Gate of Return

Mysterious chimes, shofar blasts, compulsive behavior, strange and inexplicable happenings. It’s with this crazy sense of upheaval that “Gate of Return” begins. The year is 1976.

“I’ve come to believe that the source of the chiming sounds I was hearing that morning was a heavenly shofar whose blasts were shaking me up, beckoning toward the opening gates, calling for my return, pointing the way home – a wake-up call telling me it was time to reclaim my Jewish soul.”

That is the last sentence in the memoir’s epilogue, nearly a half century later. The year is 2025.

The journey is one of a Jewish soul returning home from faraway places, beginning with a Christian upbringing.

“Everything is foreseen, yet free will is given.” That is what the author tells a bet din – a rabbinical court – on her 60th birthday on May 18, 2003. It’s her belief that her being there for an Orthodox conversion had always been foreseen, yet unknown to her at the time of her birth on May 18, 1943, or during her childhood and younger adult years. Throughout her life, she made her choices freely, including her Reform conversion when she was in her thirties. And yet, those free choices had kept her on a path that was preordained.

This ongoing journey continues way beyond her 2003 Orthodox conversion.

“In retrospect, I came to understand my sense of foreboding in 2016 as a premonition of that still-undefined danger. My nightmare’s imagery foreshadowed the broken glass that would be strewn across the Capitol floors in the aftermath of Trump’s failed coup, the broken glass through which our legislators would walk as they returned on the night of January 6, 2021, to finish their work of certifying Joe Biden as the duly elected president of the United States. Upholding the results of the election in keeping with their oaths of office and in defiance of the Trump-incited violence, they protected our Constitution and preserved our democracy.”

A chapter entitled “Shattered Glass” is a commentary in the age of Trump, with a Jewish perspective.

The last chapters of the book also include a focus on Israel and Gaza in the context of the Hamas atrocity of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s reaction after that attack.

“As the days, weeks, and months of war continued, this Israeli counter to the Hamas barbarism became itself barbaric, as if the killing and wounding of tens of thousands of innocent Gazan civilians, the utter destruction of an already destroyed place, could somehow make Israel safer. The result has been a humanitarian disaster, the definitive making of a hell on earth of a place that had long been a hellscape, and the creation of a graveyard for children – as though these things might accomplish the destruction of Hamas.”

The last chapter, before the epilogue, ends with this sentence.

“It is still next year in Jerusalem, and I keep faith in that future.”