This year, 2024, during the Jewish days of awe I will turn 69 years old. B”H I am in good health. I have lived, during my 69 years, in many places. I was born in Manhattan (at Mount Sinai hospital which is ironic because my Hebrew name is Moshe!). We moved to Forest Hills and then to Great Neck. My father wanted to leave the city in his rear-view mirror and my mother did not like the city. I left Great Neck when I was 16 and finished high school in France. After that Providence, Rhode Island and Brown University and after that Boston for a summer to take a post graduate course at Harvard in publishing thinking that would be a possible career for me. It was not. And, then having found my profession and passion in the wine trade, I moved back to France. When I returned from France, I was recruited by a large spirits distributor in Texas to build its wine business (they had very little at the time) and I moved to Dallas, Texas. I spent twenty years in Dallas, ten working for the distributor (now the largest in the world) and ten with my own importing business which I built almost from scratch. I visited nearly every one of our 50 states in those years. That period ended in 2000 and I moved back to New York. My mother had died and my father was dying and my business model needed to change.
My time in New York was a roller coaster with several positions at different wine companies. During that time, I traveled to Argentina, Chile, Spain. I learned Spanish (which I used every day in my apartment building in New York with the many wonderful workers there).
In 2016, The Jewish Federation of North America organized a trip to Israel for gay members of the Federation. As a member of the Pride Committee of UJA-New York, I was eager to participate. We were treated like visiting royalty by then President Rivlin, Dalia Rabin, Aluf Benn, the editor of Haaretz and many others. The trip was eye-opening, mind-opening and heart-opening. I discovered Israel.
And I vowed to myself to return at some point. In 2018, my life took a difficult turn: the company I worked for changed direction and severed the employment of all managers who worked for the previous “regime”. I learned I had prostate cancer and had surgery which altered my emotional state as it changed my physical one. My tenure as President of Ansche Chesed also had ended and I felt a bit rudderless for that. And so, the intuition came to me, (and intuition I have learned is God speaking to us in a whisper). And the intuition said clearly: now is the time to move to Israel. Now! In May of 2019, I made Aliyah to Israel. And now for the first time in my life I understand what it means to be home, to have a home. Not a house, a home. Looking back, I now understand why I was so uncomfortable in so many of the places in which I had lived. I was not at home and was not home. Here in Israel, I am home and I breathe in a different way. It’s not always easy by any means. “Little” Israel: the government, the bureaucracy, the often-rude manners, the traffic, the noise (honking cars) can be wearing. But ISRAEL, in capital letters, is tonic, soothing, nourishing. Living in land that understands and lives by Jewish time, Sun and Moon, that shuts down mostly on Shabbat, that opens again on Sunday not Monday, that respects the holiday periods. Home! The Israelites needed forty years to learn what home means. I needed 63 years. I am a slow learner, I guess. But I arrived and that’s what counts now. הגעתי!
Wishing the entire congregation well and a new year filled with and blessed by hope, sweetness and love. Praying for peace and security in Israel and the return of the hostages.
