By Rabbi Michoel Oishie for COLlive and Hasidic Archives
One day, a young man came to my office. He asked me if I was have heard from his brother, who had broken from the family and abandoned Jewish observance.
I told him that we had fallen out of touch recently.
“My father is worried about him,” he said.
“Your father is worried?” I asked in surprise. “The father who beat him and threw him out of the house? The father who didn’t want anything to do with him, who, even when his son was recovering from an operation, did not come to see him? That father?”
He admitted that his father was a very difficult man. Then he told me something surprising. His father regularly goes online to read his son’s blog. “Not because he is interested in what he writes, but to see that his child is still alive.”
For the last few months, however, his father had not been able to find anything written by his son and began to worry about him. That was why he had come to me.
I did some asking around, discovered that the brother was safe, and relayed the information to his father.
The episode taught me a lesson, though it is one that I still don’t quite know how to explain: even a father who does not know how to be one, feels like one.
An excerpt from the forthcoming book In the Trenches: Stories from the Front Lines of Jewish Life in Russia, it can be pre-ordered here. Find more of Hasidic Archives latest books on HasidicArchives.com. Hasidic Archives books are also available in bulk.
This article left with me fixed feelings, so I won’t say anything because judging can only be done when you’ve been in those shoes.