I Am Guilty. I Forgot.

I’m guilty. I admit it. I did it.

Actually, that’s not quite true.

I didn’t do anything. And that’s the problem.

For years, I did almost nothing to show my children the beauty of our culture, our history, our religion, our people. Not in a heavy-handed, synagogue-every-Shabbat, don’t-touch-that-bacon-sandwich kind of way. I mean, even the secular version of it. The stories. The songs. The language. The fire. The memory. The stubborn, magnificent, slightly argumentative heartbeat of Am Yisrael.

They knew they were half Israeli and half Brazilian. They knew I was Jewish. They knew I was non-practising and, frankly, not especially interested in being more than that.

And that is one of my biggest regrets.

Before 07/10/23, I was, at best, a passive Israeli Jew. I knew somewhere deep inside me that I belonged to something bigger, older and more powerful than I could explain. But it didn’t call to me. Or maybe it did, and I had simply become very good at ignoring the ringtone.

I had forgotten most of my Ivrit, despite the fact that as a child I could hold a half-decent conversation in it. I had been to a Jewish secondary school, but instead of leaving with a burning love for our people, I left with spiritual indigestion. Some terrible teaching. Some terrible teachers. Some terrible ways of making something ancient and beautiful feel small, grey and joyless. And making me as a child of Am Yisrael, push as far away from my roots as I could possibly go.

So I ran. Not physically. I didn’t pack a little suitcase and storm off into the night with a packet of Bamba and a grudge. But spiritually? I ran miles. I drifted so far from my roots that I became, for all practical purposes, an atheist. Jewish by blood, Israeli by inheritance, Zionist somewhere in my bones, but disconnected. Unplugged. Offline.

Then came 07/10/23.

And, like so many Jews, something inside me shattered. Not broke. Not cracked politely. Shattered. It was cellular. Atomic. Soul-deep.

There are kinds of pain you can explain, and then there are kinds of pain that live underneath language, where words arrive with tiny buckets and realise the ocean is already on fire.

For months, I could barely breathe properly. And I don’t think I truly breathed again until our last hostage was finally returned, not into the arms of family, but into the arms of our people, so he could be buried with dignity in the land he belonged to.

That sentence alone feels impossible.

But almost immediately after 07/10/23, I felt something I had not felt in decades. A pull. To Israel. To home. To Judaism. To spirituality. To something I could not explain, control, rationalise or neatly file away under “unexpected midlife Jewish awakening, please see appendix B.”

I started searching out and listening to Israeli music constantly. Not occasionally. Constantly. I found Israel Hour Radio, a weekly English-language radio show hosted by Josh Shron. One hour of Israeli and Ivrit songs every Sunday. Simple idea. Massive impact. Josh and I have since become friends, and he wrote the foreword to my first book, which still feels faintly unreal to type.

But at the beginning, I was just a man listening to songs in a language I had half-forgotten, feeling something in me come back to life. Israeli music connected me to my people. To my language. To my roots. To my grief. To my anger. To my prayers.

When I hear those songs, I don’t just hear melodies. I hear home calling through static. I feel closer to Israel. Closer to Jews everywhere. Closer to those hurting now, and somehow closer to those who came before us too. Our fathers and mothers. Our grandparents and their grandparents. The ones who wandered, fled, built, buried, prayed, argued, sang, cooked, rebuilt and carried the light when the world kept trying to blow it out.

It feels almost like that scene in Avatar, when the Na’vi connect to their ancestors through Eywa and the Tree of Souls. Except for me, it isn’t blue people and glowing forests. It’s Am Yisrael. It’s Ivrit. It’s song. It’s memory. It’s a chain stretching back thousands of years and somehow, after all that time, it reached forward and grabbed me by the heart.

Which brings me back to my children.

Because this is where the guilt lives. And I don’t feel like a good father when I think about it. I feel like I failed them.

Yes, I taught my kids to read. To write. To eat. To climb walls. To ride bikes. To speak. To say please and thank you. To be kind. To be curious. To laugh. To question everything, sometimes including my last remaining nerve. To be strong and resilient. To be good people.

People have told me I’ve done an amazing job. That my children are polite. Kind. Lovely. Thoughtful. That I should be proud. And I am. More than I can express. They are truly amazing little people – and I love them more than life itself.

But I failed them in one enormous way: I never taught them who they are. I never gave them the inheritance I should have placed gently, proudly and joyfully into their hands.

And that kills me.

I’m writing this with tears in my eyes because the guilt is not theoretical. It is not an abstract parenting wobble. It sits with me. Daily. Heavily.

My mum, who will no doubt read this and cry too, did everything she could to instil in me a sense of being Jewish and connected. She ran Jewish youth clubs and camps. She taught (and still teaches) Hebrew songs to multi-faith choirs. In her own liberal, gentle, quietly determined way, she is a proud Jewish Zionist. Passive. But proud.

And I am forever grateful for what she gave me.

My dad – broken and complicated as that relationship is – the one good thing he gave me and I will always be grateful for: a fierce Israeli and Zionist spirit. That fire in the belly. That refusal to bow. That deep, stubborn knowledge that we are still here because we have survived things that should have ended us and somehow turned them into memory, meaning and more life.

But me? I let the chain go slack. I let the light dim to a faint flicker.

Not because I didn’t care. Not because I was ashamed. Not because I rejected my people or my past.

But because I was asleep.

And I think many Jewish parents of my generation have been asleep too. We knew we were Jewish. We lit the odd candle, went to the occasional family seder, maybe muttered a few Hebrew words we half-remembered and told ourselves that was enough. We thought identity would somehow transmit itself by osmosis, through chicken soup, surname, the odd visit to synagogue and the occasional argument about Israel at someone’s dinner table.

But it doesn’t. Not properly.

Children need stories. They need songs. They need names. They need heroes. They need to know that Jewish history is not just persecution and trauma. It is brilliance. Beauty. Wit. Science. Music. Poetry. Comedy. Food. Faith. Debate. Survival. Invention. Courage. Family. Memory. Light.

That is how and why Legends of the Light began.

It started as my way of teaching my own children what I should have been teaching them all along. Stories of our ancestors. Stories of Jewish people who changed the world. Stories of those who served humanity as well as Am Yisrael. Stories that say: look where you come from. Look what your people have given. Look what they have built. Look what they endured. Look what they achieved anyway.

I wanted my children to see that they are part of something ancient, broad, diverse, rich and breathtakingly alive. Not a museum piece. Not a guilt trip. Not a dusty religious studies worksheet from 1992 with a sad photocopied menorah in the corner.

A living, breathing, enduring, amazing civilisation. A family. A people who have carried light through fire for over 3,500 years.

And my next books will continue that journey. Because I am learning too.

That’s the strange and beautiful thing. I’m not simply passing on knowledge I already had. I am going back to find what I lost. I am relearning what I forgot. I am digging through the rubble of my own disconnected memory and finding pieces of gold I should never have dropped. Then I am bringing them home to my children.

Here. Look. This is ours. This is yours. This is where we come from. This is what we survived. This is what we created. This is why it matters. This is who you are.

Because Eretz Yisrael, the cradle of our civilisation, has outlived empire after empire after empire that tried to erase us.

The Babylonians are gone. The Romans are gone. The Greeks are gone. The Nazis are ash and warning.

But the Jewish people are still here. Still arguing. Still singing. Still lighting candles. Still blessing children. Still building. Still mourning. Still dancing at weddings like the universe owes us a refund and we intend to collect it in joy.

And that is what I want my children to inherit.

Not fear. Not bitterness. Not hatred.

Pride. Memory. Strength. Light.

I want them to know that being Jewish is not a burden. It is not danger. It is not explaining ourselves to people committed to misunderstanding us.

It is a gift. A responsibility, yes. A complicated one, absolutely. A gift wrapped in history, tears, stubbornness, miracles, recipes, arguments, melodies and a frankly unreasonable number of books, opinions and recipes. But still a gift.

And I think every Jewish parent, in whatever way feels honest to them, should try to give that gift to their children.

Teach them who they are. Teach them where they come from. Teach them what they have inherited. Not with fear. Not with pressure. Not with joyless obligation.

With wonder. With pride. With stories. With music. With questions. With candles. With food. With laughter. With the knowledge that they belong to a people who have walked through history carrying a flame that should, by every law of probability, have gone out long ago.

And yet here we are.

Still burning. Still breathing. Still becoming.

And I hope, one day, our children will sit with their own children and look back across thousands of years of Jewish history, culture, creativity, resilience and achievement.

I hope they’ll tell them about the people who came before. I hope they’ll sing the songs. I hope they’ll light the candles. I pray they’ll understand that being Jewish is not something to hide, dilute or apologise for. I pray they’ll know it as something beautiful. Something ancient. Something alive.

I wish for them the pride I forgot to pass on soon enough. I wish for them roots deep enough to hold them steady and light bright enough to guide them forward.

And one day, I hope they’ll say, not with guilt, but with gratitude:

“My dad taught me who I am.”

And if my kids can say that one day, then I won’t have failed. I will have woken up. I will have remembered. I will have returned.

And I will have passed the light on and reminded them that Am Yisrael Chai – The People of Israel Live 🙏🏽🕯️💙