Forgive Yourself

Moussa Chacham-Tzedek, a wealthy Persian businessman who’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness, had a secret he wanted to share before he died. With tremendous siyata d’Shmaya, he managed to smuggle a group of teenagers over the Iranian border. But this was something he would surely have been proud to share with his family — so why was I the first one to hear it? And why was he so broken? PART IV

Amu Moussa was brave and resourceful,

and I was in awe of his account of how he organized “his” bochurim, moving them across the mountains and into the smuggler’s truck — and especially how he carried an injured David, together with David’s tefillin, on his back, making it to the rendezvous with seconds to spare. But for some reason, Moussa Chacham-Tzedek didn’t look proud. In fact, he looked positively haunted.

“We were in the back of a smuggler’s truck and driving across the Persia-Pakistan border on a rocky, mountainous pass in the dark of night with the lights off,” he continued his account. “I held David, and as he cried out in pain, the other boys looked at me for strength. ‘Everything will be fine,’ I assured them. ‘Hashem has brought us out of Persia and He will take care of us to ensure we make it out of Pakistan as well.’ But I wasn’t without my fears. We understood that the Revolutionary Guard wanted to stop army deserters and political prisoners like us from escaping, but the Pakistani soldiers were largely an unknown. David must have felt my anxiety as I rocked him in my arms and he whispered, ‘I still have my tefillin, and we still have Hashem.’ He was right about that, at least.”

Amu Moussa caressed the rock he held in his hand — the miracle rock he used to stop the driver who was about to pull away without him. “Our driver brought us across the invisible line between the two countries, and from there, we drove another hour before we were stopped by a Pakistani army patrol. They must have thought we had a lot more money to bribe them with than we had from the way they lined us up and searched each one of us. At first I wondered if the smuggler was an insider, planning on profiting from the whole interaction, but my thoughts quickly changed as I watched him die — shot in the head by the border patrol’s captain on a whim. Some of the younger boys began to cry and I knew we had to be very careful. Our money was almost all gone, but I didn’t mind handing over our remaining coins. Our airfare was to be paid by the Jewish Agency once we made it to a nearby city. But the soldiers weren’t interested in our story.”