I Never Planned to Become an Author

This Was Never the Plan

I never sat there as a child dreaming of writing a book.

I was not the kid scribbling stories under the covers with a torch. I was not the one announcing to the world that one day I’d be “an author.” That title belonged to other people. Smart people. Thoughtful people in tweed jackets. People who understood publishing, structure and things like chapter pacing without needing three existential crises and a family-sized bag of snacks.

And yet, here I am. Not because I planned it. Because something in me was shaken awake.

The Rupture

Like so many Jews around the world, 7 October broke something open in me. Not just grief. Not just horror. Something deeper. Something older. It hit with the force of a steam train, but underneath it was something else too: disconnection. A brutal, aching sense that I was far away from my people, far away from my roots, far away from the light.

I have always been proud to be Jewish. Always proud to be Israeli. Always aware, on some level, of our past and our history. Israel was never abstract to me. It was always in me. But this was different.

This was not identity as background noise. This was not heritage reduced to a flag, a few familiar words, a school memory or the vague outline of stories half-remembered from childhood.

This came from somewhere deeper.

Not religion, exactly. Not in the conventional sense. But something spiritual. Something ancient. Something that felt as though it had bypassed my mind and gone straight into my soul.

The Realisation

And at the centre of that feeling was one devastating realisation: my children knew almost nothing about who they were.

They knew the surface. The symbols. The visible bits. But not the depth. Not the inheritance. Not the astonishing, beautiful, painful, resilient chain they come from. Not the ancestors. Not the stories. Not the light.

And with that came guilt. A huge, heavy, heartbreaking sense of guilt.

Not because I had intentionally kept it from them. I hadn’t. Life does what life does. You get busy raising children, building things, surviving things, managing days that turn into years. You assume there will be time. You assume identity will somehow seep through the walls on its own. You assume a child standing next to an Israeli flag will magically absorb thousands of years of peoplehood by osmosis.

Turns out, it doesn’t.

How the Book Began

So the book began there. Not first as a project. Not as a product. Not even really as a decision.

It began as a series of short bedtime stories for my kids, a gentle way of introducing them to their ancestry and heritage. I wanted them to feel warmth before weight. Wonder before burden. Connection before explanation. And somewhere inside those bedtime stories, something bigger began to form.

The best way I can describe it is this: it felt as though our ancestors were reaching out through time and tapping me on the shoulder.

Not with noise. Not with thunder. Just with presence. With a kind of whisper from the past that somehow carried enormous weight.

“Tell them who they are. Tell them where they come from. Tell them about their people. Tell them about the light.”

And for the first time in my life, Jewish connection did not come through Jewish school, Torah lessons, Batmitzvah lessons or even fond memories of times with my grandparents. Those things all mattered, of course. But this was different. This felt alive. Immediate. Urgent. As if something dormant had suddenly been switched on.

A Return

Writing Legends of the Light became my way back. Back to my people. Back to my heritage. Back to my children. Back to something in myself I didn’t even fully realise I’d misplaced.

In many ways, becoming an author has been an act of teshuvah. Not in the narrow, preachy sense people sometimes imagine, but in the truest sense of the word: a return.

A return to values. A return to belonging. A return to the deepest parts of who I am.

Through this book, I have been able to express thoughts, feelings, emotions, values, grief, pride and reconnection. It has allowed me to explore my Judaism not as an obligation, but as belonging. Not as performance, but as homecoming.

What Makes an Author?

I do not think an author becomes an author because they like the idea of being one. I think an author becomes an author when they find something they cannot leave alone: Something that matters. Something they need to understand. Something they need to say. Something they need to share.

For me, that is what this became.

It was never about wanting the label. It was about finding a subject I was truly passionate about. Something I had a genuine need to explore, to understand, and to pass on. First, for myself. Then for my children. And then, if it resonated beyond that, for anyone else who might need it too.

In that sense, this book was not so different from the writing I had done years earlier.

I used to write songs and lyrics with a great friend. He was a brilliant singer, an amazing musician and we just clicked when we met. We each brought something different and together it worked – beautifully. Those songs were never about filling space. They were about writing what moved me. What connected with me. Or perhaps more truthfully, what I connected with.

I remember losing a friend – a homeless man in London. I always used to stop and buy him breakfast when I saw him. Then one day, on the way to a song-writing session, I stopped off to see him and found out he had passed away the day before. I was devastated. On the journey to my musician friend’s house, I wrote a song about the impact it had on me. And we recorded it that same day. Because it mattered. The song was called Slow Down.

That, to me, is the heart of all meaningful writing.

Not polish first. Not strategy first. Not market research first. Meaning first.

That is the same truth at the centre of my book and the books that are still to come. They are about things that genuinely matter to me, for an audience I care deeply about. My children first. Everyone else after that is a blessing and a bonus.

So if anyone reading this has a story inside them or a subject that truly matters, something they ache to understand or share, then my advice is simple: Find the words. One word at a time. Put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and begin.

Write about what you know. Write about what you love. Write for the people you love.

Do not overthink it. Just start. Let the words come as they come. They do not need to arrive perfectly dressed. They just need to arrive.

Because the first step is always the hardest. But once you begin, you may find that the story was waiting for you all along.

Opening Pandora’s Box

And then there was the research. Honestly? Fascinating doesn’t even begin to cover it.

What started as one book quickly became the opening of a vast, extraordinary Pandora’s box filled with some of the most remarkable human beings imaginable. Story after story, life after life, I found people whose courage, compassion, brilliance, resilience, generosity and humanity seemed almost too extraordinary to be real.

Some were Jewish. Some were not. But all of them, in one way or another, embodied the values that Judaism holds high: kindness, generosity, warmth, healing, helping, giving, lifting others, and bringing light where it was needed most. Hence the title.

And one of the greatest honours of this whole journey has been speaking personally to several of these incredible people. That still blows me away a bit. You spend months or years immersed in someone’s life, admiring what they’ve done, and then suddenly you are speaking with them. Not as a distant figure in a history book, but as a real human being. That has been humbling in ways I can barely describe.

A Family Journey

It was not a solitary journey either.

My mum shared it with me by offering to proofread the first manuscripts. Sharing that journey with her was a real gift and a genuine bonding experience. There was something deeply special about handing those early pages to my mum and letting her walk beside me through the birth of the book.

And then my brother took my original images and lifted them to a whole new level. That too became another wonderful bonding experience. Another thread in the story. Another reminder that this book was not just made of words, but of family, trust, creativity and connection.

One Book Became Many

The irony is that I now have so much material, I could write multiple books on this topic.

In fact, I am.

I am already in the early stages of creating two additional books that will be companion editions, while also standing in their own right. And beyond that, I already have enough extraordinary material for an expanded second edition of Legends of the Light with at least another fifty stories of people who lived extraordinary lives and made the world a far better place.

That’s the thing about this journey. It did not close a door. It blew the walls off the house.

The Labour of Love

The book itself took around two years to write. Two years of love, obsession, reshaping, refining, removing, adding, rewriting, doubting, reworking and staring at words until they dissolved into alphabet soup. It became a constant labour of love. The kind that follows you around. The kind that sits beside you when you’re meant to be doing something else. The kind that wakes up before you do.

And strangely, the hardest part was not finding the stories.

It was finishing.

Finding the stories became immense fun. A treasure hunt through history, humanity and memory. Even after publishing, I kept finding more. Incredible ones. Necessary ones. The real challenge was knowing how to close the book off naturally.

My wife kept saying, “Just publish it!”

Sensible woman.

But I couldn’t. Because something in me knew it wasn’t ready. I just didn’t know why.

The stories were there. I had reviewed them, edited them, re-reviewed them, proofread them until my eyes felt like sandpaper. Everything looked finished. And yet it wasn’t finished. The book was standing at the door with its coat on, keys in hand, and somehow still refusing to leave the house.

Even the cover went through multiple redesigns as the stories deepened and evolved. I kept reworking it until it finally felt right, until it conveyed what the book truly meant to me: a gift to my children, a guide for my children, a path to their past.

When the Final Thread Came Home

Then Ran Gvili came home.

After 843 days, our final hostage was recovered and brought back to his family. To Eretz Yisrael. And with that, something in me – and in so many of us – finally exhaled. His return brought dignity to him and his family, closure to Am Yisrael and the sense that after 843 days of suffocating agony, we could at last begin to breathe again. 

After more than two years of anguish, there was, at last, dignity. Return. Burial. Home. The final unbearable thread had been gathered back into Eretz Yisrael. And with that came a wave of emotion so enormous I could barely contain it. I cried. Properly cried. The kind of cry that feels like your soul has unclenched.

And for the first time in a very long time, I could breathe.

So, on that same day, after I wiped my tears away, I went back to the final story, adapted the ending and hit publish.

That was the moment.

Not because everything was suddenly neat and healed and resolved. Nothing about our story has ever been neat. But because the book, at its heart, was always about return. Return to memory. Return to peoplehood. Return to dignity. Return to light.

The Reward

And now, the most rewarding part of all is seeing where that bridge leads.

Seeing my kids, my nephews and nieces reading the book. Hearing my own words played back to me through the voices of children. There is something almost surreal about that. Words that once lived only in my head now coming back to me through young voices, as though the stories have finally arrived where they were always meant to go.

And when my son told me it was the greatest book in the world, my heart more or less melted on the spot.

Because beneath all the history, all the editing, all the research and rewrites, that was always the point.

Connection.

To watch a child find even a small piece of themselves in these pages is an extraordinary thing. It feels like watching tikkun olam happening in real time. Tiny shards of the light reconnecting and rebuilding. Tiny fragments being gathered and made whole again, one story at a time.

I Didn’t Set Out to Write a Book

I didn’t set out to write a book. I set out to find something I had lost.

And somewhere along the way, I found stories. I found voices. I found extraordinary people. I found my way back to my heritage in a form that felt living and breathing and real. I found a language for grief, pride, belonging and light.

Most of all, I found a way to hand something precious to my children and say:

This is yours. This always was yours. You come from something ancient, beautiful, scarred, stubborn and full of light. Never let the world convince you otherwise.

And that, for me, is where authorship began.

Not at a desk. Not with an idea. But with a rupture in the dark, a whisper from the past and a deep need to guide my children home.