Jewish Life Digital Edition February 2013 | Page 18

insistent on having me bow down.
Throughout the rest of high school and
into college, I found ever-subtler forms of
how the non-Jewish culture I was living in
was trying to get me to bow. Whether it be
through the guise of teen culture via high
school prom dances, joining a football
team, or a fraternity, or be it getting
sucked into the pull of the never-ending
cycle of consumerism that tried to convince you that first you needed a car, and
then a stereo to put in your car, and then a
nicer car, etc, till you found yourself enslaved, working to have the stuff that they
claimed would make you somebody special.
My conclusion was to get as far away
from Western culture as I could. I wasn’t
quite sure where I was supposed to go. By
1993, I found myself in a land free of Western culture’s influence – Moscow, Russia,
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I’d
heard the Soviets were anti-Semitic, so I
didn’t tell anyone around that I was
Jewish, and I never used my last name.
Then one day I was sitting with the six
friends I had made at the Russian
university where I was studying, and I
decided to confess.
“I want you all to know, I am Jewish.”
They all looked at me. “Oh really? So are
we,” they all said nonchalantly.

16 JEWISH LIFE

ISSUE 59

I had travelled thousands of miles from
my home, from everything I knew, to
discover that being Jewish was something
so powerful that even a fascist Soviet
regime that wiped away all religion
couldn’t keep seven Jewish souls who
knew nothing about being Jewish from
finding each other and bonding together.
There was something in all of us that
refused to bow.
Being Jewish somehow defied everything. I had no idea what it meant to be
Jewish and I couldn’t ask them. For all
they knew I could have been a rabbi. I just
knew now for the first time in my life that
my Judaism had to mean something.

RIPPLES OF MORDECHAI’S STRENGTH
Six years later, a few weeks before Purim,
I found myself sitting in Bnei Brak’s
Ponevezh yeshiva. I could barely read the
Talmud then, but I wanted to learn
Tosfos, so every day after lunch, I would
sit with a young yeshiva bochur for an
hour who would go over the Tosfos again
and again until I could repeat back what
he said to me, even though I had no idea
what it meant.
One day after my lesson, I sat and
prepared for Purim when I read the words
in Hebrew, “There was a Jewish man in

BEING JEWISH
SOMEHOW DEFIED
EVERY THING. I HAD NO
IDEA WHAT IT MEANT
TO BE JEWISH AND I
COULDN’T ASK THEM
… I JUST KNEW NOW
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN
MY LIFE THAT MY
JUDAISM HAD TO
MEAN SOMETHING.
Shushan the capitol whose name was Mordechai, son of Yair, son of Shim’I, son of
Kish, a Benjaminite…” (Megilas Esther 2:5)
I discovered that Mordechai was from
the tribe of Benjamin. The verse told me
that in order to discover the root of
Mordechai’s strength, he was able to singly
defy a world power.
Benjamin was the only one of the 12
sons of Yaakov who did not bow down to
Esav, the father of Western culture. This
little fact rippled through 1  000 years of
history until it would show up in Mordechai, whose confidence in being a Jew
would light up the waning faith of Jews in
127 countries, and overturn a government
and genocide.
And it would continue to ripple for
2 000 more years till it showed up in a little
Jewish boy sitting in a reform temple in El
Paso, Texas. JL
A version of this article originally appeared in
Mishpacha Magazine.
PUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION FROM WWW.AISH.COM,
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