The Unexpected Return

A secular Jew, a rediscovered identity and the enduring meaning of Zion in the modern world

If you had asked me in early 2023 whether I planned to reconnect with Judaism, light Shabbat candles every week, write books about Jewish history and proudly describe myself as a card-carrying, Magen David wearing Jew, I would have laughed.

Not politely – I mean a proper, belly-laugh kind of laugh.

Yet here we are.

Life has a funny way of surprising you. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes dramatically. And sometimes in ways that make you completely rethink who you are and where you belong.

For me, that shift didn’t happen gradually. It happened almost overnight.

Growing Up Jewish… and Slowly Drifting Away

I grew up fairly observant. We kept kosher. I did my bar mitzvah. Shabbat was observed as best we could. Hebrew lessons, Jewish school, hanging out on a Thursday night in Hampstead or Edgware with hundreds of other, mostly, Jewish teenagers. The typical rhythm of Jewish life. It was simply part of the background of childhood.

But like many Jews who grow up in diaspora communities, adulthood has a way of loosening those ties.

Life moves. People move. Communities drift.

I lived and worked abroad for much of my adult life. I stepped away from Jewish community life, not intentionally, but it happened nonetheless. My Hebrew faded in a strange and almost comical way. I can still read and write Ivrit pretty well, but my vocabulary has eroded so much that I often can’t understand what I’m reading.

The letters are there. The sounds are there. But the meaning sometimes isn’t. It’s like driving down a street you once knew by heart and realising you’ve forgotten which house you lived in and who your neighbours were. It’s quite frustrating!

My wife isn’t Jewish. But she has always respected my heritage and our customs. She enjoys our festivals and traditions even if she doesn’t fully understand every prayer or ritual – and nor do I if I’m completely honest.

Our children, meanwhile, were essentially raised atheist. Not because we rejected Judaism, but simply because life moved on and Jewish identity drifted quietly into the background as did my wife’s religious beliefs.

Then came 7th October. And everything changed.

Identity Has a Way of Finding You

Ask my children today who they are and the answer comes quickly.

They’ll tell you they’re Jewish. And proud of it. They’ll also tell you they’re half Israeli and half Brazilian.

They attend cheder now. My daughter is preparing for her bat mitzvah in 2027. Jewish identity, once something distant and abstract, suddenly became something real and important to all of us – my wife included.

And perhaps most surprisingly, the same thing happened to me. My own teshuvah – my return to my roots – caught me completely off guard.

I now lay tefillin – vegan ones! Yes, that’s a real thing. We say brachot on Shabbat. We light candles. We bake challah. We turn off our screens (much to the kids annoyance) and eat dinner together as a family and talk! And each week I open a bottle of Palwin’s No.10 Shabbat wine which is even more amusing considering I’m completely teetotal.

Life is strange (and special) like that.

What surprised me most wasn’t the rituals themselves. It was how natural it felt to return to them. And the warm glow I feel when I hear my kids and wife playing an active part in those rituals.

Almost as if something inside me had been quietly waiting for years.

The Call of Home

There’s another change I didn’t expect. I miss Israel. Not in the casual way someone misses a place they once visited. I mean something far deeper than that.

Israel feels like it’s actually calling me home.

I lived there twice as a young adult. I know and love the country, the people, the chaos, the balagan, the food, the humour, the resilience. But lately the pull feels stronger than it ever has.

In my book Legends of the Light, I wrote a chapter where Eretz Yisrael speaks to the reader like an ancient relative.

A voice reaching across generations as if it were a real person, not just a country on a map, but a living, breathing being, reminding every Jew that the door is always open. That no matter how far they wander, it remains home.

When I wrote those words, I thought I was speaking metaphorically. Now I’m not so sure.

If my wife weren’t (understandably) worried about the ongoing war and the risks that come with that, we probably would have made aliyah already.

Instead, we watch, we hope and we pray that this terrible war will eventually lead to something the Middle East has rarely known:

Peace.

When that day comes, perhaps we’ll return home. I truly hope and pray for that day – for all our sakes.

What Does It Mean to Be a Zionist Today?

Every time I open the news or glance at social media, I’m confronted by something unsettling. Blatant antisemitism. Vile media bias. Historical illiteracy. People repeating slogans without the slightest understanding of what they mean, Jewish history or the reality of life in the Middle East.

As I tell my kids often: Stupidity is a terminal condition. And sadly, it appears to be contagious and spreading fast.

But being Jewish has never been easy.

Israelis, in particular, develop emotional armour early in life. We are, almost by necessity, resilient people.

We live surrounded by tens of millions of people and multiple governments who openly call for our destruction. Israeli parents send their children to military service while parents in most Western countries send their children to university. That difference shapes you.

But it also gives you perspective.

Almost every Jew my age carries the memory of the Holocaust and the horrors that followed. Even if we didn’t live through them personally, those stories were told at dinner tables, whispered by grandparents and embedded deeply into our collective memory.

They become part of who you are.

Before 7th October, I didn’t fully understand how important it was for my own children to know that history. That realisation is one of the reasons I wrote Legends of the Light.

Our children need to know who they are and where they come from.

They need to know the stories of resilience, survival, brilliance, courage and stubborn hope that stretch back thousands of years.

Because those stories are not just history. They are inheritance. They are rays of light in a dark world.

When the Past Starts Repeating

One of the most unsettling things about the past few years has been watching old ghosts return. Synagogues attacked. Jewish schools threatened. Israelis beaten in the streets of Europe and America simply for speaking Hebrew.

These stories feel like shards of glass. Not the symbolic shards of tikkun olam waiting to be repaired. The sharp kind. The painful kind. The kind that remind you that history is never quite as far away as we’d like to believe.

For decades many Jews convinced themselves that the horrors of the past were safely locked away in history books.

But history has a way of reminding us that it never truly disappears.

And that brings us back to Israel.

Why Israel Exists

Some incredibly misinformed people claim that antisemitism exists because of Israel. That idea has the cause and effect completely backwards. Israel needs to exist because antisemitism exists. Antisemitism has been around for thousands of years – modern day Israel has been here for less than 100. Once again, factual illiteracy.

History taught the Jewish people a brutal lesson: relying on the goodwill of others for survival rarely ends well.

Israel is not simply a country. It is the place where Hebrew lives and breaths again as a spoken language. It is the place where Jews can defend themselves. It is the place where Jewish life is normal, not conditional.

And perhaps most importantly, it is home. As I said earlier and in my book, it’s a living, breathing energy that lives through us and we carry it wherever we travel.

The Story Continues

My journey back to Jewish identity wasn’t planned. It wasn’t strategic. It certainly wasn’t predictable.

But it feels right.

Lighting candles on Friday night. Hearing my children proudly say they’re Jewish. Watching my daughter prepare for her bat mitzvah. Writing stories about Jewish resilience and history. Writing this article.

All of it feels like part of a much larger story that began long before I was born and will continue long after I’m gone.

The Jewish story is thousands of years old. It has survived exile, persecution and countless attempts to erase it. And somehow, against every prediction, it continues.

So perhaps being a proud Zionist Jew today simply means this: Knowing that the story is not finished. And choosing to be part of the next chapter.