Jewels 2014

Dear Friends, Thank you for being a part of our 10th year of Jewels of Elul. Hundreds of thousands of people accessed this years Jewels on our new App, online at the Jewels website, The Huffington Post or the dozens of other websites that hosted our content. My sincere thanks to the 29 contributors who gave us their wonderful stories. Gratitude to our generous sponsors, Steve Lowenstein,  Scott Weinstein, Joel Dinkin, The Milken Archive of Jewish Music, Reboot and Ritual well for their generous support in making this year our biggest to date.  To Rabbi Raphael Goldstein for his insightful questions, Judith Berinstein for her Spanish

I was very close to my father, and his sudden passing was unexpected. A brief illness, a mistaken diagnosis. The lack of closure made it more difficult. I did what I should not have done, but I didn’t know it then. After a month, I stood by his resting place and asked to see him again. I asked for a chance to say, “I love you. Good-bye.” Something. Having heard of people who saw parents or grandparents in dreams, I hoped for a dream … my “special visit” dream. I went to sleep hopeful. One night, two, three. It was

At 12, I was a certified black sheep. Between my effeminate antics and my avowed nerdiness, I was desperate for a social miracle. Naturally, I looked to my upcoming bar mitzvah as a life raft: the bridge to fitting in. Around that time, strange things started appearing around my house. One day, a book called Putting God Back on the Guest List materialized on the coffee table. When my family called our first bar mitzvah meeting, it all came together. “Let’s talk about my theme. I’m thinking theater or traveling,” I said. “Oh, you’ll have a theme,” my mom said,

On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, I set out for Monk’s Pond to do my own tashlich. It’s a short hike from Kripalu, the yoga retreat center in the Berkshires where I have come alone on this, the first New Year of my divorce. At Monk’s Pond, a sign marks the water as a private supply. It’s unclear how a raisin challah from the kosher bakery in Newton would be viewed floating in the water, so instead I find a few sticks to toss in: my symbolic sins. As I watch them sink, I say the general confession prayer.

My parents’ marriage was a classic disaster. Often it felt like bombs were shaking our house, and the only safe sanctuary from the verbal shrapnel was under my bed or holding onto my golden retriever, Reggie. Then divorce happened, and the resulting peace treaty left broken glass everywhere. Inside and outside. In the home and in my soul. The wounds and underlying anxiety would haunt me and follow me like my shadow during an afternoon stroll. Then, my mother went to work for $2.00 an hour, and I was given a food stamp for lunch at my elementary school. My

I’m almost shocked at how little I remember of my bar mitzvah. I don’t recall my Haftorah reading, what the rabbi said, or what music played at the reception. I learned Hebrew, but I’ve forgotten all of it. Every Hanukkah, I look up the letters on the dreidel. My bar mitzvah was supposed to be such a momentous occasion, a defining moment, and my passage from childhood to adulthood. It was the day I became a man! Why do I remember so little of it? Probably because I did it for the wrong reasons – the party, the presents, the

I thought I had come of age several times over by the time I reached my 30s. After all, I had become a bat mitzvah, learning to read Torah and Haftorah and reciting prayers and speeches about my entry into adulthood as a Jew. I had gone through Confirmation at 16, taking part in a level of intellectual inquiry and analysis which surely brought my Jewishness to a more mature and sophisticated level. I had gotten married, for goodness sake! I wore a white dress and took solemn vows in front of God and my family, entering into a covenant

In 1972, around the time I turned 16, we woke up one morning to an extra-large headline: “16 TERRORISTS DIE DURING FRUSTRATED ESCAPE FROM NAVY BASE IN TRELEW.” During the morning break at school, everyone was talking about it. Right before class, the teacher pulled me aside and said, “I overheard you and your classmates. Matalon, don’t always believe what you read in the newspaper. These people were murdered.” My country, Argentina, was under military dictatorship, and the “Trelew Massacre,” as it became known much later, was the cold-blooded murder of 16 political prisoners who had surrendered before a judge and

“Why would you go back?” asked my Austro-Hungarian-born grandmother in 1994, when I announced I would be spending the summer in the former Czechoslovakia. She had never looked behind her after fleeing Bratislava (my mother’s birthplace) in 1940, first to Italy, then traveling across continents to Sydney, then Los Angeles, where I was born. “We knew you would come back,” said my wife’s grandfather as Zuzana and I prepared for our 2001 “chuppah” in Košice, Slovakia, her hometown. He had always looked forward; a Jewish surgeon under state socialism, he had moved his family from Prešov to Bardejov to Košice,

I lived in a beautiful bubble. A perfect little world. Sure, there’s lots of bad stuff out there. Sure, people are dying, they’re sick, and they have terrible problems. But, I lived in a beautiful perfect bubble: healthy family, four gorgeous children. Then, my bubble burst. Actually, it didn’t just burst. It exploded into thousands of little shards that cut me, that cut my family, that sliced us open from top to bottom, and that left hundreds of little scars all over us. When Sam was diagnosed with leukemia, he was six years old. Less than two years later, at

My 55 years on this planet can be neatly divided into two periods: Before Parenthood (B.P.) and Since Parenthood (S.P.). Everything I, as a gender queer feminist, knew, believed, and thought about both God and childrearing B.P. could be summarized as: My God was not patriarchal, punitive, a rage-aholic, or snarky. I would be a kind, patient, fun-loving, and permissive parent. My children would be kind, patient, fun-loving, and cooperative. Yiddish meets this naiveté thus: Man tracht und Gott lacht, people plan and God (the patriarchal, punitive, and snarky kind) laughs. As toddlers, my two youngest were difficult and polar

Sometimes, reading from the Torah at a bar mitzvah only becomes a Jewish boy’s coming of age moment once he steps off the bimah, and the Torah keeps on speaking in unanticipated ways. Each of us read Parshat Lech L’cha, separated by thirty-two years. Each of us was surrounded by four generations of loving family, crowned by the presence of our sole surviving great-grandparent. And, each of us experienced the death of that great-grandparent – the death of that generation – before the next Shabbat arrived. At first, the imposition of such sadness upon our simchas felt unfair to us.

As a young girl growing up in California’s largest mosque, I always felt welcomed and included. Women were on the Board, my sister was president of the youth group, men and women of all cultures prayed together in the same space. Once I left home and began exploring mosques outside Southern California, I realized many didn’t reflect the same sense of community I’d always taken for granted. Many mosques favored cultural practices of secluding women over Islamic practices of inclusion. I saw women separated from men by a curtain, behind a wall, or praying in another room entirely. I felt

Why is it that, when I catch my mother’s face looking back at me in a passing window reflection, I am filled with a sense of completion, oneness, and calm? While I fully promote (and paraphrase) Woody Allen’s famous “Annie Hall” quip about relationships – “life is like a shark, it has to constantly move forward or it sinks” – for me, moving forward increasingly means turning back. I define my sense of self by the extent to which I feel true to the “original” version of me. So, at 44 years old, I bought a horse and re-connected to

We are people who return. Each year we return to the beginning of the Torah and (re)-cycle our calendar, and each week Shabbat returns to us. There are places each of us returns to. As a people we left the land of Israel, went on a long, challenging journey, and then returned a different people. I am thinking about the people and places that call me to return. When I was 16 years old I fell in love with Israel on a summer trip, and I have felt called to return. I am writing this piece now from Israel. It’s

In college I was the “big man on campus.” Well, not all of campus… just Hillel. One guy always bothered me. He wanted the glory of leading services on Friday nights (Kabbalat Shabbat) for the big crowd at Hillel, but he never showed up when we needed people at Hillel for services on Shabbat mornings. In fact, he committed the ultimate crime: going to Young Israel instead of Hillel on Shabbat mornings. We weren’t good enough for him. I felt that it was just not fair to Hillel. My rule: unless you show up Saturday mornings, no leading Friday night.

This past November of 2013, I wrote my bar mitzvah d’var Torah about how the definition of traditional marriage has changed and advocated in favor of same sex marriage. It was uploaded on our synagogue’s website and, within two weeks, it had gone viral. I was invited to speak on Laurence O’Donnell’s show on MSNBC. I was interviewed by newspapers, tweeted by celebrities, and was even invited to speak at the URJ Biennial. As of today, over 280,000 people have watched a speech that was intended for just my friends and family at my bar mitzvah. Some people wrote extremely angry

The last thing they took out of me was the Hickman line: a tube that had been tunneled under my skin through my collarbone, embedding itself within the superior vena cava in the right atrium of my heart. After tearing the labyrinthine-like line from my chest, they announced that I had been discharged. A few hours later I was limping towards my parents’ rental car and a fragmented future. I have tried endlessly to make sense of being defined as normal after almost dying, of being expected to ‘return’ to some kind of objective reality after months of living in

Blessed are You, Adonai our God, God of our fathers and mothers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God of Sarah, God of Rebecca, God of Rachel, and God of Leah. So goes the start of the Avot v’Imahot section of the Amidah. After nearly a decade working for Spark Networks, JDate’s parent company, people regularly describe me as a CEO in the relationships business. I agree. But, not necessarily in the way they think. Creating families and building communities are inspiring missions and make my past decade’s work very rewarding. What gets me up in the

Our tradition dictates, “Be fruitful and multiply.” I can do neither. When we read of Hannah’s inability to give birth, I cry Hannah’s tears. On Rosh Hashanah, I am called to the bimah to hold the Torah, unaccustomed to women receiving this honor. My rabbi gently guides, “Hold it like a baby.” I pray, “If you give me a child, I will give him back to you, to serve you all his days” (Samuel 1:7). My prayer is answered when I turn towards my grandparents’ heritage and adopt my toddler son from Russia. I am in bliss. Reality sets in

My “coming of age” moment was the day I stood in front of several thousand people, most of whom had known me since infancy, and gave a speech about why I was raising money for cancer. As I faced the crowd of people, I felt a startling sense of déjà vu. I had stood on this stage for my bat mitzvah. I had watched as my dad made this stage into his instrument, standing and allowing himself to seep into every corner of the carpeted platform until he had absorbed the space and with it, the congregation. People often talk

A few years ago, I went on a big group camping trip a week after a friend’s bar mitzvah. Not entirely satisfied with the traditional synagogue ceremony, we invented a coming of age ritual of our own – all it took was a bunch of guys, some shared wisdom, and a gorilla suit. On our first day in camp, I charged out of my cabin in full gorilla getup. I grabbed hold of Isaac the bar mitzvah boy and escorted him up a nearby bluff, where all of the men sat cross-legged in a circle. We proceeded to go around

In retrospect, my bat mitzvah was about nothing less than life and death. But it’s not when I became an adult. Girls at my synagogue did not read from the Torah. Instead, each girl led a service using a photocopied booklet based on a theme. The available themes didn’t do much for me, so I decided to make my own book, choosing the not at all limiting theme of “Life.” My dad and I collected source material. The Life project was fun with him. We were both editors and terrible procrastinators, and we assembled dozens of quotes. We included Tennessee

I know that I’m supposed to have angst about my bat mitzvah, but looking back on it, mainly what I see is a great party: a delicious Persian spread, flowing cocktails, and a buzzing dance floor. What I am angsty about is what was missing. Save for a few Hebrew school girlfriends, nearly everyone at the party was family or family friends, and nearly everyone was Iranian. The interface between family and the outside world is tricky for Iranian Jews. Our fiercely loving family bond is truly beautiful. But, within the world outside of that community, I grew up with

When I was first asked to write a piece regarding the “Art of Return,” I thought it would be easy. I would just write about my transformation from a weight of 453 pounds down to 196 pounds and the resurrection of my old life from before the weight gain. Then, it dawned on me that the “Art of Return” signifies much more than my physical transformation. It is about losing myself along my life’s journey and then finding myself again. It isn’t just a physical transformation (which was pretty wild), but an overall transformation of body, mind, and soul. I

My coming of age story became the title song from my first album, Daddy’s Pockets. The lyrics are sparse and intense. People often ask me what the words mean. I usually respond, “They mean whatever they mean to you.” When I was a child in Boro Park, Brooklyn, every Shabbos my father and I would walk hand in hand, singing in harmony to shul. In the winter I’d hook my arm into the deep cavernous pockets of his pea coat. One Shabbos he said, “You can’t put your hand in my pockets anymore. You are too old for that.” That

In the book of Judges, we meet Samson. The ultimate Jewish man. His long flowing hair provided him with supernatural strength and turned him into a Jewish Superman. And let’s face it, the Jews don’t have many Supermen. My Samson was my father. Everyone’s is. But every Superman has a kryptonite. My kryptonite was shame. And California. I was born between two worlds. All year I lived as a secular kid in Oakland and in the summer I’d fly back to New York to join up with my father in Seagate, the Satmar community he’d adopted. My dad tried his

Growing up, my family didn’t have any coming of age traditions. No bar mitzvahs, no crownings, no sacrifice of a chicken’s head, nothing. There was, however, one incident in college when I became a man. My dad was very generous to us. A self-made millionaire back in Iran, he was able to bring a lot of money with him to the U.S. and spoil us. Like Vito Corleone from The Godfather, he was a larger than life character, always helping people out. Whenever I’d ask for movie money, he would reach in his pocket, pull out a wad of cash,

Foolish, bad decisions I made during a reckless transition out of my adolescence led to my arrest on August 11, 1987. Prison gates slammed and locked me inside cages and walls. For the next 9,500 days, I lived as a prisoner, frequently walking through puddles of blood that spilled from the violence inside. Yet, during those 26 years I learned a great deal. Stories of the courageous men and women who endured the atrocities of Sobibor, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other indignities inspired me. They convinced me that attitude and perceptions were the keys to emerging stronger than when guards first

1978-2014. My younger self awaits me in that old home. He stares at the future that would be me; I ponder the past that was him. We connect on a bridge made of yearning and nostalgia. Hesitantly, we embrace. We fall to our knees and sob. I ask if he ever told dad about how he bounced the ball that cracked the chandelier in our living room. He asks if I will ever stop doing and start being. I say, “You should have told the satin-haired girl you loved her when you had your hand on her shoulder for the

Freud wrote of a repetition compulsion. He thought that we reenact scenes or situations in our lives in an attempt to get a better result. Of course, if we ourselves have not changed, then the outcome will not change. So many of us go on making the same mistakes in new guises, wondering why things never seem to improve. The essays in this wonderful booklet are about how to repeat the past differently, about how we ourselves can be different. Our souls need not be static. In the Torah, years after a bitter break, Jacob reencounters his brother Esau, and the

The word for “return” in Hebrew is Teshuva. Teshuva is often translated as “repentance” although it literally means “return.” The sages understood that to achieve real repentance, we must first return to our true or purest selves. This is a collection of stories about people looking back. What do they know now that they wish they knew then?   What has changed?  What has remained constant?  As we prepare to move forward into the new year, the month of Elul is an opportunity to look back to the collective wisdom of our experiences as a guide for the future.  May this book