Charlie & Prince Gamdze Full Interview

so it's an honor to have you on the show thank you so much for being here um you have such an incredible background it's something that is so unique to our people um and as uh part of the uh royal family of swaziland you began your life in a very different way than most people that i've met personally so can you share with us a little bit about your background and how you ended up in israel well that is a very long story because i could give you a shortened version and that is i was studying at university in south africa in johannesburg i'm a language major so i studied french german and italian and one day i found myself very bored in an italian class and i didn't find that the lecture was saying something so interesting so i looked around myself to see what other people were doing and there was someone sitting to my right who was writing backwards from right to left i looked at him and i said i looked at what he was writing i said that's not italian what is that and after the class i asked him i said tell me what were you doing there he said i was doing my hebrew homework it was a jewish person i thought wow if i could write like that that would really be fancy you know so i you have to understand the the backdrop to all of this we're talking about a time of apartheid south africa we're not talking about the way it is today or anything like that in fact one could say that there's basically no similarity in the south africa that i know and the south africa of today so it's a totally different uh anyway so the reason i'm saying that is because i decided i was gonna study hebrew wow just out of the blue little did i know that it was going to be life-changing i thought it was just like another language like i speak german too and i speak italian i speak french so i thought well let's add another language so i went to the hebrew department and everybody who was studying hebrew over there they were all jewish people if you know something about the south african jewish community they are basically all lithuanians that came to lithuania the beginning of the 1900s the end of the 1800s 1900s 1899 1900s something like that so i was the first black person there and um so they said everybody should choose the south african community jewish community is very um traditional was tradition at least in others even if people didn't keep shabbos or something that go to show on a friday night and then make kiddish and then do whatever they want you know right anyway so i enrolled to study hebrew and after the first half a year we had learned the basics of the grammar the hebrew grammar and then we had what they called language laboratory sessions where they had a native israeli help us with pronunciation and comprehension of texts this is on the university vid sorry it's called bits for short and um the first text that i remember i remember i was sitting in this language the box with my headphones on and all of a sudden i hear this middle eastern music in the background and i sort of relax and all of a sudden i realize that this in the music there's somebody saying something so i concentrated more and i realized what he was saying i heard the words these are lines that come up in the in uh just be in chakras just after the corbonas people just before the garbage some so and uh i when i heard this it was arcadis yitzhak binding of isaac when i heard that there was something in me that it sounded familiar and you've never heard it before i've never but the first time you heard it it sounded it felt like something it felt like it was telling me something very very deep about myself i said wow how could it be telling you something about yourself you're not even jewish at least at that time i was so i i'll tell you what it felt like it felt like i had lost my memory and that this this text that was i was hearing in my ear was reviving my memory and a memory which i didn't even know i had wow so it was a very very um intense it was really intense and i i felt like more like a sherlock holmes which is one of the books that i used to read detective books right i felt i was on the scent of something very very incredible you know what's interesting we there's a we run a trip that takes lots of men to israel many of them for the first time and what's incredible is many times throughout the trip a man will come to me first time in israel and either at the western wall of the hotel or just when he lands in ben gurion and he'll say to me i've never been here but it feels familiar uh-huh exactly so this was my experience with uh the al-qaeda as i was the first um text really and uh um so my journey from that point to judaism i i call it a journey of self-discovery i was coming into knowing who i was as a person because i wasn't even jewish i didn't know what it meant well what the implications of my my search were but i started reading i went to at my university that had a collection of hebrew books called the landau lander collection and i said it must be something in this language that somehow moves me and i i didn't know it was necessarily something of a religious nature at that time i just knew it had to do with this language and i looked around what was in the the library there were books on agriculture people same um geology all kinds of books and then i saw in one corner something i didn't even know what it was and i decided to look at it it said mishnay i said what's this i i took it out from the shelf took it off the shelf and i started paging through it i said wow this is very interesting at this point you can read it i just i just wanted to read it and i borrowed it from the library and i did have some jewish friends i still have some jewish friends who are hashem they are all observant now and i started sharing with them what the rambam says what the is this and this and that and my friend started getting very interested and they started going to uh torah classes that were given by um the campus rabbi at the time rabbi moffson is his name he students in johannesburg he still lives there and um they started getting more and more interesting i was very happy for them because they were jewish anyway so they were getting interested in their own tradition but so i followed their progression uh like just from the back just looking and seeing where it's going to take them and then one day they invite me to their home and what are they doing they're putting mezuzas on the door and then the next thing about a month later i see a big balagan in the kitchen and there's a rabbi there they're crushing up their kitchen all from from the beginning of your introduction of right work to them and then you know we used to go and watch uh go and see movies on the weekend so one time i called him on a friday afternoon i tell them about a a very action-packed movie that's showing somewhere in town and if they're interested in coming to see see they said well it sounds very good but you know we keep shabbos for sure my shabbos now we don't go in to movies on friday night and i just looked at them and i was amazed what i was extremely impressed because my attitude has always been that if something is true it compels the one who hears it truth is not truth is not about entertainment truth is about do you really want the truth because the truth can actually be life-changing and some people are quite happy with the lifestyles that they live and not and are not prepared to change regardless of whether it's true or not true but i saw with my friends there were a living example for me how a person because they both came from totally secular backgrounds our person can can turn 180 degrees because they realize that the way they've been living their life life up until now it does not go in according to what they understand they will have got to be and did that that move you in terms of of your next move it did indeed it moved me because it made me understand that um well you have to understand because at that stage i really didn't know i knew i wasn't jewish and i i was happy for them but i didn't know what it would do for me i didn't know what it would do for me so i started continued studying hebrew and then at a certain stage i stopped and continued only with german and italian and then one day a person who was brought by the hebrew university professor moshe sharon he was looking through the records of students past students and he saw this name and i had pretty very high marks in hebrew and he said who is this so he went around trying to find me because we are still starting at the same university by that time i already spoke fluent hebrew even before i came to israel so he's an israeli and he asked me he said how come you stopped studying hebrew i said well what am i going to do with the language even the jews that i know they can't speak it so uh right and then then he popped the question he got the question he said would you perhaps be interested in studying for a phd in hebrew language at the hebrew university in jerusalem wow i sort of looked at him and i thought what's he talking about but in my readings i had come across um you know i started reading on my own the weekly postures of the week because my hebrew was good enough to understand what was being said and it reminded me of um when hashem said leave your land and go to the land that i will show you so i i in my cr my i had a question in my head asking saying well okay so avraham avinu was being talked to by god so wouldn't you expect that god he would just tell the rest of the people around him about hashem what's this business of taking him away from all of that all his surroundings and bringing him to the land of israel so when this professor was speaking to me this is what was going on in my head wow and i said i am also going i am going to israel wow so that's how i actually got to israel and i realized in other words if if i wasn't uh if i hadn't converted and studied talmud i'd probably be an academic by now because that was really i'd probably be a professor in some university but i realized that that's not the reason why i wanted to learn people i realized that it was actually about finding out who i am the um so he says because that's the only way a person can discover themselves is by following hashem because at the end of the day what does the person know he doesn't do that all he knows is that i like basketball and ben and jerry's ice cream and i uh these type of people i avoid and these type of people i like so in the end he only knows about he knows nothing about he himself or what they're about they only know as they say in the hebrew what they like and what they don't like right and i thought well how can a person live 120 years without even knowing who they are and then i found that it was a journey way of self-discovery my whole journey to judaism is a part is not about being convinced of um the truth of one face faith over another it was me myself it was about me that's what i felt was there a moment where you came here and you were studying what was what was the moment where you said i have to take it from this is an interesting exercise an intellectual exercise uh an exercise of passion and meaning i feel something to i have to convert to be part of this people was there a moment for you when that happened yes indeed um what happened is that um my friends who i knew from south africa they called me up while i was studying for my phd in hebrew they called me up from south africa and they told me that they were coming to study at a yeshiva in yerushalayim called osamaya and they said they wanted to see me so i went over to see them and i was really surprised that the way they looked you know with their yarmulkes and and since and they could see i was really puzzled with what what's happened to these guys and they invited me for dinner and they said how do you explain that a non-jew brings jewish people closer to their tradition i looked at them and said what are you talking about they said well if it wasn't for you we don't even know if we'd have become religious we don't know if it will become from at all but you introduced us to the rambam and it opened our whole world out up and we started going to shurim and then they were starting tomorrow in in the initiative wow so when i saw that and they said look there's some there's some classes open for every anyone can come if they want to hear you know about jewish philosophy you don't have to be jewish to come and hear those so i said okay i'll come in here a few classes so sat in the inaudible row and all of a sudden the rabbi started speaking and i said this is it what i've been searching for all this time in other words i knew there was something in the language but i did not know what it was all of a sudden i made the incredible discovery that what i loved about the language was the judaism in it because all that attracted me were jewish books speaking about judas that was like a sledgehammer for me and i got a bit upset to tell the truth because i said i started speaking to hashem and i said hashem this is not fair if i love judaism why was i not born jewish how come i was born out of the folk and i got so upset that i decided i was leaving israel and i went to guess where i went to rome in italy a language i speak i saw all these priests and nuns going around with their crosses and everything you know and i said yeah hashem this is your fault if i'd have been born jewish i wouldn't be here you know and then there were some tourists instructed taking people around showing them saint peter's and all this type of thing and he was talking about the roman empire how they contributed to civilization and all i was thinking about was what the jews were going through during those periods there were the crusades the inquisition photo defeats jewish people who burnt at the stake and i started thinking about what a jew says when he gives up his life for the sanctification of hashem's name he says all i was thinking about over there was my sleigh wow i went back to my hotel room and i closed my eyes i covered them all with my head and i said wow and i started crying like a baby and it seemed to me as if all those jewish souls of yesteryear that had passed on with the words of shema israel on their lips were joining into my shema and as i was saying that was the moment i said i told myself i am going back to israel because i felt that a person can run away to something which is so unjewish and still be looking for traces of judaism even in those circumstances i knew that i knew that it was it would be like running away from myself which i couldn't do well so i'm sure along the way you dealt with challenge you know ev every time when people come in they come from different backgrounds they look different they have different um histories how did you deal with challenge along the way did you feel it and what was your approach towards dealing with the challenges that were in front of you well there are challenges and their challenges i i felt um that i might the the surroundings that i was in were challenging for both myself and those that surrounded me because i was really the only black person around right and it's true that not everyone treated me so nicely you know from the surrounding neighbors and that but with a with a history having studied both my masters my bachelors and my masters and apartheids apartheid south africa if that what i felt in israel was nothing compared to that right so that's a challenge that i personally live which i found pretty difficult but i used that energy to focus on my studies studying gamora and i really got into it and i think i always since i was so sure that this is what hashem wanted for me i i allowed all maybe comments that weren't so nice sometimes i let them roll off my back but to tell the truth that was my that was my only real challenge but when i met it it was overcome there was i was bulldozing my way into you described there's nothing to stop me wow that's great what an incredible story of what an incredible story of our people of our torah and just how big the tent is and how big hashem wants to tend to be um and when you see something that you care about you'll just do anything to get it and as a result um you're better for it and we're better for it thank you so much i know that that your time is limited and it's an honor to have you on the show and i hope we get to bring you back again but i want to thank you for who you are and thank you for what you've done for all of us anything to encourage the jewish people anything to encourage them to come back to that that's it i think that's one of my jobs okay okay thank you thank you it's an honor to meet you and i look forward to being in touch into the future thank you so much