K-505 Israel as the Missing Key — Art Katz

Israel in Paul's Theology and the Church's Apostolic Destiny

You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go directly to Romans 11 11. The whole chapter, of course, is fascinating and that chapter should not itself be considered independent of chapters 9 and 10 and often when I got when I get on to the subject I direct the the hearers to certain elementary observations that Paul's statement on the mystery of Israel is not reserved as an addendum in the back of the book.

It's not a little index. It is smack-dab and the center of Paul's most systematic statement of his apostolic theology. It's not a little addendum. It's central and yet it has bewildered generations of theologians who have just been non-compos mentis when it comes to Romans 9 through 11 and especially 11.

They just pass it by. It's as if there's a veil over the understanding of even the most brilliant exegetes and little wonder because Paul describes the entire subject as a mystery and he says it's a mystery in which he would not have us to be ignorant lest we become wise in our own conceits, plural indicating that the concept there was a consequence for the failure to have a knowledge of this mystery.

It issues immediately into a series of conceits of such a serious kind as to disfigure if not annul the church as the church. Now when I say that I'm not saying that it will cease to be able to have services and conferences but it annuls the church as an apostolic entity and it is only as an apostolic entity that the church can succeed in winning Israel in the last days releasing the king from his containment and issuing in the millennial kingdom and glory and being fitted itself for its own eternal participation in that theocratic rule.

Aren't you glad that there are recordings? You'd have to be brilliant to have followed that statement but I've got to make statements like that because there's no shortcut and I can't take the time to dot the I's and cross the T's of all of those statements, but just let them come into your spirit and pray that the Lord will bring it up to the level of your consciousness and understanding.

It is absolutely critical in terms of your own personal eternal destiny. The issue of Israel especially of the last days is the issue of the church of what it will be in its final configuration, character, stature, power, authority, and conduct.

Israel for the church is put up or shut up. It is God's designated test as to our authenticity and the degree of the truth of our sanctification and I'll tell you that greater saints than than we who are assembled here now have failed the test historically.

Some of the church fathers Christostom called the golden-mouthed orator failed the test and lapsed into the most virulent anti-semitism because of the provocation of Jews that he had not the grace to bear.

Luther the giant of the Reformation collapsed at this test. He spent I think three days or one day. I don't know the length of time with three prominent rabbis thinking naively he would persuade them about the truth of the Reformation and that they would recognize that in the Reformation church is the revelation of the faith of the God of Israel and they failed to agree.

They were no more impressed with reformed Protestantism than they were with Catholicism and in fact their refutation of his spiritual his biblical arguments for Jesus as the Messiah according to the fulfillment of Scripture were of such a horrendous kind that they boarded on blasphemy and by that he saw that the very presence of a Jew Jewish or Judaistic rejecting body in the look and the reformed Europe constituted a threat to the young Reformation itself and then lapsed into a kind of foaming at the mouth by which he produced a book called The Lies of the Jews which fueled the Nazi German persecution of Jews four centuries later.

The Jew has ever and always been the severest test to the church. They are a goad in our sight. There's something about them that is so provocative in their da-da-da-da-da-da-da Attitude. What you say that you've discovered our Messiah you in our scriptures.

You can't even read Hebrew. Chrysostom, not Chrysostom, who is the first significant martyr Polycarp. It says in the book of Martyrs that when they gathered when they brought him to the stake to be burned to death who was then in his mid or late 80s.

The Jews were among the first to find the combustible materials and it says in the comment and this they do always. They seem to have taken a great malicious delight in aiding and abetting in the martyrdom of God's choicest saints.

So great was the animus against Christianity on the part of the Jews that was strung out in all of the Mediterranean communities where the church itself was being established. And yet Paul says in Romans 11 verse 11.

Israel's Stumbling, Gentile Salvation, and Jealousy

I say then did they stumble so as to fall? Did they stumble to the fall? Are they finished? Okay, can we be finished with this pestilential people that bug us? Can we say that they've had their chance and they have historically missed it?

They stoned the prophets and and they brought to death the Holy One of Israel of whom the prophets foretold. Doesn't it mean now that their time is over and we have now inherited their promises and we are the Israel of God?

The church would have loved to believe that. And Paul says God forbid that you should. May it never be. But by their transgression, their fall salvation has come to the Gentiles. What a great relief if there were a period right after that statement, but a lack and alas, and this is called the amazing astonishing doctrine.

A little phrase is added. Salvation has come to the Gentiles to move them to jealousy. Did you ever know that there was a purpose for your salvation beyond your salvation? That your salvation is not the sum all and the be-all of your going to heaven and the benefits that accrue to you by believing?

That there's a purpose for your salvation as Gentiles that has not to do with any benefit that accrues to you but an ultimate benefit that accrues to God. Namely, that he looks to you exclusively that by virtue of the salvation that has come to you through their fall that you in turn should move them to jealousy.

So much so that they will be willing to consider and to embrace the gospel of which Paul says in the same chapter, they are the enemies for your sake. I'll tell you dear Saints as a former missionary to the Jews and having been one myself for a long time that there's no more formidable enemy of the gospel than the Jewish people.

And the only reason you don't know it and that you can sit safely in your seat is because you have never like myself faced them nose to nose. You've never had a door slammed in your face. You've never seen the bristling anger and indignation.

You've never been cut to shreds by the cruelest words that human ingenuity could conceive that shreds you and that and they seem to have all the marbles in doing so. Anointed, authoritative and powerful.

They make you to feel like a jerk and how dare you present this message to them who have been on the receiving end of 2 ,000 years of Christian persecution culminating in the Holocaust. You who can't even make it with your own wives.

You're going to tell me who has won the Man of the Year award by the what is it the Jewish organization B 'nai B 'rith? Who has never once raised his voice to his wife who is the picture of ethical and moral consistency that I need your Christ.

Can you understand what I'm saying Saints? What does God being taken by surprise by these factors? He knows them well. In fact, he has been the author of the factors that would make the Jew in the last days the most conspicuous, powerful, vivid enemy of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And yet if we do not succeed He does not succeed. He remains contained in the heavens. The kingdom does not come. The world continues to fornicate like jackrabbits and go on with its incest and its mayhem and its pillage its murder and its ethnic cleansings and genocidal insanity until the king comes.

You will not see me until you say blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. You say why are you rubbing it in? Because I want you to feel something of the great weight of the staggering paradox of the thing that God himself has designed for the purposes of his own to conclude the age.

I refuse to give any credibility to anything that purports to be prophetic that makes no mention of the issue of Israel as it pertains to the church of the last days. That omission for me is ipso facto complete evidence that whatever is going on however much it be called prophetic is fraudulent.

There is only one great single prophetic burden of God that is on time now and that's the one that was expressed last night and that is being attempt to be expressed now. And it's not because I'm Jewish that I'm expressing it.

It's because it's the truth and it's the last days truth central to the church's consideration. Not so much for Israel's sake and and whatever their return will mean which Paul says is life from the dead but because the issue of the return is the issue of the glory of God forever.

Where do you get that tats? Romans 11 36. That's where I get it. That's what makes an apostle an apostle. His whole treatise and dissertation starts in chapter 9 with wishing himself a curse for his for his kinsmen's sake according to the flesh.

He's not indifferent to his own people. He aches for them. He would exchange his own salvation if by that means some of them might be saved. But his great jealousy and burden for their restoration is not for Israel for its own sake necessarily but that in their being restored God obtains glory and its glory forever.

It's one final historic event in time that concludes time but the magnitude of what is affected is of such a glory to God that it continues to celebrate him forever. Tell you what supposing you're a nominal Indian Christian who attends church once in a while, but more frequently into the six-pack, how much would your faith and walk change if you knew that God was putting before you an opportunity for a participation in a concluding event in the age not ever again to be given that affects his glory forever.

How'd you like to have part in that? To have part in that is to have part in the eternal purposes of God. It's transfiguring. It calls us to be larger than life, and it will compel us to be apostolic.

This is the transition from charismatic to apostolic ground, the issue of the Jew, and it's interesting that those segments of the church that have not this vista, and are in fact may be resistant if not hostile to it, however much they might mouth, the vocabulary of apostolicity do not obtain to it.

They are forever fixed in the lower realms of charismatica. This is the issue by which we're compelled to be apostolic or bust. Now, what does that mean? I'm not going to tell you right now. But maybe you'll sense it as we go on.

The Church's Ultimate Demonstration to Israel

Okay. So we have a mandate, saints, to move them to jealousy. Wouldn't it be great if there were an asterisk that would direct us to the bottom of the page, and Paul will tell us in a neat way what he means by that and how it's to be done?

We Americans who like to know how, and our methodologists would love to see it spelled out for us, but no go. And still if you had to define it, what is it that would move Israel to jealousy? What kind of ultimate demonstration?

What is the church to be that that jealousy could be affected by people who have been historically hostile and resistant? What have they seen so far that has so much as impressed them, let alone move them to jealousy?

They're the first ones to see through the kinds of things that have totally captivated our carnal hearts. All of the televangelists who've ended up tragically and in disgraceful, what you might call it, scandals.

The Jews knew long before you that they were phonies. They're tough, and I praise God for that. Don't you like a tough critic? Somebody said to me, I don't know when it was, a week or two ago, this is not easy.

I don't know what problem they were suffering in the church. I said, so what? Are we called to that which is easy? We're called to what is tough. Demanding even beyond ourselves. That's why it says before the last statement, to him be glory forever, it says of him and through him and to him are all things.

You underline where it says through him. For example, if this speaking tonight is not through him and last night's speaking, and when I'll be standing before a Jewish audience in Toulouse, France, on the first night of Rosh Hashanah in September, when we leave here, if that message and that speaking on Jewish seriousness before God is not through him, forget it.

There's a difference between performing something out of our own religious ability and something that is affected through him. Do you know the difference? And are you functioning consistently in that difference?

The church that can say yes to that in truth is the church that will move Israel to jealousy and defeat the principalities and the powers of the air. Verse 12, now if their transgression be riches for the world and their failure be riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their fulfillment be?

But I'm speaking to you who are Gentiles, inasmuch then as I'm an apostle of Gentiles, I magnify my ministry. Have you ever wondered about that? Shouldn't Peter have been the apostle to the Gentiles? And Paul, with his great rabbinical background, the prized student of the rabbi Gamaliel, shouldn't he have been the apostle to the Jews?

What a mishmash. Shows you how confused God is. If somehow I might move to jealousy my fellow countrymen and save some of them, for if their rejection be the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?

And if the first piece of dough be holy, the lump is also. And if the root be holy, the branches are too. But if some of the branches were broken off and you being a wild olive were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the rich fruit of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches.

But if you are arrogant, remember that it's not you who supports the root, but the root supports you. You will say then branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in? Quite right. They were broken off for their unbelief, but you stand by your faith.

Do not be conceited, however, but fear, for if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. Behold then the kindness and severity of God to those who fell, severity. But to you God's kindness, if you continue in his kindness, otherwise you'll also be cut off.

And they also, if they do not continue with their unbelief, will be grafted in. For God is able to graft them in again. For if you were cut off from what is by nature a wild olive tree and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more shall these who are the natural branches be grafted into their own olive tree?

For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery, lest you become wise in your own estimation or conceit that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.

That's not just so much a designation of a time, but the fulfillment of an event, or the consummation of the church's evangelical and missionary activity in the world. That the issue of Israel's restoration has not a thing to do with Israel.

It has everything to do with the church, moving them to jealousy and bringing the fullness of the Gentiles in. How many of us in our missionary endeavor, or even in our local evangelizations, link the two things together?

That whatever souls remained in the numbers that constitute the Gentiles being fulfilled, that somehow that's the release of the thing that brings Israel's restoration. It may not be anything to do directly with the Jew, but when the fullness of the Gentile be come in, something is released that has been held in abeyance, that means their deliverance.

For thus all Israel will be saved. It's not a direct ministry to the Jew, but when the fullness of the Gentiles come in, all Israel will be saved just as it is written, the deliverer will come from Zion, he will remove ungodliness from Jacob.

Notice, not Jacob from ungodliness, ungodliness from Jacob. Jacob is acted upon by a release that comes for God to do it, out of Zion, because the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. Isn't it remarkable how God ties in everything to conclude the age as it pertains to Israel and becomes Israel's key?

So from the standpoint of the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but from the standpoint of God's choice they are beloved for the sake of the fathers, for the gifts and the callings of God are irrevocable.

It's a good question to ask, what is the gift and calling of Israel? And even if they themselves have blown it, even if they themselves do not desire it, to be a nation of priests and a light unto the world, because they'd much rather make money, still, because God's word has made that call and established that gift, it will be fulfilled even despite them.

You know why, saints? Because the issue of God's word is the issue of God's honor. It's the issue of God's name. It's the issue of God. And if he cannot succeed within Israel, even in their own patent and demonstrated unwillingness, he is not God.

His word has got to be greater than their obstinacy and unwillingness. That's how great the issue is. It's the final demonstration of God as God. Not because of Israel's disposition toward him, but all the more because of their disposition against.

That in their intractability and resistance and stubborn rejection, they all the more give opportunity to God to demonstrate himself as God. For he will have mercy upon whom he will have mercy. All the more mercy because they deserve it the least.

Oh, the depths of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. Are you following this? So the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable. For just as you were once disobedient to God, but now have been shown mercy because of their disobedience.

So these also now have been disobedient in order that because of the mercy shown to you, they may also now be shown mercy. God has shut them up to disobedience. They couldn't be good if they wanted to, but the heck of the matter is they don't want to.

So God is judging them for their failure, but their failure serves his every purpose. They are shut up into disobedience. That the only thing that can come to them, that can extricate them from that hopeless fix, is the mercy of God.

And what is the mercy of God if it is in any way deserved? Mercy is not mercy except as it is undeserved. That's what makes it mercy. And mercy is not merely an attribute of God. It is central and distinctive to God's whole being.

Remember when Moses said, show me thy glory and it will suffice me. And God hit him in the cleft of the rock and let his hind parts go before him. And it said he revealed to him his tender mercy, his chesed.

That's the Hebrew word. Moses asked for glory. God showed him his mercy. And when God shows his mercy, he shows his glory. When Paul says to him, be glory forever, the glory of God is going to be revealed by the mercy of God when it shall be extended to a people who are totally undeserving till the moment in which they receive it.

And that shall be done before the face of all nations so that no nation will be with excuse as to who in fact is God. For they will have witnessed both the severity of his judgments that have cast that people again into all nations and bring the most severe time of Jacob's trouble upon them that they will be ground to powder that only a remnant of them will survive the terrible devastation of those days.

That in fact if it was not cut short, no Jewish flesh would survive. It will eclipse the Holocaust because nothing past has ever been like it nor will again includes the Holocaust of the Hitler time. That is future and at the door.

Are you ready for it? You say, how can events of this ponderous kind be at the door and now as you're speaking, I'm beginning to put two and two together. Yeah, I'm catching a glimpse that what's happening in Israel is totally untenable.

Their condition is so fierce, it's so utterly hopeless. There's no prospect of any kind of political resolution of the difficulty with the Palestinians and they're ringed about by nations that are so bent upon their destruction.

Hopeless. Mounting anti-Semitism in all the nations of the world. Jewish tombstones overturned. Graffiti written on synagogue walls. There's anti-Semitic literature being turned out on American presses throughout this country in tons and it will find ready acceptance the moment that our economy dips, let alone collapses.

The Jewish bankers, the Zionist conspiracy to take over the world economy and how many untutored dum-dums who look for simplistic answers will be quick to grasp something that's in keeping with their own regenerate hatred of Jews just beneath the surface of our so-called civilization.

We're going to be plunged into such Nazi-like terror against Jews in this very country that you could never have imagined any more than Germans who pride themselves on Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Brahms, and Wagner could have imagined it could have come to them.

The mercy of God, and only the mercy of God, will save them out of their last day's distress as many as God has elected unto salvation and the redeemed of the Lord, which we sang tonight, shall return to Zion battered, bloodied, bruised.

Mourning and sighing shall flee away. From what? From their last day's affliction and the terror that will be at the heart of their life right to the last moment's peril when God will save them and bring them back as captive out of captivity on litters, on mules, on shoulders of kings and queens and bring them to the millennial and restored nation from all the places in the earth in which they have been cast and dispersed in his judgment.

Anyone who sees that process and it will be visible before the face of all nations will not again ever be able to dispute who in fact is God. God is the God of Israel. He's the God of judgment and severity, but the God also of mercy and return.

And the nations that will not come up to Jerusalem to honor him there will suffer a curse. Okay, all of that was introduction. Now what I've labored on all afternoon is some thoughts on Romans 11. And the moment I see you dozing off and you can't take more, I'll stop.

But I have some fresh things here that I've never myself seen before. So in one of the most remarkable strokes of the divine genius, God turns the tragedy of divine judgment. Israel's casting away as the very means for the grafting into the Gentiles, which redounds finally to Israel's return.

What seemed their loss may thus conceivably accomplish a far wider measure of good than even consistent loyalty could have achieved. If Israel had gone on with an unblemished track record and received the Messiah, and then it was itself the nation that brought the message of the gospel to other nations, they would not have succeeded and done as much as what was obtained by their rejecting the Messiah.

I don't know if you can understand that. The gospel that came through their rejection and that was promulgated by the apostolic church was free from the ethnic and religious taint of the Jewish community that could not have brought that message without some discoloration of legalism or religious pride that would have turned the Gentiles away even from the message of the Messiah.

That in their rejecting of the message, it could come now to Gentiles in a way in which they could both hear it and receive it and be for them their salvation. Something was served by their rejection, but something is served also by the faith that has come to the Gentiles who now in turn will so act as to bring them back again.

So the tendency that Paul is battling in the church is against the church wanting to see in Israel's fall a final defection. But the genius of the quote amazing doctrine, that's what some men have called this amazing doctrine, is that God places the premium of their return upon the church that was created out of their rejection.

Can you see there's a reciprocal thing here? They have fallen so that you could be grafted in. But your grafting in is not for your satisfaction alone, but so as to bring them in. And in that way God can comprehend all in his mercy.

That's the staggering and amazing doctrine. The mandate of obligation to the Jew in every locality where the church itself should be established brings, these are my words, an ultimate dimension of demand, which, if accepted and fulfilled, provides that dynamic that makes the church the church.

The Gospel to the Jew First

I'll read it again. Okay. Remember what Paul says in Romans 1 .16, I believe it is. This gospel, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. He had every right to be. It was totally unintellectual. It was totally non-rabbinical.

It was off the wall in terms of people being saved without doing anything, but just believing, which is an offense and a scandal to Jews to this day. All you have to do is believe? What a cop-out. You mean you don't keep Sabbath, you don't light candles, you don't do this, you don't fast on Yom Kippur?

What a snap. You just got to believe? It's a scandal and contemptuous route to salvation for Jews. And it strikes at the very heart of the desire in man to affect his own righteousness by his own acts.

Now, what am I saying? Paul says, I'm not ashamed of this gospel. For it is the power of God unto salvation. The gospel itself is that message of foolishness, that scandal of a message that human intellect can not only not conceive, but it is calculated to be offended by.

It has an intrinsic power in itself of the death and the resurrection of that one who came down from heaven and lived in obscurity, was rejected by his own people, became their sin bearer, shed his blood, and was vindicated and approved of the Father by being raised out of that death and being ascended to the right hand of power and glory, and given all authority over heaven and earth, and whosoever believes in him shall not be disappointed.

I'll tell you what, you don't know how foolish that message is until you stand up before a Jewish audience at Harvard University or City College of New York and preach it. And because we haven't, we are less of a church than we ought to be.

Because God has calculated that for our necessary growth. They are the enemies of the gospel for your sake. You need that, or you would have declined it to some kind of sappy, charismatic, sensation-feeling, pulse-taking, dumb-dumb spirituality that not only does not affect the Jew, it doesn't affect anyone.

This is the gospel to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. Don't start where you got it easy, start where it's toughest. Start in Jerusalem where I was crucified, and where the prophets were stoned, and see how far you get.

See if your four spiritual laws will cut any mustard. Okay, go ahead and add a fifth one, which they've done. We Jews always require one more. I mean, I don't want to disparage that. I know that there have been Jews who have been saved by the witness of Jehovah's Witnesses, by Mormons, by the most remarkable outlandish and unbiblical deceits, but it set in motion something that had eventuated in their salvation.

Praise God. But what I'm saying by and large is this. It's not going to be through some cutesy thing, or some little formula, or nomenclature for salvation that we can obtain by showing them step one, step two, step three.

This is the hard critic. These are the ones that have been on the receiving end of two millennia of persecution by seeming Christians that has etched itself so deeply into Jewish consciousness that my 91-year-old mother will not set her foot into a Volkswagen.

Now she may set her foot into my Mercedes-Benz, because I'm not sure that she knows that that's made in Germany. Deep, deep prejudice. Because what shall a Jewish mother believe? If Hitler was not a Muslim and he's not a Jew, what is he?

He's a Christian. And it's at Christian hands. A brother, Michael Brown, has written a book, Our Hands Are Steeped With Blood. Yes, they are. Jewish blood. And if you knew what I knew, you would cringe about the hundreds of Jews in Germany and Central Europe and in other places during the times of the Crusaders who blocked themselves into their synagogues and refused the offer of conversion in order to spare their lives, but did a Kiddush Hashem.

They sanctified the Holy Name of God by murdering their children and slitting the throat of their wives and taking their own life. That when the Crusaders with their crosses on their tunics came bursting in to the synagogue, all they found were corpses.

Boy, I'll tell you, God has the deck stacked against him. And how many times have I been told by my outraged Jewish kinsmen when I sought to communicate to them that I'm worse than Hitler? Hitler only sought to destroy our bodies, they said, but you seek to destroy our souls.

You paid flunky. So let me read this statement again. To move them to jealousy, to affect their restoration by bringing in the fullness of the Gentiles, the incentive for the completion of our evangelical and mission burden is a mandate of obligation to the Jew in every locality where the church itself is established.

Have you noticed this? Wherever the church is, Jews are. I have found them in Tokyo. I have found them in former Yugoslavia. I know a Jew who speaks, what do you call that, the best form of Chinese? Mandarin Chinese.

And then he speaks Castilian Spanish because they went from China to Latin America. Where in the world have Jews not been dispersed where the church is, Jews are, in one form or expression or another, however few.

So in the purposes of the judgment that has cast them into the nations, they have also been deposited at our door so that we are without excuse in terms of what our witness to them has been. And as I know that I know that I know, the church that has not seriously considered this and taken it to heart to do it has never known the power of the gospel as it is revealed most acutely as it is presented to them.

And if we have not learned it with them, what are we presenting to the Greeks? And that's why the Indians are in their lamentable condition today. The mandate of obligation to the Jew in every locality where the church itself is established brings an ultimate dimension of demand which if accepted and fulfilled, it takes a conscious yes to the Lord.

It's a mandate that is not automatic. It's implicit in scripture, but it needs to be embraced where we say yes to the Jew first. If it's accepted and fulfilled, provides that dynamic that makes the church the church.

There's no way to embrace this mandate and still hold the resurrection simply as a doctrine. It compels you to cross the transcendent ground that makes resurrection the key to the operation of your own life.

Because except that your witness to them is on that basis, you have no witness. And that means that the life itself is not only the power but the source. It's not going to be your four spiritual laws.

It will be what the life itself will express. As he will and when he will, you might find yourself embarrassed in what you're prompted to speak by his life that you would never have spoken yourself if you had chosen.

I don't know how many Jews I've insulted in the power of the Holy Ghost. It's like saying to a black brother who was seated opposite me at the faculty dining hall in Oakland, California, when I came back as a believer, having been one of the leading faculty radicals as an atheist.

And he was munching away in indignation, knowing that I'd become a Christian, shooting arrows at me with his eyes and gristling. And he says, I'm struggling. He said that my black children can sit opposite your white children and eat their lunch at the same table.

I said, I thought you were radical. Is that all you want, this equal mastication? Well, I will not be satisfied until we're breaking bread together in brotherly embrace. John 3 .16 has probably been one of the greatest cop-outs that the church has employed in the absence of any other provision because they know not God as their life, who will give them a unique word appropriate to the one being confronted, where if you substitute John 3 .16, you're only putting before them a dead cliche.

God had me picked up off the side of the road by a man and having me sit down on the front seat and making me to feel as if I were the exalted guest, doing him a favor. And he turned to me as we drove off and he said in German, he said, my brother, he said, why are you traveling like this?

And I answered him in my broken speech. I said, well, I'm a modern man whose life is shattered at its foundation. I'm seeking for the deepest answers to life. Where did that come from? And before I could think further, I was saying, and I'm Jewish.

I thought of all the stupid things to say. Why did you have to give him that unsolicited piece of information? And I turned cautiously to see his recoil. And the remarkable thing is the guy was lit up like a tube.

He thought that being Jewish was dandy. For me, it was only another one of the inexplicable predicaments of life. I didn't know what it meant to be a Jew, but evidently he knew something I didn't know.

And he said, would you like to have some refreshment at my expense? And we did. And what a golden conversation in a Swiss coffee house. As I poured out my soul to a Gentile stranger, thinking to myself, cats, what are you doing?

You're sharing the deepest, most private secrets of your life that you have not shared with closest friends or your own mother. With a man who has picked you up who is a stranger. What is it with this man that can draw my heart out like that?

And I spit out everything. I was a man dying of despair and hopelessness. Berkeley grad. They used to put my scores up on the blackboard and then begin the rest of the class somewhere lower. Without hope.

And I was telling him my sense of futility for the human race. That we're moving toward holocaust, to racial decay and absolute moral degeneration. And I see no hope. I've been a Marxist, I've been an existentialist, I've been a pragmatist.