How Ellen White bridges the great divide with our fathers, the Jews. By Rabbi Joe Kagan
I met Rabbi Joe Kagan at the Weimar Institute in California. His family comes from Eastern Europe. There, his aunt had been raped while a priest stood over her with a crucifix and said, “This is the punishment for killing Christ.” You can imagine how many Jews feel about Christianity. Joe Kagan was still young when they moved to the USA. He made his debut as a cantor at Carnegie Hall at the age of 13. He had a beautiful tenor voice. After a highly qualified education, he became a rabbi. I met him in 1978, when he was older, after he had worked as a researcher on Ronald Reagan’s staff in Sacramento. If you had questions about a particular topic, he would do the research and provide the answers.
Joe Kagan had a very negative attitude towards Christianity. He would never have picked up a New Testament. But he was extremely well versed in the Jewish Old Testament (the Torah). After all, he was a highly educated rabbi. One day, a book entitled Patriarchs and Prophets by Ellen White fell into his hands. He read it with great astonishment and wanted to know who this Ellen White was. That was when we got to know each other. He asked us who this Ellen Gould White was and which university she had attended. We told him that she had only gone to school for three years. “Where did she learn Hebrew then?” he asked. We told him that she never knew Hebrew, but was the most prolific author in history. This was just one of her books.
He was impressed by her knowledge and said that the information in this book(Patriarchs and Prophets) coincided with that of the Mishnah. The Mishnah is part of the rabbinical scriptures, but was only translated into English thirty years ago and only highly educated rabbis could have such knowledge. Patriarchs and Prophets contains the history of his people and is very, very accurate. He also said that you have to know Hebrew to write like this, because the sentence structures are not English, but Hebrew. The rhythm, the meter, the arrangement of the words, the idioms are not English. He said it seemed to him as if the book had been translated from Hebrew into English.
My family and I became close friends with Joe, his wife and his son. As we studied the Bible and some of Ellen White’s books together, he once said, “I am convinced that Ellen White was inspired by the same source as the Hebrew prophets. I want to … accept Jesus as my Messiah.” He would not have found Jesus by reading the Bible alone. Although the Hebrew Bible is full of prophecies about the Messiah, it was the writings of Ellen White that opened his eyes to the fact that Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of all the Hebrew prophecies. Only then did he pick up the New Testament and read about the Jewish Messiah.
I often saw him with tears in his eyes … We were allowed to be present at his secret baptism on Saturday evening, December 22, 1979, in the Bear River near Sacramento … When he came out of the cold water, praising God and singing praises to his new Messiah, he said: “Now I am a complete Jew. I have accepted the Old and the New Testament and the Messiah that all the Jewish prophets have told us about!”
Shalom David
I recently gave a few workshops in Europe on art and archaeology in the Middle East. I happened to meet a Jewish family from Israel. Shalom David is originally from Iraq and his wife is from Chile.
They are currently attending an Adventist school in Europe, where I encountered quite a bit of opposition to the writings of Ellen White. This Jewish family invited me over to their home for the traditional Sabbath beginning meal. It was a wonderful event. His wife and lovely children sang and celebrated the arrival of the Sabbath, as Jews have done for thousands of years. I told them the story of Rabbi Kagan. He was thrilled and said: “Exactly the same thing happened to me. I would have rather burned the Bible than open it! I wanted nothing to do with Christianity. But I read the writings of Ellen White. God’s spirit rested on this woman. Her writings are as if they had been written in Hebrew. You can really feel the rhythm, meter and idioms of Hebrew in her books. I also believe that she was inspired by the same source as the Hebrew prophets. She was the catalyst that made me fall in love with Jesus, my Messiah.”
Rabbi Ben
Just yesterday I met a rabbi here in California – Rabbi Ben. It was after the Sabbath commencement meal I had been invited to last Sabbath with him and a group of Adventists. At the meal, he followed the whole ceremony just like Rabbi Kagan and my new friend Shalom David in Europe. Yesterday we talked about the Hebrew ceremonies and how they still have healing power for illnesses. Rabbi Ben told me that he also had the same experience. He had hated the Bible, but Ellen White had brought him to Jesus. She was the trigger for him to read the New Testament and fall in love with the Messiah. He also told me that he had visited one of the most influential rabbis in America, who is already over 90 and must remain unnamed. When he was talking to this rabbi in his library, he skimmed through the many, many book titles on the shelves and came across the book Patriarchs and Prophets by Ellen White. Rabbi Ben then asked him how he had obtained the book: “Why did you get this book from a Christian author?”
The rabbi said, “This is a very reliable source of our history.” I recently gave this testimony on television on 3ABN.
Since then, my phone has been ringing off the hook. Interested people from near and far, from India and Australia say, “We want to know more about Joe Kagan and Ellen White.”
First published in German in Fundament für ein befreiertes Leben, 8-2006. Abridged, translated and published with the kind permission of the author.
Source: hoffnung-weltweit.info
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