Not the trope and not the house plan.

April 15, 2026.

Dear Ehud, thanks for the email and for the follow-up phone conversation.

I think I have a good grasp of your questions now and of your dilemma and hope that I can be of some help.

I'm thankful that your friend Dawson

recommended that you contact me. Dawson's a great one. If you don't mind, I would like to repeat back to you a summary of what I heard from you and then take it from there. If I've misunderstood anything, just let me know. But before we get into it too deep, I would like you to know what I took away from our conversation. The long and short of it

is that you are an agnostic Jew, and over the last year you began considering the claims of Christ

seriously, which has landed you in quite a jam. You were brought up in a conservative Orthodox home,

solid, loving family, and with all the stereotypical high achievement expectations. Despite that,

or perhaps because of that, you and your parents

are close. You respect them very much. You went through Dartmouth, did a stint in the Marines,

and are now in graduate school and finance. When it comes to worldview, you kept the faith of your

family for the first year of college, but since that time, you've run the gamut of options,

experimenting as you went. This has included

New Age, militant atheism, mind-expanding drug use, life in a commune, and pure hedonism, all of

which gradually got old and then settled down into a tepid agnosticism. Although some might consider

it a medieval anti-Semitic trope, please know that I'm not using it like that. You literally

have been a wandering Jew. Not the trope, please know that I'm not using it like that. You literally have been a

wandering Jew. Not the trope, not the house plant, but the fact of wandering has been real. And the

jam is this. You described yourself to me on the phone as quite simply lost. But at every stage

of your lost wandering, your parents have been thoughtful, kind, accepting, and truly helpful to you.

So you have two things going on in your mind. Because of your kind, accepting, and truly helpful to you. So you have two things

...