A Million Miles from Nowhere   

I wasn’t sure what I’d find in Okinawa, but I didn’t expect a group of eager Jews

I didn’t expect to find an animated Jewish community at the ends of the earth, but it underscored how the pintele Yid isn’t constrained by borders

There are several places a frum American Jew might realistically expect to find a decades-old picture of his own grandfather.

Atop a pile of books being given away by a church congregation, in a military installation on a tiny island in the East China Sea, four hundred miles from nowhere… is not one of them.

But there it undoubtedly was, and there, as well, was I, staring at each other across 85 years and a thousand miles. The questions hanging heavy in the tropical island air between us were: Which of us had taken a more unlikely route to get here? And how had we both wound up at the same coordinates in the space-time matrix of this serendipitous universe?

Purim in Japan

I’d come to Okinawa, Japan, for Purim of 2024. Not as a Purim joke, or in pursuit of an elaborate costume or overblown mishloach manos theme, but for real: to arrange and lead the chag for the small but proud group of Jews living on the island. Setting out, I wasn’t sure what I would find — but a courageous small kehillah of Yidden absolutely thirsting for Torah definitely wasn’t it.