I have the most amazing news!!!! (This not a hook, nor am I overstating the sheer amazingness of this news!) So grab a drink of your choice and hunker down on the overstuffed love seat in the corner, because I’ve got a you-couldn’t-make-up-a-story-like-that.
Spoiler alert for those who can’t wait: Gabby’s Place got a place!
Okay now some quick backstory for the three of you who don’t savor and reread every word I write.
After October 7 in very quick succession I was shocked and mortified by the atrocities done to beautiful girls and babies and other forms of humans sleeping in their farm beds. Then I was extra voltage shocked, fried and smoking with the bitter infusion of burning rubber that the world around me and colleagues who knew me and institutions I trusted blamed these beautiful beautiful girls and babies (but what was Israel wearing?) And so in a series of rapid fires, I blew up my career, walked away from it all, and started my new and spectacularly unpaid extra full time career, code name “Israel.” (There was no time for branding sessions. All the copyrighters had gone on strike since the world forevermore believed white was black and remaining available graphic artists were only painting in Pantone’s color of the year Palestinian Green.)
I was a tiny tiny part of this massive effort of hedge fund executives and Israeli expats and however many other voices on the other end of the phone who had dusted off their super hero capes and were helping ship helmets for reservists; home delivery kits for pregnant women in the thousands of small towns that were isolated; household supplies for hundreds of thousands of displaced Israeli children. In my un-named unit we moved medical equipment down the East Coast to a donated warehouse in Florida where they were loaded onto planes donated by Governor DeSantis. I coordinated with teams on the ground in Israel for customs, VAT taxes and distribution.
On October 6 (I told you truth is wilder than fiction) I had officially opened up my file to realize a long long yearning of the soul of my souls and make aliyah. In the January after October I led a two week mission in Israel and used the time to scope out a landing spot.
What could have gone sideways? Look: bureaucracy in any county is a huge hassle. Israeli bureaucracy has an extra special spice blend. Israeli bureaucracy for special cases like mine that have involved more than one marriage and divorce leading to a hopscotch paper trail of name changes…well it’s not simple. And I can’t handle Verizon on a good day.
After a year and a half of arguing with the state of Israel that, no, I could not provide an apostille on a piece of paper from my divorce because my ex husband never filed that piece of paper, I found it impossible to breathe thinking about another morning not waking up and putting my foot down on any other land than Mine. So I got a one way ticket and packed five suitcases weighing 32 Kilos or less and sent Nefesh-B-Nefesh, the paper work pushers for North American immigration to Israel, my itinerary. Which is to say: another Jew is coming home with or without the correct documents.
Now we have to go back back in back story to about a ten year old version of me. What big dreams did that little tike have for her life launching from 125 Toll Drive, Southampton, Pennsylvania? To be a chef, a rabbi and a writer.
Towards my chefy aspirations, precocious me submitted my banana bread recipe to (pre Food Network) TV famous Chef Tell. As a prize for being accepted for his children’s cookbook, I got a private tour with the Great Chef Tell himself at his restaurant in the Philadelphia suburbs.
That same year, 10 year old writer me ran a poetry contest for Shelmire Elementary School. I “published” a book of the winners which was somehow bound (Mom?) and then sold to the impressed writers’ fans (Moms and Dads) with the proceeds donated to the Tay Sachs foundation.
Rabbi to be me skipped merrily through to the end of my angst filled adolescence, sure that I knew my career path. Before going away to undergrad I had already lined up my Rabbinical graduate degree at the Reform movement’s divinity school, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. The snag came in university when I found out that while women have many sacred missions within Orthodox Judaism, Rabbi isn’t one of them.
Over the years I then formulated a basic aspirational ideal job title: Chabad Rebbetzin. These wonder women do all I loved to do and more. Between writing and speaking and teaching, they whip up Shabbats for hundreds with a flick of their dish towels.
Two snafus: the title of Rebbetzin is like Mrs. It requires a husband who does the whole Rabbi-ing part of the team gig. Not only am I not married, I am also not really Chabad. I love the Chabad movement, and the 7th Lubavitcher Rebbe who, before his very mortal death in 1994, created an entire International infrastructure of outreach centers around the world to simply love every Jew. In addition to many parts that do jive with my flower child mystical magical kaleidoscope view of the world as we’d wish to know it, the Chassidic philosophy includes something akin to the marriages that have not been my forte: a deep and specific bond between a chossid (a Jew who chooses this path) and a Rebbe.
And it’s a monogamous kind of pointing from the bleachers. A that’s my guy! That’s right. Down there in the black jacket. No to the left. That black jacket and felt hat. I’m more of a freelancer for the founder of Chassidism, the Ba’al Shem Tov. Think of me like a special projects consultant.
So here I am spending my life preaching purpose. Find your superpower! Pull that internal rope that holds the scaffolding to slowly slowly and finally hand over hand and tug that truth that little you knew all along and then walk to that crossroad of the road called What the World Needs Most From You. And there, Dorothy, you’ll find the lodging of the deepest desires of your soul of souls that was there all along. Home.
So fast forward four decades and I land in Ben Gurion International airport with more cooking utensils than concrete plans. Through a series of sidesteps once I arrived, two things happened hand in hand:
One, I found my superpowers. I cooked one Shabbat meal for a reservist family whose husband was away at one of seven fronts. Then I cooked five. Then one by one volunteers ages 14-88 joined me and we started sending 100 Shabbat meals a week out of my little Israeli kitchen. Where did it come from? My home. My heart. Gabby’s Place.
Funding this out of my own shallow pockets led to the second set of events: I ended up without my own set of keys.
It would turn out that the lead actor in the intersection of passion purpose and poverty was a very tall Charedi Rabbi who doesn’t speak a word of English.
You see, for over a year of sending out thousands of meals, Gabby’s Place was just my home. There was no organization. No nonprofit status or board of advisors. Not even a bank account. And no matter how frugal I was, buying the groceries for 100 Shabbat meals a week got costly quick. I had to lower cost and increase revenue.
Over a year ago, one of our volunteers posted in a Hebrew language Netanya volunteer chat about Gabby’s Place. She received a message from the tall Charedi Rabbi who runs one of Netanya’s largest charities including soups kitchens and food distribution to thousands of widows, children, Holocaust survivors and others with need.
Could they help?
Tuv Lev became one of the first institutional partners of Gabby’s Place. Every Tuesday at 2, I went to the Tuv Lev warehouse and picked up a case of frozen fish and six kilos of rice. Then I snapped on some rubber gloves and dug into palette boxes waist high of fresh Israeli produce that Israeli farmers and kibbutzim donate. Multiple charities like Lecket run massive efforts to redistribute excess produce across the country before it spoils. If you’ve come to Israel on a mission to pick beets, they may have ended up on my pallets that were then peeled by an 80 year old volunteer from the UK, converted to salad and soup by our team, and sent out in a Shabbat delivery. Holy beets.
Rabbi Weiss runs a massive organization in Tuv Lev. I suspect that he hires a machine somewhere that takes every shekel and stretches it until it’s thinner than rice paper and somehow convinces vendors to accept the now transparently thin but longer shekel as actually worth 3 shekels. It’s Rabbi math.
Rabbi Weiss is six foot and a heck of a lot inches. He always wears a white button down shirt that may start the day fully tucked into the baggy black slacks, but never ends that way. He always has a smile under his long grey beard that is always always matched in his eyes. He does not speak a word of English but between translators, Google, and my slowly improving Hebrew, we’ve managed to work together in ever expanding ways over more than a year. In January we started a partnership that gives 50 local reservist families monthly boxes of groceries, household items, diapers and formula.
If you’re wondering my screening process: if a husband sends me a WhatsApp message from one of seven fronts that his wife needs toilet paper. I believe him. (It could break a beating heart to think about our young soldiers risking their lives protecting over 3,000 calories of a day of “aid” to the families who decapitated babies while their own babies in Israel don’t have formula.) Gabby’s Place provides the first emergency boxes, communications, home deliveries and then the families become part of the Tuv Lev monthly system.
If you read my last piece and were sad, I am sorry. I thought it was very inspiring how confident I was that Hashem had a plan even when I found myself a wandering midlife Jewess with a backpack but no keys. Apparently it landed a little closer to She’s officially now out of her mind than oh how inspiring that she’s getting up in the middle of the night to find her ascent in the descent.
So if you were too busy shaking your head in despair at the last letter to get the gist- I had consulted with a mekubel, a big mystic, one who had actually translated Zohar (the holy holy book of Kabbalah) into English. I sat at his dining table in a makeshift kitchen under a tarp in the courtyard of his cave apartment in the tunnels of the Old City of Jerusalem.
What had I missed? What had I failed to do of the work that is mine to do? What should be my next steps?
In Cliff Notes short short: he said that it was a great level of chesed, of love and giving, that I was living. That I was living just for others to the point where I had thrown myself so much into this life and given my time (and as it turns out all of my money) was an admirable life. But as I’ve clearly completed my tikun, my cosmic corrections doing it that way, now Hashem wanted me to do it another way. Build Gabby’s Place and keep raising money for our reservists and their families, but pay myself a salary.
But how to do this without a place to do it???
So night after night after the mystic in the caves, I got up and looked for the glory in the one room fifth floor walk up where you have to imagine some spaces where a stair used to be on a street that you just don’t want to promenade at night.
And then a once in a lifetime amazing opportunity- the tall mystic in the cave invited me to spend Shabbat meals with them as long as I could find a bed somewhere nearby. This should have been simple. Easy peasy. But I define hashgacha pratit, divine providence, as when it appears irrational. It was irrational, made no sense, but I could not find a single place to just sleep for one Shabbat night despite many messages sent frantically over the week.
I found myself going into Shabbat alone, with no hot food, in a very creepy building. What should I do? I wanted to go to daven, to pray at Shabbat services. I remembered a storefront sign that said Bait Kenneset, synagogue, maybe it had a minyan on Shabbat. Lo and behold, a beautiful full service was going on with a full women’s section. And then afterwards not just a little fish and crackers for a kiddush, a complete sit down meal for all- salmon and challah and dips, chicken and cholent with big pieces of meat. Delicious.
After returning for the evening service, I stepped into the kitchen and there was a very tall 6 foot a lot Rabbi standing there. I look up and up. Gavriella? Tuv Lev guy? Well we had a big heart to heart after the havdalah candle was extinguished. At the end he said: you know, maybe we could find a place for you within Tuv Lev. Remind me at 10 on Monday.
Monday morning I sent Rabbi Weiss a Hebrew WhatsApp proposal. Essentially Gabby’s place could become a part of Tuv Lev who would help me get my work visa and then put me on a modest salary for which I would do fundraising, volunteer management and social media.
Yes. That’s exactly what he was thinking. Could I come by in an hour? And after two hours of very slow Hebrew and the occasional Google Translate to the begrudging Rabbi, he had written out a contract.
Now the whole time I was relieved for myself that this was a path to my own stability with a visa to aliyah and please Gd the ability to get a bank account and regular lease. But it was a little shadowed by the feeling that I was giving up the dream of a chesed center once and for all.
And then at some point between slow slow Hebrew pause try to understand, he said: Oh, and Gabby’s Place can have the synagogue Sunday through Thursdays. The industrial kitchen. The social hall. The women’s section. The office. The second kitchen. Front and back outdoor areas. The keys.
Shabbat meals. Weekday coffee hours with childcare. Spa days. Free social work and therapy. Challah bakes and cooking classes. English classes for the kids. Job fairs to hire reservist owned small businesses.
The keys to a home.
The ribbon cutting is planned for September 7 in Netanya. Before then I’ll be putting up a new English website for the combined organization. (We have nonprofit status in five countries!) Bli neder I will share as much as I can of the transformation in the coming weeks. You, too, are a part of the community that is building this dream. Thank you.
And so, dear reader….Dreams really do come true. Flawed and messy people can find their superpowers even in the middle or fringes of a lifetime. The ascent really is in the descent. Even in the darkest hours Am Yisrael has a very special collective power: we find the light.
Am Yisrael Chai
XO Gavriella
Learn more about Gabby’s Place:
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.