My son isn't Jewish but I send him my love from afar

As told to Musia Slavin by Yehoshua Goldberg

How will I do this again? I asked myself when I woke up one Monday morning, soon after I turned 23. I didn’t know if I could keep going through the motions. Make money. Buy expensive things. Make more money. Buy more things. Make even more money. Buy even more things.

I already had the flashiest car on the market and was getting expensive haircuts every three weeks — just because I could. I was already going on wild shopping sprees and spending a fortune in high-end stores without checking my bank balance.

When your account is so well-padded, another hundred thousand — or two — doesn’t make much of a difference. I was chasing the money, but for what? I was already living the high life. How much different could it get?

My world didn’t always revolve around wealth. My two brothers and I grew up in a Christian home in Brisbane, Australia, and were raised by a single mom who struggled to put us through private school. But our religious education was important to my mom — even if it meant that we were eating beans on toast for dinner. Again. It was all she could afford.

I graduated high school, became an electrician, and then, after two years of tinkering with wires, playing with control panels, and fixing broken circuits, I stumbled upon a more lucrative career. I became a commercial real estate agent, and within a year, I was rich.

But the money wasn’t doing anything for me anymore. It didn’t give me happiness, satisfaction, or the sense of fulfillment I craved. That’s how I found myself 23, loaded with money, and wondering how I would go on.

But the job was waiting, so on that Monday, I donned my custom-made suit, put on my designer watch, and headed to my expensive car. When I stopped at a traffic light, I noticed the man in the next lane. He was at least two decades older than me — wearing a similar suit and a similar watch and he was driving a similar car. And he looked miserable.

Would that be me in 20 years?

Then the light turned green and both of us sped off. I didn’t think about the man much that day, but the next morning, I had the same feeling of heavy dread when I woke up. And when I got to the same traffic light, the same man was there, looking just as miserable.

Yes, that’s going to be me in 20 years — unless I do something about it.

After work that night, I typed “timeline of religions” into my browser and scanned the results. I’d learned about Christianity in school, but it never rang true to me. If I was searching, I wanted the real thing. I wanted to go as close to the original source as possible.

Judaism was first on the list.