Dan and Dalia, God changed our hearts during a sabbath (shabbat) dinner

Dan and Dalia grew up as secular Israeli and searched for the truth in all kinds of religions. They had never read the New Testament. Then they meet a Jewish believer, who tells them about the Messiah during a Sabbath meal. Watch this testimony: “God changed our hearts during a Sabbath dinner”.




Subtitles from youtube video

Shalom, we are Dan and Dalia Alon. We live here in Mizpe Ramon. This is a small city in the middle of the Negev in the high desert. We are about 850 meter above sea level. As you can see, we are standing here on a viewpoint, which looks out over the crater. This is the biggest crater in Israel and also of this kind all over the world. So this is a very unique place.

As you heard my name is Dalia, I’m 61 years old. I was born in traditional family. My father was a religious man, he used to go to the synagogue and to keep Shabbat. We don’t, my mother, she didn’t do it. From seven sisters, I’m the sixth in the family. I was born as a rejected child because my mother, she didn’t want me because we had five children in our home when I was born. Since I was a child, I was a very serious person and I looked for the meaning of life. So then I grew up and went to the army and after the army I went to a few workshops to seek for the truth. Then I met Dan and we got married and then we started to look for the truth together. We tried all the bad things. Now we know that it was bad, but in that time we didn’t know it. Such as meditation, yoga, all kind of new age workshops. We also look for the religious, part of it, with the women who came to our place in the north. We didn’t find any solution in one of them.

I was born in a very secular, even an atheist family. My parents were founders of a kibbutz, many years ago, before even the foundation of the state of Israel. They were kind of pioneers here in Israel. I was born to a quite regular family, you call them an ‘Ashkenazi family’. And I had a regular family life in Israel in those years. Then I finished my high school and going to the army and serving and then after the army, I just finished my service and I met Dalia. We got married and our oldest son was born and as Dalia shared, we started to look for the truth. We were looking for things to find out how we can improve our lives, to make our lives better.

So we went to America in the summer of 1991, the whole family, I got what you call a one year sabbatical from my workplace. We came to the west coast of America, to the state of Oregon and we settled down there and after we settled down in the summer, we started to explore America. One of the first short trips we took, was to a very nice natural park. So we parked our car and went down to see one of the waterfalls. Dalia was holding a new camera, we just bought, on her neck and we saw a lady sitting on a rock speaking to somebody. And Dalia said to me, “Look, she has the same camera as we have.” And then I was caring for our children, they were running here and there and I called them in Hebrew. And all of a sudden, Dalia said, “Come” and this lady was sitting and looking with big eyes on us, she said, “Wow, you are Jewish.” She heard my Hebrew and then she said, “I’m Jewish too” and we started to speak and she joined us for walking in the park. We were walking and she was sharing with us that she loved God, that God was her father and God loves us so much. And for us from Israel, Jews, that sounds very natural. She was speaking about God, you know. We tried to convince her about our new age things. We were talking in parallel. We are here, she is there. But we found something is special about her. We didn’t understand it in that time. We came back to the parking lot, to say goodbye and we exchanged our addresses and phone numbers and we told her about our oldest son who is going to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah in three months. She was so excited, so we invited her to come.

A few months later we had the Bar Mitzvah party, actually it was in the synagogue in our Jewish community in the city where we lived. And she came in the evening and she told us on the spot, that she’s not going to spend the night, because she was very busy, I’m only going to spend with you the dinner, what you call the Sabbath dinner. So we spend time and we were talking and talking into the night. And in the middle of the night, just when we wanted to say goodbye, goodnight, go to sleep, she said that she believes in Yeshua, she believes in Jesus. That she is a believer. And we don’t remember exactly what was going on there, it is a kind of foggy for us today. But we remember that she was sharing with us a few Scriptures, maybe from Isaiah 53 or Jeremiah 31.
And I… In that moment I believed, I believed, I didn’t understand anything. We have never…. We need to make it very understandable… We as Jewish people, Israelites in our forties, we never read the New Testament before, we never even heard that there are Jewish people who believe in Yeshua, in Jesus. We never met that kind of people before. People who believe in Yeshua, in Jesus. But I believed in that moment and Dalia also. We don’t understand anything, we said, “Wow”. It was the heart, not the head. It should be the Messiah, because half of the world is following Him, so it should be Him.

So we came to know the Lord and during the years we moved to here. Now we share the Gospel with people here in Mizpe Ramon and other places in the Negev area. And we know it is really, really important to share the Gospel with the Jewish people. Jewish people, you know, are not different from anybody else. They are not exclusive or not better than anybody else. Even God says we are not better than anybody else. God didn’t choose us, because we are better or we are good. He chose us because of His plan, to bring the Messiah, to bring the Gospel to the whole world.
Now we need to bring the Gospel to the Jewish people. Actually Yeshua came to preach the Gospel to the Jews, but they didn’t receive Him. He came to His own, but they didn’t receive Him. So the Gospel went all over the world, that was His plan to go to the Gentiles. But now it needs to come back to the Jews and Jewish people need to hear the Good News. They need to hear, to know the truth and to follow Yeshua. That’s the only way. Yeshua said, “I am the Way, I am the Truth and I am the Life.” “Only who will come through Me will come to the Father.” So He is the only Way. There is no other way, there is no bypass, no other way to come to heaven, through Yeshua. So the Jewish people need to hear the news. Praise God, that we heard the news, we heard the Gospel. So we could choose it and receive it and to follow Yeshua. Until today -Praise God- into eternity.