Excerpt: Letters I Never Wrote My Sisters

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Mark Twain quotes (American Humorist, Writer and Lecturer. 1835-1910)

In the first days of January 1973, I arrived in Israel to explore and discover what it meant to be Jewish. My formal conversion was completed the previous month, and after years of pondering how I should proceed with my life, I decided to 'visit' Israel for an indefinite period to learn, work and live. If pressed to give an honest assessment of my intentions prior to my departure I probably would have admitted that I had no intention of returning to North America or the life I had prior to Tevet 5732 (December 1972), but my official response to family and friends was that if it worked out, great, otherwise I'd return.

It cannot be denied that I saw myself in some small way following in the footsteps of Abraham the Hebrew, the archetypical Jew. As he had turned away from his native land, from the people and culture that nurtured him, from his father's house and traditions, so too I was in the process of turning away from my Canadian land, from the culture and language that had nurtured me and ultimately from my family and their beliefs and traditions.

Now the LORD said unto Abram: 'Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee. (Genesis 12:1)

In this process, distanced from my family, caught up in the fascinating and all encompassing challenges of learning a new language, discovering a new land, learning a new (for me) but very ancient tradition, the lines of communication with my family that had never been very strong, gradually faded to short formal "signs-of-life". It must be said that I did try to communicate the thrilling life transforming process I was experiencing, but for an overwhelming multiplicity of reasons, the content of my letters were so strange, so incomprehensible to those friends and family members who received them, they were in capable of responding. As a result I too ceased challenging them.

When I left my family, my nation and my country in January of 1973, my sisters were 16 and 10 years old respectively. I can make a lot of excuses as to why I didn't write my sisters more than I did, to this day I sincerely believe that most of my 'excuses' were based upon a realistic assessment of the situation: their degree of interest, my ability to communicate, and so on. Today thirty-five years later if there is one aspect of my life that I regret, it is that I did not make more of an effort to reach out and maintain some kind of meaningful communication with my sisters.

I won't play "if only" or "what if". We can never really know. What I do know is that I genuinely feel remorse and a very strong desire to do something, no matter how trivial it might be in the grand scheme of things, to if not make amends at least attempt to atone for my previous transgression-by-omission. The following collection of fictional letters are an attempt to create the communications I should have sent but didn't. It is my firm hope that my sisters will accept my small token of atonement and that others who read these missives will gain something from my experience, be it insight, edification or simply entertainment.

The thirty five years that I live in Israel are approximately half the history of this small and struggling country. Hopefully, if nothing else, there will be a value in the sharing of my narrow personal perspective on the great events that transpired and continue to transpire here in what often appears to be the focal point of modern history.

[Interested in reading more? Contact JFisher@ePublicist.ca and ask to be invited as a Reviewer on my FastPencil.com project. There you'll be able to read the entire book AND tell me what I need to fix to make it worth reading! YBA]