I was raised with the Jewish teaching of b'tzelem Elohim — the belief that every human life is sacred. My parents, a Jewish teacher and a public servant, taught me that our tradition is a responsibility.

 

At a young age, I was diagnosed with a handful of learning disabilities. A speech impediment so severe that only my parents could understand me for the first six years of my life. Oppositional Defiant Disorder (a label I've learned was meant to contain me). Oh, and short-term memory loss! I almost forgot about that one... 

 

I've spent a lifetime composting these "disabilities," "impediments," and "disorders" into gifts. The frustration these caused me hardened into rebellion until I softened them back into something more sacred: a refusal to accept that rupture has to be the end of the story.

 

Coming into this world unable to make myself understood is one of the greatest teachers I've ever had. I struggled to pronounce my own sister's name well into my teenage years. Now, I've led hundreds of workshops across the United States and five continents helping others to communicate, listen, and be heard.

 

But if you really want to know who I am, let me tell you who I come from.

 

Thousands of years ago, my ancestors called themselves Ivrim, boundary crossers. They shaped a civilization built on community, responsibility, and sacred argument — and they lived within a shared covenant that this world can be made holy.

 

Our elders constructed a ritual architecture that sustained this inheritance through the fires of disorientation and displacement. Because for millennia, wherever my ancestors planted their roots, they were treated like strangers.

 

As a child, my father showed me letters from my great-grandmother Jennie, who spent her childhood fleeing violent pogroms. Her mother would hide her and her siblings in separate fields, hoping that if one was found, others might survive. Eventually, every Jew in their village was exiled, and all of their homes were burned to the ground. My family that remained in Europe was erased a half-century later.

 

These stories are the soil I still walk on. Anyone who has a lopsided family tree like mine knows what it's like to walk in a lineage shaped by loss. We've seen how unprocessed pain, fear, and hatred pull us toward polarization and dehumanization.

 

But many of us have also felt the power of community and connection. We know it’s possible to create conditions that alchemize contempt into curiosity and fear into compassion.

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I believe that this fierce season of fracturing and fear carries its own sacred revelation: it is inviting us into ritual and relationship as the truest forms of wisdom.

 

This is why I have devoted my life to the ancient practice of helping people find their way back to one another, and to the belief that this world can be made more whole.