IF There Was God...

[Questor]

There are no second generation believers in Messiah, as it is not an inherited trait. And I have no knowledge of what wiccans physically pass down to their children.

...I mean, there pretty much have to be at least a few people who are the children of a religious movement that blossomed in the seventies?  Are you telling me here that you converted?  From what?

Christianity is a religion that sprang from a denomination of Judaism, and hybridized away from it rather a lot after the first century, falling into open idolatry. To me, and many other Jews that follow Yeshua, some, if not all, forms of that religion have adopted pagan Greek and Roman notions that are in direct contravention to Torah, which observant Jews attempt to follow. Yeshua was a Torah abiding Jew, and so were his Jewish followers until they had died out, or gone underground, avoiding the persecution by Christians in the second century onwards. 

Many non-Jewish believers do attempt to follow Torah, even as I do, and in truth none of us do it well, but once a Gentile believer in Yeshua resolves to do so, they have become god-fearers, proselytes to Judaism, who are leaving the gentile pagan world behind bit by bit.
 
Jewish believers in Yeshua are merely walking in the ways of their fathers, and remain Jews, who then, of their own desire, choose to follow Yeshua, and trust in him as their Messiah.

I'm familiar with the pitch, but I was more interested in your lived experience.

I come from a secular Jewish family that neither went to churches or synagogues, and due to their inherited fear of persecution, kept none of the Jewish Festivals, and attended Christian Churches in their childhoods only until they reached the age of responsibility, primarily as a means of finding social acceptance. They kept a surface adherence to Christmas and Easter, (presents and chocolates) and avoided all mention of G-d, but then, they were born in the 1920’s, and Judaism had not yet attained sympathy from most Christians in America. They wished to be seen to assimilate, yet, as had all their forebears, always quietly married other Jews. What I know of Judaism I was taught inadvertantly by my family, in things I was directly taught, and what was let drop, and then furtively hidden thereafter.
 
I had a few interactions with Christian communities that scared me to death, one in my childhood at the age of eight, as I had no real awareness of what they were talking about, and I was not encouraged by my family to gain such awareness. The second occurrence was in the seventies, when at the age of fifteen I was ‘invited’ into a local independent church when baptisms were handed out rather automatically to anyone requesting them, and which did not require any real knowledge of more than what Yeshua’s death meant to anyone, Jew or Gentile, in regard to what is commonly called ‘saving grace’, and is the justification of anyone who trusts in Yeshua to be remitted punishment of their sins in breaking Torah, as Yeshua had already died for the sins committed. 

This, in and of itself, is not a conversion to Christianity, as anyone with sincere belief in Yeshua can baptize someone who desires it.
 
I had read little of the Scriptures, and the Apostolic Writings, at that point, but I understood the gist of the matter. The events of my baptism were enough to keep me away from most any church from that point onwards, and when I did occasionally seek information at one, having read the entire Bible, any question I asked got me promptly kicked out, because I saw the oddities in the extremely imperfect translations from the original writings into Greek that most people call error, but are readily explained by an understanding of the original meanings of words that are very specific in their interpretation into Greek, but rather more attenuated in Hebrew and Aramaic. It does help to have some understanding of the Hebraic mindset that I seem to have picked up in part from my family, and in part from comparing Greek/English translations of the Scriptures to the Aramaic/English and Hebraic/English translations of them, but rigorous research is needed, seeking back into the writings of scholarly Jews who never met a Christian, and yet followed in Yeshua’s footsteps. They present a far different understanding of who Yeshua was understood to be than Christians do, who are sadly untaught in just how the Greek Church Fathers and the various decrees by Constantine changed what was a very Jewish sect of Judaism into the Greco-Roman based religion it is today.
 
What is most fascinating is the work of G-d through the Christian Churches, in that many of those that were ill taught later simply read their Bibles, and to the extent it is applied to Non-Jews, walk very uprightly in Torah. Unfortunately, most Christians are taught adherence to the outward forms of the Christian religion, and never get that far, leading to what is seen as blatant hypocrisy, but is a false assumption that Torah itself no longer matters to G-d, and thus need not be followed.