My Battle for the Torah
My young adulthood, between the ages of twenty and thirty was stolen from me. When I was born on the Fourteenth of Nisan, the anniversary of our Exodus from Egypt, the last thing that my poor mother and father, of blessed memory would ever imagine was that I would repeat their life cycles. They were firebrands plucked out of the Nazi holocaust, living daily terror under the Third Reich. They travelled to Australia, as far as possible from the
nightmare they had known in Europe.
“You will have sons and daughters, but they will not remain yours, since they will be taken into captivity,” says the Bible verse (Deut. 28:41).
In the Holy Land during the destruction of the Second Temple…Sure!
In Europe during the Holocaust…Sure!
But, in Australia, the ultimate refuge after the Holocaust…No! Don’t tell me!
This is the story of a long and painful journey destined to cut me off from my family, work-friends — and except for a small group of people I will call exclusive brethren — virtually everybody I would theretofore encounter.
Many years later, after I had developed the maturity to appreciate the hand of God with all its infinite chesed and hidden intricacy, those lost years would be returned to me. Today I am a happily married man living in a religious community in Eretz Yisrael, the Land of my Fathers, with a four year old son of my own. Yehudah Baruch is my first child. It took a long time for me to get to this point in my life. Emotional scars don’t heal as quickly as physical scars. For me, they didn’t take years to heal. They took decades. Now, Hashem has given me the opportunity to give my seed something that I never knew for so many years.
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Reprinted with permission.
Zeev Breier
Ph. 02-9919974, 0533119974
Email: zeevbreier@gmail.com