Shalom everyone,
Imagine this situation: In your spiritual journey, you have searched alone, questioned everything alone, and sought divine truth, alone. Then finally, without any human guidance, urging or prompting, you find God – I mean, really find and experience God as a living Being, with a distinct personality, who teaches you and makes everything clear to you. Then you realise that, human-wise, you are still alone in your beliefs, opinions and outlook. What do you do?
If human fellowship is more important to you than the faith that you’ve found, then your answer is simple: find some other religion where you will experience that human connection and companionship that you crave.
But then, even when you are surrounded by other human beings and their happy, gregarious voices, you are still alone, because no one else thinks like you do, believes as you do, or understands the same things as you do. You have to bite your tongue and censor the thoughts you want to speak out loud, because you can never express your opinions. You have to stay quiet and smile politely, because the human community you so desperately sought and took refuge in, doesn’t hold any of the same values as you do – values that you learned from your journey alone, with only God as your Guide and Mentor, and which have come to define who and what you are in the very essence of your being.
This, my brothers and sisters, is the oft-repeated experience of the earliest Followers of the Way in the Modern Era. I was just one of a number of people who, in those early days, thought that we were utterly alone in faith.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve had enquiries about, “Where is your nearest congregation?” I must have been asked that literally thousands of times over the last 25 years. Then I have to be honest – because that is the Talmidi way – and I tell them, “We are an internet community; our membership is too spread out around the globe to have synagogues or congregations.” After that, 99% never contact me again.
Then there is the 1% who follow up. They contact me again, because they have found the destination that God Himself has led them to. They have found a home, with people who hold the same values, ideas and beliefs that they do.
When I left Christianity, I honestly did not know what to believe, or believe in. My only constant was God. So I asked God to teach me: “Heavenly Father, I am ignorant; I know nothing. Teach me what to believe, and I will follow You wherever You might lead me.”
Over the next few years, I studied many faiths by myself, but nothing spoke to my soul. Nothing answered my questions. Eventually, I stopped resisting the pull of the knowledge I had picked up on the Jewish Jesus, and I stopped battling against what I now knew about the history of his earliest Jewish followers.
Well, you know where those studies led me. But like every other Follower of the Way in the late 20th century, following on from the joy of finding a faith that I was fulfilled by in the depths of my soul, and which made complete, perfect sense to me, I realised that I was alone.
I tried joining other communities – both Christian and Jewish. I was castigated every time I told anyone of my new-found ideas, and sometimes even mocked when it was pointed out to me that I would always be alone, “because the most important thing about religion is connection with other human beings, and if there is no one to connect with, what’s the point of believing in what you believe?”
I always took this to mean, “You should join our religion, because it’s big – it has millions of members, and therefore must be true; a small religion has nothing of any value to contribute to the human race.”
I was mocked for trying to find other people who thought the same way as I did – because apparently, that was entirely the wrong approach to religious faith.
So I had to ask myself, “What’s more important to me? The Truth I have found in God, or the cynical, mocking scorn dressed up as human love and fellowship? Should I appease others, and acquiesce to the beliefs of those around me, just for the sake of ‘connecting’ with other human beings? Is it worth staying with them, only to be reprimanded if I should ever dare to express what was in my heart?
Or should I remain faithful to the Way that God Himself had taught me and led me to?
People who already accord with the beliefs of religions that have a membership of many millions, will simply never be able to comprehend the dilemma. They cannot possibly comprehend.
For me, the answer was obvious. How can I abandon the God who had called me? How could I forsake the God who had taught me everything I now know? How could I possibly turn my back on everything that God had so graciously given to me?
Talmidis – those who stay the course through thick and thin, in spite of the opposition they face from those around them – are made of stern stuff. We don’t follow teachings just because some important influencer in the media says that we should; we don’t believe every word that we read or hear, just because some important preacher or rabbi preaches them.
No Talmidi has become a Talmidi because someone has convinced them; they are Talmidi, because they have been led or called personally by God.
I was alone in faith from 1987 until about 1995, when I found the Ebionite community of Shemayah Phillips. During the time that I was alone, I practised my faith alone in secret – Shabbat, the festivals, customs, everything. During that time, my only table companion was God. My only other friend in faith was God. The only other One I could share and discuss my faith with, without being mocked, scorned or sneered at, was God.
During that time of aloneness, God honed my spiritual beliefs. Then I met Shemayah’s Ebionites, and I found that there was hardly any difference between my beliefs and theirs. The unique miracle of Talmidaism – for me – is that God has led us all to the same mindset.
A Catholic priest involved in missionary work once told me, “When you are trying to convert someone to Christianity, they need to be taught Christian beliefs, because they don’t come naturally. They need to be taught they are in sin and need saving. Then you need to teach them that God can become a human being; then you need to convince them that God’s death can save them from hell.”
No human being taught me my current faith. I was called to it. Same with most other Followers of the Way.
On my long journey – especially during those years when I thought that I was the only Follower of the Way on planet Earth – YHVH never once abandoned me. YHVH was my only shelter and refuge, my only Shield and Protector.
YHVH never abandoned me. That is why I will never abandon you. I will always be here to answer your questions, to support you spiritually, and to pray for any intentions you wish me to pray for. I will never take advantage of you, or try to fleece money from you, or deceive you in any way – because I am a servant of God, and I would never do anything to bring dishonour or disrepute to the Master who called me to service.
To me, God is not just a theoretical concept, or a theological construct; YHVH is a real, living Being whom I respect and serve. I didn’t create God, and I didn’t create my religious faith.
If you identify as a Talmidi, then you are never alone, because God – YHVH – is with you.
Blessings in YHVH’s Name
your brother and servant
Shmuliq