When a believer is finally convinced in what they believe, it would require a New York moving company to get them to budge on their beliefs. While I find steadfast faith inspiring, such unwillingness to be open to new teaching is what keeps some people from missing out on all that G-d has for them.

For the Jewish people, two thousand years of anti-messianic teaching has created a blind spot for the possibility that Yeshua was indeed the promised messiah. Some have even abandoned the messianic hope altogether, which is a shame. Yet that is relatively minor compared to the error of the Christians.

Mainstream Christianity long ago abandoned the Jewish roots of their faith, and it shows up not only in the big issues, but in the details. They exchanged the true name of Yeshua for the less-Hebraic-sounding Jesus. They exchanged Adonai’s own feasts and festivals, declared and established in the Torah itself, for shame pagan holidays like Easter and Christmas. They celebrate most of their holidays with a feast of ham, rather than a kosher menu that Yeshua himself could have joined them in.

Any Christian who says Jewish people are “too stubborn” to recognize the truth of Adonai and his messiah, Yeshua, needs to take a good long look in the mirror; what they see reflected there could easily be found in Webster’s Dictionary as the very definition of the word “stubborn.”

Believe it.

It’s strange.

One of the main reasons I am a bar/bat mitzvah teacher at my congregation is that those who are parents themselves aren’t exactly beating the door down for their turn at bat. In the nine or 10 months I’ve been doing it, even though I’m not a parent, I miss the class and the kids quite a bit on Saturdays I can’t make it, which are thankfully few and far between.

Take this past weekend for example.

I loved being in Chicago with my wife, spending time with her grandmother, her uncle John, and other important people in her life. It was great fun, a nice getaway and long overdue: over two years since we’d been down there ourselves. The whole weekend was memorable in good ways. But I must confess that, come Saturday morning, I missed getting up and going to Sar Shalom to teach “my kids.”

Sure, they can be challenging, hard to deal with at times and a bit of a handful. But they can also be bright and studious and full of joy. I enjoy teaching them. And it beats buying body shop supplies.

Saturday this week can’t arrive quickly enough.