The speakers on the plane crackled followed by an announcement I had waited to hear most of my life, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to Israel!” As we pressed toward the lush green land from the sky, my eyes could not take in enough of what I was seeing.

My parents, Mitzi and Irv Sher, were the children of Russian Jewish immigrants. They were raised as conservative Jews but after they married and began to raise children, they moved into a looser form of Jewish observance, with a large component of enlightened secular humanism.

I was born in Morroco, and came to Israel at 9 years old.  As a man I went to Yeshiva (seminary and place of rabbinic study) and became a rabbi. On the Day of Atonement in 1973, a war started at 2:00 pm in Israel.