbol, because if
• 1:14:13
  it's just a symbol then you're not fulfilling it.
• 1:14:15
  It doesn't say just slaughter the lamb.
• 1:14:17
  Yes Christ was sacrificed, but when do you actually consume
• 1:14:22
  him? It only happens in this, the
• 1:14:25
  Eucharist, when you're actually consuming the body, blood, soul
• 1:14:30
  and divinity of our Lord. Then you are really fulfilling
• 1:14:33
  Pesach, the Passover. There's also the links of what
• 1:14:37
  it means for him to be the Lamb of God.
• 1:14:40
  He takes you all the way back to Abraham, where Abraham is going
• 1:14:44
  to sacrifice his son, but then he says God will provide a lamb.
• 1:14:49
  However, what you see stuck in the thicket is not a lamb, it's
• 1:14:53
  a ram. But he does provide the lamb in
• 1:14:55
  Christ. So we recognize also that in the
• 1:14:58
  Passover of celebrating the sacrifice of the lamb was
• 1:15:01
  pointing to the true Lamb of God.
• 1:15:04
  That's why when Saint Paul talks about Christ, he calls Christ
• 1:15:08
  our Pesach. He is our Passover because he is
• 1:15:13
  that fulfillment. I was promised and was practiced
• 1:15:17
  and that I rehearsed as a Messianic Jew and as a Jew in
• 1:15:20
  Orthodoxy. Now in Catholicism, that's the
• 1:15:24
  fulfillment. Now we're in the reality.
• 1:15:27
  It's like your messianic Jewish practice was preparing you all
• 1:15:33
  along to be of such an on fire Catholic.
• 1:15:36
  Yeah, no, really. I I tell people it might seem
• 1:15:39
  crazy. Oh, you were jumping from this
• 1:15:40
  to this. I'm like, no, I think God was
• 1:15:42
  funneling me. Yes.
• 1:15:44
  Because I did gain a love for scripture in the Protestant
• 1:15:48
  world, I gained a love for the commandments in Messianic
• 1:15:52
  Judaism, and I learned the heritage.
• 1:15:54
  And in Catholicism, I'm finally living out the reality where I
• 1:15:58
  can now share it with people. Even if I get called a fake
• 1:16:01
  Catholic or a fake Jew or this and that, I can still get the
• 1:16:04
  opportunity. I get the opportunity to bring
• 1:16:06
  this beautiful reality that gets lost and overlooked in the midst
• 1:16:11
  of, you know, political arguments and theological
• 1:16:14
  disagreements. And you're right, I'm wrong,
• 1:16:16
  blah, blah, blah. We get so distracted and we
• 1:16:19
  forget about this beautiful reality.
• 1:16:21
  Although those things matter, we cannot forget this that at the
• 1:16:25
  end of the day, what we're trying to do is bring the most
• 1:16:28
  beautiful gift, which is Christ Himself, to the world.
• 1:16:31
  What for you has been the most surprising thing?
• 1:16:36
  Being Catholic. There's a lot of things that I
• 1:16:39
  would say that surprise me, surprise me that the surprises
• 1:16:44
  began as I started me connecting the dots.
• 1:16:48
  The next part is just seeing the variety of Catholics in the
• 1:16:52
  world, right. So even in at first I didn't
• 1:16:55
  even know about the other rites, but I knew about, you know,
• 1:16:59
  within the Roman Rite, the Latin rite, you have the the
• 1:17:02
  traditional Latin mass, you have the Novus Ordo.
• 1:17:06
  And then I started digging into all of this because this is
• 1:17:08
  another thing I forgot to say that in my journey to become
• 1:17:10
  Catholic, I was not ignorant to scandals.
• 1:17:13
  I was not in ignorant about bad popes.
• 1:17:16
  I was not ignorant about things that were done in the name of
• 1:17:20
  the church that were not good. I was not ignorant to it.
• 1:17:24
  I was aware and I needed to be aware because I knew people
• 1:17:27
  would try to use it against me. But I was surprised to see that
• 1:17:32
  in in all of that I found such beauty.
• 1:17:35
  For example, Catholicism in Japan is what I came up with.
• 1:17:40
  That's how I ended up Catholic. So I know Catholic, I know
• 1:17:43
  Catholicism in Japan. When I went to the States for
• 1:17:46
  the first time and I went to do a traditional Latinas, I'm like,
• 1:17:48
  this is completely different. And people talk about that Novus
• 1:17:51
  Ordo and they say like, for example, it's, it's too, too
• 1:17:54
  modern. But when you go to Japan it, it
• 1:17:56
  doesn't feel the same. However, it's still Christ
• 1:18:00
  still. Christ.
• 1:18:02
  And that, that surprised me to see that, you know, sometimes we
• 1:18:05
  bicker. But when we go down to the
• 1:18:07
  reality, which is what I love, I want to get down to the facts.
• 1:18:11
  I want the reality. People will complain about what
• 1:18:14
  their preferred method is, what right or what.
• 1:18:17
  Or music or liturgy. But it's about Christ.
• 1:18:21
  And when I got to understand that, I think it really helped
• 1:18:23
  me to embrace Catholicism all the more.
• 1:18:25
  And that's why also the same way that as a Messianic Jew, I would
• 1:18:29
  want to go to different places and see how it was.
• 1:18:32
  I love now going to different parishes and seeing what how it
• 1:18:36
  goes down. And the beauty of it is that
• 1:18:39
  this is also very Jewish, that we still have the format, the
• 1:18:42
  order on which you do the service, if you will.
• 1:18:45
  So the order of the Mass is the same wherever I go.
• 1:18:48
  So I have like the little Roman missile, and I can go to Japan
• 1:18:51
  and celebrate it the same way that I celebrated here.
• 1:18:54
  And it's the same way that if I go to another country, I will be
• 1:18:56
  able to celebrate it there. So I think that surprised me
• 1:18:59
  that that unified observance. I think that surprised me a lot
• 1:19:05
  because again, it made it more Jewish to me.
• 1:19:08
  I don't know how else to do to frame that.
• 1:19:09
  But that's it. Just seemed familiar in a way.
• 1:19:13
  It is so beautiful when you really take a step back and
• 1:19:16
  think about it because there's so many things you can take for
• 1:19:18
  granted. I take for granted every day in
• 1:19:19
  my life. And you take a step back and you
• 1:19:21
  think right now in every country in the world virtually, except I
• 1:19:26
  guess some time changes, it could depend on being in the
• 1:19:28
  middle of the night. But there is a mass being said
• 1:19:31
  and potentially hundreds of different languages, same
• 1:19:34
  liturgy, same Scripture, same Eucharist.
• 1:19:38
  And this is the universal church.
• 1:19:41
  Catholic means universal. That's this is what it is.
• 1:19:44
  We pray together, yes. Yes, you know what that factor
• 1:19:48
  right there, exactly how you just framed it is one of the
• 1:19:50
  things that stood out to me when I was reading the did OK because
• 1:19:52
  one of the things that they mentioned the did OK.
• 1:19:55
  Again, being kind of like catechism, it it ties the
• 1:19:59
  Eucharist to the prophets when they say that there will be this
• 1:20:03
  sacrifice, this oblation sacrifice that will be
• 1:20:06
  everywhere in the world. So it let me to know that the
• 1:20:10
  faith of the ancient Hebrews would not remain.
• 1:20:14
  In in a piece of land, it would be universal means that from the
• 1:20:18
  beginning the prophets knew that this was not a land based faith.
• 1:20:23
  It was a people based faith in their covenant with God.
• 1:20:26
  So wherever we could be around the world, we're still unified
• 1:20:29
  to the same God. We're still worshipping the same
• 1:20:31
  God through the same sacrifice. So that was another surprise for
• 1:20:35
  me because I could see the very clear unification of the
• 1:20:41
  prophets and of the faith that we live now as Catholics.
• 1:20:45
  So that I think that's one of the things that I would like
• 1:20:47
  Catholics to realize too, is that once you learn the history
• 1:20:51
  of the faith, not just the Catholic faith, but go take it
• 1:20:55
  back to the origins of the Catholic faith, which is with
• 1:20:57
  the Hebrew people, you're going to see something quite
• 1:21:00
  beautiful. One of the things that helped me
• 1:21:03
  to embrace this was a document by the church that a lot of
• 1:21:07
  people are very sensitive about because it gets misunderstood.
• 1:21:11
  It's Nosratate. So Nosratate in our time, that
• 1:21:16
  document basically covers our relationship as Catholics with
• 1:21:20
  other non Christian religions. It talks about specific It does
• 1:21:25
  touch up on the Hindus and the Buddhists, but it also talks
• 1:21:28
  about the relationship between Christians, the Muslims and the
• 1:21:32
  Jews before becoming Catholic. And this is an encyclical?
• 1:21:36
  Yes. Yes.
• 1:21:37
  Do we have the year? So this is Paul the 6th in 1965.
• 1:21:42
  Yes. And for me, this document was
• 1:21:45
  important because when I was in the transition to become
• 1:21:48
  Catholic, I had a Deacon who happened to be Jewish and he
• 1:21:52
  became a friend of mine. And he told me, you need to read
• 1:21:55
  this because I thought that the church really would not want to
• 1:21:58
  accept me. Because remember, I was seeing
• 1:22:00
  the church as maybe they hate me.
• 1:22:02
  Maybe they're not really going to accept me when they find out
• 1:22:04
  that I'm a Jew, especially when I have like, the Star of David,
• 1:22:09
  like I had tattoo. Yeah, tattoo.
• 1:22:10
  And I also had like, the necklace and all of these
• 1:22:13
  different aspects of my life. I'm like, they're not going to
• 1:22:15
  accept me. But he said, no, go, go read
• 1:22:17
  this. So I read the whole document.
• 1:22:19
  I even reread it again last night, the whole document, just
• 1:22:22
  to refresh him. And it was beautiful to see that
• 1:22:25
  in this document, a lot of people misconstrued it because
• 1:22:29
  they think that it means that the church is saying that Jews
• 1:22:32
  don't need Christ. That's not what the church is
• 1:22:34
  teaching. It's simply saying that we have
• 1:22:37
  a connection, an ancient connection, and it acknowledges
• 1:22:43
  in the very beginning of the document we are not denying this
• 1:22:46
  fact that Christ is and always will be the way, the truth and
• 1:22:49
  the life. This is how the document begins
• 1:22:52
  so that everything else that you read needs to be read under this
• 1:22:54
  lens. And when he talks about Jews and
• 1:22:57
  the matter of anti-Semitism, I'm like, wait a second, the church
• 1:23:01
  is condemning anti-Semitism. So that means that the church
• 1:23:06
  does not hate me. So I can be part of this.
• 1:23:10
  And that's when I'm like, OK, I feel a little bit more more
• 1:23:12
  relieved now that I'm going to be going into the church.
• 1:23:15
  So for a lot of people, I think they they see it, they're like,
• 1:23:18
  oh, this is a super liberal document.
• 1:23:20
  It's saying that we're the same. And I'm like, no, this is not
• 1:23:23
  what it's saying. It's just teaching us that we
• 1:23:25
  are to seek peace amongst men. And this is what the scripture
• 1:23:29
  that they try to tie it with is. It says that while we proclaim
• 1:23:33
  Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, we need to be
• 1:23:35
  seeking peace. We live in a world where not
• 1:23:38
  everybody's Catholic. That's just the reality.
• 1:23:42
  And it is our duty to bring the faith right and make disciples
• 1:23:45
  of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of
• 1:23:48
  the Son and of the Holy Spirit. But because not everybody's
• 1:23:52
  Catholic, how do we interact in this world?
• 1:23:55
  Is it through hostility? Is it through aggression?
• 1:23:58
  Is it by condemnation of everybody else who doesn't see
• 1:24:01
  things the way that we see it? Or is it in love?
• 1:24:03
  Is it in charity? Is it in meekness, trying to
• 1:24:06
  bring others to Christ? And that's a beautiful thing
• 1:24:10
  that allowed me to see that. OK, yeah, the church doesn't
• 1:24:13
  hate me. And this is something that I
• 1:24:16
  know that I'm going to have to deal with because in the middle
• 1:24:18
  of all of this, I had the reality of what I was just
• 1:24:21
  telling you where I had Catholics getting at me saying
• 1:24:25
  that I'm a fake Catholic or Jews, then also attacking me
• 1:24:29
  from their side. So that's why before earlier I
• 1:24:33
  said that it was kind of like a rocky road in my my walk as a
• 1:24:37
  Catholic because it touches on sensitive topics like, OK,
• 1:24:42
  anti-Semitism. We understand that the church
• 1:24:44
  says this, but about Zionism, for a lot of people they want to
• 1:24:48
  relate the two. Is anti Zionism the same thing
• 1:24:52
  as anti-Semitism? I had to dig into all of these
• 1:24:54
  topics which are especially nowadays quite sensitive and I
• 1:24:58
  think that it hurts people more than it does any good.
• 1:25:04
  Like, for example, I actually noticed in in Twitter or X how
• 1:25:08
  you were so uncharitably attacked for what you said.
• 1:25:12
  And it bothered me because I understand the the term Zionism
• 1:25:19
  in a certain way. And I know that people see it in
• 1:25:21
  a different way. But I always like to go to like
• 1:25:22
  the origins, the meanings of what the words are.
• 1:25:25
  And the founder of this movement of Zionism, his name is Theodore
• 1:25:29
  Herzl. When he introduced it was
• 1:25:31
  because he wanted a unification of the Jews.
• 1:25:33
  He saw that there was persecution of Jews around the
• 1:25:36
  world. And this was in the 1800s, right
• 1:25:38
  before the Zionist movement established.
• 1:25:41
  And it wasn't just the Zionist movement establishing Israel.
• 1:25:44
  It was countries around the world to the United States
• 1:25:47
  saying give the choose a state because they were just massacred
• 1:25:50
  in the Holocaust and basically they no one wants to.
• 1:25:53
  I mean, this said this is this is the ugly part of the history.
• 1:25:56
  It's like the countries weren't welcoming.
• 1:25:58
  I mean, we, even the United States, we turned away Jews that
• 1:26:02
  were sent right back to Germany and killed in the Holocaust
• 1:26:04
  because we wouldn't welcome them.
• 1:26:05
  So that's the other part of the, the history of the nation state
• 1:26:09
  of Israel, which is not the Israel in the New Testament.
• 1:26:12
  You know, it's not the new Israel.
• 1:26:13
  We understand this is. Catholic, yeah, there's an
• 1:26:15
  important thing to highlight too.
• 1:26:16
  For a lot of people that they don't realize that there is
• 1:26:18
  there is a difference, There's a distinction that needs to be
• 1:26:20
  made. Israel proper, which is the
• 1:26:23
  church, is comprised of both Jews and Gentiles.
• 1:26:26
  So this has nothing to do with being anti Jewish just because
• 1:26:29
  you say that the church is a true Israel.
• 1:26:32
  I'm a Jew, I'm in the true Israel.
• 1:26:35
  You're maybe from Jews back. I don't know who who is.
• 1:26:39
  It doesn't matter because in Christ we are one.
• 1:26:44
  Go to Ephesians chapter 2. Go to Romans Chapter 9 to 11 and
• 1:26:48
  you will see that the mission alone go to the prophets
• 1:26:50
  themselves where it tells us that we will be brought together
• 1:26:54
  and be made one people, right? So the saying that we are
• 1:26:59
  Israel, that we are the true Israel, the biblical Israel, is
• 1:27:03
  not anti-Semitic because it's comprised of Jews and Gentiles.
• 1:27:05
  Right. And it's meant to be for all
• 1:27:07
  people. It's meant to be for.
• 1:27:08
  Everybody, Jesus Christ is for all Jews, all Gentiles.
• 1:27:11
  Yeah. So the new Israel is like the
• 1:27:13
  ultimate, you know, Kingdom of all of us together.
• 1:27:16
  Yes. And this was always expected.
• 1:27:18
  Yeah, You know how earlier we were talking about.
• 1:27:20
  Fulfillment of the law, not the abolition of it.
• 1:27:22
  Very true, very true. And as we were talking about
• 1:27:24
  before, even with Saint Peter and the whole thing of the
• 1:27:26
  kosher laws, it was from then that he was even understanding
• 1:27:30
  it that, yeah, we are meant to be one in Christ and whatever
• 1:27:34
  God calls clean is clean and you cannot call it unclean.
• 1:27:37
  So that reality is something that we'd need to differentiate
• 1:27:40
  that there is a reality that the church is the true Israel, but
• 1:27:43
  then there is also the state and that's something that gets
• 1:27:46
  convoluted and this something that we need to separate to
• 1:27:48
  understand it properly. It's the same thing with Zionism
• 1:27:51
  and there's same reason why I stick to the terms.
• 1:27:54
  But at the same time we cannot ignore the reality of actual
• 1:27:57
  anti-Semitism. So this is what I would like to
• 1:27:59
  clarify if it's OK when it comes to Zionism, even though Herzl
• 1:28:06
  proposed it as a political movement, there was always a
• 1:28:10
  religious attachment to it. When he has this, they call it
• 1:28:15
  the First Zionist Congress, which happened in Basel in
• 1:28:21
  Switzerland. They gather all types of Jews,
• 1:28:23
  Orthodox all the way to the atheist Jews.
• 1:28:26
  They even have some Christians in there where they're trying to
• 1:28:28
  propose this idea of hey, let's we're being persecuted, let's
• 1:28:33
  find a home and they propose going to what they claim is the
• 1:28:36
  ancestral land. The only issue with that is also
• 1:28:40
  that there were people that lived there after.
• 1:28:43
  The last time that Jews actually lived as a people in Israel was
• 1:28:46
  all the way in the Maccabean revolt.
• 1:28:49
  After that the Romans take it over.
• 1:28:50
  After that the Ottomans take it over, then Christianity takes it
• 1:28:53
  over, then Ottomans take it over again, and then later they had
• 1:28:57
  to consult the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to see if he
• 1:29:00
  would give the land to the Jews for the purpose of creating the
• 1:29:02
  nation state. So.
• 1:29:05
  I mean, the conquest history is. Yeah, it's radical.
• 1:29:10
  I mean, imagine being American and that America was taken over
• 1:29:13
  10 different times, but then you're like, well, I was
• 1:29:16
  American 2000, you know, whatever how many years ago,
• 1:29:18
  which is true. And I think this is, you know,
• 1:29:21
  and the interesting question of the church's teaching on nation
• 1:29:26
  States and their, their, their right to create borders and have
• 1:29:29
  sovereignty, but not to the point of harming or attacking
• 1:29:33
  others. So there's this as always, even
• 1:29:36
  I, we get into this hot water on the immigration issue on the
• 1:29:38
  show, we talk about what is the church and, and the Bible really
• 1:29:41
  teach about immigration. A nation have its right to, to
• 1:29:44
  borders, but we have to welcome the stranger.
• 1:29:46
  We don't just welcome the stranger when it's convenient
• 1:29:48
  for us. We welcome the stranger when
• 1:29:50
  it's, when they're knocking on our door in the middle of the
• 1:29:52
  night and we, they're asking for bread like we welcome the
• 1:29:54
  stranger, period. And that's very controversial
• 1:29:57
  for some Christians. So they say we'll just let a few
• 1:29:58
  of the immigrants in when it suits American interest.
• 1:30:01
  But then you also have to, yes, take care of American interests.
• 1:30:04
  And you do have a right to a secure border.
• 1:30:07
  And immigrants coming to your country have the responsibility
• 1:30:10
  of assimilation. So it's all of these like things
• 1:30:13
  that hold together. So similarly with this
• 1:30:15
  conversation and where you're going, as there's so much nuance
• 1:30:18
  there. That's the point and that's the
• 1:30:19
  point that a lot of people want to glide over where you're as a
• 1:30:23
  Catholic, you are being forced to almost choose, are you pro
• 1:30:27
  Israel or are you pro Palestine? And it's like, no, it's, it's
• 1:30:30
  much more nuanced. As a Catholic, I say that
• 1:30:33
  Zionism because of the way that it's actually defined now by
• 1:30:37
  people want to twist words all the time.
• 1:30:39
  What is a woman? You know, what is gender versus
• 1:30:42
  sex? I go to the original because
• 1:30:44
  that's the safest way to converse.
• 1:30:46
  And when we can have actually defined words, we can have real
• 1:30:49
  conversations and we can get to the bottom of it.
• 1:30:52
  Because this should never be a we.
• 1:30:54
  We got to sneakily trap the other person into agreeing with
• 1:30:57
  me. That's not what it is.
• 1:30:58
  Define the word properly. Zionism is we want to build a
• 1:31:01
  place for the Jews to live, but as much as you want to say it's
• 1:31:05
  political or religious, there's always going to be the religious
• 1:31:08
  undertone. Herzl himself said this in the
• 1:31:10
  very first Zionist Congress in Basel, where he said that he
• 1:31:15
  declared that even before the Jews go to Israel or to the land
• 1:31:20
  of Palestine, as at that time, he says first we need to come
• 1:31:24
  and return to Judaism. So he saw the necessity to unite
• 1:31:28
  in their ancestral faith as he saw it, and then to their
• 1:31:32
  ancestral land as he saw it too. So there's that.
• 1:31:36
  But then there's the matter of what you're speaking about.
• 1:31:38
  What about what the church teaches about?
• 1:31:40
  OK, whatever your stance is, let's say we're anti Zionist
• 1:31:44
  because theologically we can't be Zionist.
• 1:31:48
  And also the terminology that is used, it was defined always, not
• 1:31:52
  just politically, but it also had that religious under
• 1:31:55
  undertone. And but we have to define it
• 1:31:57
  because I think anti Zionism is used, is not used the way you're
• 1:32:01
  defining it, unfortunately. Instead it's used as people who
• 1:32:06
  are angry with Israel are like very pro Palestine, don't really
• 1:32:11
  acknowledge the right of the Jews to a nation state, don't
• 1:32:14
  really acknowledge that there's anti-Semitism running rampant,
• 1:32:16
  which you personally have experienced, won't acknowledge
• 1:32:19
  the plight of Jews on October 7th.
• 1:32:20
  All of these things, right? Refuses to acknowledge those
• 1:32:23
  things. And then they say, well, I'm
• 1:32:24
  Catholic 'cause I'm anti Zionist, and that's what
• 1:32:26
  Catholics are supposed to be. But they're basically equating
• 1:32:29
  their version of anti Zionist to, yeah, basically anti the
• 1:32:32
  Jewish state, anti anti anti, right?
• 1:32:35
  And that's where there's all these pitfalls with this term,
• 1:32:37
  right? And so I always say, define
• 1:32:39
  Zionism. And you're saying, well, this is
• 1:32:42
  how you see it historically and how you think it should be.
• 1:32:44
  Defined. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:32:45
  That's my that's my call to everyone Yes.
• 1:32:48
  Just let's stick to the original terminology so that we can
• 1:32:51
  actually have honest conversations.
• 1:32:54
  It it's such a heated topic where everybody just wants to
• 1:32:56
  talk over each other. But let's just accept this as
• 1:32:59
  Catholics, it is true we cannot be Zionist because it always
• 1:33:03
  involves this spiritual aspect to it, which and but why?
• 1:33:08
  Why is it against the Catholic faith?
• 1:33:10
  Because it denies Christ's Messiahship.
• 1:33:12
  The reason why they believe in the religious sense or when,
• 1:33:15
  when people want to say, oh, the religious version of Zionism is
• 1:33:18
  because it was the promised land.
• 1:33:19
  It was promised to us, we want to go there.
• 1:33:22
  But even the political has that. So why can we not accept Zionism
• 1:33:26
  because it denies Christ's messiahship.
• 1:33:29
  It denies the fact that the church as a whole, whether
• 1:33:31
  you're Jewish by heritage or if you come from another nation in
• 1:33:35
  Christ, you are one. It denies that reality.
• 1:33:39
  But that's the term. We understand that this is what
• 1:33:42
  the term is. That's what we can as Catholics
• 1:33:44
  can say plainly we are not Zionists.
• 1:33:49
  But I think it depends on how you define it.
• 1:33:50
  No, no, no. That's why because there's a
• 1:33:52
  political Zionism today that many Catholics do support, which
• 1:33:55
  is the right of Israel to exist. OK, so this is where I want to
• 1:33:57
  stop. Because a lot of people, and I
• 1:33:59
  know you want to stop it, and I appreciate you wanting to
• 1:34:01
  clarify terms as I think it would be helpful if everyone, if
• 1:34:04
  everyone agreed in this discourse, this is the
• 1:34:06
  definition of Zionism. This is how we're going to
• 1:34:08
  define it. And maybe we've created a new
• 1:34:10
  term to understand people that will support Israel's right to
• 1:34:13
  exist, to defend itself, all of these things, not to commit war
• 1:34:15
  crimes, by the way, but to defend itself and to exist and
• 1:34:19
  also to reject anti-Semitism. That term doesn't exist,
• 1:34:22
  unfortunately. It's all coupled under the
• 1:34:24
  politics, the religion, people who are evangelicals who believe
• 1:34:27
  in dispensationalism, like the everyone's using the term
• 1:34:29
  Zionist, everyone's defining it differently.
• 1:34:31
  And so there's all of this confusion as a as a consequence.
• 1:34:35
  And I see, unfortunately, you know, when you, when you look at
• 1:34:38
  the history of Israel and you know, being established, right,
• 1:34:41
  it was established. I know we were talking about
• 1:34:43
  this beforehand, but it wasn't established just for Zionist.
• 1:34:46
  The Zionist movement, who had a religious fervor behind it, was
• 1:34:49
  like, oh, we finally got our state.
• 1:34:51
  It was established by basically international decree because of
• 1:34:55
  the Holocaust. It just happened.
• 1:34:56
  People like, what are we going to do with this?
• 1:34:58
  Traumatized people? And unfortunately, a lot of
• 1:35:00
  nations didn't want to allow the Jews to attempt assimilation.
• 1:35:04
  They just didn't want to deal with, I mean, Germany obviously
• 1:35:08
  tried to destroy the Jews, right?
• 1:35:10
  And so they're like, well, let's just, we'll stick them in their
• 1:35:13
  ancestral land and, and just hope it all works out.
• 1:35:16
  And so I think understanding the history where it's not like they
• 1:35:18
  finally conquered their way to achieving a Jewish, a Jewish
• 1:35:23
  state. They actually originally offered
• 1:35:25
  a 2 state solution, which was rejected by the people at the
• 1:35:28
  time, by the Palestinians. They said, no, we don't want the
• 1:35:31
  two state solution. We just don't want you to exist,
• 1:35:33
  period. We want a one state and it to be
• 1:35:35
  Palestine. No Israel's allowed.
• 1:35:37
  I think where where you're tapping into is the whole notion
• 1:35:39
  of the geopolitical situation versus the religious point.
• 1:35:43
  This is why and and if it's OK, I would like to just completely
• 1:35:47
  elaborate this point to make it clear, which is like we said, we
• 1:35:50
  cannot call ourselves Zionists. That's just the reality.
• 1:35:54
  But that does not right. But This is why I had to define
• 1:35:59
  the term as what it was originally historically.
• 1:36:01
  Because what it is today politically is different for a
• 1:36:04
  lot of people. What happens with that is we
• 1:36:06
  want to be careful with that. Just saying, oh, but this person
• 1:36:08
  interpreted it that way. And that person, because even
• 1:36:11
  our very own Pope, Pope Leo the 14th, condemns this Orwellian
• 1:36:15
  manipulation of words because he calls us a weaponization of
• 1:36:18
  terms. And we can't as Catholics
• 1:36:22
  something that the very Pope is condemning.
• 1:36:24
  We can't play with that and say, well, because they define it
• 1:36:27
  this way. They define we need to, as
• 1:36:29
  arbiters of truth, stand our ground and say this is what it
• 1:36:32
  means because this is what it has always meant.
• 1:36:35
  Now before we move on, now there is the reality of yes, this has
• 1:36:42
  resulted in people becoming anti Jewish for real, right?
• 1:36:46
  They relate everything that the state does and they they say
• 1:36:50
  everything that the state does is bad.
• 1:36:53
  So that's when you're pinned what, what are you going to
• 1:36:56
  choose? Are you choosing Palestine or,
• 1:36:58
  and I say, no, Israel has done wrong.
• 1:37:01
  Palestine has done wrong because there's wrong everywhere.
• 1:37:05
  There's wrong that has happened within the church.
• 1:37:07
  We have to be honest about this reality as well as being honest
• 1:37:11
  about the reality that there are innocence in both sides.
• 1:37:16
  There's innocent Palestinians, there's innocent Jews, there's
• 1:37:20
  innocent people in in Israel that are not even Jews.
• 1:37:23
  We have a lot of Christian brethren there.
• 1:37:25
  I have Christian. When all of these things were
• 1:37:27
  happening, like October 7th, I was in constant communication
• 1:37:31
  with whomever I could to try to figure out like, are you OK?
• 1:37:35
  What's going on? There's just people that just
• 1:37:38
  want to live. And for a long time, and for a
• 1:37:41
  long time, even before the state, there were Jews there
• 1:37:43
  too, and they used to live in relative peace.
• 1:37:47
  Nowadays, as things start to escalate and words get twisted,
• 1:37:51
  which is this is my fear, when words get twisted, when
• 1:37:55
  everybody is polarized, everyone is seen as an enemy.
• 1:37:58
  If you don't think like me, you're against me.
• 1:38:00
  We need to stop that mentality, but the only way to do it is by
• 1:38:03
  stopping this notion of. They interpret it this way, I
• 1:38:07
  interpret it. That way I would push back a
• 1:38:09
  little bit just because you think about thing about Pope
• 1:38:11
  Leo, Pope Leo has never said and, and Pope Francis has never
• 1:38:15
  said, this is, this is the objective definition of Zionism
• 1:38:19
  and This is why we must reject it.
• 1:38:20
  They've always spoken about a theological Zionism versus a
• 1:38:23
  political like this is the language of the church.
• 1:38:26
  So I, I would say, let's use the language of Mother Church.
• 1:38:28
  Mother Church talks about a theological Zionism that we as
• 1:38:31
  Catholics do reject because we're not dispensationalists.
• 1:38:34
  We understand the new Israel not to be the state of Israel, but
• 1:38:37
  to be Jews and Gentile who have accepted the Messiah.
• 1:38:40
  Right. But then the political Zionism
• 1:38:43
  is very complex because what exactly do you mean?
• 1:38:45
  Do you mean Israel can do no wrong and that Israel's always
• 1:38:48
  right and that I defend everything that the IDF does?
• 1:38:51
  No, I think both of us would say no.
• 1:38:54
  Does it mean that Israel has a right to borders and to defend
• 1:38:57
  itself and to try to eradicate those that would say, you know,
• 1:39:01
  in this case Hamas, like try to try to beat Hamas or conquer
• 1:39:04
  Hamas? You could argue, yeah, of
• 1:39:05
  course. I would say 100%.
• 1:39:07
  Does it mean that war crimes are acceptable?
• 1:39:09
  No, Right. So I think this is where, well,
• 1:39:12
  I appreciate the fervor behind, you know, you seeing the
• 1:39:15
  theological origins of Zionism and saying, well, let's with
• 1:39:19
  Catholics, we have to reject that.
• 1:39:20
  And I agree with you, we have to acknowledge because of the way
• 1:39:24
  that Israel was founded, the nation state, modern nation
• 1:39:26
  state of Israel, there was a political Zionism that didn't,
• 1:39:29
  it didn't involve religious fervor for many of the people
• 1:39:33
  involved with the founding of the state when America was like
• 1:39:36
  basically signing off on on signing up Israel, it wasn't
• 1:39:40
  because of personal religious beliefs.
• 1:39:41
  I see where you wanted. To of those political founders.
• 1:39:44
  So I, I do think that the reason I think it's important it to
• 1:39:47
  make those distinctions is because in today's environment,
• 1:39:53
  I don't know if you have experienced this personally.
• 1:39:56
  You shared you've experienced anti-Semitism.
• 1:39:57
  I know friends who are Jewish who feel terrified.
• 1:40:02
  They feel like they don't want us to have a state.
• 1:40:04
  There's one of Jewish state and there's like 50 Muslim states.
• 1:40:06
  They don't want us to have a state.
• 1:40:08
  They think we're subhuman and they, when we try to defend
• 1:40:12
  ourselves, we can never do it correctly.
• 1:40:14
  And so we're always going to just get hated for it.
• 1:40:17
  And so we're afraid of, you know, if you're Jewish, you're
• 1:40:20
  seen as bad. They're, they're, they're
• 1:40:22
  scared. And so to say, well, I'm anti
• 1:40:25
  Zionist, I'm anti, which they hear as I'm anti you having a
• 1:40:29
  state. That's how they hear it.
• 1:40:31
  Many, many Jews that I know Anyways, you're, you're, you're
• 1:40:33
  different. You're as a Catholic Jew, you
• 1:40:34
  have this beautiful perspective, right?
• 1:40:37
  So I think it's dangerous to use the terms with any sort of
• 1:40:42
  assumption that people understand the definition and
• 1:40:44
  should just accept whatever definition we are promoting, if
• 1:40:47
  that makes sense. Yeah.
• 1:40:48
  I think so. Then the key becomes, whenever
• 1:40:51
  you do have a conversation with anybody about this, it's
• 1:40:54
  probably wisest to ask them their definition of.
• 1:40:57
  Yes, I totally agree. So like for example.
• 1:41:00
  Right now that's what I attempt to do.
• 1:41:01
  How are you defining? Zionism, yeah.
• 1:41:03
  So if you're talking about Zionism or even anti-Semitism,
• 1:41:05
  because recently there was this this situation in which there
• 1:41:11
  was a conversation going back and forth about religious
• 1:41:14
  liberties. And we as Catholics are told or
• 1:41:20
  we know that we can't relate to Zionism, but we understand what
• 1:41:24
  we're saying. Theological Zionism, even
• 1:41:26
  political in a sense, because it's tied to it.
• 1:41:28
  But it's only when you define it the way that I'm defining and
• 1:41:32
  the other person says so you're denying that I'm allowed to
• 1:41:36
  exist. That's not what we're saying.
• 1:41:39
  So this this talking. Me though, because there's some.
• 1:41:42
  People, because there are. Some, I know Catholics,
• 1:41:45
  unfortunately, not that I'm unfortunately to know them, but
• 1:41:48
  unfortunately they believe this, that think that Israel is
• 1:41:51
  literally the synagogue of Satan and that Israel should be
• 1:41:55
  banished. It's the most evil country to
• 1:41:56
  ever exist. It's the most evil nation in the
• 1:41:58
  world. Like what about North Korea?
• 1:42:00
  Like. Yeah, that it goes too far.
• 1:42:02
  It go, but that's not just some random person.
• 1:42:05
  That's a bunch of Catholics today, unfortunately, and non
• 1:42:07
  Catholic. Yeah.
• 1:42:08
  And I believe there is a there is a special animus and this is
• 1:42:12
  the definition of anti-Semitism. There's a special animus there
• 1:42:16
  against the Jews and it's and it's and it's a real hatred.
• 1:42:20
  And then they're they're, then they, then they disguise it in
• 1:42:23
  pietistic language, which is of the devil in my.
• 1:42:26
  Opinion. Yeah, this.
• 1:42:27
  Is and you've experienced this. I know.
• 1:42:28
  Yeah, this. Exactly this is and This is why
• 1:42:30
  I can agree with you 1000% because what you're saying is
• 1:42:33
  what I've experienced. The only reason why I'm quite
• 1:42:36
  fervent about this is because I like terms to be defined how
• 1:42:40
  they are historically meant to be.
• 1:42:42
  Because I I know I realize that people have different
• 1:42:45
  interpretations. It's like a very Protestant
• 1:42:47
  mentality, right? The scripture says this well
• 1:42:50
  that's why we have 30,000 different denominations.
• 1:42:53
  It it happens everywhere. So I think the rule should be
• 1:42:57
  for us like not. A rule for the original
• 1:42:59
  interpretation. For the yeah, for each
• 1:43:01
  individual. What I mean is this.
• 1:43:04
  Our, our rule of practice should be when we're in a conversation,
• 1:43:07
  try to figure out what the other person means so that you can
• 1:43:09
  actually elaborate. Because I do agree with you 100%
• 1:43:13
  that what has happened it's been taken overboard masquerading as
• 1:43:17
  something righteous which is not There is actual anti-Semitism
• 1:43:22
  because I experienced it when people just call me a fake
• 1:43:24
  Catholic they call me I'm Assad agent.
• 1:43:26
  They said that I'm. Called like a dirty Jew or
• 1:43:29
  something. Yeah, Dirty Jew.
• 1:43:30
  I've been called a rat. Everything.
• 1:43:32
  Everything. I'm so sorry, yeah.
• 1:43:34
  Yeah, I don't. I don't really mind it so much
• 1:43:35
  because I built thick skin and I know that it's still bad.
• 1:43:38
  It's still. Bad it is from the pit I.
• 1:43:40
  Do not, I do not condone it at all.
• 1:43:42
  I do not condone it. At the same time, I also want
• 1:43:46
  people to do what you're saying. Can we be critical of Israel?
• 1:43:49
  Yes, we can. Yes.
• 1:43:51
  But can we be critical? Of am I, I know some a very
• 1:43:53
  small group of people. So it's not most, but there's
• 1:43:56
  been some people who I think some of them have bad
• 1:43:59
  motivations potentially some of them probably have good, but who
• 1:44:02
  have said, oh, you know, Lila, you've never criticized Israel.
• 1:44:05
  That's not true. You've never spoken out for the
• 1:44:08
  people of Gaza. That's not true.
• 1:44:10
  So I think. That's where that when people
• 1:44:12
  wield those accusations, right? And it's not just me, it's it's
• 1:44:15
  all kinds of people out there, right?
• 1:44:17
  I think it's this special obsession with the with the
• 1:44:21
  crimes or perceived crimes of Israel and ignoring anybody
• 1:44:25
  else's, including the the plank in your own eye.
• 1:44:28
  And I think that is what's the root of that, a special animus
• 1:44:31
  or obsession with Jews. That's what it that's what it
• 1:44:34
  is. And I and, and and that's why
• 1:44:36
  some people who like probably say I'm anti Zionist, down with
• 1:44:40
  the Zionist, you know, fascist state or whatever.
• 1:44:42
  Yeah, there's anti-Semitism there.
• 1:44:45
  And I know people. Like see what you're saying?
• 1:44:46
  But then there's certainly people who oppose Zionism,
• 1:44:49
  certainly theologically like we do, and aspects of Zionism
• 1:44:53
  politically and for very legitimate reasons.
• 1:44:56
  So it's a big mix. But you see exactly what you
• 1:44:59
  just said there. This is this is how the
• 1:45:02
  conversation should go, where we're explaining the the terms.
• 1:45:07
  We're able to really get down to it and say, yeah, we can condemn
• 1:45:11
  actions in both sides and even in our own right because we,
• 1:45:15
  like you said, we forget to look at the plank in our own eye.
• 1:45:18
  For example, the church condemns anti-Semitism, but what you're
• 1:45:25
  describing is describing a reality where there are
• 1:45:27
  Catholics really for real being anti-Semitic.
• 1:45:31
  And they don't think they are. And they don't think they are
• 1:45:33
  because they're relating it to like the whole state.
• 1:45:35
  So they're also convoluting the whole, you know, the crime
• 1:45:38
  commit, the states committed this crime or the state did
• 1:45:41
  this. This means all the Jews are bad,
• 1:45:45
  right? Or that no Jew has the right to
• 1:45:47
  live? Or I think it's, it could be
• 1:45:48
  more simple than that. It's not that they say all Jews
• 1:45:50
  are bad. It's that they say the state of
• 1:45:52
  Israel, their view committed these crimes, right?
• 1:45:54
  Like, for example, the, the, the aid blockades.
• 1:45:56
  I, I spoke out against that. Like let in the, like I
• 1:45:59
  understand you believe it's enriching Hamas and they're not
• 1:46:01
  even giving it to the people. And they have all these reasons,
• 1:46:02
  right? And they're trying to fight a
• 1:46:03
  war. You know, there's people,
• 1:46:05
  there's a starvation crisis. And I think it's pretty
• 1:46:08
  objective at this point. It's not like some Hamas
• 1:46:10
  propaganda, yes. So we can call that out, like
• 1:46:13
  let in, let in the aid, right? But you can say you can, you can
• 1:46:17
  criticize and, and, and everyone has the right to criticize any
• 1:46:20
  government force, right? And you can criticize the
• 1:46:23
  Israel, the government of Israel, right?
• 1:46:25
  But then to criticize it in a way that they are the most evil.
• 1:46:30
  They are like they've they're they're, they're literally
• 1:46:33
  synagogue Satan, whatever it is, it's not those same people in
• 1:46:36
  the same breath might say, well, Jews aren't all bad.
• 1:46:38
  You can be a Jew against Israel and then you're okay by me.
• 1:46:41
  Say I'm not anti-Semitic. They're like, you're holding the
• 1:46:44
  nation of Israel to a standard you don't hold anybody else to.
• 1:46:48
  Yeah, including your own country.
• 1:46:49
  By the way, America, which killed. 10s.
• 1:46:51
  Of thousands of children in Afghanistan.
• 1:46:53
  That's that's one thing that and.
• 1:46:54
  The allies that were fighting that war, Right.
• 1:46:56
  So, yeah, so. And again, not to say any
• 1:46:59
  child's death should be accepted.
• 1:47:01
  It's horrific. You know, we should oppose it
• 1:47:03
  and speak out against it. I think yeah, we we need to
• 1:47:05
  carry that practice, use proper, proper definitions, have
• 1:47:09
  positive intent. Yes.
• 1:47:11
  Right and assume positive intent, right, Everybody that's
• 1:47:17
  in whatever side when you're defending your point, it can
• 1:47:20
  assume. It can be assumed that you're
• 1:47:22
  not coming in with I'll intention.
• 1:47:24
  You're not trying to post the other person directly as your
• 1:47:27
  enemy. Most of the time, like you're
• 1:47:29
  saying in the Internet is crazy. People are wild, but most of the
• 1:47:33
  time in real life conversations, everybody wants to promote the
• 1:47:37
  good right? Maybe they're seeing it from
• 1:47:40
  their angle. Another person is seeing it from
• 1:47:42
  their angle, just like the same way that you have Jews in New
• 1:47:45
  York that say Nope, we're not Zionist, and the same way that
• 1:47:50
  you have Christians saying yes I am Zionist.
• 1:47:52
  So define things properly. Condemn where it needs to be
• 1:47:57
  condemned, but do not use unequal weights and measure.
• 1:48:01
  If you're critiquing 1 country for doing evil, critique another
• 1:48:04
  one in the same way that you're that same fervor.
• 1:48:06
  Do it with the other ones. If you want to call out evil,
• 1:48:09
  make sure you're calling out evil within yourself.
• 1:48:11
  If you're going to do it before you talk about the speck in your
• 1:48:15
  brother's eye, check out the plank in your own.
• 1:48:18
  And I think that we, when we can do that, when we can balance
• 1:48:21
  that out and have real conversations instead of just
• 1:48:23
  trying to talk over each other, we can actually move to places.
• 1:48:26
  This is why Nostrata thought that was so important to me,
• 1:48:29
  because there is that talk where it recognizes the church is the
• 1:48:34
  truth. We are the fulfillment, Christ
• 1:48:38
  is the way, the truth and the life.
• 1:48:39
  However, we need to try to achieve peace.
• 1:48:42
  How do we do this with I know a lot of people hate this word in
• 1:48:45
  the traditional circles and in the Internet, but dialogue
• 1:48:49
  that's so important when you can just have a conversation where
• 1:48:53
  you're not treating the person across from you as your enemy,
• 1:48:56
  but as someone who you're trying to find a a middle ground in
• 1:49:00
  someone who you can find peace with.
• 1:49:02
  So again, when it comes to these issues with Palestine and
• 1:49:05
  Israel, yes, we we will critique, but at the same time,
• 1:49:10
  we need to be very careful to judge properly, judge with
• 1:49:15
  balance, judge with, with a proper view.
• 1:49:19
  Not just because you're seeing on Instagram, on on Twitter and
• 1:49:22
  on TikTok fitting you these feeding you all of these
• 1:49:27
  different things that you're supposed to say and feeding you
• 1:49:29
  all the the lies and the convoluted truths or you.
• 1:49:31
  Have to, I mean, it's like you have to post the equivalent of
• 1:49:34
  the black square today. And in some parts of the
• 1:49:36
  Internet, like if you don't say these things or do these things,
• 1:49:39
  then you're like completely useless.
• 1:49:42
  You have no life. You have no integrity.
• 1:49:44
  Like, you know, people have said this even to me, not again, not
• 1:49:47
  a lot. I don't want to make it sound
• 1:49:48
  like this is like the majority because it's not.
• 1:49:51
  But there are people who are so animated by this in a way that
• 1:49:54
  takes on this strange life of its own.
• 1:49:57
  And I know you've experienced it personally.
• 1:49:59
  And I, I think that's where like that's where you see Satan at
• 1:50:02
  work, I think. I think so too, yeah.
• 1:50:04
  But but to your point, I love what you're saying.
• 1:50:06
  Like we should define our terms and we should ask the question
• 1:50:10
  what do you mean by this? And I like what you're saying,
• 1:50:13
  which is to judge with balance. Like you said, you can critique
• 1:50:16
  when the aid was not being provided or when excessive force
• 1:50:19
  is used. But we also remember as
• 1:50:21
  Catholics that the Church does allow for a country to defend
• 1:50:25
  itself to exist as long as it seeks the the peace with its
• 1:50:30
  neighbors. It's not pursuing war.
• 1:50:33
  If you're just going out there trying to conquer every land,
• 1:50:36
  the church is going to say something.
• 1:50:38
  It's going to oppose it. If you are defending yourself,
• 1:50:42
  the church is not going to stand against you for defense.
• 1:50:45
  So you need to be balanced. You need to be judging with the
• 1:50:49
  right heart. Yes, there is evil in the world
• 1:50:52
  everywhere, but we as Catholics cannot sing to the level of the
• 1:50:56
  world to judge everybody so harshly and treat everyone as an
• 1:51:00
  enemy. That's I think that's the
• 1:51:02
  problem that we forget that Christ said pray for your
• 1:51:05
  enemies. I wonder how many people that
• 1:51:08
  critique and attack from any side.
• 1:51:11
  I'm not saying as a Jew from any side.
• 1:51:14
  I wonder how many people actually pray for their enemies.
• 1:51:17
  Who actually cares for the salvation of their souls?
• 1:51:20
  This is something that I encountered actually after my
• 1:51:22
  conversation with Matt. A lot of people were attacking
• 1:51:25
  me, which was really funny. For what?
• 1:51:27
  What were they attacking you? For they were attacking me for
• 1:51:29
  two reasons. The Catholics were saying you
• 1:51:33
  need to condemn that the Taliban, you need to be more
• 1:51:36
  strict on it. And I even though I did critique
• 1:51:39
  it, but they wanted me to be more aggressive.
• 1:51:42
  And then I had from the Jewish side too, saying or not not
• 1:51:45
  Jewish, but more some Jewish and some more Zionist aligning
• 1:51:51
  Christians saying you're being way too rough on Israel.
• 1:51:55
  Because I said, and I didn't even get into politics really or
• 1:51:58
  the geopolitical situation. I just said that the church is
• 1:52:02
  Israel and they got so angry. I I mean, I've been, I've had
• 1:52:06
  people angry at me for saying the church is Israel.
• 1:52:08
  I've had people angry at me for criticizing Israel.
• 1:52:11
  I've had more people though angry at me for saying that
• 1:52:15
  Israel, Israel has a right to defend itself.
• 1:52:17
  And, you know, saying that Israel has, you know, basically
• 1:52:21
  saying, you know, it was horrific what Hamas did,
• 1:52:23
  etcetera. And he was saying, well, Hamas
• 1:52:25
  was just fighting back or whatever they say.
• 1:52:27
  So yeah, everyone's going to have their standard, but to the
• 1:52:30
  point you're beautifully making again and again, like the
• 1:52:32
  Christian standard, the Catholic standard.
• 1:52:34
  Here it is laid out. You can read the encyclicals on
• 1:52:37
  how we should see our Jewish brothers and sisters.
• 1:52:40
  And the Pope's do talk about Israel.
• 1:52:42
  They talk about acknowledging its right to exist.
• 1:52:44
  They talk about a two state solution.
• 1:52:46
  They talk about let you know, let the innocents live.
• 1:52:50
  But they also recognize that Israel has right.
• 1:52:52
  It's a the new. I mean, that's where it's like
• 1:52:53
  Mother Church's nuance in this is such a blessing for
• 1:52:56
  Catholics. But don't be more Catholic than
• 1:52:58
  the Pope. They don't be more, don't be
• 1:53:01
  more Catholic than the Catholic Church.
• 1:53:02
  Well, which is why I don't like when people say you can't be a
• 1:53:06
  Zion. You can't.
• 1:53:07
  To be Catholic is to be anti Zionist because no Pope has ever
• 1:53:10
  said that. So I think that's where we have
• 1:53:12
  to be careful with our language here.
• 1:53:14
  Yeah. That's where and the only, the
• 1:53:16
  only pushback that I bring to that is just simply defining the
• 1:53:20
  terms. Of course, that's, that's the
• 1:53:22
  only pushback because I feel that with what you're saying,
• 1:53:25
  when you're describing what you're describing, I'm like,
• 1:53:27
  yeah, I, I align 100%, yes. But I just don't use the
• 1:53:31
  terminology because of how I understand the term, which is
• 1:53:33
  based on this historical aspect of the word.
• 1:53:36
  So I think we break things down, we slow down, we talk and we can
• 1:53:41
  get to it because at the end of the day, like you've experienced
• 1:53:45
  and I've experienced, people are going to hate you for whatever
• 1:53:47
  you say there. There is no such thing.
• 1:53:49
  And somebody told me, yeah, somebody told me once, though,
• 1:53:53
  that if everybody seems to be opposing you from one side or
• 1:53:56
  the other, it's most likely a good sign because you're not
• 1:53:59
  being polarized. You're not going to this way or
• 1:54:02
  that way. You staying in the road.
• 1:54:03
  The road of Christ is peace. It's love, it's mercy, it's
• 1:54:07
  rightful judgement, but it's just and it's kind and it does
• 1:54:12
  it with the right intentions. When you're villainizing people
• 1:54:16
  or when you forgiving the sins of people or not not forgiving
• 1:54:20
  because we are to forgive. But when you are overlooking
• 1:54:23
  their sins as if they did no wrong, that's wrong.
• 1:54:26
  Both of those are wrong. But we are called to be in that
• 1:54:29
  narrow path. And I think that's why that that
• 1:54:31
  analogy that the Lord gave us is so beautiful because the road is
• 1:54:36
  indeed narrow and it's very easy to fall to one side and the
• 1:54:39
  other. And if we're not constantly
• 1:54:41
  checking our heart, frequenting the sacraments, doing prayerful
• 1:54:47
  examinations of conscious, then we're really going to be tempted
• 1:54:51
  to fall to one side or the other.
• 1:54:53
  So I, I thank you for this conversation because I think
• 1:54:55
  even as we began, we, it almost sounded like we were in opposing
• 1:54:59
  views. I knew we weren't, I knew it was
• 1:55:01
  the term. I knew it was the terminology,
• 1:55:03
  because if we're going to define Zionism as theological, which I
• 1:55:06
  understand was an original definition.
• 1:55:07
  So I, I, I value that perspective that you have, then
• 1:55:11
  we're, we are aligned in opposing it.
• 1:55:13
  And then you'd, I think about the word feminism.
• 1:55:15
  Honestly, this reminds me because anytime you have a
• 1:55:17
  politically and also sometimes theologically charged word, you
• 1:55:20
  get this. People accuse me like you're a
• 1:55:22
  feminist, Lila and other people are like, please be a feminist
• 1:55:25
  Lila. It's like, what does it even
• 1:55:26
  mean to be a feminist? Right, right, right.
• 1:55:27
  And let's define it. If you're talking about modern
• 1:55:29
  day feminism as large interested.
• 1:55:31
  No, of course I'm any I'm for this Trump.
• 1:55:33
  If you define original feminism as a movement to ensure equals,
• 1:55:38
  you know, treatment under the law for men and women, right,
• 1:55:40
  then I I'm 100% in agreement right.
• 1:55:42
  So it's it's the same idea of what is feminism?
• 1:55:45
  What is Zionism? What are these things?
• 1:55:47
  You define them, then you have the meaningful conversation.
• 1:55:49
  Yes, and but I but I think what your story is so beautifully
• 1:55:55
  depicting for people is that we don't belong to a tribe, we
• 1:55:59
  belong to a person. Yeah.
• 1:56:01
  Oh, I like that. And you're, you're, you've made
• 1:56:04
  a lot of tribes mad, so you know, so to speak, right?
• 1:56:07
  Or groups mad, you know, whether it's some Catholics who don't
• 1:56:10
  like you for your Jewishness, God forbid, maybe evangelicals
• 1:56:16
  are like, why are you Catholic now?
• 1:56:18
  Or why are you against Zionism theologically like
• 1:56:21
  dispensationalism? And then you're talking about,
• 1:56:23
  you know, obviously the the Jews who are like, what are you
• 1:56:26
  doing? Are you Catholic now?
• 1:56:27
  You know so. You.
• 1:56:30
  Belong to our Lord, Yeah. But we belong to our Lord, I
• 1:56:33
  think. Yeah, That's so beautifully
• 1:56:34
  said. We don't belong to the tribe.
• 1:56:36
  We don't belong to a person. That's beautiful.
• 1:56:39
  I like that. Thank you so much for that.
• 1:56:41
  Daniel, thank you. This has been such a beautiful
• 1:56:43
  conversation. I feel like we could keep going.
• 1:56:45
  We probably could. Maybe we should do a follow up
• 1:56:47
  on on the politics stuff. The politics.
• 1:56:50
  I, I just and you did a beautiful job.
• 1:56:52
  So thank you for letting me share and you're sharing.
• 1:56:55
  It's got to be a people are like Lila, you need to address this
• 1:56:58
  on your show. And I I touched on it a few
• 1:56:59
  times. I've been trying to find
• 1:57:01
  somebody who can do it with the nuance it deserves in its
• 1:57:05
  fullness. I've written up a few show notes
• 1:57:07
  about, you know, the six kinds of Zionism, six ways you could
• 1:57:10
  define it or how to talk about this issue.
• 1:57:12
  But I think that the fundamentals of what's already
• 1:57:16
  been stated by Mother Church on this that every all of us can go
• 1:57:19
  to. Yes, that's.
• 1:57:21
  It they don't need me to say it. You can go look at what the Holy
• 1:57:23
  Father is saying. You can go look at what the
• 1:57:25
  church teaches on this. And there's your.
• 1:57:27
  That should be our foundation. Yeah.
• 1:57:29
  Exactly. We if we establish that we have
• 1:57:32
  more chances of succeeding as a people, especially with our
• 1:57:35
  mission, because we're trying to really reach out for souls.
• 1:57:38
  Yes, that's the goal. Yes.
• 1:57:40
  Thank you so much, Daniel. Thank you, Lila.
• 1:57:42
  This is awesome. Beautiful.
• 1:57:43
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• 1:57:53
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• 1:57:56
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• 1:58:00
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• 1:58:05
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