A Rabbi's Search for Messiah

by Isidor Zwirn

Book Overview

The book tells the life story of a Orthodox Rabbi from Burbank, California who through his study of the Hebrew (Old Testament) Scriptures came to realize who the true Messiah was. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• ISBN: 0962395080
• ISBN13: 9780962395086
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Good News for Israel
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Yeshua/Jesus Chosen Without Help From Gentiles

A Rabbi's Search for Messiah is an autobiographically intimate story of one Jewish man's unique and interesting search for truth within the Jewish faith of his fathers. Reared as an Orthodox Jew in a family of rabbis, Isidor Zwirn applied his yeshiva-learned research methods of scripture research (doresh in Hebrew) to explore the questions about Messiah that so often go undiscussed in Jewish culture.Isidor lost his mother to the flu epidemic of 1919 and grew up with his father in New York's Lower East Side in a neighborhood of other Jewish immigrants from Poland. After two years his father remarried. Isidor grew up in a warm loving home with good relationships all around. Many personal anecdotes give the reader, whether Jewish or Gentile, powerful insights into the daily life and perspectives of mid-twentieth century Orthodox Jews. The author includes his early and continuing brushes with anti-Semitism, which are neither flattering nor exaggerated. He also includes the psychologically rough treatment he received from his fellow Jews once he decided that the Jesus of the New Testament was indeed the long awaited Messiah of the people of Israel.Both of these latter aspects point well to the real power of this book. Rabbi Zwirn did not "receive Christ" from a Gentile evangelist, rather he came to his conclusions about Jesus/Yeshua from totally within the Jewish community. Generally, he had had little contact with Gentiles, except for being subjected to various forms of anti-Semitism. He had no contact with Gentiles about religious matters, but reasoning as an Orthodox Jewish person he had come to what most Jews consider to be a Gentile conclusion. But Rabbi Zwirn never considered himself a "Christian" but a Jew who had found the Jewish Messiah from studying the Jewish scriptures (Old Testament to Christians). It was only after he had come to this conclusion that he started to study the New Testament. Significantly, he labored with very limited success in his gospel studies until he started to read the New Testament in Hebrew. Once he began to address the New Word in the language of Torah, then many new and exciting discoveries were made. He shares some of the more important ones with the reader.Isidor Zwirn had come to faith in Yeshua/Jesus by researching the Bible and not by some miraculous, emotional revelation by faith as is typical among America's non-Jews. Thus, he was not fully accepted or understood by either group, which is why the last part of the book is Rabbi Zwirn's attempt to explain and bridge the gaps that developed around him between Jews and Gentiles. While commenting on the Apostle Paul's writings in the book of Romans, he explains his "aha" moment on this issue in his book on page 90:Through my growing familiarity with Christians and their (to me) strange theology, I realized that the majority of Christians strongly believed that one could only come to God and Yeshua by faith. While I as a Jew, on the other hand, had always been t