There is something unexpectedly tentative in Charles (Chuck) Snow's manner, a resistance to proclamation, to certainty. Perhaps this is compensation for his 22 years of dogmatic faith; perhaps it's a residue of the shattering he endured when that faith collapsed. Still, one can see in the large, overweight, ruggedly handsome man with a short graying beard and powerful laugh something of the old charisma -- the ability to project both intimacy and authority that helped him become one of the key leaders of "Messianic Judaism" and draw Jews to faith in Jesus.

His speech is smooth but not glib, his manner embracing without smothering, emotional without sentimentality or self-pity. Above all, he can laugh at himself.

When we'd first spoken on the phone to arrange an interview -- the first in-depth interview he has given since breaking with the "Messianic" community four years ago -- I asked him to describe himself, so that I'd recognize him in the Jerusalem cafÈ where we were to meet. He told me he'd be wearing a knitted black and white yarmulke.

Mischievously, I said, "And you won't be the guy handing out 'Jews For Jesus' pamphlets."

"No," he said, laughing, "I think I'll leave those at home."

[Mr.] Snow grew up in an assimilated American Jewish family. He spent his youth moving around the country; his father was an army career officer who commanded missile bases. When Snow was two [years old], his parents divorced; his mother left and he didn't see her again. Relations with his father, a man incapable of expressing emotions, were disastrous. An angry, unhappy teenager, he went to live with an aunt and uncle in Philadelphia.

There, he met some "Jesus freaks," as they were known in the late 1960's, and joined a Christian Bible study group. For the first time, he felt the warmth of family. There was no wrenching of his Jewish self; he'd grown up ignorant of the most basic Jewish instincts.

He joined an Evangelical church, and there, paradoxically, discovered his Jewish identity. The pastor, delighted to have a Jew in the congregration, turned him into "a Jewish trophy," in Snow's words.

Though Snow was honored for belonging to the people that had produced Jesus, the real message was: After Christianity, the Jewish people no longer has a reason to exist. Snow began reading about the history of anti-Semitism, and discovered the murderous consequences of Christian "displacement" theology, the notion that the

"New Israel" had displaced the "Old Israel" as G-d's chosen people (and which most mainstream churches have in recent years repudiated).

Snow's tenuous Jewishness was bolstered when he heard an Evangelical minister declare in a sermon that Jews who died in the Holocaust without accepting Jesus went to hell. "My sense of a merciful G-d was offended by that notion," he says. Trying to reconcile his faith in Jesus with his emerging Jewish identity, he sought out fellow Jewish 'believers', as messianics call themselves, and joined a Philadelphia messianic community, [called] "Beth Yeshua."

"Suddenly I wasn't just an appendage to Christianity, and it was okay to be Jewish. More than okay: It was G-d's glory."

For the mainstream Jewish community, Snow and his fellow 'believers' were apostates; enemies of Jewish survival. For Snow, though, "Messianic" faith was his entry into Jewish identity. "Most of the 'Messianics' I knew were as ignorant of Judaism as I was. This was our way of becoming Jews. We connected to the Jewishness of the holidays no less sincerely than worshipers do in an Orthodox synagogue."

Snow concedes that there was a certain manipulation at work: "Holidays were times to bring one's parents to the congregration, and some of them became 'believers'. But, we didn't see holidays as just an opportunity to "witness" [a euphemism for proseletyzing]. Our main purpose wasn't to manipulate Judaism. We truly felt it was ours."

That same delicate balancing between manipulation and genuine identification defined Snow's increasingly public persona. By now an ordained "Messianic" minister, or "rabbi," as he called himself, he began lecturing in Evangelical churches on how to missionize more effectively, by using terms less likely to agitate Jews, like substituting the word "messiah" for "Christ."

But he also explained Jewish sensitivities to his Christian audiences, to make them understand the historical background to Jewish resentment against missionizing. "A Christian witnessing about the messiah he loves will often misinterpret an angry Jewish reaction and walk away thinking, 'These Jews are terrible people'. I was trying to prevent anti-Semitism."

Snow married the daughter of a prominent "Messianic" leader; a few years later, the couple adopted a son, Aaron. Snow had G-d, truth, a loving family, public stature. Life was a web of happiness, all of whose elements were dependent on "Messianic" faith.

In 1988, the ["Messianic"] movement sent him to England, where he revived the London Messianic Congregation in the largely Orthodox Jewish suburb of Golders Green. Friday night services were packed. People were drawn by the ecstatic singing and dancing. Most of all, they came because of Chuck Snow, who offered troubled congregants the empathy of a man who'd managed to overcome loneliness and rejection. One Israeli journalist who wrote about Snow's Friday night services told him privately, "If I were looking for spirituality in Judaism, this is the place I'd come to."

And yet Snow himself was beginning to glimpse spirituality within mainstream Judaism. Living among Orthodox Jews, he could, for the first time, observe their lives; he felt drawn by the way parents and children interacted, drawn by the calm that fell on the neighborhood as Shabbat approached. His encounter with living Judaism made the "Messianic" community's repudiation of rabbinic Orthodoxy seem facile, [and] ignorant.

He began quietly attending classes at a local adult Jewish education center. He had no intention of becoming an Orthodox Jew: his purpose was simply to study. The center's heads knew, of course, who he was: Chuck Snow appeared regularly in the media. For a while, they allowed him to come. Finally, though, they asked him to leave, explaining apologetically that the community wouldn't understand if his presence there became known. More hurt than angry, he left.

As his study of Judaism deepened, he concluded that, in some cases, rabbinic commentaries on the Torah seemed more perceptive than the Christian commentaries he'd studied and taught. And he began to question the traditional Christian reading of certain verses in the Prophets as portents of Jesus' coming.

"In the New Testament, there's a verse that says Jesus moved to Nazareth to fulfill the Biblical prophecy that the messiah would come from Nazareth. But I couldn't find that anywhere in the Prophets." He kept his doubts to himself: Messianic leaders who had questioned dogma were eased out of the inner circle, suspected for their "weakness."

Finally, he found an Orthodox rabbi willing to study with him. Every Saturday night, they discussed rabbinic commentaries on the week's Torah reading, sometimes for five hours at a time. He kept those meetings secret from his closest friends, knowing they wouldn't understand -- or perhaps because they would understand the implications of his search more clearly than he did.

Every Friday night, he continued to preach, but with this twist: His sermons now focused on the Torah portion of the week. Though he drew on the New Testament where he felt it was relevant, he also introduced rabbinic interpretations. "I wanted to help my congregants grow as Jews, just as I was. I wanted to make them realize that they didn't know Judaism."

Snow became increasingly desperate, feeling a growing dissonance between his commitment to the "Messianic" movement and his inner questioning. Most devastating of all, he no longer believed that Jesus was the messiah. "I'd always prayed to G-d, not to Jesus. I'd never felt the need to substitute Jesus for a direct relationship with G-d. But I was still terrified. I'd been taught that without Jesus you went to hell, and now here I was, rejecting him."

One day, he went for lunch at a kosher deli. The place was packed, and he found himself sitting beside a young Orthodox Israeli woman named Rivkah. They began speaking, and he confided his dilemma to her. "If I leave, my life is over. I'll lose my wife and son. I have no way out."

"There's no such thing as no way out," countered Rivkah.

Rivkah contacted Orthodox friends in London; they formed a small group and offered Snow emotional and practical assistance in breaking with the "Messianic" community. He quit the pulpit and moved out of his house.

His defection stunned the international "Messianic" community. It was said that he was possessed by Satan; for how else could the abrupt rejection of the truth by which he'd lived for 22 years be explained? "Deprogrammers" were even dispatched

from the States to try to win him back; Snow refused to meet with them. "The movement tried to blacken my name in any way it could. I didn't defend myself; the lies made it easier to cut my ties."

The story has a happy ending, of sorts. Snow moved to Israel in 1992, almost immediately after quitting the "Messianic" community, divorced his wife, and married Rivkah. They have one son. They live in Efrat, the West Bank town near Jerusalem known for its moderate Orthodoxy. Now 44, Snow works as a handyman, driving a 1977 pickup truck constantly about to break down.

The one ongoing tragedy in his life is his estrangement from his first son, Aaron. "The last time I phoned, he called me 'Chuck' instead of 'Dad'. My ex-wife has convinced him that I'm Satan's right-hand man." Snow dreams forlornly of bringing Aaron to live with him in Efrat, and to have a bar mitzvah for him at the Western Wall.

Just as he once refused to damn Holocaust victims who didn't believe in Jesus, so now he refuses to judge Jews who do believe in him. "G-d is a lot more merciful than we are. For me, a heretic is someone who denies G-d and does evil. I may have strong disagreements with "Messianic" Jews, but they're trying to serve G-d in their way."

Snow retains affection for Jesus -- not as the messiah, but as a Jewish teacher. "Most of his ideas were taken from the Torah. The rabbis in the Talmud who spoke about Jesus as a bastard were reacting to Christian anti-Semitism. One has to separate Jesus from later Christian teachings. As a 'Messianic', I learned how to read the New Testament through Jewish eyes." Snow has kept his copy of the New Testament: "I don't read it a whole lot, but I'm also not afraid of it."

Not surprisingly, he has rejected overtures from anti-missionary Jewish groups eager to exploit his expertise. "I don't want to be used by anyone," he says. He is troubled by the confrontational tactics of the anti-missionaries -- like the ultra-Orthodox group that recently burned copies of a missionary tract mailed to Israeli homes.

"Messianic Judaism shouldn't be legitimized, but we should treat individual Messianics as fellow Jews. If we can dialogue with Christian ministers, we should be able to talk with Messianics -- not about theology, but about their place in the Jewish community. Certainly we'll never win them back by demonizing them. If that Orthodox rabbi hadn't studied with me, I might not be living as a Jew in Israel."

He is particularly upset by Israel's policy of denying "Messianics" citizenship under the Law of Return -- a decision based on a Supreme Court ruling that, by embracing Jesus, "Messianics" have opted out of the Jewish people. (When Snow immigrated to Israel, he discovered that his name had been on an Interior Ministry blacklist; he needed respected rabbis to vouch for his new identity.) "We exaggerate their potential threat here. Every Jew should have a place in Israel, regardless of what he or she believes.

"Messianic Jews died in the nazi camps; if Israel had existed then, would it have denied them refuge?"

Though trying to live as an Orthodox Jew, Snow hasn't plunged blindly into his new faith, wary of substituting one absolutist system for another. Perhaps the essence of his transformation is to have exchanged dogmatic belief for a process of spiritual struggle. "I won't take on a religious practice unless I can fulfill it with sincerity. I love davening the traditional prayers, but true prayer comes from the heart.

"The 'Messianic' movement taught me that it's possible for a human being to be in love with G-d. Judaism today is largely lacking the sense of a personal G-d. But it really is possible to stand in G-d's presence, to turn every day into an experience of intimate relationship with Him. I'm not qualified to lecture to anyone, but I can't help feeling that the Jewish community needs more openness and joy of faith, that we have to recapture something we've lost."

What is perhaps most remarkable about Chuck Snow is his lack of bitterness. He has the rare generosity of a former true believer toward his rejected faith and community, however unreciprocated those sentiments may be.

"I feel a certain gratitude to the 'Messianic' movement, which helped me become a Jew. I met wonderful people there, whom I continue to love and respect. Maybe G-d had to take me through the 'Messianic' movement to finally bring me home."

Back To Testimonies

Email: JewishCo1@aol.com