I Found Shalom Testimony: How Ayelet Found Spiritual Fulfillment in the Jewish Messiah

Ayelet grew up in a secular Israeli family, but she always believed in God and spent a lot of time researching New Age practices and Eastern religions in search of the truth about God. One day she read the New Testament and found it to be a very Jewish book. She was also surprised to see that it was not antisemitic. In fact, it presented the Jewishness of the Gospel and of Jesus. Ayelet found that to follow Jesus was the most natural thing for a Jewish person to do.

​Here’s her story.

As a little girl, I used to sit by my window and sing, lifting my voice to the sky, thinking somehow God was listening.

I grew up in Israel in a secular family. Of course we kept the holidays, like everyone in Israel does. I always believed in God, but I never really had a relationship with Him. I didn’t even know what that would look like. Go to school, get a job, find a place to live, get married, have kids—that was the expected routine. But I kept thinking, “Okay, well, what else is there? There has to be something more than this.” When I was twenty-three, I left Israel for the first time to come to America, initially just to visit my mom, who was living in a spiritual community at the time.

It was a beautiful, healthy place—no smoking, no drinking, no drugs. It had been started by a guru from India, and the philosophy was that whatever you believe is fine, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. I learned about yoga and about Hindu philosophy and a lot of other Eastern thought. It felt very surreal, very peaceful, like a bubble set apart from all the craziness of the world outside. Eventually, I decided to stay for good.

While I was there, I met my husband. He was very involved in the spiritual side of the community, but as time went on, I started to feel less and less connected to it. I had my own ideas, but I never really found my own path. Everyone else around me seemed to find their place, or to see the guru as their spiritual teacher—some people even saw him as a god. I never felt like I wanted to be a part of that. I knew, deep down, that it definitely wasn’t the way for me.

I was looking for God. I wanted to feel Him, to really know Him. I thought the closest thing to that would be the synagogue—that was the only thing that made sense to me. I didn’t even consider churches. To me, the synagogue always felt very ritualistic—you had to do this and that and this and that—and it never felt, even growing up, like the way to God. That sent me on what became almost an obsessive quest for answers.

Videos, documentaries, the internet—I spent whatever spare time I had trying to find those answers, trying to get to the bottom of it. It consumed me. If you had asked me back then whether I’d ever believe in Jesus, I would have said, “Are you sure? Are you crazy?” But when I finally picked up the New Testament, I was curious to see what was so bad about it. I needed to come to the conclusion logically—I needed all the evidence to actually make sense. And suddenly I was learning things about Jesus and about Christianity that were completely different from anything I’d assumed before.

It read like a completely Jewish book, set entirely in a Jewish context. That made me want to keep reading, to find out what else no one had told me—because I didn’t see any of the antisemitism I expected, and I didn’t see anything negative or anything that felt Christian about it at all.

As I read the New Testament, I learned more about who Yeshua is and how Jewish He truly was. There is nothing more Jewish that a Jewish person can do than to put their faith in the Jewish Messiah. By the time I finished the Gospel of John, I was ready and willing to surrender to Yeshua. There was something about that book—the way it was written, and the way it all came together so logically. But there was one part I was still holding back on: surrender felt, to me, almost like defeat.

So, I was alone in my room, and I got down on my knees and prayed that Yeshua would come into my life. There were no lights, no dramatic signs, nothing changed on the outside. But you get that feeling when you know something is right, and that is the feeling I had. I felt like I had found the truth—the truth. And I said, “Okay. I’m Yours.”

Ayelet is the founder of The WORD in HEBREW.

Watch more testimonies of Jewish people who found shalom with Yeshua on the I Found Shalom website.