Dance. Dance like no one is watching. Jake P. does when he leads Shabbat service on Saturday mornings. As a Spiritual Counseling Intern at Beit T’Shuvah, he brings charm and flair to every service he leads and every session he has—speaking in poetic prose that could be needlepoint stitched into decorative pillows. Although they’d be hard-pressed to provide the same level of comfort as the words do themselves. So, who is this bearded mystery man who mixes simcha and break dancing? He’s one of us. He’s family.
That’s because of one simple truth Jake learned growing up: Friends can become family. That lesson would prove fundamental for him—as well as many of our residents and community members—the chosen family. Maybe that’s what God meant when he said, “The chosen people.”
Those friends became increasingly more important to him as time went on. You see, because Jake is a valley boy through and through (but don’t hold that against him), born to South African immigrants who landed in Los Angeles in the ’90s. They built a life out of nothing in particular. No grandparents down the block. No cousins folded into the neighborhood. No extended family idling at the airport. That is what truly bred his familial friendships, which was convenient, because the family tree was not a relaxing place to climb. His father was, in Jake’s own unbothered shorthand, “a medium dad” to him and something much harder to his older half-brother—”critical, withholding,” a workaholic who was mostly gone. His parents were old-school South Africans, raising kids with the only tools they had. As Jake tells it, his mother once recounted, with genuine confusion, how she only stopped spanking her kids in public when other parents started giving her looks at the store. Jake’s somehow landed on all of this with grace. “They tried the best they could with the tools they had, just the tools they had were crappy.” No bitterness in it. Just the calm of a man who decided that understanding gets you further than blame.
When Jake was young, his older brother—the soccer star—started to act out. Parties, rebellion, light weed smoking. His parents’ answer to the 14-year-old’s struggles was rehab. Then, when that didn’t work, again, then eighteen-some months at one of those troubled-teen programs out in the Utah desert, run, as Jake notes, by fundamentalist Mormons. He was ten when it happened, old enough to feel the whole house shift on its axis overnight. “I woke up, my brother wasn’t there, and they were like, ‘Oh no, he’s at the program in the desert, and we’re a program family now.’”The desert program’s vocabulary moved in and never left. “We all make choices” became his mother’s signature line—a sentence that does not mean what to the ear what it means on paper.
Young Jake, with the pressure off for rather unfortunate reasons, found his own sanctuary. There were precisely two places he wanted to be, with nothing in between: on a stage, or in a library. At lunch, he disappeared into books and read whatever was on the shelf. Here, he found escape. In the theater, he could be anyone and say anything. Here, he found escape velocity. “The stage is really freeing. I can be someone else, and I’m saying these lines, and I can really embrace the full feeling of whatever this character is feeling. I’m kind of like an empty vessel for the emotion.” His first role ever was the rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof. Foreshadowing?
So here we have a chubby theater kid who lived inside his own head, too smart for his own good, and content to let his older brother absorb the family’s athletic ambitions. Then middle school arrived with its social gravity. All Jake wanted was to hang with the skaters—the cool kids. He couldn’t skate, so he bought a BMX bike. Sometimes he would hold the camera to film the skate videos, but that wasn’t enough. So, he appointed himself the provider of snacks and the keeper of the weed. The definition of “just holding it for a friend.” He’d puff twice and pass once—knowing all the while the consequences his brother faced for the same crimes. But his style was different. When his parents caught him, he didn’t scream or slam doors. He cried. And, he reports with a straight face, it worked considerably better—nobody shipped him to the desert. He had, at minimum, learned which lever to pull.
Through all of it, Judaism kept circling back like a song he couldn’t stop humming. Clearly, his house was one of strict rules—where doing things right, and the appearance of doing things right, were the whole ballgame—but the holidays were real, and Saturday mornings meant synagogue. “I love synagogue. I loved being there. I really had a good time. I liked Hebrew school. I thought it was really interesting.” It wasn’t an obligation he was waiting to outrun. It was a door he knew he’d always keep open.
After high school came Israel, the partying, a long-distance girlfriend his parents could not stand, and a slow drift through his early twenties. He poured coffee, then waited tables, and, through it all, his love for Judaism kept appearing in the unlikeliest moments. While working at a Jewish deli in Calabasas, he got sent to staff a big catered event he assumed was just a party. The moment his boss said the word “shiva,” Jake jogged out to his car, fished the black kippah out of the glove box, and walked back in dressed to honor a grieving family. Two weeks later the owner said, “That was a classy move,” and promoted the twenty-two-year-old to manager. The way Jake put it: “I have a cultural understanding of the clientele of our deli. The old Jews who go to the deli? I know old Jews who go to the deli!” It is maybe the most Jake thing in the whole story: the instinct to do right by mourners. The reward was secondary. Deserved—but his clear motive was to be there for the grieving. That’s Jake for you.
I also think it should be noted that, while many spotlight subjects have carried guns in their glove box, Jake has always kept himself strapped with a kippah, “just in case.”
At 22, Jake didn’t realize that management meant 70 hours a week—six days on, one day off. So, he spent that one day off increasingly more intoxicated—six days on, one day blacked out. The veteran night manager trained him to pour himself three or four fingers before counting the drawers, and knew exactly what he was doing. When 2020 hit and the bars shut, Jake became an essential worker, selling deli groceries to the terrified people of Calabasas…all while drinking his way through the dark times. And it was there, in those first apocalyptic weeks, that something cracked open. Convinced the world might genuinely be ending, he started scrolling his contacts and his Instagram followers and—of all things—making amends. Apologizing. Reaching back toward people he’d hurt. “I hope you’re surviving this time because it’s really scary.” If the world was going to end, Jake wasn’t planning on leaving it with regrets.
One of those amends turned into the rest of his life. He reached out to a woman he’d been close with in Israel—a friendship a jealous ex had once made him torch. They texted. Then talked. Then spoke for hours night after night. Jake would be on the phone with her, circling his parents’ cul-de-sac on a skateboard he’d bought online, learning to ride as a grown adult because, in his words, he “didn’t want to have been a poser my whole life.” On the first time off he had had in years, he flew out to see her. She stood at the busy airport. On sight, He kissed her. A moment you only hear about in romantic comedies or the truest, deepest, most earnest of love stories.
Soon he was wedging two suitcases and a bag of bedding into the back of his Corolla and pointing it at Colorado. Denver became its own sprawling chapter. Another deli gig that grew into a career, a culture of after-hours pours and jam-band psychedelics, and a climb from the owner’s drinking buddy to the head of HR. Eventually, he dreamt up a restaurant of his own, ran the numbers, and watched the dream get quietly murdered by a spreadsheet. But the dreaming pointed somewhere he didn’t expect. He’d wanted to be a rabbi back in his late teens, before restaurant math convinced him he’d be broke forever. So he’d started joking that he didn’t need to be one—he already had a congregation right there at the deli, tending people’s physical needs if not their spiritual ones. “Sometimes a good sandwich is a spiritual need.” This might be the most Jewish sentence ever produced—pure Jewish-mother theology. But he knew that wasn’t enough for him. He may have done everything for his customer congregations—putting the service in the service industry—but he yearned for more.
He married his beloved in March of 2024, left Denver on a three-month road trip, and finally landed in Los Angeles at the gates of the American Jewish University. Time to become a rabbi. When you really think about it, it’s the marriage of everything Jake grew up loving. When I asked why he wanted to be a rabbi, he responded with, “ Oh, you mean the one job where you get to literally give a book report once a week?” I laughed, but he continued. “And it’s the same book every single year! So, the job is to figure out something new to say about it, which means you have to read a lot of other books too!” His excitement for reading is infectious. “I wish I had that,” I say as I write this.
Recovery, for Jake, didn’t arrive as one cinematic rock bottom. It arrived as a quieter reckoning with honesty. After a moving moment at Beit T’Shuvah around Passover, he decided that something had to change in his life. Rabbi Iggy suggested that he do a “sober omer.” So he cut all of it—weed, alcohol, even the cigarettes he’d been shamefully hiding from his partner, who happens to lobby against Big Tobacco for a living. The relief surprised him. The cravings barely showed up. “It doesn’t live like that in my head,” he realized—and that, all by itself, was a kind of freedom.
If you don’t know the ins and outs of Rabbinical internships, I don’t blame you. They don’t teach this sort of thing in most schools. Here’s the long and short of it: While going to school, they have to get hours working at a temple, or hospital, or institution of some kind. Basically, while they learn to be a rabbi, they need to practice those skills in the wild. When it came time to apply for an internship, Jake was accepted at Beit T’Shuvah where he found that, “Torah is alive here in a way that it’s not alive in most places.” In a lot of synagogues, he says, the tradition can feel embalmed, a beautiful thing behind glass. Here, the residents actually believe the wisdom of Judaism might save them—and for plenty of them, it does. That, he says, is the whole reason he stayed. “It’s real here.”
If you have not been to a Saturday Shabbat Service, I encourage you to. The energy is different than a Friday night. Maybe it is because it in the AM and half the residents are wearing pajamas, or maybe it is because every so often you may catch Jake on the bimah movin’, groovin’, and Beit T’Shuvin’. He simply does not believe in inhibition—he’s loud, he’s big, he cries in public without apology—and when the band kicks in, he moves like God is in the room. “Dance is what happens when you have no more words,” He prays for your save, my save, his sake, and God’s sake—the whole world. That’s a man who loves deeply and truly. That’s a man who offers to visit the hospital to check on any resident, alumni, or community member—even if he doesn’t know them. Because, in his words, “it’s what you do.” Jake, I hate to break it to you, but it’s not what most people do.
Admitting the world can be a lonely place, Jake says, “The only antidote to that is community. It’s putting people in relationship with each other.” Beit T’Shuvah, to Jake, is just that. It’s friends who have become family. That just be the secret to his joy—to his all-consuming warmth. And if I am being honest, we could all learn to be a little bit more like Jake.
Love.
Listen.
Dance…like everyone is watching.
