“Dear Jack. You are losing readers, and as a huge fan of your books, allow me a few moments to tell you why.”
So begins a letter from a reader who names himself only as Earnest. I am curious as to what he has to say, as a critical huge fan.
He says two novels of mine are his favorites…first Indecent Proposal…’’the movie so goyish, that I was shocked to find the novel so Jewish. Beautifully written, as the Amazon reviewers say, but it begins and ends with Israel. Your Krav Maga chapter, the Jew against the Arab, is so meticulously orchestrated that it is unmatched on the art of self-defense. Joshua Kane is the champ, but Israel is the hero.
“Why Israel? i know the book is now a classic and an international bestseller, but Jack, the book could have sold many more copies if it weren’t so Israel.
“Is Israel so unconditionally perfect? In your eyes, yes. The same for your novel Compulsive, my favorite book of all time. I am a horseplayer myself, so I know what Gil Gilels is going through. In your fast-paced zip zip prose, he must navigate around a Soros type character to save himself, his aged parents, and Israel…chapter 22 the sum of it all.
“But Jack, why Israel? Israel is not popular these days. But you persist. Please explain.”
Dear Earnest…You may as well ask me why I love my wife, my children, my grandchildren unconditionally. This cannot be explained. Not in words.
Maybe in music. When I hear the opening notes to Hatikvah, I am touched so deeply that I can not resist weeping. It gets me all the time.
The emotion is inexplicable and overpowering. Emotion is a secret part of the heart. To say too much is to write it away.
I was raised in a Torah-loving home. Let me skip to a brief memory. When I was a child, my mother would start the water running for my bath.
This was okay until the water got too high. At least I thought so. I thought so because in that instant, the water menacingly rising, I was trapped with my people facing the Red Sea.
So real was the Torah to me…and so to this day.
To this day, a people returning home after a 2,000-year absence is the greatest love story ever told.
Yes, growing up, I had heroes in baseball…DiMaggio, Mantle…also hockey…Maurice Rocket Richard, Guy Lafleur…the movies, mostly Westerns.
But the biggest hero of them all was, and is King David. I am with him through all his trials and triumphs, and he speaks to me every day through his Psalms.
You could say that from David I take my cue. From Psalm to Psalm, David expresses his unconditional love for Israel. He cries to God for our sake.
David is no globalist liberal. He is openly disdainful of the other nations, particularly those who torment his people.
How did he know Hamas, from 3,000 years ago, and that at this moment, thousands of these nations, the great unwashed, are marching throughout America to protest Israel?
Their day will come. He saw the reckoning then, in his day, and he will see it again, in our day.
David writes that for God, the nations are toys, playthings. Only Israel is God’s treasure.
Similarly, Moses. A stiff-necked people? Yes. But Moses was all in for his Hebrews.
To prove his unconditional love, he declined God’s offer to destroy the people, and create a new nation from Moses’ seed.
Said Moses, “If you destroy them, O Lord, destroy me too.”
I still get chills when I study this.
This legacy is mine, and it is my privilege to honor it and pursue it in all my works…God give me the strength.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here.
NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here
Plus, a free sample chapter of his noir gambling thriller, Compulsive, is available from his website, here.