Never Give Up on Your Dreams
Never give up on your dreams. You never know where life might take you if you believe in your goals, work hard to get there, and never let go of hope.
It is with a heart full of joy that I share the news that, at the age of 86, I am about to become a published author with the upcoming release of “The Resistance Rabbi and the Gift.” It’s a story of love and faith in the most difficult of circumstances.
The story opens in Poland in 1938, as tensions of the coming war are building.
With Nazi power surging, a young rabbi joins the Polish underground and becomes an elite fighter. A brilliant pianist turned bomb specialist becomes his greatest hope—and his greatest risk.
The roots of the novel reach back to 2008, when my wife, Myra, of blessed memory, and I led thirty congregants on a mission to Poland. The mission was called Routes to Roots. My own family originated in Poland before settling in Duluth, Minnesota in 1908. As I was growing up in Duluth, I felt the Holocaust was something far away that had nothing to do with me, yet I remember having horrible nightmares about it. The trip to Poland changed everything I thought I knew about myself, and the Holocaust, despite having taught a great many courses about it.
Standing together with Myra in Auschwitz, and walking the streets of Warsaw, I felt something I still cannot fully explain—a familiarity with places I had never been, as though some part of me had walked there before. It was a profound experience. My imagination seized on the idea that perhaps I had a past life tied to the Polish resistance and that the streets I walked and the buildings I stared at were seen through the eyes of my soul, opening a path to a deeper understanding of who I am and what my life’s purpose is—or perhaps was.
The idea of writing a novel about what I thought might have been my previous life was born. I called it Eli’s Journal, and I began writing as soon as we returned home.
The novel sat dormant for many years. Life does have a way of pulling us in new directions. I had come to terms and learned to cope with my lifelong battle with Dyslexia, but my 2005 diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease was an entirely different challenge.
photo by Sandi Altner
My work on the novel finally resumed in the last year with the help of my writing companion, Sandi Altner, an historical fiction author. Together, Sandi and I worked through every page of the early draft, created new scenes, rewrote storylines, and explored human reactions to impossible challenges.We enjoyed hours and hours of study together as the story developed and deepened. For me, it was a very personal journey as I imagined myself as Eli, struggling with the torment of how God would view a rabbi who must take lives as he fights for the survival of the Jewish people.
Through it all, we came to experience the triumphs and anguish of Rabbi Eli Morgenstern and Miriam Goldberg in their journey leading up to war in 1939.
Completing this novel and sharing it with you is a dream I have had for a very long time.
I encourage each and every one of you to follow your own dreams and make time to do something that is truly important to you. Keep going. If it’s that significant or just fun, you can find a way to do it.
I will remind you of an old Yiddish expression: “A man is not old until his regrets take the place of his dreams.”
Hug your family, and live your dreams.
Shabbat Shalom,
—Rabbi Merle E. Singer