He had a hard, Jewish, stubborn streak.
Every time he ran away from a Yeshiva, a nice, proper Yeshiva his father had to pull some strings to admit him into; and when he said quietly, staring at the floor – I don’t want to study Torah, I want to be a sailor – blood drained from his father’s face, he swayed and missed the chair, trying to sit down, and mom helped him up, weeping silently; and when he left his home and his community, shaved off his beard and his newly-grown “payot”, sidelocks, that have only recently reached the required length – and cried at nights, punching his pillow; and when he was teased and called butterfingers, girly girl and worse on the ship, because he had never lifted anything heavier than the holy pages in his entire life; and when he was forcefully acquainted with some – well, actually with all the aspects of the raucous secular life, and he was wondering in horror if everyone was living this way; when his entire life was broken, cracking like shattered crockery under his new sailor’s shoes – never, not a single time did he think – what if I was wrong, what if it’s not for me after all, what if I’m going to regret it…
And he never regretted it, not once.
The sea was his life, his love, a mean bitch and a sweet mother.
His family disowned him, and he became a child of the waves.
He never talked about his past.
And soon enough even those who used to tease the former orthodox Jew and make fun of him, gave it up and forgot. He was just a guy, though a little weird. Doesn’t drink but smokes like a chimney, never hits the ladies but plays a guitar and sings divinely. Just another guy.
The night shifts, just before the dawn, were his favorite.
He used to pray at the rising sun, its cold and stained windows…He was quietly pronouncing the words for God – and there was nobody between them, just the green waves as far as the eye can see.
He was praying for some peace for his father because he knew that the pain and the shame his father felt for his apostate son were nothing in comparison to the pain and the shame he felt for being an apostate father. And the terrible guilt he felt towards his son would soon consume his warm, loving heart.
He was asking for peace for his father, but never asked for forgiveness for himself.
He was sending letters to his mother secretly, via his neighbor. She wasn’t religious, led a free life and often invited a young Yeshiva student for a cup of coffee. He always declined, of course, but she wasn’t angry. She was the one he asked to deliver to his mother short notes he was mailing from different ports.
He matured, his hands weren’t so soft and plump anymore, his skin grew darker and tougher, and his gaze – calm and confident.
He was getting prepared to join the army.
He was ripping off every root and string that was still connecting him to his childhood, to his days in Yeshiva, conversations of men and his mother’s whispers.
He was ripping off all the connections – and suddenly signed up for a remote university course on Judaism.
God wasn’t the one who banished me from his house, he explained to a bewildered friend. God didn’t give up on me, and I didn’t give up on him.
And once he admitted to himself that he yearned for the quiet rustling of pages, the murmur of his classmates and monotonous voices of his teachers.
I’m not dead, I haven’t lost my memory, I didn’t become a different person – all that is I is inside me and will always be.
All my love is bigger than the sea – I love the sea and my father and mother and God.
I am not going to cut my love into pieces and divide it, I am what I am. Stubborn, stiff-necked, loving and beloved.
That day he wrote to his father.
Tate, he wrote, if only you could see through my eyes.
The sea, he wrote, is most beautiful at dawn, when the cold mist is creeping across the deckhouse window, and there are just the sun and the waves ahead.
God, he wrote, has never left me, tate, and I have never left him.
Tate, I love you so much, I’m really missing both of you.
A man who had grown older and shriveled significantly during those years, while remaining still extremely stubborn, wept while clenching a yellowish page covered with letters and repeating over and over, “My son, my heart, a soul of a sailor… everything is going to be fine now, my boy, everything will be fine”…
Translated by Diana Shnaiderman-Pereira