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and how the Seven Feasts of Israel pointed to his birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension. He did his best to articulate why he believed that Yeshua was the Messiah. He often invited them to come to the congregation but they politely declined. They felt that Ben was simply infatuated by this new congregation, and being “a nice Jewish boy” would eventually, as his mother put it, “give up this meshuga nonsense.” He and his father often had antagonistic conversations about whether Jesus was the Messiah, and sometimes his father became angry and sarcastic and referred to Jesus as “your heretical rabbi.”
    Ben loved Jesus’ Hebrew name and often said “Yeshua” to his father, but his father would refer to Jesus as YESHU: using the Hebrew acronym, which means, “May his name and memory beblotted out forever,” a term coined in extra-biblical rabbinic literature and used by many Jews who are opposed to Yeshua being the Messiah. It is traditionally forbidden by many Jews to even mention His name. The irony in all of this was that Yeshua in Hebrew means “salvation.” Ben was sad that his father had so hardened his heart against Yeshua that he couldn’t listen.
    After seven months of attending Tikvat, as a third-year law student (a “3L”) Ben met his future wife, Rebecca.
    Rebecca Emerson was a Gentile. She played the guitar in the Tikvat band, danced with the Tikvat Israel Dancers, and was conversant in Hebrew. She even taught Hebrew in Tikvat’s Hebrew school. She was studying to become a midwife. She had long light brown curly hair, hazel eyes, and a lovely smile. She had been homeschooled and was just nineteen years old when she and Ben met. She had grown up attending Tikvat.
    When Ben first started to attend Tikvat, Rebecca was away, traveling on an eleven-month Christian medical mission trip to Ethiopia to witness to and physically help the Falasha Jews who were preparing to make aliyah—immigration to Israel. Rebecca took this trip along with her parents and her younger siblings. When they returned to the United States they resumed attending Tikvat.
    Ben was captivated the first time that he saw Rebecca. Who was this young woman who sang and played the guitar so well? Both Ben and Rebecca soon joined the staff of the Youth Group. They became fast friends and spent a lot of time together during Youth Group meetings and activities. Ben found Rebecca to be grounded in her faith, confident, intelligent, and well educated. She could speak knowledgeably on nearly any topic, especially apologetics, history, politics, economics, biblical prophecy, natural science, creationism, and biblical law. She was much more conversant in Hebrew than Ben.
    Along with Ben, Rebecca had taken the Messianic rabbi’s biblicallaw class, in which they had studied all of the ancient biblical laws in the book of Leviticus and also Talmudic law studies. So she had learned to discern circular logic and fallacies, and to recognize the original intent of the law and its later overamplification in modern Jewish life.
    Ben found Rebecca to be vivacious and funny. He soon began to learn about her dreams and aspirations for the future. She wanted to be a midwife, a wife, mother, and a homeschooling mom, raising a family out in a rural area, living a homesteading life. Even though much of that was foreign to Ben, he was beginning to think she was a wonderful young woman.
    Rebecca’s father, Ron Emerson, was a dentist and had led a medical mission team into Gondar, Ethiopia. Because he was a dentist going into villages free of charge, the Ethiopian government allowed him and his team in. Her father said that his family was “part of the team,” so they were also able to get visas and accompany him for the year they were there. Rebecca and her siblings quickly learned the Amharic language once they were in Ethiopia. They helped both her father and the doctors on the team with language translation and doctoring. She even witnessed and