When Iranian drones and missiles were on their way toward Israel in the spring of 2024, the top Hebrew word that Israelis searched for on the web while they waited for hours with nothing to do but wonder where the drones would fall was Tehillim: Psalms.
I was not surprised. Jewish people of all ages love the Psalms. Even the most secular Jewish person tends to know them from either their upbringing in synagogue or time spent at Jewish events (bar/bat mitzvahs, funerals, etc.) or in celebration of the Jewish holidays, however infrequent that may be. When a Jewish family receives frightening news—a diagnosis, a son at the front, or a child who has not come home—somebody recites Tehillim, and nobody argues about it.
No wonder Israelis reached for the Psalms in a moment of national dread and deadly drones.
That moment moved Your Mission to the Jewish People to act. We built an online campaign in Hebrew offering a modern Hebrew edition of the Psalms as a free download. More than 7,000 Israelis took advantage of it at the time, and many more have since. We framed it with an introduction and conclusion pointing to the great messianic psalms, including Psalm 2, Psalm 22, and Psalm 110, which Jesus and the writers of the New Testament quoted.
Before I tell you what we are planning next, may I share a story with you about one of my heroes of the faith, who also loved the Psalms?
His name was Isaac Feinstein.
On the last day of June 1941, outside the city of Iași in eastern Romania, a cattle car—built to hold forty men—was crammed with roughly one hundred and forty Jewish men. The doors were shut, the windows were shut, and every crack was sealed. It sat for hours in the summer heat while the men inside slowly ran out of air. Isaac Feinstein was one of those men.
Isaac was born in Romania in 1904. As a young man he came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, and his father responded as some traditional families did in that era: he recited the prayer for the dead over his living son and sat shiva for seven days (a Jewish mourning practice). I do not tell you this to portray Isaac’s father as a villain, because in his mind, he was protecting a people, a covenant, and an identity that had come under centuries of persecution from those who claimed to believe in Jesus.
Isaac spent his life as a teacher, preacher, and singer among his own people. He married a Swiss schoolteacher named Lydia in 1928, and they had six children. He traveled from town to town with a slide projector, not always welcomed, but never deterred. In 1938 he moved to Iași, where roughly half of the 100,000 residents were Jewish.
That same summer, Joseph Hoffman Cohn, then leading our mission, was traveling through Europe trying to get people out. He had seen the signs of increasingly deadly antisemitism earlier than most, and as he and Isaac walked along the Danube, Cohn offered him a position in New York City that included a salary and safety. Isaac said no. To leave his post, he said, would be cowardice.
Three years later, war broke out between Romania and the Soviet Union, and Iași became one of the most dangerous places to be Jewish. Friends begged Isaac to flee to Bucharest, but he refused again; he wanted to be where his people were. He preached his last sermon on June 22, 1941.
The pogrom began six days later. Over the next few days, German and Romanian forces, along with their local collaborators, murdered between 11,000 and 12,000 Jewish people in that one city. Isaac was arrested on the morning of June 29 and placed in the crammed cattle car with the many other Jewish men. In his house, they found two flags—a small Norwegian one from the mission that employed him, and a Zionist flag bearing the Star of David. By every account he walked out of his home holding one in each hand. Isaac was taken because he was Jewish. In that courtyard no other distinction mattered, and it never has to those who hate us.
Lydia did not learn what had happened for three months. Then, two men came to her door and told her Isaac had recited the Psalms in the locked cattle car with a strong voice, and his face had seemed to shine. There, he had spoken quietly with the men dying around him, comforted them, and pointed them toward God before sinking to the floor, where he did not get up.
Richard Wurmbrand, who knew Isaac well, added another detail that has long stayed with me. In the car beside Isaac was an Orthodox rabbi, reciting the same ancient Hebrew words. They were simply two Jewish men reciting Tehillim, the way our people have always said them when there is nothing else left to do.
When the air in the car finally ran out and Isaac suffocated, his head was resting on the rabbi’s shoulder.
Two Jewish men—they died at the hands of the same hatred, sang the same songs, and held one another up.
Jewish people and Christians have disagreed about many topics for two thousand years, but we have never stopped reciting the same poems. We sing from the same hymnbook—written by Jewish people in Hebrew and sung in the Temple in Jerusalem long before they were spoken in any synagogue or church. When the worst comes, we still reach for the same book.
Isaac’s story has taught me something about these poems. The Psalms are not decorative. We treat them as devotional literature, like a verse on a coffee mug. They can be that, but that is not what they were written for. Many of them were composed by people who were hunted, betrayed, exiled, and grieving, and who needed language equal to their experience. David likely composed many psalms while hiding from Saul in the darkness of a cave.
The words of the Psalms stay with you when nothing else does. Isaac had no book in that cattle car, no notes, no pulpit, no light, and no air. What remained had been etched on his heart and soul decades earlier, and it was enough—enough to keep him to the very last minute.
Open the Psalter almost anywhere and you will find someone speaking to God with startling frankness: How long will You forget me? Why do You hide Your face? The Psalms are honest and do not try to sanitize human desperation, nor do they treat God as if He is barely interested.
It is for this reason I have called my new book Psalms of Hope.
Now, I do not mean optimism. Isaac Feinstein’s story does not end the way any of us would want it to end. But hope in the Psalms is sturdier and stranger than optimism. It refuses to conclude that darkness or death has the last word. My new book took three years to write, and I had the joy of plumbing the depths of a dozen of my favorite psalms along the way. So, we are excited to share it as a free evangelistic outreach in English, Hebrew, and Russian!
Seekers who request it will receive this book along with a copy of the Psalms to read alongside what I have written. The book is written for those who do not yet believe, though I hope believers will enjoy it, too.
My prayer is that God will use it to help seekers examine King David’s relationship with God and discover the One who is the culmination of all Scripture—Jesus the Messiah.
