To stand out is to be seen. To be seen is to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable is to stare fear in the eyes and, despite everything, stand tall. That’s easier said than done. Actually, I suppose that’s not easily said either. Not when you’ve been raised as Josh has. Josh learned to make himself small in a body built to be seen. He’s slouched. He’s draped an arm over the back of the chair beside him, because if he didn’t, his shoulders would fall into their natural impulse of meeting his knees like a wilting orchid. But, in the face of this mask he has worn over his whole body—his whole soul—Josh is strong, determined, and ready to face the road of recovery head on.
The oldest son, the one who stayed most like his parents, the varsity football captain at Milken who was secretly the intellectual, the chameleon who became whatever the room required. The masks worked so well that he began to fear what was underneath them. “I used to fear that when you remove all of my masks, there’s nothing at the center of the Tootsie Pop.” The whole world felt farther away than he knew how to handle.”I often used to feel like an alien—Like there’s plexiglass between myself and the community.” Watching the world go by, barely understanding it. An alien feeling like he had no home to phone to.
Where Josh laid his hat, however, was Encino. Encino and Mexico, to be exact. Six months here, six months there. His mother is a force—an MBA from Anderson, once the branch manager who handled the accounts of Mexico’s wealthiest men, who organized an itinerary for Thatcher, Gorbachev, and Reagan when they came after the earthquake. His father came from a powerful Argentine family and gave his time to boards, charity, and work—everything but the diapers. He had, by any measure, a happy childhood, and he could never quite feel it. His mother tells the story: he’d come home from a friend’s house, and she’d ask how it was, and he’d say, “A little bit bad.” Why a little bit bad? Because there was no chocolate milk. Everything else had been perfect, but there was always the missing chocolate milk of it all. “I always had a hard time focusing on the positives. My blessings were so numerous that I could not count them to this day. And yet I always seemed to focus on the negative.”
The lesson Josh absorbed was geographic. “In America, the people who stand out are loved. In Argentina and in Mexico, the tallest blade of grass gets cut first.” He learned to excel quietly, to be good but never the best, smart but never so smart that anyone else felt small beside him. “It was okay to be in the top quarter, but never the top one.” He has never been bullied. No one has ever had a bad word for him. He made sure of it. What stuck in his mind wasn’t the fear of school bullies, but the oppression faced by the Jewish people and the terror that he may face that same persecution one day—the same as his father, grandfather, and many before him have felt. “We’ve been Jews for a long time. It hasn’t been a smooth ride.” His trauma wasn’t a daily build. It was in his blood.
He found his first escape in books, and got in trouble for it—reading during class, reading during recess, always reading. Words, words, words. “I was a big fan of escapism.” It makes a kind of sense: the boy who didn’t fit the chairs, whose knees rose desks, whose head hit thresholds—who had a hard time physically hiding. “It was not comfortable to be me.”
The first drink came at twelve, accompanied by a cigarette, in Mexico, where no one blinked. What he remembers is not the taste but the feeling. “I did not feel good or bubbly or happy. I felt relief.” The same word arrives for the first time he got high, at seventeen, and it lands like a confession. “It was the only time that I felt like I deserved what I had, because I carry a lot of guilt for having things that others do not.” When he got high, for the first time in his life, that plexiglass wall shattered. “I didn’t feel too tall when I was drinking.” That was the trade Josh didn’t know he was making—a life of comfort purchased in the only currency that ever quieted the discomfort of being himself. Trading himself for being himself.
After he graduated from Milken Community school, Josh took a year off to live in Argentina. Instead of finding himself, he found a turning point in his addiction, and that he hated his homeland. They pride themselves as “The Europe of the South,” (a political mine field that this may not be the forum to run through), where politeness was read as weakness. Here, his where his pot smoking became daily. That puff puff didn’t pass until he was 28. It was also the start of his suicidal ideations. At his grandmother’s house, he pushed his bed against the window so that if he rolled out in his sleep and died, it might look like an accident.
Then came King’s College and England, where something unexpected happened: for the first time, nobody asked which kind of Jew he was, or why he spoke Spanish at home. “I was just the American kid. I’m loud, I’m tall, and I played football.” For a moment, the size that had always marked him became the thing that allowed him to belong.
Then in second-year, He broke his back doing Pilates, fractured a disc, spent eight months in bed. England, mercifully, doesn’t hand out opiates the way America does, so the injury didn’t become an addiction of its own. But what corruption England’s healthcare system lacked, COVID made up for. He finished law school remotely from a London apartment with a cocaine addicted girlfriend and a dealer who delivered to the door. He’d stopped reading entirely. “The name of the game is escape.” And he found new ones, in drugs and video games. “Pixels release more endorphins than black and white text.” …and drugs release more than both combined.
When Josh returned to the USofA, he passed the Bar and started practicing constitutional and immigration law. He wanted to help people, to stand between frightened people and the machinery of the state. His calling in lives in his belief that constitutional rights belong to everyone, all the time, even the people the country most wants to toss aside. But while defending the rights of the innocent, the darkness inside of him still lurked behind the mask of the righteous attorney. He was still smoking weed every day and, at this point, taking a copious amount of doctor-prescribed amphetamines. Then, the government’s stance on immigration changed (a political nuclear reactor explosion that this may not be the forum to run through), and his job went from helping people stay to escorting them out safely. The day he signed his fiftieth voluntary departure, something in him gave out. “I was like, yeah, fuck this.”
Everything collapsed at once. He had married, quietly, at the Beverly Hills courthouse—a woman he loved who needed papers, an engagement three days long, a fact he didn’t even tell his parents. She knew about the pot. She didn’t know about the amphetamines. She caught him gambling, and the relationship was over. By then, his life had narrowed to two acts: court and sleep. He drove her to work and prayed there’d be no traffic on the way home, because traffic meant fewer hours to sleep before he had to pick her up, and fewer hours meant a panic attack. It was his baby brother who finally said it plainly to their father. “Get him help or get him out.”
Josh came to Beit T’Shuvah sleeping twenty hours a day and certain he’d be gone in a week. He was resistant, hiding in his room, running the old plays. Then he tried some of his old tricks. “Hey, wow, I’m cured. Thanks, guys!” He went to work on his father the way he’d worked on every doctor who ever wrote him a prescription—got him on the phone, spoke Spanish so the staff wouldn’t understand, and arranged his exit. But, behind his back, his father called the staff and told them of Josh’s plans. When Josh realized this, something cracked open that no amount of cleverness could re-close. “If I can’t manipulate my father into getting what I want, then I may as well fucking get with the program, because I’m not going anywhere.” The rock held. So he stayed.
What Josh found here was a Judaism that asked nothing of him but honesty. He’d spent his life in rooms full of people more observant than he was, reciting what Rashi said and what Rambam said; here, the text wasn’t the answer but the way in. “Judaism says the answers are in the text, and the Beit T’Shuvah approach is that the text helps you find the answers within yourself.” He describes this place the way you’d describe something braided. “The difference between Beit T’Shuvah and a normal rehab is the difference between a Shabbat candle and a Havdalah candle.” One flame, or seven candles woven together. The case manager, the spiritual counselor, the therapist, the psychiatrist, the groups, the temple, the community—all of it burning at once, “a far brighter light than if we were only attacking the addiction from one angle.” He stopped counting his days. He doesn’t know exactly how many there are. “This is the rest of my life,” he says with a chuckle. “If I’m counting the days, what am I counting up to?”
Today, he has an internship with the Alternative Sentencing Department, where he uses his skills as a lawyer to help incarcerated individuals find sanctuary at Beit T’Shuvah. The internship gave him back the work he’d lost, the version that was never about money—court with clients, the DAs and the public defenders and the parole officers, the thing every idealistic lawyer wishes they could afford to do. “It feels great to give back.” The masks he used to wear, laid atop each other like an artichoke, have now been shed…revealing the heart. “I feel like there’s something there, which is something that I never felt before.”
He still doesn’t fit his chair in the sanctuary. But he belongs in his chair in the sanctuary. That’s his seat in our community. Every Friday, he and his father sit crammed against each other singing, praying, and never apologizing for a moment of it. His kindness and generosity are felt throughout the community, and warmth permeates our temple. The tallest blade of grass, the one taught his whole life to cut himself down before anyone else could, is learning that he was never too big for the room. The room was just too small for him.