“Everyone wants to quit at some point, but if you don’t push yourself, you fall further behind and you’ll soon be off the wagon."
My younger self wouldn’t easily recognize me today. As an outreach director in the Bay Area of Northern California, I juggle three jobs helping overseeing 750 NCSY students. My wife Chani has a full-time job as well, and we have four children. In the last two months alone, since the start of the new year, our staff has run over 200 events.
As a teen, I wasn’t the committed type of kid. When I was ten, my family made aliyah from Baltimore. Miserable about the move, I refused to go to school, refused to learn Hebrew, refused to do anything really. I floundered through a record nine schools; by the time I reached 11th grade I had very few academic skills.
One Friday night, my friends and I were hanging out on the streets when former New Yorker Rabbi Yosef Amar gathered us inside, we played a game of ping-pong and he warmed us up to an oneg Shabbos. That scene soon became a regular fixture in my life, and with Rabbi Amar’s infinite patience and my parents’ support, I slowly turned my life around.
With time I grasped Gemara learning and began to enjoy it, and I eventually made my way to Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh (KBY), a hesder-style yeshivah in Kvutzat Yavneh. In yeshivah I’d sometimes watched a daf yomi shiur in progress and I envied the way those people were actually covering ground.
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