Connecting the Dots: An Unmaking & A Remaking
My journey from Cairo to Judaism and Zionism; the Introduction
They say you can only connect the dots looking backwards. It’s a truth that settles upon us all eventually, often accompanied by a quiet chorus of ‘what ifs’. What if I’d taken that job? Moved to that city? Married that other person? For most, it’s the gentle, sometimes melancholic, soundtrack to midlife reflection.
For me, an Egyptian who chose Judaism, who tore himself from the fabric of everything he knew and wove himself into an entirely new tapestry, looking backwards isn’t gentle. It’s seismic. It feels less like tracing a path and more like navigating the wreckage of a life deliberately detonated. It’s difficult. Painful. Jaw-dropping in its sheer audacity. Sometimes, late at night, the reality hits me with the force of disbelief: This is my life? The dusty Cairo streets, the cadence of Arabic laughter, the familiar scent of koshary shops, the very rhythm of a culture that shaped my bones – it’s all thousands of miles and nearly a decade behind me. It’s as if I took a rubber to the first twenty-five years of my existence. Just… gone. A self-inflicted vanishing act.
Think about what most people inherit: a religion worn comfortably like a favourite jumper, a culture absorbed with one's mother's milk, an identity handed down like a family heirloom, a tangible connection to ancestors through land, stories, or possessions. I inherited none of it. By choice. This, I believe, is one of the most radical, terrifying things a human being can do. The cost? Unimaginable. It’s paid daily in the currency of phantom limbs – the ghost sensations of a life amputated.
And yet.
I have no regrets.
Let me say that louder: I HAVE NO REGRETS.
Here, now, in this chosen skin, in this chosen faith, in this chosen family, I am happier. More content. More authentically me than I ever thought possible. I am, quite simply, the person I clawed my way towards becoming. That truth is my bedrock.
So why look back? Why dredge up the ghosts and the dust?
The urge is complex, a knot of motivations I'm still untangling.
Is it nostalgia? Perhaps. A bittersweet ache for the feel of home, even as I reject so much of what it represented.
Is it fear for my children? Absolutely. A cold dread that they might never truly grasp the roots of the tree they sprang from. That they won’t know the Cairo sun that baked my skin, the alleyways I played in, the specific weight of the history and struggle I carried – and ultimately left behind. That my ‘before’ will be just a faded photograph, devoid of context and heartbeat.
Is it fear for myself? A terrifying, growing certainty. I am forgetting. The names of the streets in my childhood neighbourhood are slipping away, dissolving like dust in my palms. And then, the true horror: I couldn’t remember the phone number of the friend who knew me from age four to twenty-five. His number. Engrained in my muscle memory for two decades. Gone. A visceral panic seized me. Why? We’ve spoken barely a handful of times since I left Egypt in early 2016. But that number was a lifeline, a tiny, tangible thread back to him, and by extension, to me. Its loss felt like watching a piece of my own past turn to ash.
This forgetting is a kind of death. And it connects to a deeper, more chilling realisation: In a very real sense, I have died.
When we lose someone we love, their absence is a constant ache. They’re missing from holidays, celebrations, the mundane Tuesday dinners. For everyone I ever knew back home, I am that absence. I am the missing one at Eid, at weddings, at funerals, at the corner café. They have grieved, or simply moved on. I am, functionally, dead to them.
But here’s the uniquely surreal agony: I can still see my own funeral. I’m not looking down from heaven; I’m peering through the cold, unforgiving glass of a screen. Social media becomes a macabre window. Instead of seeing them smiling up at my benevolent ghost, I see them. And what I see often makes me recoil. I see friends, cousins, people I shared my deepest secrets with, my daily bread… cheering for Hamas. Sharing memes that casually call for the murder of Jews. Lately, aligning themselves with the Mullahs in Iran. The cognitive dissonance is shattering. Were they always like this, simmering beneath the surface, and my love for them blinded me? Or has the world hardened them, twisted them into versions I don't recognise? Witnessing this, from the outside, feeling the betrayal vibrate through my bones – it’s like attending my own wake and hearing the mourners curse my name. I don’t smile down; I swear at the screen. A lot.
I thought about pouring all this into a book, wrestling with structure and publishers. But the process felt stifling, artificial. No. This story needs to breathe, to unfold in real-time, as I sift through the wreckage and the jewels of my past. It needs the immediacy, the vulnerability, the raw connection of sharing it with you, piece by piece.
So, consider this your invitation. Join me. Walk beside me as I try to reconnect the dots – not to go back, but to understand the path that led me here. To reclaim the memories before they vanish entirely. To make sense of the profound loss and the even more profound gain. To show my children the soil from which their father grew, thorns and all.
The journey starts today, 20th June 2025. I’m 34. A bit soft around the middle. Blessed with two incredible kids. And I’m standing at the edge of memory, ready to dive back in. Let’s see what we find. Shabbat Shalom!
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