Los Angeles — Rabbi Shlomo Riskin came to town this past Shabbat and spoke of his 20 years as rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Efrat. He explained that he’d given up his comfortable life on the upper West Side of Manhattan, where he was chief rabbi of Lincoln Square Synagogue, because Israel was the chapter heading for Jewish history today and life in exile was only a footnote.
His Shabbat sermon was a stirring evocation of why the Israelis have the courage to go on. For me, it was also a powerful reminder of what might have been.
Half my lifetime ago, I was a 21-year-old baal teshuva, or returnee to traditional Judaism. I was at the age when ideas matter more than anything, when history and life are waiting impatiently to be written, when I was on fire to change the world, or at a minimum, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, not to let the world change me.
The burning question was not how to make a living or whom to marry; it was how to make a difference, and Israel was the obvious answer.
Back then I attended Lincoln Square Synagogue and listened, rapt, every week to Riskin’s emotional sermons on the importance of aliyah and his own plans to carve a town out of the Judean hills 20 miles south of Jerusalem. I went to the planning meetings and met other singles and married folk who were to follow him to the West Bank. I received the blueprints for the various types of houses that were available and even settled on a garden apartment, which would have cost a princely $30,000.
I took a “pilot trip” to Israel and visited the site of Efrat, the town Riskin would build. I met with a counselor in Israel to discuss my military status — I’d have to do basic training and go into the reserves immediately, since I was too old to go into regular service. Or I could get married and have a baby, which would reduce my military requirement even further — “That’s what we in Israel call ‘family planning,’” the counselor explained with a smile. I applied to law school in Israel and was admitted to Bar Ilan University. I was, in short, good to go.
But I didn’t. I stayed in the States.
At the time, my family was going through hell. My parents had divorced two years earlier after an acrimonious seven final years of their marriage. My sisters were exploring the drug culture and failing at college. My mother, who had lost most of her extended family in the Holocaust, her own father in a murder 13 years earlier and her mother to cancer five years after that, was on the verge of emotional collapse.
I stayed to take care of her.
Do I regret that? Of course not. She carried me for nine months; I returned the favor, in a way, by “being there” for her. It seemed clear to me then that had she lost me to aliyah, it might have been what the Talmud calls the “makeh va’patish” — the final hammer blow.
I just couldn’t do it. I put ideas and dreams to one side and took care of her.
Living the footnote
Over the last 21 years I visited Israel many times and certainly followed the news from the Middle East. I watched Efrat grow, and on my visits to that town wondered what my life would have been like and which garden apartment would have been mine.
When war came to Israel in 1982, when the first intifada broke out and when Oslo degraded into the Temple Mount intifada, I wondered where I would have been, what I would have been doing, what my military role might have been, even when and where I might have gotten killed.
I hadn’t seen Riskin in 21 years, until Shabbat morning in synagogue. He’s a little thicker around the middle, as am I, and his hair has thinned, as has mine. His ability to move an audience has only increased with time. His presence, and his passion for his beloved Israel and his beloved Efrat, reminded me that he is living the chapter heading in Jewish history and I’m living the footnote.
Israelis claim the moral high ground in any discussion of Jewish life, now more than ever. It grated on me that in a few days Riskin would be traveling from Ben Gurion airport down the dangerous road that leads to Efrat, that he would be under fire once again whenever he went to the supermarket, or to a restaurant, or even a Passover seder. And I would be in relatively safe, comfortable West Los Angeles.
If I had gone then, I wouldn’t have married my wife Suzanne. I wouldn’t be father to my daughter Chynna Bracha, or to the twins due with God’s help this July. I’d be someone else’s husband, someone else’s father, living someone else’s life.
But by placing my life, and the lives of my family on the line for the State of Israel, would I be fighting my own cause or fighting someone else’s? Would the fire in the spirit of the 21-year-old boy have banked by now in the soul of the 43-year-old man? Or would my life be as full of passion and excitement as that of Riskin, 20 years after the fact?
My mom’s in great shape today, and I’d like to think that my staying in the United States is part of the reason why. Or maybe she would have done just as well or better had I made aliyah. One thing about being the father to a girl in diapers and the husband of a wife pregnant with twins is that you don’t have a lot of free time to engage in speculation or remorse.
But seeing Riskin reminded me that in our lives there must be rehovot, roads, not taken. Should I have gone? Should I have stayed? The hard fact is that no one can say whether I made the right decision. But the 21-year-old in me, I confess, was stirred yesterday. And he feels mightily, powerfully, disappointed in the 43-year-old man he has become.
Syndicated columnist Michael Levin is the author of 14 books, including the upcoming “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Jewish Mysticism and Spirituality,” and of The Daddy Track, a parenting column that appears in The Chronicle.
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