The Promise

THE PROMISE is my promise to my mother, from her proud mama's boy. On her deathbed, all she ever asked of me was to be a mensch. My mother was dying of ovarian cancer through most of my adolescence, and I spent those years by her hospital bedside instead of anywhere else a teenager is supposed to be — holding her hand, singing her the Yiddish lullabies she used to sing to me, easing what the medicine couldn't. In the hallways of my own school, at the same time, I was being bullied for being Jewish — two wars, fought in the same breath. I created an alternative ego, SexyHeeb, who wasn't built to survive one of them. He was built to survive both: tough enough to take the hits at school, tough enough to hold what I couldn't say out loud about losing my mother. When she died, what SexyHeeb protected me from changed. It wasn't bullies anymore — it was the emptiness, the abandonment, the yearning for a mother I could no longer reach. Somewhere inside that grief, I kept coming back to my family's trips to Israel when I was a boy, chasing that same age of innocence I yearned to feel again. I realized Israel was my mother, and I wanted to defend her. That's what took me to Israel, into the Israeli paratroopers, and into a real war — carrying an invented self all the way in, and finding out, standing in the middle of it, whether he was a costume, or who I'd actually become. My armor. My shield. My sword. A Jewish warrior. My journey told exactly how it happened. It says more about faith, survival, empowerment, and evolution than any argument ever could.