Last Friday, I shared with you that we had dozens of unbelievers who visited our congregation, Tiferet Yeshua, in Tel Aviv. These mainly were Ethiopian Jewish Israelis, who were able to hear of Yeshua from one of their own—Pastor Yonas from Jerusalem, whose family immigrated from Ethiopia many years ago.

Tiferet Yeshua is a very unique congregation. One of the primary reasons that we were drawn there 22 years ago, when we moved from America to Israel, was because of their commitment to reaching Israelis. Tiferet was the first congregation to do everything in Hebrew only. They decided to forgo translation from the pulpit or even offer visitors headphones to hear the message in English. It wasn’t to be rude, but to make sure that when Israelis enter the congregation, it would be a culturally relevant experience. The original pastoral couple, Ari and Shira Sorko-Ram—themselves, Messianic pioneers—felt that in order to reach Israelis, it would have to be in Hebrew alone. Ezekiel prophesied not only that the Jewish people would come back to the land of Israel, but would find their God (Ezekiel 36:24-27).

That was the same type of commitment that Eliezer ben Yehuda had when he immigrated from Lithuania to the Promised Land in the late 1800s. At that time, Hebrew was a dead language. It was used only in prayer and in Bible reading. No one woke up in the morning and spoke Hebrew as their first language. Not one person in the world! Ben Yehuda’s goal was to resurrect Hebrew to become the national language of the future rebirthed Israel.

Everyone was against him. The religious were deeply offended that he would take a holy language and seek to make it secular. He was excommunicated from Judaism. Despite these setbacks, including battling tuberculosis, when he and his wife had a child, he determined that this child would be a native Hebrew speaker in the modern era.