Memoir

Fear. It was the name of the entire minority. There are Blacks, there are Hispanics, there are “The fearful ones”. Like the shittiest gang name ever. They looked around at a country full of Jews, established to protect themselves in an anti-Semitic world, and decided to become a minority in a country...

Blessed art thou God, who gave the rooster knowledge to differentiate between day and night Every morning, the wakeup ritual was the same. Someone would drag a boom box into the dormitory hallway, and crank out the same Miami Boys song as loudly as they could. “I am grateful to...

Psychedelics have played a key part in my growth and healing past traumas. When I have spoken about them in the past, more people have asked me about my experiences, and I finally sat down to complied a rough overview of my own journey. Along the way, I tried...

I hated Morah Tova for about 12 years. I was proud of how much I hated her. My mother says she was a frustrated artist. I remember telling her she was not invited to my birthday party. She seemed unfazed. I hated going to kindergarten. I would cry, I am...

I used to walk by the cheder at any time of day or night and just hear singing from within. It was magical. At night, the lights would glow from the building. I would tell my mother “Some day I’m going to go there, right?” and she’d say “yes,...

We didn’t have summer vacation at school. We studied every single day of the year. So the transition from one grade to the next was a simple act of gathering up your books one morning and moving over to the next classroom. The transition to 6th grade, I was in...

When I became bar mitzvah, things got intense. I knew that everything until then had been child’s play, just practice for the real thing. Now we were playing for real, and every move I make and every law I break, He’ll be watching me. I remember breaking down and crying...

9th grade came around, which was a whole new level. Yeshiva Ketana is 3 years of “Junior High school”, which meant a different part of the neighborhood, finishing at 9:30 every evening, and studying Gemarah for the first time. If I thought Mishna was difficult, Gemarah was a whole new...

12th grade is the first year of Yeshiva gedola. Literally the big leagues, this is the first year of the rest of your life. You enter a study hall that could literally be the place you sit for the next 50 years. My classmates are still there 12 years...

The summer that was the second half of 12th grade, I finally switched yeshivas. My friend had moved to this place a year before, and my parents “had heard good things”. This was a place that studid “iyun” in depth, but had a respect for breadth.They didn’t want to...