Mowgli in Kipling's The Jungle Book, Reality, and Identity

I was a reflective child and a little bit lonely, growing up in the Hampstead Garden Suburb in North London, close to Finchley. My parents were refugees from Germany, and we lived in a middle-class Orthodox Jewish community. It was a comfortable, settled, conservative environment, in a very nice suburban house with a garden. Despite this, I was very reflective and enjoyed my solitude. As soon as my parents went to bed, I would start to live, opening books to read fantasies under the bedclothes so they wouldn't see that I was awake half the night. I had a big fantasy world, which made me live a separate existence.
One of the books that had a profound impact on me was Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. I read it about five times. The character of Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves, resonated deeply with me. Mowgli thought he was a wolf because he was brought up by wolves. This idea struck a chord with me: I only think I'm Stephen because I'm brought up by people who tell me I'm Stephen. Therefore, there is no inherent Stephen; it's just a kind of conviction, a decision, or an accident that my parents called me Stephen and made me like I am. But I could have been anything. This sense was very interesting to me, but it was also something I couldn't talk about with anybody. I really questioned reality at that age while living in my fantasy worlds.
In kindergarten, I would always be the one to climb up on the climbing frame and sit there alone, watching all the other kids playing together. I wasn't unhappy; it was a relatively happy childhood, but I still felt a bit isolated from the usual football-oriented childhood. I was questioning a lot about what was going on. What am I? Who am I? How did I become what I became? These questions were always on my mind. The story of Mowgli made me think deeply about identity and reality. If Mowgli could believe he was a wolf because he was raised by wolves, then my identity as Stephen was just as arbitrary. This realization made me see myself as a blank slate, shaped by the people and environment around me.
And then gradually I became [referring to: going through the various forms that emerged from desires and attachments through life]. As I grew older and went to school, I enjoyed my education. We had some benefit of crazy schoolteachers who were not standard schoolteachers. It was a time after the Second World War when people who were a bit older and had lived full lives came to teach because there wasn't anything else to do. They were big people who had not been trained as teachers. My English teacher, for example, was an ex-swimming champion. When he got older and couldn't swim anymore, he went on to teach English because he loved the language. We spent all our English classes going into the nearby forest and reading poetry together under the trees. When we reached our A-level exam, equivalent to the ‘Bagrut’ national high-school final exams, he didn't tell us what books we had to read until three months before the exam. We nearly made a revolution, as we were in panic. He said, "If you love poetry and language, you'll be fine and don't worry about it." He gave us the book and told us to read it and then go into the exam. We were in panic because it was very typical of the kind of education I had, which was very special. Education wasn't just about knowledge - it was about life, values, and inspiration. The teachers were mentors, not just instructors, I really loved the school because of that. The teachers were more like models for us of how we could live rather than being technical teachers.
Even in kindergarten or maybe a bit later, I questioned reality and the persona I became. This was all going on inside my mind and thoughts, and I didn't have someone to talk about it with. It made me hesitant and unsure about who was talking when I communicated with people, as I often felt a disconnect between the words I spoke and the deeper self-observing the interaction—wondering whether it was the socially constructed persona or my true inner voice expressing itself. I needed to reflect a little before I could communicate with other children, so I was actually a quiet boy. I had quite a lot of difficulty communicating with other children and even with my parents. I didn't have the automatic certainty of who I was very deeply to be able to spontaneously talk from that place. There was a gap between the thinking and the speaking, a gap of a little bit of space of uncertainty. Reality wasn't taken for granted, so there was always this little gap.
For example, I had a lot of communication problems with my father. He was a kind man, Orthodox Jew, and both my parents were very much trying to do things right in society and fit in, learning the codes of behavior. My mother used to say, when I asked her why she was doing something, "Because that's what one does." That was her answer all the time. My parents were quite big people in the sense that they were conditioned by their experiences as refugees from Germany. They were conditioned to behave according to the norms and look for the norms. I was doing the opposite, exploring what the norms were and not necessarily seeing them as helpful. I couldn't explain myself to my father. He would tell me to do things like go to synagogue, wear a hat, or wear certain clothes because these were the norms of the Orthodox Jewish society of London. I couldn't explain why it didn't fit me. This gap affected my speech and communication, and it was a problem I struggled with.
It didn't make me unhappy, except for a period in my early teens when I was going through puberty. During that time, I felt a bit contracted because I wanted to have more friends and didn't find them somehow. But my childhood before that was pretty happy. I would go out and play in the garden a lot, and I was okay with being alone. There was an age of difficulty, but it didn't make me depressed. I was living fully, getting up in the morning and watching the early birds jumping in the garden, the butterflies coming in the summer, and nature in our small garden. I didn't like sports that much, but I loved nature.
During my childhood, my father would put on tefillin every day, every morning and pray, and he was very much involved in the synagogue. He was the gabbai, the warden of the synagogue, and he would go every Shabbat. There was a clear expectation for me to follow these practices until I got myself out of it at the age of 14 or 15. I just said no, I cannot. Until then, it was a strong expectation, and I was part of Bnei Akiva, a religious youth movement. I was okay with it until I realized that it was not for me. It was mostly about control. As a small child, I saw the fear behind it, the fear of the adults that they had to have a very tight structure. Orthodoxy was a shield against the fear of wildness, the unknown, not doing things right, or not having codes of behavior and norms. I saw it as part of the sickness of adulthood, and I saw this quite young. I was in love with the uncertainties of life, the excitement of living.
I had a rich inner life and the outer world of playing with one or two neighbors' kids, inventing new rules for Monopoly, and engaging in creative activities were part of my childhood. I didn't have many friends because I didn't share the same interests as other kids, like football or television. We didn't even have a TV. All the other kids had the beginning of TV, but we never had one. This sense of being different and questioning reality and identity was a significant part of my early life.
I remember a certain point when I was about 7 years old, I had a sudden insight, and it totally freaked me out.
happening. It’s not a person or an ego—it’s just a quiet presence.