If a person takes a bundle of reeds, he cannot break them all at once. But taken one at a time, even an infant will break them. Just so, Israel will not be redeemed until they are all one bundle. (Midrash Tanhuma, Nitzavim, Chapter 1) Even as a child I was troubled with deeper questions. As a child with a passion for knowledge and a penchant for research, I became intrigued with “life, the universe, and everything” (to paraphrase on Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). I was fascinated with nature, and intrigued with human nature. And one of the issues that touched me to the core was anti-Semitism. As I wrote in my latest book, Like a Bundle of Reeds, a shadow followed through my childhood years, and even through my teens. It was the specter of the Holocaust, that thing which many chose to never mention, though it was always there. When I grew up the questions surrounding anti-Semitism kept haunting me, and became a very tangible issue through my years as a refusnik (Soviet Jews denied permission to leave the USSR during the 1970s). But once outside of the Soviet Union, and being a new oleh in Israel, more worldly challenges demanded my attention, such as learning a new language and providing for my family. It just so happened that in Israel I became a...
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