What a Jewish Engineer Discovered About Our Survival

You ask what first sparked my interest in Judaism. It may sound surprising, but the answer is Jewish history. I had always known the major events of our people’s past. I had studied them, read about them, and could name many of the tragic chapters but I never saw the full picture.

One day, it all changed. My perspective shifted. I began to look at the history of the Jewish people not as isolated episodes, but as one continuous story. I started to see it from above, like stepping back and seeing a giant tapestry instead of just its threads. And what I saw took my breath away.

The story of the Jewish people is not like that of any other nation.

According to the patterns of history, we shouldn't still exist. By all logical accounts, we should have vanished like so many mighty empires and great civilizations before us. Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Sumer, Akkad, all of them rose and fell. Their remains are studied in museums and archaeology courses, alongside the Mayans, the Hindus, the Andeans, the Cretans, and others. Where are the ancient nations we read about, Moab, Amalek, Canaan, Tyre, Edom, Midian? They are all gone.

But the Jewish people? We’re still here. Somehow, after everything, we survived.

No other nation in history has faced the kind of ongoing hatred and persecution that we have. From generation to generation, we were attacked, expelled, and oppressed. We were confined to ghettos, robbed through harsh taxes, enslaved, and silenced. We were drowned in rivers, hunted in pogroms, burned at the stake, and locked in Inquisition prisons. We were forced into conversions, separated from our children, and murdered in the death camps. We suffered under Pharaoh, under Rome, under Stalin, under Hitler.

And all this happened while we were in exile, far from our land.

But somehow, through it all, we didn’t just survive but we returned. We came back to our homeland. We came back to the Torah. We rebuilt our communities. We kept our ancient customs and language, our values and teachings, as if we had never left.

At some point, I had to admit to myself that this doesn’t make sense unless there is something greater behind it all. It’s impossible to ignore the presence of a guiding Hand in our story, the Hand of the One who shapes history. Only later did I learn that the Torah itself promises this. Our eternity as a people is not an accident. It's a divine promise, spoken clearly by Hashem in the Torah.

So what more does a thinking person need? When you step back and see it clearly, it becomes obvious: there is a Creator who watches over His people. He has written our survival into history itself.

And that realization was my first step back toward Judaism.