Mosab Hassan Yousef (Arabic: مصعب حسن يوسف; born May 5, 1978) is a Palestinian who worked undercover for Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet from 1997 to 2007.
Shin Bet considered him its most valuable source within the Hamas leadership: the information Yousef supplied prevented dozens of suicide attacks and assassinations of Israelis, exposed numerous Hamas cells, and assisted Israel in hunting down many militants, including the incarceration of his own father, a Hamas leader Sheikh Hassan Yousef. In March 2010, he published his autobiography titled Son of Hamas.
In 1999, Yousef converted to Christianity, and in 2007 moved to the United States.
– Wikipedia
This guy is my definition of bravery.
He has risked it all. Family, riches and support structures because of his pursuit of Truth. Then, he realized that by losing it all, he gained it all.
In the interview, when asked what he gave up in order to come out of the closet.
(around 23:40) “… all the terminology I am using. I cannot reduce Jesus the Christ, the master into human language. I cannot reduce him to a written language, or a spoken language. But definitely, I did not give up anything. I thought that I had something to give. But honestly, what I got in return is freedom, happiness, peace, health. I was healed from many problems I was born with as a child. So basically I don’t consider that I lost anything. I see that I won everything.”
Later on, he then dissects the oversimplified hate/love terminology as follows. The pastor talks about the conventional love and love less idea as it pertains to giving up family for God. I always thought this idea is usually communicated too simplistically. Mosef gives his take. I find his take a good reminder about the unconditional love of Jesus as well as spiritual warfare – that our fight is not really against flesh and blood but the powers and principalities that keep people in darkness.. The key is not about a love that indulges our maturities but about different types of love girded by higher degrees of morality (Kohlberg).
Mosef responds like so:
“This is going back to hate and love. This is how the human language cannot convey such a truth. If you don’t see what between the lines, the meaning of the words… I hate my father as an ego, spiritual ego, ego mind, falsehood; but I love him as an individual, a human being struggling in darkness and in delusion. That’s the difference. Same thing with terrorists. With a rigid spiritual ego, that they are destroying life, and killing innocent people. I don’t love them , I don’t like them.. and I hate their falsehood, but as individuals I am able to see through all the masks that they wear. I see a poor struggling animal, they are harming themselves and harming life. My family disowned me, and it was a good thing… if we need to experience freedom, we have to drop our attachments… trying to please everybody. This is how we get lost as individuals, by trying to impress and trying to convince others of a false identity that is not who we are. We need to be truthful to who we are, to see the divine from within, to see Christ within. And family, society, security … all these things secondary. What’s the point of winning the society and losing ourselves? And this is something I had to experience by the inspiration of Christ-consciousness. That was one of the things – I was successful in my society. I was very protected, but I was not myself. And I had to choose between my identity, or personality, a illusion created by others for me.”
This story touches me on different levels. For him Christ-consciousness broke him from the hold of mental prisons of his ego which has enhanced greatly from his background. He got transformed from the label of his personality, as illusion given to him by society, to his identity, a beloved child of God with Christ inside. He fought the condemnation that came with journeying with Christ and won. For me it was that for me too, but the Christ-consciousness also transformed me closer to a physical identity as well (actually, Mosef talked about this too). To be made whole. To heal when medical science could not. To drop all the labels people have been calling me as they did not understand. This is so that I can live a life of joy and service. What could be better than that?
letters to a modern-day Job 