If you're on messianic Instagram, you've seen the very well-researched posts and videos by New York Jewish college student turned messianic teacher Aaron Dranoff AKA @TheTorahGuide_.
We're thrilled to share his testimony of how he came faith and launched a ministry that's reached thousands of people all over the world.
Aaron Dranoff's Story
I’m a Jewish guy from New York State. From a young age, I was always interested in understanding what role my Jewish identity should play in my life. Religion wasn’t on my mind, but I really connected with the idea of honoring my heritage. In college, I majored in history and was presented with the opportunity to focus on Jewish history, so I did.
During my time in college, I was introduced to three different rabbis on campus and we studied Judaism together. Originally, the religious or spiritual aspects of those conversations didn’t matter much to me. I was only interested in the cultural history of my people and I enjoyed the traditions.
The religious aspect only became important to me when I began my search for truth. Several months into these conversations I began to look into Jesus and my Rabbis helped me process what I was learning. Our conversations became incredibly thought-provoking, formative discussions for me.
How did you come to believe in Yeshua?
I had this really strange moment when I was in my second year of college. I was standing in a store holding hair pomade.
I was going to steal it, this was nothing new I had been stealing small things for several years. There really was nothing different about this time, it was in the middle of the semester, it was a regular day but as I was walking down the aisle with the hair pomade in my hand I saw a coffee pot.
When I saw this coffee pot I had a flood of thoughts all at once. So far, I’ve only ever had so many thoughts at once one other time in my life, it was a few years later. And that time made more sense because I thought I was going to die. I was merging onto a busy highway in San Marcos, Texas and a small pickup truck cut me off right as I got up to 70 mph, but then he slammed on his brakes. I swerved left to avoid him but my tire blew and pointed me directly at the divider going 70 mph.
When I saw the divider I didn’t think I was going to die, I knew this was it. And in that millisecond I thought about how long it would take the friend I was meeting to find out about my crash, I thought about why turning the wheel didn’t work, I thought about how it was ironic that as a brand new pilot I was getting into a car accident.
You get the idea. With all that adrenaline I had many thoughts in the time it took a car traveling 70mph to travel about 15 yards. I hit the divider and my car was destroyed but amazingly, I was completely fine.
When I was stealing hair product that day a few years earlier, I had just as many thoughts in an instant, except it wasn’t a high-stakes situation, they were deeper thoughts, and they didn’t seem to be prompted by anything except a coffee pot.
Let me try to recreate the idea the coffee pot gave me all at once. I realized that if there is no creator, then I could live my life however I wanted and make my own path in life, but if there is a creator then living my life however I wanted might be the worst thing I could ever do.
Because if everything that exists was created, whoever created it must be more powerful than anything in the universe. A creator would be so transcendent that he wouldn’t get busy, he would be able to focus on everything going on in his world. If he exists, he intentionally made everything and would be invested in everything and focused on everything. This means he intentionally made me and would be focused on me.
If there is no creator then I didn’t have a built-in design, and that was just fine with me. But if I was intentionally made then I wanted to figure out what I was intentionally made for.
If you use a coffee pot the way it was designed it will last a long time, and make great coffee. But if you use it for something else like to hammer in nails, you’ll destroy it.
If I was designed for a purpose and did something else with my life, it could destroy me.
I decided right then and there, to look into the major world religions to find if there was any good reason to accept them. I promised myself that I would follow the truth wherever it led, and until then I would try to be a generally good moral person, living the way I thought a creator god would want me to live.
I didn’t really think there would be any persuasive evidence for a creator and it would only take a few weeks to go back to life as usual. I took the most streamlined approach I could think of, there was one way I could narrow the most likely options down between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Ironically figuring out who Jesus was, seemed like the most efficient approach. Traditional Judaism by and large teaches that Jesus was a false prophet or at least a false messiah. Christianity teaches that Jesus is the Messiah who rose from the dead, and Islam teaches that Jesus was a Prophet who did not rise from the dead.
I started by looking into the evidence we have about Jesus and was immediately surprised by the amount of early sources we have about his life. I spent several months looking into the historical evidence around Jesus’s resurrection and became more and more convinced that despite how much I’d like to think that resurrection is impossible, Jesus really died by Roman crucifixion and was really alive leaving behind an empty tomb 3 days later.
I shared my findings with my Rabbis and they asked me questions that really honed my focus and pushed me to keep digging for more. Finally, after several months of hunting for all the loose ends I could find I realized that the more I searched the more I found in favor of Jesus’s resurrection, and the weaker all the objections seemed to be.
I decided to stop ignoring the evidence and just accept that this really happened. But, what did this mean? I knew this historical event about Jesus happened but what was the next step?
I didn’t know this at the time but I had started to accept something else, not just the historical fact of the resurrection, but I had started to accept Jesus. I knew he rose from the dead, and if someone could do that then I was open to what they had to say.
I read the gospels, this time not just to critically analyze their historical accuracy, but to learn what Jesus had to teach me. And Jesus taught me, through the New Testament, that he knew me my whole life. He even knew how much I didn’t want him to exist so that I could live my life without feeling guilty. He knew all of this and he still died in my place so that I could share his life forever.
After this, I didn’t feel obligated to follow Jesus because it was the right thing to do. Now that I knew who he was and what he did for me, I knew how much he cared for me, I could trust him. So I did, I received Jesus as the king of my life, and decided to trust him with everything.
When did you begin your ministry?
The Torah Guide started in 2021. It was a project that I started while I was writing “Judaism, the Messiah, and Jewish Identity.” I had all these organized and detailed notes from my time investigating Jesus that I wanted to convert into helpful resources to help other Jewish people. That started with publishing “Judaism, the Messiah, and Jewish Identity” in 2021 and the next step was making videos, podcasts, and other tools available for free on social media.
What is your ministry goal?
Our goal is to help people read the Hebrew Bible and discover Jesus. There have always been Jewish people who believe in Jesus, and right now there are more Jewish believers than there have ever been. There are over 250,000 messianic Jews worldwide. But unfortunately, this is less than 3 percent of all Jewish people, which makes the Jewish people an unreached people group.
Our vision is to see the Jewish people understand that if you let the Hebrew Bible communicate on its own terms it’s clear that Jesus is the promised Messiah.
How can people support your ministry?
Our resources, especially the animated videos and podcasts, are designed to be helpful for personal growth and to be implemented in class curriculums or small group studies. You can follow us on YouTube and social media, and share our content with your friends and congregations.
If you know any Jewish people pray about how you might be able to bring up our videos in conversation and ask if you can share some with them.
How can we support you? All of the resources we make are crowdfunded so that they can always be accessed completely for free, so we also need monthly financial support.
Support The Torah Guide here: https://thetorahguide.com/give/
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Website: https://thetorahguide.com
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetorahguide_/
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