Why I Created This Practice
I Created the Practice I Needed
I was writing for Hollywood so….
How did I come to create this writing workshop?
Chapter 01
Jerusalem, 3 A.M.
A Big Door Creaks Open.
Cambridge is freezing and so am I! Winter break, I fly to Israel, first time, no expectations, and stumble into my first real Shabbat with an old Russian refugee rabbi. Shoebox apartment. He pulls book after book off the shelf and to my amazement, we explore the nuances of love. For me, for the first time, the ancient texts breathe. I’m suddenly inside the real questions: freedom, family, desire, responsibility, what makes a life worth living.
I don’t find answers. In fact, I have a kipah, custom-made, ringed in question marks, that I can wear with sincerity around Jerusalem.
Chapter 02
First Personal Midrash Workshop
The Joy of Creativity Calls Me.
I start a Stanford PhD chasing one question: how can two people read the same text and walk away with two entirely different truths? I love words. They’re my music. At Stanford I help super-nerds open up and pour their real feelings onto the page. Then in Hollywood, I make characters come to life on screen. Exhilarating, but I want to explore deeper questions. So I start pulling a question, an image, a conflict from the weekly Torah portion and use it as a spark to write my own life, and invite others to do the same. A few students on my back deck soon become thirty. Thirty becomes a workshop at the American Jewish University. Week after week, teen to octogenarian, and out come the treasures: childhood memories, searing relationships, ambitions, dreams, fears, passions nobody had let themselves speak before.
Each week, another portion, another spark. You never know what’s going to catch the imagination.
Chapter 03
Then I Walk Away
The “Ism” Doesn’t Walk Me in a Straight Line.
I love Judaic texts: the layers, the brilliance, the history. But the world is vast and glorious and it calls me to adventure: Himalayan monasteries, Amazonian medicine ceremonies, ashrams across India. Always writing. Never willing to waste a day of this one precious life. Chasing the fullness of it, on this Earth, in this body, and living it again through words.
The big questions never completely leave me.
Chapter 04
I Find My Way Back Through Life, and Death
Life Is a Sly and Masterful Teacher.
Becoming a father again, after a long hiatus, pulls me back toward community. The pattern was always there: whichever country, whichever chapter of my life, my closest friends were almost always Jewish. India. Europe. The Caribbean. My people are my home. My wife, Mariela, goes deep into Kabbalah with a teacher in Spain, and suddenly our dinner table is having conversations that crack me open in wholly new ways, despite once teaching the history of Jewish mysticism at university! We start shutting everything down for Shabbat: a real oasis, kids and food and singing and friends. Through my small family, my Jewish life comes alive again, the same warmth I first felt in Jerusalem. I start wondering if Write Through the Torah could go online.
This time, the writing workshop would be leavened by a longer life, richly lived.
Chapter 05
Then… October 7
Everything Changes. Not Once. Twice.
We all remember waking up on October 8th to the news. The shock. The disgust. The grief. The fury. My extended family’s kibbutz is invaded. Ten murdered. Then comes a second horror, slower and stranger: watching the world go hateful, brainwashed by a well-funded, well-orchestrated demonization campaign that finds shockingly fertile soil. Suddenly we’re all on the front line: a London street, an Australian beach, any synagogue, any gathering, any time, anywhere. My life. My children. Yours.
In a world gone mad, I find myself reaching again for this well of beauty and wisdom, and for my place in it.
Chapter 06
Why This, Why Now
Your Writing and the New Jewish Renaissance.
I find myself back in the creative practice I started years ago, except now it carries more weight, more urgency. Maybe like you, I feel like I live in two worlds: the one before October 7th, and this new one, where our voices, our truth, our humanity are being drowned out by other voices. That’s why I’m putting everything into Write Through the Torah again: to bring our voices up from the depths. To speak our truths. To tell our stories. First, so we reconnect with ourselves. Second, so we share them with others. Third, so we inscribe a million Jewish voices loud enough to drown out the lies about who we are. This workshop is an ongoing oasis where centuries of Jewish wisdom become something to question, wrestle, celebrate, and create with, joining the generations who have made this tradition so rich. We have so much love and creativity to offer the world. This is a place to make it happen.
I want each of us to become conscious authors of our own unique experience.
I created this writing practice for myself, my joy, my clarity, my soul.
And this is the practice into which I invite you now.
Adam
