A Light From the Nations

By Malkie Schulman

Ever since she was as young as six or seven years old, Diana Lynn remembers sitting in church with her family in their hometown, Lakewood, Washington, and thinking, this doesn’t make sense.

“It came to a point where I got in trouble with the pastor. He didn’t like that I was asking so many questions. He complained to my mother, and so eventually I stopped asking him.” Still, Diana’s questions remained. “There were so many things that it said in the Bible that we were doing differently,” Diana continues. “Like when to celebrate the day of rest – why were we observing it on the first day of the week when the Bible clearly states it’s the last day of the week?” When she questioned this contradiction, she was told that G-d changed the day and that she must believe.

Same with keeping kosher. The Bible clearly states the laws of kashrut, but Christians do not observe any of them. Diana recalls her pastor’s sermon one Sunday relaying the story about a supposed dream Yoshka’s “disciple” had that revealed that from now on you don’t have to eat kosher. Even more bizarre is when her pastor concluded the tale by saying, “Thank G-d, G-d realized bacon was good.”

“My mother kept a magnet on the fridge that read, ‘G-d is the same today, yesterday and forever.’ I would think if that’s true, why does the church keep changing things and saying things are done away with?”

As someone who approached life through logic, Diana was becoming increasingly frustrated. “I like to connect the dots, but the dots were not connecting.” One time in a class about Leviticus (Vayikrah), her pastor verse by verse, tore it to shreds. “There was nothing true about what he was saying,” shares Diana. “I felt so angry that I just stood up and walked out of the class.”

Nevertheless, despite her increasing frustration with church doctrine, eventually, Diana came to the conclusion that she was a Christian because she was born one and it’s best not to ask too much and just do.

At the age of 21, Diana married her husband, an evangelical preacher. Part of an evangelist’s job is to visit different churches and preach the Christian faith to them. This meant they never stayed in one place very often. Diana’s husband preached love and peace to the various congregations he served, but in his home, it was a different story. He often physically beat his wife. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Diana shares, “I’d come to church all black and blue, and nobody would say anything. They loved my husband and totally ignored what was clearly going on.”

He also often told her she wasn’t a good Christian woman. He’d force her to watch Christian TV programs, but that, Diana maintains, turned out well because it was the catalyst that got her to start questioning her beliefs again. There was one program about the Seventh Day Adventists, a Christian sect that observes the Sabbath on the seventh day. Learning about their practice brought back all her questions. Another catalyst for Diana’s requestioning her faith was the fact that more than one church kicked her family out of the congregation because of their dark skin color.

“My two sons were young then and my older son would go off for a Sunday school lesson. I’d come in to see how he was doing, and he’d be off by himself in the corner, completely ignored by the class and the teacher. In general, there was always the sense that we were second class citizens and then finally we were actually told to leave the church.”

Between the blatant racial discrimination and ignoring her obvious bruises, in 2005, Diana decided she was emotionally, mentally and spiritually done with the church. She had no idea where she was going to go from there. All she did know was that there was no more going back.

Starting From the Very Beginning

“I had the sense that G-d wanted me to start over, to read the Bible from the beginning,” Diana shares.

Interestingly, all this time, Diana had never met a Jew, although she does recall at the age of eight, a Jewish man in a black suit, black hat and white shirt coming to speak to the church members. He had been asked to come to explain Judaism. “I was fascinated by his words and remember feeling that there was something so peaceful and joyous about him and his modestly dressed wife that I had never seen in the world around me. I clung to every word he said. I have no idea who he was, and I don’t remember his name. I just remember basking in that sense of peace.”

Looking back to that long ago event, Diana says she can see now how through that incident Hashem set her up for her journey to Yiddishkeit.

“Re-reading the Bible starting with Genesis,” Diana maintains, “felt like blinders were taken off my eyes for the first time. I purchased my very first book on parsha and it was like the whole world turned over for me.”

This was the start of Diana’s journey to unlearn all

that she had been previously taught and to begin to learn the truth. Though Diana had still not met any real live Orthodox Jews, through reading the Chumash on her own and listening to podcasts and videos from Rabbi David Fohrman, founder of Aleph Beta, she slowly began to relate to G-d as Hashem. She also began to experience herself more and more as one with the Jewish people and their mission.

Your Money for a Mitzvah

In 2014, after 17 years, Diana’s divorce became official. “I stayed so long, because for years I’d been told, ‘Just submit to your husband and pray for him and then everything will be all right.’” But, of course, everything wasn’t all right, and after all that time, though the physical bruises had disappeared, the emotional bruises remained and Diana had a lot challenges to work through.

However, her next religious challenge came in 2015. Diana was working as a banker in a bank she’d been with for over ten years. She wasn’t supposed to work Saturdays at all, she shares, but somehow, she ended up working every Saturday. She needed her job, but she didn’t want to work on Shabbat anymore. Unfortunately, her manager wasn’t letting her take off.

“I started davening. I said, ‘Hashem, I need to have Saturdays off. You have to do something.’” What happened next, she explains, is that out of the blue, her manager started complaining about something as silly as her shoes. Then a colleague got mad because Diana parked in his space one time. It came to the point that her work environment became so uncomfortable that she knew she had to make a choice – to quit with no other job prospect and trust Hashem, or stay, trusting the bank system.

“I did quit and that was for me a big ‘I am following this path moment,’” shares Diana. “Banking had been my life for over a decade, and I walked away from it because I wanted Shabbos more.”

It wasn’t until 2016 that for the first time Diana spoke with an Orthodox rabbi and asked him about conversion.

“He asked me if I had any interest in remarrying. When I responded yes, he said, ‘I don’t recommend you convert then, because based on your skin color, no Jewish man will want to marry you.’

“That was definitely difficult to process,” Diana admits. Especially when, a few weeks later, another Orthodox rabbi she spoke to said the same thing. Diana realized then if that was indeed true, she had to decide what she wanted more. Like she had chosen Hashem over her job, here too, Diana decided that “I would rather live alone for the rest of my life than give up a special relationship with Hashem as a Jew.” (Diana also understands that Hashem is the only One who is All Knowing and that if His desire is for her to find a mate in the Orthodox world, then so it will be.)

A(nother) Twist in the Road

Not long after Diana was turned down by the two Orthodox rabbis, she began attending a Conservative synagogue. She knew about Hashem, but she wasn’t savvy enough yet to know the difference between Conservative Judaism and Orthodox Judaism. One day, she passed by a Conservative synagogue and felt an overwhelming desire to go inside. She was directed to the rabbi of the congregation who encouraged her to attend classes and Shabbat services.

“When I walked into shul on Shabbat,” Diana says, “it was like the whole world disappeared and all that mattered was saying my prayers and being in front of Hashem – it was so real and intense. When I left, it was like stepping back into the outside world, but there was this deep peace.”

Ironically, perhaps, Diana felt she was finally connecting to Hashem in a real way, not like in church. “When I chanted the prayers, I felt my soul enveloped by the ancient Hebrew words. I knew I wanted this closeness to Hashem, not the emptiness I had always felt in church.”

It wasn’t long before the rabbi agreed to convert her, and Diana changed her name to Eliyana Yael. It was a little longer after that, during Covid, when she started establishing ties with Chabad and began attending classes that she discovered that her Conservative conversion was not valid.

“It was and still is heartbreaking,” Diana admits. “I thought I had done everything right, only to find it all stripped away.”

Where do I belong? What do I have left? What am I

doing? were all questions she was left with.

“This experience was a huge challenge for me. I had abandoned a lucrative career and possibly my chance of remarriage for Judaism and still I was not considered Jewish.”

Nonetheless, Diana was not going to let this setback deter her from her goal to be a halachically full-fledged Jewess. “There is a beauty in this journey,” she maintains. “I know it’s happening for me not to me. It’s helping me grow. And maybe it happened this way so once I am halachically Jewish, I can help other women in the same situation.”

“When you’re searching for something for so long, and then when you finally find it, it’s so beautiful and precious you never want to let it go.”

Looking Forward

The final step to becoming halachically Jewish for Diana, according to her rabbis, Rabbi Dov Mandel, Chabad rabbi in Fort Worth, Texas, and Rabbi Michael Chaim Coffman of Beitar, Israel, is to move to an area that’s within walking distance to a shul. The closest Orthodox area right now from where Diana lives in Arlington, Texas, is Fort Worth, and that’s a 15-minute drive from her. The next closest Orthodox community is in Dallas, and that’s an hour drive from Arlington. Diana is doing what she can to make a move financially feasible as soon as possible. Until then, since she knows she’s not allowed to fully keep Shabbos anyway, she’ll sometimes drive down to Chabad in Fort Worth for shul on Shabbos morning.

Meanwhile, Diana continues to grow in Torah learning and mitzvah observance. The Elucidated Tomer Devorah, a book that discusses Hashem’s 13 Attributes of Mercy has reshaped her, she maintains.

“It’s how I want to walk with Hashem in this world. The more I learn, the more self-aware I become, and the more of a sense of self I have.” For example, she says, “I have a button-down shirt I’ve worn for years, but recently I had the awareness that I’d like to dress more modestly so I buttoned one of the top buttons.” Eating kosher is also being aware of what you’re putting into your body, so Diana pays more attention to proper kashrut certification. “Is this what Hashem wants me to eat?” she will ask herself. She also lives by the two following mantras: Ain od milvado and gam zu l’tova – there is nothing but Hashem and nothing to fear and it’s all good.

Learning the why of everything, in particular, brings Diana joy.

“It’s so beautiful when you take a physical mitzvah and learn all the deep layers of meaning behind it. The more I learn, the more I realize there’s so much I don’t understand and the more I want to learn. And the more I learn, the more I feel a deeper connection to Hashem and feel His love.”

What does bring Diana heartache is the baseless hatred she sometimes observes around her, individuals of one religious community not speaking to people in another religious community because of differences in religious practice.

“How is it that they’re all Jewish (and all Orthodox!) and yet they don’t get along with one another?” she queries. “If we want to bring Moshiach, we have to start truly loving each other.”

Nevertheless, despite all the hardships, twists and bends in the road that she has had (and still has) to endure, Diana maintains, “I believe there is a purpose to it all and ultimately the purpose is to bring more light into this world. Also,” she shares, “there’s a joy in the journey that’s hard to explain to someone who’s always been Orthodox. I think it’s the idea that when you’re searching for something for so long, and then when you finally find it, it’s so beautiful and precious you never want to let it go.”