Playing to My Strengths

I

started playing the piano at the age of five. When I was eight, my father took me to play for a family friend who was a concert violinist with the Chicago Symphony. After hearing me play Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 16, he told my father, “This boy is talented. He can go into music. But music is a hard career.”

I heard, “This boy is talented. He can go into music.” But my father heard, “Music is a hard career.” He and my mother encouraged me to develop my talent and enrolled me in a preparatory program for Juilliard, America’s leading performing arts conservatory, but when the time came for me to attend college, he insisted that I pursue a “normal degree.” I was deeply disappointed, as I had dreamed for years of studying at Juilliard, but instead I attended a state college, where I majored in math and computer science.

Although our family was not observant — we belonged to a Conservative synagogue — my siblings and I were raised with strong feelings of loyalty to Israel. We also kept kosher at home. In 1982, my junior year of college, I attended a one-year overseas study program at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. All through my studies at the university, I continued to keep kosher and asked that my roommates either do so as well or keep their food separate. Strangely, many of the people who roomed with me soon “flipped out” and became religious. Even more strangely, their parents invariably blamed me, the kosher-eating roommate. At many a sheva brachos for a newly religious roommate, parents would approach me and accusingly declare, “Michael, it’s all your fault!”

And I wasn’t even religious myself!

But what goes around comes around, and after I got married, in 1992, my wife and I embarked on a teshuvah journey, eventually becoming fully religious and moving, in 1999, to Israel, where I worked as a computer consultant in Ramat Beit Shemesh while raising my four children.