EPILOGUE TO BAPTISM ANNULLED
Carmen had at least two children by her second husband. I lost track of her around 1990.
Archbishop McCarthy and the Archdiocese of Miami stepped up efforts to improve Catholic-Jewish relations. McCarthy would have made a wonderful Bishop of Rome, but he retired in 1994, and passed away in 2005 at the age of 87. While McCarthy appears to have stood for the best of Catholicism, his Church slipped back to its former ways when it selected as its leader Pope Benedict XVI, a man who had previously worn the Nazi uniform.
As for Jake, when he was ten (in 1987) I took him to Mount Sinai, Egypt where we both gave thanks for the answer to my prayer there eight years earlier. In 1988 Jake (with his mother’s consent) and Kathy, studying under the direction of Rabbi Ralph Glixman, both earned Orthodox conversions. At 13 he was not only bar mitzvahed in an Orthodox synagogue, but became a baal koreh (master of the reading) who could conduct a four- hour service in Hebrew. Our family rewarded him with a trip around the world.
We moved to Israel briefly in 1992 where I worked part time at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. Carmen didn’t show up in court to block my motion to remove him from the U.S. I bought my long dreamed of sailboat and brought it over to operate on a charter basis, but Hurricane Andrew destroyed our house in Florida before we could close on the sale of the property.
Jake never notified his mother of his return to America. He attended four high schools over four years – one in California, two in Florida, and one in Silver Spring, Maryland. The young man scored a perfect 800 in Math on his SAT and 740 in English. He won a Type I ROTC scholarship to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a bachelor’s degree in geophysics and a commission as a second lieutenant. His first set of orders was supposed to be to Space Command, and I was ecstatic.
It was at about that time that my son and I took different paths. I began work on my Ark Code book. It explored an alleged predictive computer code said to exist in the Torah. Jake never made it to Space Command. He obtained a five-year deferment from active duty in order to attend a rabbinical college (yeshiva) in Monsey, New York. In December, 1999 Yacov told me that he would be married in a few months. I asked who the woman was. He told me that he had not yet met one, but that it would be arranged soon. He was married three months later to a religious girl from Baltimore. Before the year 2000 ended, my first grandson was born.
Jake is now an Orthodox rabbi and military chaplain, having served in Texas, Kuwait and Qatar. For about four years (2003 to 2007) we were actually on active duty at the same time, but I rarely heard from him. However, about every 18 months I received announcement of the birth of another grandchild. So far he has produced six (five boys and a girl - see photo of 4 of them).
Kathy and I also had a child of our own. Like his half-brother, David is brilliant. At the age of 18, he graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University with a major is space physics. His research on Martian atmospheric pressure has been ground-breaking.
There’s a common cliché in Judaism, "God save us from the baal teshuvas." These are people (often converts) who become so strict in their observance of Jewish Law as to lose sight of its real meaning, and to some degree, their humanity. The day came when I asked Jake why he didn’t visit our home anymore. His reply was that, “Abraham did not return unto his father, Terach.” More, after all that I went through for him, he informed me that only (Yeshiva Ohr Somayach in) Monsey, New York made him a Jew.
Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. Know that children do not come with a guarantee of eternal loyalty or love no matter what you do for them. The prophet Malachi knew this when he concluded his book with the words "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the LORD. And he shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers; lest I come and smite the world with utter destruction."
Barry S. Roffman
February 7, 2012.
