Timeless Interview — Art Katz

Hello, thanks for joining us today. Our guest is Art Katz. He's renowned around the world for doing ministry. Quite a bit of ministry, I believe, Art. Messianic ministry, would we call it that?

Well, occasionally. It's just a service to the church, my Jewish people, when I can find them.

Right. Now, you've just come off of a junket to Europe. Tell us a little bit about what you were doing there.

Well, I was in England, France, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, just speaking into churches and ministers' conferences, varieties and diverse things that the Lord opens. Just as here, it was yesterday, we were at the pit at the University of North Carolina, where indeed I met a Jewish young man.

So the Lord has us in varieties of places, full gospel occasions.

Now, you've been traveling around the world, so you've been able to first-hand observe the church. Now, you have some very strong thoughts about the condition of the church, what state the church is in today.

And I think last night at a home of a friend, Alex and Liv Jones, God really moved upon you in a very special way to talk about the church. How about kind of rehearse that again.

The Church’s Unreality and Loss of Authenticity

For our viewers today? Yeah, I'm happy for the opportunity because it's still very much in my heart. I'm simmering with it, and I think I'm sensing something of the Lord's grief for the condition of the church, the unreality of the church.

And I think nowhere is it more flagrant than in, ironically, the Holy Spirit charismatic Pentecostal dimension. I don't have all that much contact with fundamental churches, but I think in a certain sense they may well be cleaner than we, who they make no profession of the gifts of the Spirit which we purport to have, and therefore they don't run into the kinds of excesses and abuses that we exhibit.

So that was what the Lord had put on my heart last night. I have a paper here that I had composed before I left for this trip, and I do a lot of papers, and this one was stimulated by a paper given to me by a brother on the subject of anointing, in which his principal theme is that anointing is not some fixed phenomenon that God confers on individuals as if it were an office, an ecclesiastical office in the church, but something proportionate to one's actual, authentic relationship with God in moment-by-moment obedience to the thing which he requires.

And in it and with it comes the spirit of revelation, and he gives the example of Peter recognizing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, upon which the Lord says, upon this rock I will build my church, and that the rock is not even Peter himself, but rather the revelation that had come through the Spirit in a moment given, which is to be the foundation of the church itself, the operation of God's Spirit by those who are in true union with him.

And so we've moved away from this moment-by-moment dependency in authentic relationship with God to somehow thinking that anointing is a fixed thing conferred upon certain men of faith and power, and that naivety requires us to turn up the amplifiers and give a sense of anointing or a certain loudness in the church, and now speaking in our activity, which the naive presume to think is anointing.

And so last night's message was a call to authenticity, to reality, because God is the God of truth, and when we move off and away from that place and come to unreality, his Spirit is not there, and we need, and we therefore compensate for it by turning up the dials, which further deepens the unreality and puts the church in a lamentable place and condition.

Religious Clichés and the Performance of Revival

Now, I think both you and I were witnesses of this phenomenon the night before last at a full gospel event here in Durham. It had all of the trappings of the kinds of things by which men respond to the cues that are given, and use words like revival and praise the Lord, and I feel the presence of God.

These have almost become cliched expressions, and we're expected to jump when we hear them, and we do, but it's not the prompting, in my opinion, of God's Spirit, and the whole thing is becoming increasingly unreal.

I call it surrealism. That's a form of art that is very exacting in its depicting of real things, but the whole thing that is depicted is unreal. I don't know if you've ever heard the name Salvador Dali was a great surrealistic artist, painstaking attention to detail, but the actual thing that he was depicting was mirage, was an unreality, and we are lapsing into that, and either I'm in a poor condition myself, or my condition is of such a kind that I'm picking up and discerning God's own sense of things and His grief.

Now, I have an extra motivation for being concerned for the reality of the church, namely that the church is God's appointed agency in moving Jews to jealousy, and we Jews, even in our darkness, have a kind of unfailing radar that we can, in a moment, identify and sense whether something is real or feigned, and I think that we would be more relentless in identifying the phoniness of televangelist ministries than the church itself that has supported men right into their deceptions and into their moral failures, and past their moral failures, where a Jew would have clicked him on the TV set and instantly had a reaction against the hype that has become so familiar to us that we don't even wince anymore, we become dull.

You cannot be exposed to untruth and come away unscathed. Something is lost. Your spirit becomes dull, and then the next opportunity for being brought into an unreality is the greater, until, by a series of meetings and exposures and the whole content of that kind of thing, we become deceived, and I'm concerned that we're moving toward that.

Yes. Okay, what I hear you say in art is that we are placing such an emphasis on the manifestation of a service, and the real tragedy that I heard you say is, too, that if a man gets up, even the people can put pressure on a man who is anointed to perform, and if he walks into the service and doesn't feel an anointing, he feels compelled to still do certain things, say certain things in certain manners, to appear to have the anointing.

Yeah. I think that if we.

Were vigilant for the truth, instead of allowing ourselves to be boxed in like that and cued in to perform, we would blow the whistle and say, some things are missed here, I don't sense God's presence, and I'm not going to allow you to manipulate me to produce something that will give you a high.

Let's look and pray and see what it is that somehow has alienated God, and find our way back to him who is reality. And of course, that would jar people and adversely affect the service and spoil it, perhaps, but God calls the church to be the ground and pillar of truth, and if we are unwilling for the risk of a spoiled service, if the show must go on, it will invariably become a show.

And in that show and in that congregation are people who are hurting, whose marriages are threatened, whose family life is collapsing, whose own sense of integrity is failing, and sense of God. And yet they're being brought into a certain environment, the milieu, an atmosphere in which they have to wear a kind of a chintzy smile, and ain't we got fun, and we're all spiritual, and come out of that and go back again into their grayness, and the unhappy situation that is at home and in their real life that is not met by the unreality to which they are exposed in the church.

And then they think something is wrong with them, that they're not sufficiently spiritual, they're out of the spirit, when it's the system itself, the religious thing itself that's at fault, and of which they are the.

Victim and the product. Yeah. Art, in the segment today, let's talk about more about the anointing, because the anointing oil, the Bible says, breaks the yoke. Yeah. And we're talking about that, I have been, excuse me, talking about that.

The Anointing as God’s Approval and the Cost of Obedience

We have folks coming into church, they're in trouble, they're hurting, they have real problems that are maybe kind of glazed over because of a super service, and yet I know too, God does move in very tremendous ways in the lives of people in services, but they have got to be able to leave there knowing that God has changed their life.

And the anointing, let's talk about the anointing, because we talked earlier, that the anointing comes with the price. Yeah. Let's talk about that. In my opinion,.

And I've been a believer 32 years and traveled broadly, as we said at the beginning, the anointing is my life. If I'm not in the anointing of God, woe unto me and those who are hearing me, because I have a kind of prophetic jealousy that any given moment of service is once and for all and shall not be given again.

That there's a sense in which eternity hangs in the balance and life and death issues are being propounded and can only be propounded in the anointing of God. We're not talking about merchandise or making a sale.

Great issues are at stake and can only go forth in the power of God. And so my sense is that the anointing oil is the measure of God's approval on the thing that is being spoken and performed. He anoints what he appoints.

And when we move from that in the promotion of our own ministry, our own self, our own vanity, the Lord recoils. The Spirit of God is not attesting to that. And that's when we raise the decibels of our sound system to compensate.

So I would say that a man has the measure of anointing in proportion to the consistency of his obedience to God, which will often bring him into conflict with his own interests or the promotion of his own ministry or with those to whom he's ministering.

There's got to be a certain kind of integrity and a ruthlessness of certainly a fearlessness with regard to accommodating men. And there are not many who are walking that way with any consistency that the oil of God would be upon them and that there would be a residue because it's not that God just doles it out by the spoonful for the moment.

But as you know, often when we finish our time of ministry, the anointing yet lingers, even sometimes so strongly we can't even fall asleep. The energy remains. Now in Zechariah 4, there's a remarkable discussion about the two men who stand by the Lord and by the candlestick of God and feed it.

And it says, and the oil or the anointing is within themselves. It's not that some artificial linkage, but that there's an accumulation of something that has come through obedience. It comes through prayer.

It comes through anything in which there is a replication of the cross, a suffering that is born in an obedience to the Lord, the willingness to suffer humiliation, to bring disappointments, to be disappointed even in ourselves.

In other words, a suffering that need not be our experience if we're willing to, if we want to play it safe, to go along, to be promoted within a system. When we risk those things or have no interest in those things, and we serve the purposes of God, as I did last night when people held their breath because I was virtually naming names.

I cited the experience of the full gospel banquet that you and I attended the night before as a very example of the unreality that parades as anointing and is called even revival, where we saw a young minister get up and bring a series of cliched statements, even referring to the cross, but there was no explication of the cross.

There was no word of the cross or requirement to face the cross in one's experience, but just to rev up the atmosphere and create a certain thing through verbiage. That's not going to build a residue of anointing or oil.

The Wise and Foolish Virgins: Oil Beyond the Moment

A beautiful portion of scripture is about the virgins, the five wise virgins and the five foolish. The five wise had an abundance of oil beyond the requirement of the moment, so that they didn't have to go fishing for it when the midnight hour came, and the Lord called, and the door was open for the wedding banquet.

But the five foolish, their light was already flickering out. They had only oil to carry them to midnight, but not through it, and they missed out. And it's interesting that when they finally sought to get in, the Lord would not open the door to them, and though they cried out, he said, I never knew you.

It raises the question of what kind of oil did they have even until midnight? Was it some kind of synthetic equivalent of the true, seeing that he didn't know them? Because the oil is God's conferring of himself, his spirit, because the believer and the servant is in union with him according to his purpose and will.

Or it might have been that they had a minimal oil that they had obtained with prayer in petitions that had only to do with their own need. The residue that would have been sufficient as an abundance beyond that would have been prayers that go beyond our need.

Now, I don't know if you'll remember, Frank, but virtually every word that was said in testimony that night that we attended had to do with me and mine, the benefit, the blessing. God gave me, he does for me, he will do for me, me, me, me, me, me.

And I mean, it's true that, and I've been a recipient as all believers of the things that God gives and does, but when our whole Christian viewpoint is fixed at the level of what we will receive and our petitions and prayers is, Lord, do for me and give for me, there's no abundance beyond that.

I think that the abundance, the extra oil comes when our prayers go beyond our own interest and need to take up the things that have to do with the Lord's need. His name, his honor, his glory, his purpose, his will.

And that the virgins lacked an abundance indicates that their petitions were fixed at the level of self. And I think that that's characteristic unhappily of most of the church today, even, and all the more painfully,.

The charismatic and the Pentecostal segment of it. Well, I think too, Art, that we, as you mentioned, in our prayer life, most of it is directed toward us. Now, obviously there are times that we have to direct prayers to our own needs, but we have to be praying for others.

And more importantly, as you said, we've got to be praying for God's purposes, God's will. What do you want to accomplish through my life? What are you seeking to work in and through me? Now, a lot of people have this thing about praying, that praying will exempt them from all the troubles of life.

But yet when Daniel prayed, his praying put him in the lion's den. It didn't extricate him from it.

Witnessing to the Lost Rather Than Performing for Believers

Until later. See, even when believers pray for revival, what they're wanting is a shot in the arm, a benefit and a blessing that would accrue to them. Now, it's interesting that two of the men that were with us that night, in fact, leaders in that chapter, were with us the next day at the pit at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

And the place was ringed around with students, black and white, overwhelmingly lost. And they came for the performance. They wanted to see me do my thing and preach in some kind of way of Paul and rivet the attention.

That happened the previous time. This time, the Lord seemed to impress us not to publicly speak, but to go and seek out little knots of students and go one-on-one in conversation. And we did that for about two hours, and we had four or five of the richest conversations and challenges to men, and the last of which was with a Jewish young man himself.

And I just rejoiced that I had stumbled on one of my own kinsmen. The thing is that the other two men sat talking to each other the entire length of time, and never once, though they were ostensibly filled with the Holy Spirit, and the night before putting on such a performance of spirit of revival that is with them.

But where was it when they were in contact with the lost, when eternity was hanging in the balance? Where was that vitality and anointing and spirit so ostensibly displayed the night before in the Christian cultural setting, which was a performance?

The fact that they lacked it in the world, where it should have penetrated the unbelieving, was an embarrassing statement that maybe what they purported to have the night before, they did not in fact have.

For if they had it, they would not have had to be encouraged or provoked to go and speak to students. The very life that is in them would have been pressing them for expression to the lost. So something is profoundly amiss, Frank.

And you know how a prophetic man operates. He draws from the experience of the day, the grist of what is happening in the conjunction between that full gospel event that we attended and the next day at the pit, the contrast.

And so it raises some very serious questions about truth, integrity, righteousness, the Word of God, our relationship with the Lord, and that what we have been exaggerating and building up in a kind of phraseological Christianity, in key words that evoke certain responses, is in fact not true.

And God is the God of truth, and the Spirit is the Spirit of truth before it's the Spirit of power. And so we need to return to reality and to a God who is truth in truth, or we're going to find ourselves painfully deceived.

The Judgment of Unreality and the Call to Repentance

And here's what I want to say, and here was my burden. I took a nap yesterday afternoon, I was wiped out, and then I had to get up and seek the Lord for that night's Word. And the impression that the Lord put upon my heart was this, don't spare.

Name names, so to speak. Identify and share with the men the experience through which you have passed with them, without naming the name, they know who is being referred to. Because if they do not howl at the deviousness of their life and the deceit of it, in the name of the Lord yet, what will happen in the day of the Lord's appearing and before the throne of His judgment, when we stand before Him and in that moment, in the moment of eternity, we see as we are seen, and we recognize the fraudulence of our life too late to remedy any part of it.

And we are fixed and stuck with that unreality for all eternity. It's an unspeakable shame. It's an eternal embarrassment without remedy. Now every one of us have had experiences where we have been flushed with embarrassment, and there's a red burning, and it's the most uncomfortable feeling when you're caught in moments like that.

But praise God, the moment passes. But how about if it was fixed eternally, and it never passed? God was giving men an opportunity last night to see their condition and the untruth of it, however well-meaning their intentions, and thinking that they were even doing God's service in promoting that, and to cry out an acknowledgment of its truth and ask for God's forgiveness.

The Lord put upon my heart the word call, C-A-U-L. It's a biblical word, a Hebraic word, about the call of the heart. It's a membrane that grows over the heart. It's a viscous, transparent kind of tissue that for every untruth, every lie, every deceit, every cutting of corners, every unfaithfulness, every taking of liberties where we don't insist upon the truth, something develops over our heart.

It's the call of the heart. It's a membrane, and it becomes thicker and thicker by every untruth until our hearts are rendered dull. The Spirit of God cannot come through that veil that is over our own heart that is the product of our own insincerity and our own deceit.

And last night I used Psalm 24, the Lord quickened, about who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? He who has clean hands, a pure heart, and has not given his soul over to vanity or to deceit. I will tell you that in my impression, the overwhelming number of, quote, charismatic spirit-filled Pentecostal believers cannot ascend that hill.

They have given themselves to deceit. The system itself encourages it. And on a few occasions when I get into churches like that and speak in the integrity of God, the things that he gives, I tell you that people stop breathing.

They know that a moment of truth has come that requires the most radical of adjustments. And the believers, many of them will respond, but the men, the officialdom, whose positions and religious office is caught up with the system are defensive of it.

And even on the recent trip from which we have returned in Australia, we found that when in two occasions where God spoke in in a penetrating way, which is his mercy, they took the tapes out of circulation after my departure.

Now they're going to be standing before the Lord one day and have to give account. Now what's the issue of ascending the mount of God? Why is it so critical that, and God raises the question, who shall ascend?

As if to say, how many candidates are there? Who's even desirous of going up? Most of us like to remain at the plateau of familiarity in things that give us some vibes and kicks and warm feelings and sentimental things.

We don't want to go up. Up is defying gravity. You get burrs and sticky things in your legs. You pant for air. It's hard. But who will go up? Who will ascend the hill of the Lord who has a pure heart and clean hands and has not given his soul up to enemy?

And then the Psalms 24 ends speaking about the King of glory and is at the gate, as if to say he's waiting to come in, but he'll not knock the gate down. He has restricted himself and imposed the condition upon himself that the gate must be opened by those who ascend the hill of God and have hands clean enough to throw the bowl that allows the King of glory to come in.

The Church’s Responsibility for Racial Reconciliation

Now, if the King of glory did not come in at the pit at the University of North Carolina yesterday morning, what eternal tragedy and loss to black and white if it was only a few well-meaning men speaking their cliches.

In fact, those students told me we are so turned off by men who come and holler at us and insult us that we don't even recommend that you speak publicly because we're habituated to being turned off by those who have preceded you.

That's why I had to go one-on-one. But whether we give them four spiritual laws, a little cliched are you saved, brother, or allow the King of glory to come in is the issue of having ascended the hill of God.

In a word, the world is in desperate dying condition. I'll go further than that, Frank. I would say that in the South, the South is at the verge and at the border of an enormous racial holocaust. The resentments and the bitternesses, I'm being told this by believers, that are mounting in the South and that no amount of civil legislation or political answer can handle the situation.

We've tried that. There's got to be something from God and a mercy from God. The King of glory needs to come in to the social situation in the South by those who will allow him in who can throw the bolt who have ascended the hill.

So our unreality, religiously, is costing us dearly and will eventuate in rivers of blood in the streets of Durham and Raleigh and places in Georgia where we have been unless there's a true church that can ascend that hill and throw the bolt that opens the gate that allows the King of glory to come in.

The stakes are great.

Talking about, and I guess maybe the politically correct term today is racial reconciliation, and yet the church, the genuine church, should be at the heart of that, and yet there is so little progress, whether the South or anywhere, but as you said, the South, probably more than many places on either the white side or the black side where real efforts are being made.

I mean, we talk it. We think it's a good idea, but yet our churches are not very much interracially mixed. Our friendships are not interracially mixed. Practically nothing. We talk it, and it's a good thing to talk about how we're going to go about it, what are the dangers we're facing now, as you mentioned, really dangers of some physical conflict if something doesn't turn this around.

Well, as we said at the beginning, it's the anointing that breaks the yoke, and men whose hearts are bitter, who are captive to their own bitterness, resentment, and hatred, need that yoke broken by an anointed word that is not some feigned religious cliche, and how you're doing, brother, that is insincere.

And so the anointing is the critical key, and the issue of anointing is the issue of truth, the issue of authentic relationship with God, because if we're not authentically related with him in truth, moment by moment, how shall we be related with men?

And if we're not authentic with ourselves, who are of the same race, the same religious persuasion, what shall we be expressing to those who are outside of our orbit, and to whom we need to bring a greater reality?

I said to someone about the outreach at the university the other day, the challenge is to bring to these students a reality greater than what they themselves know and esteem, and you cannot fabricate that.

From Religion to the Life of Christ

There's something ironic. I've been a believer for 32 years and struggling with these issues, and I was a Jew who was turned off by Christianity for the first 35 years of my life, because I could not stand cliches, empty vacuous phrases, cheap religious things that seemed even to be an obstruction to the progress of mankind, and still are.

There's something about the nature of that which is holy, that if it's not jealously guarded and watched over, becomes the cruelest of deceptions and cliches. It becomes the introversion, the negation of what is holy.

It becomes, in a word, religion. And I said to one of the students who thought, well, are you giving me some religious talk here? I said, no. I said, Jesus came to bring us life, and that more abundantly, and because we, the church, have not jealously guarded the life, have not lived in the life, have not been jealous for the spirit of the life, which can only go forth in truth, the life and the faith has degenerated into mere religion, into cliches, and we're looking for revival, to bring some kind of jumpstart to a very gray condition that needs a much deeper remedy than some kind of back-thumpet, slapping preacher who can string together a number of cliched phrases with a hyped-up ability and call that revival.

In talking about revival and talking about what God is doing, I remember you mentioned this book the other night, Apostolic Conversion, Pretext to Reality, which is basically what we've been talking about, I think.

Give us a little background on how this came about and what some of the reactions were when you preached this message. Yeah, this is a single-message booklet, Frank,.

Apostolic Conversion and the Cost of Radical Obedience

That is really the transcription of a spoken word, and that word came to a congregation in California that seemed to have it together. They were charismatic, they were prospering in the Lord and abounding in joy and happiness and life, and what am I doing here, Lord?

They're at uttermost success, and I was there for four nights. After two nights, I was despairing and crying out to God that I had treasure from the Lord to share, but there was a wall against which the word bounced back into my teeth.

They simply were not receiving, and I sensed that somewhere in the unconscious realm, they had covenanted so far and no further. Not only were they charismatic, but they were also wealthy. It was a very prosperous congregation, even financially.

In fact, the home that we were staying, I don't know how many thousands of square feet of space, an outside three-storied garage, and a big boat. Well, maybe there's something there by which men will not want to go further, because it will threaten and jeopardize their very substantial vested material interests.

Whether it's that or other things, I don't know. I did know I was up against a brick wall, and what's the point of having a treasure and unable to share it? And so we fasted that third day and sought the Lord, and that night He gave this message on the anatomy of conversion.

What is conversion? God would have all men to be converted, and so I say, many saved, but few converted, and examined Paul's conversion experience to try to identify what are the critical factors by which a man will cry out, Lord, what would you have for me to do?

And to live his entire apostolic life in the light of that continuing question. There are numbers, in fact, I would suspect the overwhelming majority of even spirit-filled believers who have not once asked that question, let alone lived consistently in it, either not having the faith to believe that God would answer, or not desiring an answer that would put them in opposition to their own self-interest.

You can't seek the mind of the Lord and the will of God if you yet have some design for yourself. You've got to come to him on utterly naked ground that whatever his will is, as he will reveal it, we intend to do it.

Well, when they heard that anointed word, it was so powerfully anointed, Frank, nothing could stand against it. These people went down, and it was more than a little ceremonial response. I mean, they were digging into the woodwork, and I don't know how long they were down.

There were groans and cries that ascended to heaven that were real, and when they got up, I could see in their faces something had changed. That change has gone on now three years later. One-third of the congregation has left because this pastor has been so converted himself that his preaching has changed, and men meet with him now six o 'clock in the morning daily, and they're seeking God's direction radically.

It has thrown the church into a financial crisis. It has cost something, but something profound has happened. When I saw that, I said, this word needs to be in print, and that's what this booklet is, and so we would just commend it to anyone who's watching us who would like to have it.

They can write our little ministry in northern Minnesota. We're up there in the frozen tundra and have been there for almost a quarter of a century in obedience to God. I'm a New Yorker, Frank. I'm a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley.

I should be in some urbane, sophisticated center. I'm up in the boondocks. Why? Because God has called us there to prepare a place of refuge for Jews in last day's flight and distress in this very country.

Unless the church will be converted radically and anointed radically, we cannot be to Jews in their final extremity what we must. So this is a significant booklet. There are other books, Reality, The Hope of Glory.

Maybe some believers know of me and have heard of these books, published by Morningstar, and the most recent is The Spirit of Truth. And if we miss it here, we miss it everywhere. And so if you can't get these in your local bookstore, by Art Katz, then write us in Minnesota, Route 2, La Porte, L-A-P-O-R-T-E, means in French, The Door, Minnesota, M-N -5 -6 -4 -6 -1.

So Ben Israel or Art Katz, Route 2, you don't even need the route number, we're in such a country, just Ben Israel or Art Katz, La Porte, Minnesota, 5 -6 -4 -6 -1, and we'd love to hear from the people who watch in the response to what we're sharing, and about a newsletter that we publish seasonally, and about our books and tapes.

Katz’s Jewish Background and Hostility Toward Christianity

Art, let's talk some about your personal testimony, because I think folks would be interested in how you, growing up as a Jewish boy, found Jesus Christ, and accepted him as your Messiah, when a large part of the Jewish nation still does not.

Well, I wasn't your little.

Village atheist, I was a professional atheist, and vehemently bitter against religion and Christianity most of all, because I believed then, as most Jews do now, including my own mother, that Hitler was a Christian.

Well, he's not a Muslim, he's not a Jew, what is he? Jews can't distinguish between born-again and nominal Christians. Every Gentile who is not a Muslim is a Christian, and what we have suffered, we have suffered, quote, at Christian hands.

Even the Crusaders, with the white crosses on their tunics, were Christians, who burned, you know, in our synagogues, and looted and pillaged our communities in Europe to finance their crusades. And so we are born with an inveterate hostility against Christianity.

I'll tell you that I could not even name the name of Jesus peaceably, but only as a curse word, in anger, when, you know, oh Jesus Christ, that kind of a thing. To call on the name of the Lord was one of the most excruciating moments of my life in my 35th year, and if God had not given me the grace to overcome historic Jewish prejudice, I'd be dead today.

The ability to call on his name was the birth of his life in me, and it was a grace that was given, because he knows the field aid that the enemy has had in corrupting that name for Jewish consideration.

Not only what we have suffered historically in violence, but even the thing that we're discussing earlier, the flakiness of Christianity is so beneath the level of integrity to be found in traditional Jewish religious life, that why should we even be interested?

So I had all of these prejudices, and yet, because I had not God, I had ideology, I had philosophy, my life came to a crisis in its 34th year. I was teaching history in a high school in California. My marriage had failed to a German woman.

How could it possibly succeed as a natural man? We were just opposing forces, and I realized that I could raise questions with my students, but I couldn't answer them. And so, I took a year's leave of absence from the teaching profession to find philosophical answers.

I mean, what else should an atheist look for? And I put a pack on my back, and I traveled through Europe, because we Jews have been so influential in shaping the Western world. And I thought, if I'm going to find an answer, I've got to find it where philosophy and values have been created, even by us, because something is amiss.

Our predicament is worsening. It's not just an art cat who's in trouble. The world itself is on the verge of moral collapse, of atomic annihilation. The world is shot, and I had no answers. My ideology could not answer.

And so, I kept a diary, a journal, through that experience, and it's just remarkable that day by day I was noting that I was being picked up off the side of the road by an unusual kind of people. They were Gentiles, but there was something in them that I could not identify beyond what a Gentile is, a warmth and a love and a depth of something, a peace that was challenging me, and their words were remarkably penetrating.