August 17, 2018

Editor’s note: Naomi Ackerman, executive director of the Advot Project, was at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills on Aug. 8 for the final dress rehearsal of a teen summer theater program with Homeboy Industries, which works with youths formerly involved in gangs. She and the teens were preparing for a performance the next day that would culminate their 10-week Relationship 101 program that uses theater and the arts to teach communication skills and healthy relationships. However, during the rehearsal Ackerman received a call informing her that one of the performers, 18-year-old Ramon Cardona, had been shot and killed. The show was postponed until further notice. Below are her thoughts, written in the tragedy’s immediate aftermath.

---

Thursday, August 9:
This morning I got into my car and turned in the opposite direction of where I was supposed to be driving. Today I was supposed to be at the culmination of our summer teen theater project, a collaboration with Homeboy Industries to be held at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

So many feelings were involved in this culmination. It was not an easy summer, but it was all coming together. It was exciting to see the youth simply being youth, the masks coming off, creativity knocking at the door.

We almost made it to the finish line.

We rehearsed on Monday and Tuesday. The sweet smell of triumph was in the air. The kids danced and sang — not without major pushback, but they too could feel the final presentation creeping up on us. Everyone was getting excited.

My car had been loaded all week with the props, T-shirts, snacks and art of my beloved homies. My own children and their friends had to wiggle around all these things to find a seat whenever I took them here or there.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared us for what happened yesterday. As we were unloading all of our things in the theater, I received a phone call notifying me that one of “our” kids had been shot and killed.

What were we to do?

In all the years I have been doing this work, this was the first time I’d lost someone in one of my programs — someone who had been dancing, smiling and ready to take on the world.

Having lived in Israel, I sadly learned the reality of young, innocent people being torn from my side to fight a senseless war. But the gang wars of California take “senseless” to a new level.

I am simply beside myself.

I had a brilliant team this summer: Two amazingly talented acting teachers who steered the ship; a music director who raised the bar beyond the sky; and three magnificent dance teachers. 

We are all shell-shocked.

Tragically, Homeboy Industries knows how to deal with these situations and postponed the show.

Today, we stood together in a healing circle at Homeboy headquarters. We listened. We grieved. We passed around burning sage. We ate. We held the hearts of the youth.

Our work is like pushing a boulder uphill. There are days when our work seems impossible. Today could have been that impossible day. But instead, today reminded me exactly why we do what we do.

The kids talked about our program. A video of Ramon, the young man who was killed, played in a loop. Someone said Ramon had been a “lost” boy and that this summer he was the happiest he had been in a long time.

Our job is to bring the happy. The fun. The hope. We cannot stop the rage, as hard as we try. And believe me, there is nothing I want more than to stop the rage.

But we can hold each other. We can love. We can let be. And we can believe in change — as hard as it is. We must never, ever, ever stop believing in the possibility of change, because that belief is essential for the change to happen.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared us for what happened yesterday. As we were unloading all of our things in the theater, I received a phone call notifying me that one of “our” kids had been shot and killed. What were we to do?

A man in the healing circle said, “I pray for Ramon and his family, and I pray for the shooter.”

It stopped me in my tracks.

“I pray for the shooter, because he too is suffering from trauma.”

My goodness. My goodness. We pray for everyone. We pray.

I am so grateful for the individuals in my personal community who have been reaching out all day. I am grateful for the Advot community and my remarkable team, who have been present the past 24 hours. I am grateful to the Wallis staff who simply did everything I asked of them, without question or hesitation, even though I changed my requests every 30 minutes.

I am grateful for the Homeboy community, which taught me a lesson today about the beauty of community, the simplicity of compassion and the power of communal prayer. I am grateful for the absolute privilege of working with these kids, who challenge me and force me to grow as a teacher and a human every day.

Homeboy’s Father Greg said: “Today we feel the presence and the absence.”

Today I feel despair and hope. I feel so many mixed and contradictory emotions. Who knew the heart could break and expand at the same time?

What I do know is that, at some point, we will have our performance. We will make sure the voices we heard will be heard, because they have much to say.

We will not lose faith. We will never — and I mean never — give up on these young people and the possibility of them being everything they hope to be.

So you cannot either.

When Sara-Chana Silverstein wrote her book proposal for “Moodtopia,” she had no idea it would serve as a blueprint for her own journey.

The Los Angeles native who now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., is an herbalist, classical homeopath and international board-certified lactation/breastfeeding consultant who said she decided to write “Moodtopia” to help people combat stress and improve their quality of life. 

Her book offers a guide on how to integrate herbs, aromatherapy and color therapy into people’s lives. Doing so helps you “learn to be in control of your moods so your moods don’t control you,” Silverstein told the Journal in an interview at a Los Angeles coffee shop. 

“Becoming a master of your moods is something people need to practice every day,” she added. 

Silverstein wrote the book proposal for “Moodtopia” in 2014. The following spring, around the same time she was shopping the book to agents, her 26-year-old daughter was hit by a car while crossing the street in the crosswalk. She emerged from the accident miraculously unscathed and was cleared by the hospital. However, five months later, in October, she suddenly became paralyzed from the shoulders down. Doctors diagnosed her with transverse myelitis, an inflammatory disorder of the spinal cord, and said she would be a quadriplegic for the rest of her life.

“I ended up living in the hospital for 7½ months,” Silverstein said. “I stopped working. I couldn’t leave the hospital, because my daughter couldn’t even hit the emergency call button.”

It was during that period that Silverstein unconsciously began in-corporating the lessons she had laid out in her book proposal. She placed a sign on her daughter’s hospital room door saying no one could enter unless they were smiling. She started spraying essential oils in the room and all the nurses would migrate there. She brought in plants, painted her daughter’s nails and dressed her in hospital gowns that were in her daughter’s color palette. She snuck in acupuncture, massage, craniosacral and Feldenkrais Method specialists, and practiced laughter yoga to facilitate her daughter’s healing.

“Despite what everybody said at New York University and Mount Sinai hospital, my daughter is up and walking with a cane,” Silverstein said. 

An Orthodox woman with seven children, Silverstein admitted, “My faith left immediately” in the wake of her daughter’s diagnosis. “I struggled as a religious woman to have faith in God when he would do this to my daughter. But I continued to keep Shabbos and keep kosher. I continued to dress modestly. And I slowly but surely saw the miracles of my daughter’s hard work and her belief that she was going to get better.”

In December 2015, Silverstein landed an agent and then sold the book proposal in early 2016. She completed the book a year after her daughter was hospitalized.

Said Silverstein, “It says in the Days of Creation that God put the healing in the world before the illness. He created plants and trees before man. Since the Holocaust, when all the midwives and the wise women were killed, we also lost the wisdom of plant knowledge. And one of the goals of my book is to re-educate the Jewish people on the ways they can use herbs.”

Silverstein, who grew up in Studio City, moved to New York when she was 23. However, she spends every summer in Los Angeles and visits several times a year. 

She’s delighted to be back “home” for the local release of “Moodtopia,” which will take place at The Grove’s Barnes & Noble on Aug. 28. 

“I’m an L.A. girl,” she quipped, “who visits New York for the winters.”

There are parents who volunteer to coach their kids’ Little League baseball teams or AYSO soccer teams, and then there are people like Randy Michel and Peter Waxler, who continue coaching long after their own kids have grown up. 

The two 64-year-olds have coached JCC Maccabi Games baseball teams for a combined 41 years, and for the past dozen or so years they have been doing so together. Most recently, they coached a team for boys 14 and younger from the Westside JCC’s Los Angeles delegation.

The JCC Maccabi Games got its start in 1982 in Memphis, Tenn., with 300 athletes. The games have taken place almost every year since, often in multiple cities concurrently, with local families generously hosting the athletes. 

This year’s event, from Aug. 5–10, was slightly different. The Merage JCC in Irvine and Alpert JCC in Long Beach joined forces to put together this year’s event in Orange County, playing host to 2,500 Jewish teens from all over the United States, as well as from Israel, Canada, Mexico and Great Britain. 

Michel, an accountant who lives in West Hills, first got involved with the Maccabi Games in 1997. Two years earlier, he and his son Jesse, then 11, “kind of accidentally stumbled on Maccabi,” he said. They were playing catch at the West Hills Pony Baseball fields when they noticed an unfamiliar group of teenage boys practicing. They turned out to be a team preparing for the games, which were being held in Los Angeles that year,

Jesse told Michel he wanted to participate in the games when he was old enough, and he followed through when he turned 13. With the exception of one year, Michel has been coaching a local Maccabi baseball team ever since.

It’s about the whole Jewish experience, including the rachmanus rule: “compassion and good sportsmanship, both on and off the playing field.” — Randy Michel

Waxler, who lives in Calabasas and was a pitcher at UCLA, is an attorney in the insurance business. He became involved with the Maccabi Games when his oldest son, Brett, tried out and made the cut for a Maccabi baseball team in 1999. When that happened, Waxler, who had coached Little League for years, was recruited to coach the team. He has been coaching ever since. 

Michel and Waxler have coached some very talented Maccabi athletes over the years, including current Major League Baseball pitcher Max Fried of the Atlanta Braves and outfield Kevin Pillar of the Toronto Blue Jays.

They also have experienced moments of baseball magic. In 2000, “We got to play one of the gold medal games in Tucson in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Triple-A stadium,” Waxler said. “The normal thing is to play at a park or a high school field. All of a sudden, you’re playing in a stadium that is one step below Dodger Stadium.” 

But both men stressed that the JCC Maccabi Games are bigger than baseball. “It’s really about the whole Jewish experience,” Michel said. “That includes the rachmanus rule, defined in official materials as ‘compassion and good sportsmanship, both on and off the playing field.’ ”

“Kids go for the competition,” Michel said, “but [participating in] the nighttime events, when they are socializing with [2,500] Jewish athletes, is like no other experience. I just feel a lot of pride and joy. It’s a way of giving back to the Jewish community. And selfishly,” he added, “I love baseball. There’s really nowhere else I’d rather be than on the field.”

In 2005, musician Craig Taubman curated a collection of short writings that attempted to get the reflective juices flowing in the month leading up to the High Holy Days. 

Called “Jewels of Elul,” the writings — which are about 250 words apiece and closely resemble tweets but with greater insight — have since become an annual tradition, save for a two-year gap in 2016 and 2017. Contributors have included Jewish and non-Jewish artists, activists, rabbis, politicians and entertainers, such as former President Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama, Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and pop star Lady Gaga.

Taubman penned 29 “Jewels,” one for each of the 29 days of the Hebrew month of Elul, and this year’s contributors were asked to write about the question, “What if?”

“ ‘What if’ is the ultimate dare, the permission to think out of the box and reach for what might, could or ought to be,” Taubman, 60, wrote in the introduction to this year’s offerings on jewelsofelul.com. “It is the spice of life and, for me, the fuel that drives me through the day.”

In his contribution, Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert juxtaposes a mundane kvetch with an inspirational insight: “What if the Wi-Fi on airplanes was so much faster?” Lupert writes. “What if instead of using Wi-Fi on planes, we talked to the person in the next seat?” 

Rabbi David Ingber, founding rabbi of Romemu in New York, acknowledges his road rage and his tendency to assume the worst of other drivers. In his piece, he asks, “What if we could give each other the benefit of the doubt?”

“ ‘What if’ he was still alive — becomes our call to action,” writes Jeanne Pepper, the mother of Blaze Bernstein, the Jewish college student from Orange County who was killed on Jan 9.

Other contributors this year include Jewish transgender activist Abby Stein; Orthodox Rabbanit Alissa Thomas-Newborn; California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (also a Democratic gubernatorial candidate); comedian Sarah Silverman; her sister, Rabbi Susan Silverman; March For Our Lives activist Matt Deitsch; Zionist author Gil Troy; and songwriter Eric Bazilian, who wrote the 1995 Joan Osborne hit “One of Us,” which asks, “What if God was one of us?” 

‘Jewels’ offers ‘bite-sized’ reflections that are also rich and deep in their themes. And the variety of people Craig brings together enables a diversity of perspectives, so everyone can find a voice, or voices, that brings out their own. —Rabbi David Wolpe

Taubman told the Journal in a phone interview he would not be writing “Jewels” were it not for his longtime collaborator, Sinai Temple Senior Rabbi David Wolpe. Wolpe also wrote the foreword to this year’s volume.

“Rabbi Wolpe gave me permission and opportunity to experiment and try new things,” Taubman said.

“What I would say is that ‘Jewels’ offers ‘bite-sized’ reflections that are also rich and deep in their themes,” Wolpe told the Journal in an email. “And the variety of people Craig brings together enables a diversity of perspectives, so everyone can find a voice, or voices, that brings out their own.”

This year’s theme of “What if?” was born out of a lunch meeting a couple of months ago between Taubman and philanthropist Bruce Whizin. Taubman said Whizin asked what it would take for Taubman to bring back “Jewels” this year. “Time and money,” Taubman responded, to which Whizin replied: “What if I gave you the money?” 

“With that ‘What if’ question, I got the theme and I got the money,” Taubman said. 

“What if?” is also the theme of Taubman’s forthcoming High Holy Days services, which will be held at the Pico Union Project in downtown Los Angeles. The project is Taubman’s nonprofit interfaith arts center, housed in the original Sinai Temple building, under the auspices of his congregation, Sanctuary @ Pico Union.

Taubman plans to print and distribute approximately 20,000 hard copies of this year’s “Jewels of Elul,” which will be available in a CD-sized book and printed on glossy paper. Each copy comes with a request for a donation to the Pico Union Project. The writings were released on the Jewels of Elul website on Aug.12, the first day of the month of Elul. 

After announcing this year’s contributors, Taubman said he received a letter from someone angry over the inclusion of Newsom and omission of his Republican opponent, John Cox. Similarly, a person wrote to him to express displeasure that Sarah Silverman, a champion of liberal causes, was included.

Taubman, for his part, said the point of “Jewels” is not to preach politics — though several of the contributors express their dislike of the current president — but to increase civility. 

The point, he said, is to hear from “people who are like you and people not like you.”

You can sign up here to receive a “Jewel a Day.”