I was a Jew, I knew that, but I’d also copped out on my people, my team. As a Jew, did I have the heart of a field mouse?

As told to Cindy Scarr by Chaim Cohen

Pregame

I was 27 the first time I saw tefillin on a living Jew, at my younger brother Ari’s bar mitzvah. Now I’m 54, twice 27. It’s like there are two equal-sized halves to my life. But I only vaguely remember what the first half was like. I have memories, but if I’m telling you a story about the first half of my life, it feels like it’s in third person, as if I’m an observer in that person’s life. I know the details, I know the information, but I almost can’t imagine what life would be like without Shabbos and kashrus, the basic stuff.

I was born October 8, 1969, in the town of Sharon, Massachusetts. For those that don’t know, Sharon is a Jewish town, although at the time, I lived in the non-Jewish part that was “being taken over by Jews,” which wasn’t much fun for me.

I was a skinny kid with a long neck and a big nose. I got picked on a lot and even chased home. My parents divorced when I was four, but when I was ten my mother got married to a great guy who allowed me to play football, which changed a lot of things for me. He told my mom that if she didn’t let me play, I’d get bullied and beaten up my whole life.

It was great. The kids who bullied me also played football and my favorite part of the game was that it was a fair fight — no one could gang up on me, it was one on one. I was really aggressive and angry, and very good at football.

Growing up, we were sort of affiliated Conservative. And depending on who you ask, I was either thrown out of Hebrew school or asked to leave. By the time I was 12, I wanted no part of the extra work involved in preparing for a bar mitzvah, but my father and non-Jewish stepmother forced me to continue with a tutor and have a bar mitzvah ceremony.

In my mind my bar mitzvah party was more of a goodbye party. I was saying goodbye to temple forever. I believed that if I assimilated, it wouldn’t matter — I could marry a non-Jew and disappear from the Jewish nation forever, and that would be no loss to the Jewish People. Who was I, anyway?

But here’s something that still fascinates me: To get myself pumped up for football games, I would look at a specific Holocaust photo, which I later learned was a famous photo of Rabbi Moshe Yitzchak Hagerman of Olkusz, Poland, who was forced to put on his defiled tallis and tefillin, stand barefoot and daven next to the men from the Jewish community, tied up and face down on the ground. I’d look at that picture and work myself into an angry, vengeful state, perfect for football, of wanting revenge against the Nazis for hurting Jews.

Beyond Rabbi Hagerman’s holy face, however, I had no other Jewish connection, nor did I plan on ever having one.