I grew up in a conservative Jewish home in Los Angeles during the 50's and 60's. My family was not religious, although we faithfully attended High Holiday services, celebrated Passover and Chanukah and thoroughly enjoyed dressing up for Purim. We were, and are, Zionists, believing in the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. My father and mother were both presidents of the local chapters of B'nai Brith and Pioneer Women, respectively. I loved going to Habonim camp during the summer months as a pre-teen.  Some of my fondest childhood memories are living a kibbutz-type lifestyle in the mountains of Saugus, CA. I had my bar mitzvah at the age of thirteen, and really didn't think I was a man yet. My bar mitzvah training was secular. We learned Bible stories, but didn't talk about God, the One who inspired the Book.

I met the woman of my dreams in October 1967.  It was love at first sight, literally.  Rita and I were married ten months later at Temple B’nai David in Los Angeles.  We saw hypocrisy in the Judaism of our parents' generation so we began to look for meaning and purpose in other places.  We experimented with drugs, then studied Hinduism and yoga.  Rita and I were initiated into Transcendental Meditation in 1967.  We had our astrological charts read, played I Ching and dabbled in Tarot Cards.  We had no idea any of this was wrong or evil until we read The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda.  He entered into a dark realm: a place we did not want to go.  We decided to leave our hippie ways and get serious about Hinduism.  We wanted to become yoga instructors. I wore white clothes and a white turban and for some reason thought this made me holy.

I sat cross-legged on the couch at our going away party in Hollywood, California.  It was August 1970.  I wore my yoga whites, my long hair flowing down my back and over my shoulders.  A friend asked why Rita and I were going to India.  My answer: “to find Universal Truth.”  The words just rolled off my tongue.  Unbeknownst to me I had communicated the essence of our quest.  I knew the sky was blue in Los Angeles.  The sky was also blue in China.  If there were physical truths that were the same for all people, I reasoned there must also be spiritual truths that applied to everyone.  Little did we know that God was already tugging at our hearts and His plan was beginning to unfold for us as a couple.

We decided to find a better place to live.  The 60’s was a turbulent time in America.  From the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, to The Beatles invasion and the emergence of the “love generation,” to experimentation with drugs and the increase in Eastern religion and the occult, many young people were discontent and unhappy with “the system.”  Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were both assassinated in 1968.  Vietnam was in full swing and dividing our nation.  I was an anti-war demonstrator and worked on a film team to document the “peace marches.”  The Kent State Riots occurred in May of 1970.  Students on campus and scores of others protested the bombing of Cambodia, a decision of President Nixon's that appeared to expand the Vietnam War. Thirteen students were shot; four were killed by the Ohio National Guard.  That was it!  We’re outta here!  We packed our household goods for shipping in case we didn’t return.  We sold our two cars (a Volkswagen bug and a Volkswagen bus), bought backpacks, down sleeping bags, hiking boots and one-way tickets to England.

We were lost in the Soho district of London looking for a vegetarian restaurant.  A man appeared who said he knew the way and would walk us there.  We sat down to order and 20 minutes later he returned with a book, The God Who Is There, by a Dr. Francis Schaeffer.  Over the next month of traveling my wife and I read this book.  It was stimulating, intellectual and challenging, and appealed to our university-level curiosity.  At the back of the book was an invitation from the Schaeffers to visit their community in Switzerland.  We made no definite plans.

In September Rita and I attended an international rock concert with 600,000 wild and crazy young people on the Isle of Wight, south of England.  We tried to avoid the bedlam at the huge campsite so we headed up into the trees for some relative quiet.  We set up our tent next to two young Americans, Will and Robin.  As we engaged in conversation, we told them we were on our way to India to find a guru.  They told us they had found “the guru of the west.”  His name was Francis Schaeffer.  (Hey, that was the guy who wrote the book.)  We did not enjoy the concert.  We saw Europeans cutting down trees to create private campsites.  We saw people stoned on various drugs and not only acting like fools but creating danger for themselves and others.  Black Sabbath was the theme band and their song played over and over and over again: “Come, come, come to the Sabbath.  Come to the Sabbath, Satan’s there.”  For us it was the end of the “love generation.”  The experiment had failed.  We really thought if everyone would just get high all the problems in the world would disappear and we would love one other.   The poster in our kitchen read, “War is not healthy for children or other living things.”  Our idealism had been shattered.  At the entrance to the rock concert was a small group of people giving away books by none other than Francis Schaeffer.  They came to share their faith and the truth of the Bible with the hippies.

We traveled from England to France through Belgium and Holland to Copenhagen.  From there we hitchhiked through Germany to Switzerland.  In Lausanne we went to a bookstore and, as was our custom, went immediately to the religious section.  In the middle of a display with titles facing out was a book with big red letters, The L’Abri Story, by Edith Schaeffer.  I opened it and found a map to a small town called Huémoz, with the names of the châlets in the L’Abri community clearly marked.  We thought this was an amazing coincidence.

We went camping up the mountain from Château-d'Oex.  We wanted to build a snow cave, eat wild edible plants and practice our survival skills.  But it began to snow before we could set up camp.  Amazingly, as the sun was going down, we found a cabin with wooden beds, an open-hearth stove and a cord of cut firewood.  We were snowed-in for a week.  What we didn’t know was that we were just over the mountain from Huémoz and L’Abri, but couldn’t get there due to the jagged and treacherous Alps.  So when the storm lifted we hiked back down the mountain and hitchhiked a ride with a kind Swiss man.  He drove us two hours out of his way and dropped us off on the front lawn of Châlet Les Mélèses, where the Schaeffers lived.  Their son, Frankie, welcomed us.  He was in charge of room assignments.  There was “no room in the inn,” so we slept on the linoleum floor in the Schaeffers dining room that first night.  Still no room the second night so we slept between shelves of books in the library in Beau Site next door.  A Christian couple heard of our plight and gave up their couple’s room for two Jewish hippies on their way to India to find Universal Truth.  We would find it here in the pages of the Bible, in the love of the L’Abri community and in a person they called the Messiah of Israel.

Mrs. Schaeffer explained to us her bird’s-eye-view of the Bible, later to be published in her book, Christianity Is Jewish.  There was indeed a Jewish theme from Genesis to Revelation.  She affectionately called us Abraham and Sarah and embraced our heritage.  We thought Christianity was for gentiles, not Jews, but here we found people who loved us unconditionally for who we were.  Dr. Schaeffer quoted a little poem.  “How odd of God to choose the Jews, but not so odd as those who choose the Jewish God yet hate the Jews.”  We were about to meet a Jewish Messiah and find the entire Bible to be a Jewish book written by Jewish authors inspired by God.

We spent countless hours, sometimes late into the night, with Os Guinness and Darrow Miller.  Os had just returned from India and brought back many slides depicting the reality of life there.  It was not saffron robes and the peace promised by gurus visiting the West.  The romantic and “holy river” Ganges was polluted with human waste.  People would run to catch the urine of “sacred” cows, which roamed the streets and villages undisturbed.  Vermin were rampant and rats were known to attack babies at night.  But they were not killed for fear of killing “Uncle Henry”.  You see, reincarnation permeates all of Hindu society.  We didn’t necessarily believe it, but we accepted it as part of our Eastern belief system.  It was what the gurus taught.  But consider this.  Karma says if you do well in this life you will rise on the ladder of enlightenment in the next life.  If you have “bad karma”, you will return as some sort of lower life form, maybe an animal or insect.  However, who or what governs this system?  Who or what determines the outcome?  Who chooses what becomes of me?  The Eastern gods are not personal nor do they have infinite power.  So in what do I base my faith and trust?  What do I believe anyway?  What at first seemed positive: always being given another chance to succeed, became depressing: the possibility of infinite returns to this temporal, miserable life on earth.  Our naïve idealism was shaken once again.  Each week Os lectured from a chapter of his book, The East, No Exit, and gently dismantled our beliefs in Hinduism and Eastern religion. 

Darrow was very patient with us and showed us how Jesus fulfilled the words of the Jewish prophets. King David wrote, “I am poured out like water and all My bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax, it has melted within Me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd and My tongue clings to My jaws. You have brought Me to the dust of death, for dogs have surrounded Me. The congregation of the wicked has enclosed Me. They pierced My hands and My feet. I can count all My bones. They look and stare at Me. They divide My garments among them and for My clothing they cast lots.” (Psalm 22:14-18) Could this be a prophetic description of Jesus on the cross, eight hundred years before the Romans used crucifixion?

Isaiah spoke of a servant “who was wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities, and by his scourging we are healed.  But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him.  Like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so he did not open his mouth.  He would render himself as a guilt offering.  He poured out himself to death yet he himself bore the sin of many.” (from Isaiah 53). This sounded like someone who was sacrificed for us. The following also proved meaningful to us.  “But you, Bethlehem Ephrata, though you are little among the tribes of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to Me the One to be Ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.” (Micah 5:2)  Only God is from everlasting, so we knew this must be talking about a Messiah who would come from Bethlehem.  “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you. He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9)  Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey.

“For unto us a Child is born. Unto us a Son is given, and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end.” (Isaiah 9:6-7)  A Son would be born who would be called Mighty God, Prince of Peace and His government would have no end.  Again, this could only be God.  “Who has ascended into heaven, or descended? Who has gathered the wind in His fists? Who has bound the waters in a garment? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is His name, and what is His Son’s name. Surely you know?” (Proverbs 30:4)  This is definitely describing Creator God who has a Son.  We could not ignore the fact that Jesus fulfilled all these scriptures, and more.  He lived what the prophets spoke.  As we got more in touch with our Jewish heritage we began to call him by his Hebrew name, Yeshua.

We had many discussions about worldview, culture, existentialism, eschatology, epistemology, soteriology and life in general.  We talked about geology and the flood story of Genesis and how dinosaurs fit into the Biblical account.  The L’Abri staff knew so much about the history of Israel and the Jewish people and was surprised to discover I had never read the Bible.  They said, “It’s your book, you know,” and challenged me to find out for myself.  So I began to read.  It made sense.  It fit into the real world.  It was actually understandable!  God was revealing His Truth to me.  My heart began to soften as the words of the Bible made me aware of my sin and challenged me to get right with my Maker.

One of our discussions led to the theory of evolution.  From the primordial pool of antiquity, given enough time and chance, and voila… the universe as we have it today.  Though it was just a theory, it had been taught as factual science in our classrooms growing up.  It never dawned on me to question evolution as it seemed to make so much sense to my secular humanist mind.  So I dove in with both feet.  I discovered this theory was just a theory.  The fossil record was not comprehensive but had huge, gaping holes in it stretching over thousands of years.  If evolution was true, and species evolved from one to another, then there should be millions of fossils to substantiate these transitional forms.  None exist.  The theory of evolution says that life has evolved from simple to complex over millions of years.  This contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics, called Entropy, which says that all organic life moves from complex to simple.  I discovered the creation account of origins made much more sense, and that both required some degree of faith to believe and accept.  I remember standing on a balcony one sunny afternoon.  I was looking southwest from Switzerland to France over the Rhone River Valley, the Swiss Alps to my left and Les Dents du Midi to my right.  The cloud formations were magnificent, mingled with a brilliant blue sky.  I thought to myself, “This can’t be an accident.  There’s too much detail, too much beauty.  God must be real.”

It was Thanksgiving night 1970.  After dinner the whole L’Abri community met in the chapel as Dr. Schaeffer led us in communion.  I wasn’t exactly sure what that was.  He taught about the death, burial and resurrection of Yeshua and its significance for us today.  The Bible teaches that without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin.  God gave the Jewish people a pathway to Him.  It was through sacrifice.  An animal was brought and sacrificed upon the altar as atonement for sin.  Yeshua gave His life as the sacrifice once and for all. 

Dr. Schaeffer sat on the stone fireplace wearing his usual lederhosen.  I was sitting on the floor, cross-legged with my eyes closed.  As he explained the meaning and significance of communion I had a vision.  At the time I didn’t know it was a vision.  It was just a series of pictures in my mind.  I saw myself standing at the foot of a crucifixion stake, a very large cross about 20 feet tall.  Yeshua had been crucified and from his wounds he was bleeding.  As I looked up a drop of blood hit me in the forehead.  It startled me and I flinched.  Another drop, and I flinched again.  Another drop.  Another drop.  I don’t remember the number of drops, but after a short time I realized, and believed, he died for me.  All the theology, all the discussions, all the love of the L’Abri community, and now it became personal.  Yeshua was the Messiah of Israel, and he died for me as the sacrifice for my sins.

Immediately after the service I ran up to Rita and said, “I think I’m a Christian.”  She said, “I think I am, too.”  We were stunned by the words coming from our mouths and by what we heard the other say.  We believed!  The Bible is true.  Jesus is the Messiah.  We went right to Dr. Schaeffer and told him the news.  He called over Sheila Bird, a L’Abri worker from New Zealand who seemed to understand the love and grace of God.  Birdie took us to her châlet, La Niché, and led us in a prayer of repentance.  It was a profound, moving experience as we submitted to the will of God, confessed our sins and understood forgiveness for the first time in our lives.  I burned my turban in the wood burning stove of Châlet Bourdonette, along with pictures of Rama Krishna and “the holy mother”.  As I watched the flames something inside of me was set free.  The deception and lies of Eastern religion would no longer control my thoughts.  Our lives have never been the same.  "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

Exactly one month later we were invited to celebrate Christmas with the Schaeffer family.  We had never celebrated Christmas.  What would it be like?  It was an honor.  No glitz.  No department store glamour.  No Santa Claus.  Just the love of God and a loving family.  I still remember the gifts that were given to us that night.  But the greatest gift of all was Yeshua, our Jewish Messiah, who had come to abide in our hearts, set us free and give us eternal life.  We were searching for “universal truth.”  We found it in a most unexpected place.  We were surprised to discover Truth is a person.  Yeshua said, “I am the way the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father but by Me.” (John 14:6)

Our journey continued and took us to Israel from 1971 to 1972.  Rita and I lived and worked on a kibbutz north of Haifa.  We studied Hebrew four hours a day, six days a week, for almost six months.  After a year we were what I call “street fluent.”  We went to a yeshiva in Jerusalem to see if the orthodox rabbis could refute the claims of Yeshua as the Messiah of Israel.  Their answers came up short.  Our faith continued to be strengthened.  We arrived home exactly two years after we had left.  During that time we visited fifteen countries and had grown up a lot.  I remember thinking, “I think I’m a man now.”

In 1973 we moved from Los Angeles to Marin County, north of San Francisco, where we lived for thirteen years.  It was here that we attended a local congregation in the midst of the Charismatic Revival that was flourishing worldwide.  Some called it the Jesus Movement, as myriads experienced God’s amazing grace and trusted Him for salvation.  I bought my first guitar and began to understand the meaning of praise and worship.  I was surprised when the senior pastor invited me to a leadership meeting.  He said people were beginning to look to me as a leader.  I said, “Are you sure?”  I taught a Bible study and was licensed into ministry in 1978.  I began to function as a pastor and was ordained in 1980.  We moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1986 where I served as associate pastor of a lively, growing church for ten years.  Throughout this time we wanted a more Jewish expression for our faith.  At times we felt like fish out of water.

In 1996 I accepted the position as Messianic Rabbi of a messianic congregation in the Seattle area.  We had come home.  We worship the LORD and preach the good news of Messiah from the context of Jewish life and culture.  We gather to worship on Shabbat (the Sabbath) and celebrate the Biblical Festivals of Israel.  We own a sefer Torah (scroll of the Five Books of Moses) and read from it every Shabbat.  We keep biblical kosher and honor our heritage.  We no longer celebrate Christmas or Easter, but we still believe in the Incarnation and the Resurrection.  Now we understand the words of the prophet Zechariah.  "I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him as one mourns for an only son.” (Zechariah 12:10) History has been fulfilled.  His story completed in Messiah.  We await His return.

For more, see Hylan's .mp3 message titled The Legacy and Teachings of Dr. Francis Schaeffer - Reflections on L'Abri 50th Jubilee.

Blessings and Shalom,

Hylan Slobodkin

See also Hylan's Family.