“Be part of the brotherhood / Yes it’s chain lightning”
-Chain Lightning, Steely Dan
Conceived in Israel to a Yemenite-Israeli Sabra father and Jewish-American mother, I was born in Passaic, NJ and have spent my whole life immersed in Jewish and Israeli culture. After thirteen years in Jewish day schools, I made aliyah at age seventeen. I lived in Israel for six years, three of which were spent in the IDF as a combat engineer. There I absorbed the mantra of the Combat Engineer Corps into my bones: “Today we’ll do what’s hard; the impossible, we’ll do tomorrow,”
I returned to the US to study Jewish history and culture at NYU, but Israel tugged at me again, and I took a graduate year at Hebrew University. My life has swung on a pendulum between America and Israel, between English and Hebrew, between professional Judaism and experiential Judaism, and I have been enriched by each arc.
In my professional life, I taught Jewish History and culture at Hebrew high school for 17 years, then worked at Hillel, Federation, Birthright and most recently, at Moving Traditions. I also did workforce development in the Satmar community in Williamsburg. I embrace the idea of Jewish peoplehood, but I hug the Jewish people even closer. In another life, I imagine myself not as Abraham and Sarah, with their tent open on all four sides, but as their promoter, reaching out to people who need an open hand, not just an open door. Or maybe as Eliezer, who uses management and operational skills to bring Abraham and Sarah’s heavenly visions of community down to earth.
Although I was raised in a yeshiva setting, I am no longer orthodox, and consider myself “Just Jewish.” My wife and I speak to our children in Hebrew, and we celebrate all the Jewish holidays often updating the traditions to suit our lives and the era we live in. We are raising our children to be compassionate and kind to all people, and we use the vocabulary of Jewish ethics when we talk with them about our values. Our community includes Israelis, American Jews, and Philo-Semites of all backgrounds.
My identity, my mission, my orientation towards the world is to welcome, to embrace, to validate and to honor. I am the latest link in a chain stretching back to Sinai, to the emigres from Ur, to the refugees from the Garden of Eden. The chain is strong, and it gives me the strength to be open, to accept each person as they are, to believe in what they could be, and lift them up, if they are ready and consent to it. My work is to create and hold space for others, and watch them fill that space with their unique gifts.