Where I come from

I grew up in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, an only child, in a family that started out Conservative and grew more Orthodox over the years. I went to public school until high school, then spent three years at a yeshiva, where I went straight from a public school classroom into the top Gemara shiur.

My Gemara teacher that first year, the man I spent hours with every day, gave us one rule on the first morning: follow your mind, no matter where it takes you. It was exactly the right thing to tell a precocious teenager, and it has been working on me ever since.

I tried rabbinical school and I tried college. Neither went the way it was supposed to, so I learned what I needed by living. I work from the periphery, a hedge witch more or less, and the view is better from the edges.

Rambam, and after

All that time I was growing past Orthodoxy and into a Maimonidean path: not quite Ashkenazi, not quite Sepharadi, Maimonidean. In the early 2000s I was part of the first Maimonidean circles online, email lists of people working through the Mishneh Torah together, asking how to actually live by it, and learning Yemenite history and practice along the way. In college I published a Rambam Siddur, the first publicly available siddur built on the liturgy Rambam records in the Mishneh Torah, and started a small publishing company around it.

Then I found José Faur, through his essay Anti-Maimonidean Demons, on a website that no longer exists. It took apart the way street Orthodoxy tells its own history and made me rethink where Jewish authority actually lives. Golden Doves with Silver Dots, Homo Mysticus, and, when it finally came out, The Horizontal Society showed me what a Maimonidean Judaism could be.

Today I am a little bit post-Maimonidean. I want to live as full, honest, and authentic a covenantal life as I can, and I am asking what of the halakhic system can be restored and developed for a civilization that faces forward instead of repeating its past.

Jerusalem

I first came here on Birthright at seventeen. I was raised a Zionist and named Gil Elon by parents who identified deeply with Israel, and arriving felt like a hand sliding into a glove. For the first time, everything about being Jewish felt natural, connected to the land and to the people around me. Tolkien’s elves heard the sea once and could never get it out of their heads. That was me. I went home, came back to staff a Birthright trip, and never let it go.

I made aliyah straight to Jerusalem about fifteen years ago and stayed. My wife and I are raising our daughters in South Jerusalem, among wonderful neighborhoods, communities, and people. I speak English and Hebrew and a little Arabic.

What I am, more or less

A philosopher and an artist. A systems thinker and a builder. A translator between traditions, between ideas and reality, and between people who don’t quite see each other yet. The short labels I use need some unpacking:

• A Rational Mystic. Reason is the basis, and nothing I believe can conflict with it. But reason is a doorway, not the whole house. Past it there is a transrational, more intuitive and poetic way of knowing, and I think it is real.
• Post-Maimonidean. Rambam’s method formed me, and I follow it even where it leads away from his own conclusions.
• A Student of Sages, Jewish and otherwise. I am trying to learn how to be a wise and good person. A modest yoga practice, Zen, and the Stoics all help, and the Dhammapada and the Bhagavad Gita ride in my pocket.
• An Alphabetic Jew, in Faur’s sense: Judaism as a community that reads, interprets, and writes, in a world that is itself a text to be interpreted. That makes me a member of the world’s oldest book club.
• Pro-Palestinian. I want one state where all of us are equal, with equal citizenship for everyone.
• A Libertarian Socialist. A socialist, not a Bolshevik. Most things are best governed locally, especially with technology supporting civil society.
• An Intergalactic Zionist. The Politics page explains that one.

What I do for a living

I’m a co-founder and the COO of BrightLeaf Giving and BrightLeaf Digital. It started with two of us who wanted a better way for people to give and to raise money for good causes. BrightLeaf Giving helps grassroots projects raise money through fiscal sponsorship before they have the connections or the structure to do it alone, and I think it is the best grassroots fundraising platform there is. BrightLeaf Digital builds the software behind it, along with plugins and development for WordPress and Gravity Forms.

I work with AI all day, every day, across every part of both companies, and I coach people who want to work that way. More on the Work page.

Who I keep returning to

Abraham Joshua Heschel writes about the deepest and subtlest things beautifully and rationally, with a passion you can feel on the page. Marcus Aurelius shows what it looks like to live philosophy, working through his life in notes to himself. Hunter S. Thompson isn’t on their level, but his sheer joy of life makes him a pleasure to read. Rambam and his family, always. José Faur, whose The Horizontal Society I have read four times.

No ten books made me. All of them did, and they still do. Some arrived at exactly the right time. Here is what I’m reading now.

What this site is for

This is for the things I want people to engage with fifty years from now. The essays argue. The poems don’t. The tools are tools. The art is art.

If anything I write changes your mind, or the world, that’s the only reason it exists. I might be wrong about how fast any of this changes. I’m not sure which way to update.

If you’re new here

Start with Perks of Being a Maimonidean. It’s the cleanest door into what I think halakha is for, and most of the rest builds outward from there. For the politics, read Two Sides to a Flag.

#kulWahad