From Hollywood to the Holy Land - Rabbi Sinclair's The Life Story

uh good afternoon everybody tell you a little bit let's start here about um or must be nearly 35 years ago I was standing at L airport uh the immigration stand there and I pull out this ancient British passport that I have and I hand it to the lady behind the counter now she picks up the passport and she looks at the name inside it says John J O N Sinclair not a very Jewish name so she looks up at me and I'm you know dressed in sort of standard Ked outfit hat the coat everything she looks at the name she looks up at me she open she flips flips the passport to the picture page and there is this picture of this jet setting Hollywood record producer with a very with a Douglas Fairbanks mustache and a very very self-satisfied look on his face it must have been something like like this so she looks down at the picture she looks up at me she looks down at the picture she closes the passport and with this sigh which mixes tremendous sympathy and total bewilderment she says what happened so I replied with to her with two words in Yiddish now I don't know a lot of Yiddish but two words in Yiddish I do know I said to her pin yid she said ma apparently her Yiddish was about as extensive as mine was so I translated for into I said which translates into into English as the Jewish spark teaches inside every year there's a little Pinter and it never ever ever goes out however far a person becomes estranged from the beliefs the knowledge the traditions of our fathers and our grandfathers as's a little spark a little candle that goes on glowing in the darkest of Darkness some I guess as R scha said some 35 years ago I decided to come to and if you told me back then when I was a record producer producing records in London in Los Angeles and in New York and if you told me then that 35 years later 37 years later I would be standing here this afternoon speaking to you now I'd have changed my manager people ask me how did you become from in Hollywood so I tell them if living in Hollywood doesn't make you from nothing will when you're working in the Dream Factory when you see the secular World up close eyeball to eyeball you have a very good idea of the tremendous fakery that the secular world is and what a powerful fakery it is so how did I get from Hollywood to the Holy Land well to cut a long story short I always wanted to be an actor when I was a kid I always acted in school plays and um when I went to University I I learned I studi drama and English and I the difficult thing about being an actor is to be an actor you have to have what's called an equity card a union ticket a union card now to get a union card to get an equity card you have to have a job but to have a job you have to have an equity card I managed to kind of break into the industry because they were putting together a touring company of this musical which you've probably never heard of called hairir yeah you remember hair so back in the late early late SE was early 70s there was this big musical called hair it was like a hippie Musical and it would started off off Broadway went to Broadway and now went to London and now they were putting together a tour around the the provinces of England and each cast had about 30 boys and girls so about they were looking for 90 kids which is why they dropped the rules a little bit 90 kids who could all sing dance and act well I could act I could sing and as I wrote on my resume I could move well I managed to move well enough to get myself a job in the touring company of hair and we tour I spent six months touring around the provinces of Leeds Birmingham Bristol we went up to abedine uh Liverpool I can promise you for a so-called glamorous profession it's extremely boring what's the most important part of a play everyone's done a play here Ryan performance most important part part part of a player would suggest is rehearsal that's when you know everything either comes out or it doesn't come out it's a bit like baking a cake what you put into the oven comes out of the oven what doesn't doesn't don't put into the oven doesn't come out but once you've had your opening night and you've had your second night you've had your third your fourth fifth sixth seventh you're doing eight shows a week every show is two and a half three hours long it's night after night night after night the same thing over and over again and you got nothing to do you you you're know some strange provincial Town you've know relatives there you know friends there you've seen every movie in town three times so you spend tremendous amounts of time sitting in coffee bars drinking enormous cups of coffee now I had a friend in the cast and we I remember sitting in a coffee bar one day with him I think it was in leads we were talking about you know three things that really interested us the first of these three things was musicals we were in a musical we used to discuss how far could you push the edges of the envelope how far could you push a musical and it would still be you know acceptable the second thing we used to talk about was science fiction movies we love the you know 1950s black and white these cheap science fiction movies where which didn't fool anybody everybody was in you know I'm not talking about the sort of science fiction movies that you can see nowadays where you know the special effects budget was probably marginally larger than the gross national product of Peru last year I'm talking about the sort of science fictions where movies they spent about 25 cents on this ridiculous inflatable beach ball which kind of bounces around Gotham City terrorizing the poor inhabitant we love these bad science fiction movies you know we used to compare notes you remember Michael Remy Michael reny The Day the Earth Stood Still ah yeah that was a great one the third thing we used to talk a lot about was rock and roll now I'm not talking about the sort of rubbishy here on the radio nowadays I'm talking about you know the real thing Chuck Barry little Little Richard we loved all those old records so I remember we were sitting in this coffee bar in leads one day and I said to and I an idea dropped into my head I said Richard why hasn't anybody written a science fiction rock and roll musical his eyes lit up he said that's a good idea that's a good idea let's do it so we sat down that afternoon we started to to write a musical well we hadn't got very far with this musical we had the idea of this opening scene would be this sort of classic Midwestern wedding there with the white picket fence and the bride and the groom would drive off and the confess into the lovely beautiful sunset and of course there to be this torrential rainstorm as soon as they leave town you know the LA Police Department fire department pouring millions of gallons of water onto some Hollywood set and of course what happens the car breaks down and the groom turns to the bride and she and he says didn't we pass a castle back down the road anyway it's a kind a very long story short before we got very far with this musical I had to leave the cast of hair hair was a very tough J job for the actors because it had never been designed to you know to be run month after month on the road things you can ask an actor to do for two weeks in an off Studio Off Broadway Studio production so one of the things that we used to do was this thing called knee acting knee acting involved the entire cost of 30 of us walking down stage and as one man falling to our knees and it must have looked amazing you know 30 people suddenly dropping to their knees the problem is I don't think the Rola Shalon had this quite in mind when designing the human knee and so after 6 months of knee acting my right knee gave out and swelled up left the cast of hair went back down to London to cut a very long story short I got involved in building a recording studio now this recording studio turned out to be the first 24 track recording studio in England in Europe now I don't know if you know anything about recording but everything at the time was 16 track the more tracks you have basically the more flexibility you have the more advanced the technology so we opened up as 24 tracks and we were the latest thing on the Block the problem is we didn't have a hit record and Studios fall stand or fall by their hits you know if you have a hit that's the place there the magic that's it but if you don't have a hit so you're in another Studio even if you've got great technology everybody's looking for magic so uh hit came along in the following way there was this band that had simply run out of room they' run out of tracks and they were working in a studio called Trident in wardor Street in the West End of London and they they'd run out of room they hadn't finished the record they putting out their new single and it was this extremely complicated piece of music so they had to come to us we were the only game in town they come in you know with the big back in the day these big 2-in tapes they put it up on the tape recorder and from we can hear outside in the control and what's going on in there and this is their new single I mean these guys are crazy you know back there in the 70s Auntie the BBC used to rule the airwaves with an iron fist what the BBC decided was a pot record to get played and if the BBC didn't play it that's it you were dead but BBC's definition of a pop record was basically something 2 minutes 43 and a half seconds and a major key in 44 time I'm exaggerating but it was very rare you know they had very strict type programming this song which was going to be their new single was about 4 minutes long the time the Rhythm the time signature changed about every 30 seconds it was about five different Keys we thought these guys were be going to be crazy this is never going to go how wrong we were the song was a song called Bohemian rapidy the song the band was a band called Queen and basically after that we could have sold the studio time for about 25 hours a day bottled the air and stood in the street and sold out as well nothing succeeds like success so as a result of getting this big hit record which was mixed at my studio we started to get very good offers of work from the states and I'm standing in the control room in the studio one day and this guy comes on the line with this fake American accent and he goes oh hi uh you don't know who I am but I heard you're a real good producer I got this band they're going to be number one we're going to fly over New York City to produce the album we're going to get your limousine from the airport to your hotel we're going to get you a limousine from the hotel to your room we get you limousine from the room to the kitchen we get you limousine to the limousine to the limousine and I think to myself anybody's got an American accent as bad as this has got to be joking it takes me two minutes into this conversation to realize no this is actually a real manager with a real band and a real accent and before I can say Jack Robinson there I am in si rehearsal Studio standing there with my cousin who's co-producing with me listening to these guys and nobody had heard a note of music up to this point you everything happened so fast onto the plane and so you know I'm standing there and I'm looking at these guys and I'm thinking what do these guys can't play well I breathed a sigh of released when they struck up the first four bars of a song and I thought to myself B hasem well I would have said bashem had I known to say it at the time bashem a hit record and it was a hit the song was a song called cold as ice the band was a band called Foreigner and that debut album by Foreigner went on to sell over five million records barem so around this time I get a phone call from my Earth while writing partner Richard he says he says John what's happening you know are you are you are you a record producer are you a Studio owner or are you a playwright what's happening to our musical I said Richard you write this musical you know you got a basic idea but you goe and you know I know a little bit about the business now when you finish doing it we're going to set up a music publishing company to publish the music you go ahead take it so he went ahead and he finished it off and it became quite successful I know if you ever heard of it it was called The Rocky Horror Picture Show so there I was in 1977 I've got the first 24 track recording studio in Europe I've got a 5 million selling Platinum 5 million selling album five platinum records neatly lined up there on my mother's living room wall I've got the music publishing of one of the biggest musicals of the decade it's more than a musical there a migas I've got this m a Fastback Bentley Continental with a long fish tail back it's about 3/4 of a block long pure aluminium body they only made 150 of them inside there's this beautiful B burgundy and beige pure leather up whole street that 15 cows have had to Die For in the middle of the dashboard is this this beautiful limited edition Smith's analog clock which is ticking away ticking away I promise you this car is so quiet you can hear the moments of your life ticking away ticking away and I'm driving around town and I'm looking at them and they're looking at me and I'm looking at them and they're looking at me and I've been eating steak for lunch and steak for dinner and steak for breakfast and steak for steak and I think to myself is that all there is this is it this is what people practically claw each other you know to get to this this is it and I was filled with this tremendous sense of emptiness I went back to London I started to think to myself you know so what do we do here at the time I was writing some songs with a guy called Robert Linsky all shom and we got signed up to Charisma records and Charisma records we put we we made this single we wrote this single that Charisma were convinced was going to be an enormous hit and they put us on the the BBC we did vid we did and the the song bombed completely you know if I ever see hash everybody said this is going to be a number one hit and it went absolutely nowhere so I took another thought about it and I think thought to myself you know something I'm going to go back to acting that's where my real life my my my real love is gave up the music business pretty much on the spot flew out to the coast flew out to Los Angeles got myself an agent I started to work I did the first EP episode of Moonlighting I did a thing called John and Yoko a love story I played George Martin The Beatles record producer I did um Half Moon street with sigoni Weaver and I was working and I start to get the same feeling now I'm really in trouble I have no idea what it is that's going to make me f feel fulfilled in life at this point I read a book really two books one book within the other one book was let's say the the shell the kipa and the other was the fruit pre let's start with the kipa the shell the shell the book that contained the other book was a novel by a famous Yiddish author and that sat on my desk in my bookshelf rather in Los Angeles about two and a half years until I finally took it and I read it on a beach in a place called Cabos San Lucas in Baja California in Mexico now for those of you who don't know cabasan Lucas is the place where when the pressure of doing nothing in Hollywood gets too much for you you can go down to cavas Lucas and do nothing down there instead I took this book and I read it on the beach and it hit me between the eyes like a jugut the book was about AAL Chua this was a book about AAL Chua somebody in the war in the war years who grown up in Poland and when the Nazis Yak rolled over this little Jewish stle they rounded up all the Jews they hered them to this little Jewish this little um wooden Shool the Stormtroopers run in they have these bales of hay and carine and gasoline and they they throw the torch and the whole thing goes up in this tremendous Inferno and the screams the cries that are coming from the shol and there's a very young agile teenage boy who manages to clamber his way up to the ladies gallery and up and up and up through an open Skylight he escapes he runs away to Danzig he gets on the boat he gets to New York City and he throws if he'd had it to fill him with him he would throw them into the East River but he threw everything away all of the thousands of years of Yiddish kite he threw away he turned his back on the Rabon on everything he starts a completely secular life many years later he's in a Bookshop and he gives the book to the lady behind the counter and he looks at her and he realized that this was a girl that he remembered from the town the strle that he grew up in they recognized each other they meet and after these many years they fall in love and they get married and of course she completely by now also has become completely secular completely without any contact to Yiddish kite they meet they fall in love they get married and they get married in a totally cular secular way couple of years down the road once the gloss is worn off and the boredom starts to set in I don't think I need to go into too many details the hero of this book comes back unexpectedly one lunchtime he pulls his key out of the door puts it in the door he opens the door and in front of him he sees a sight he cannot believe what's been going on he stands there transfixed by this terrible terrible Apparition for a few seconds and then he he rushes into the apartment runs into the bedroom opens up a closet he knows in an old suit he has a few hundred grabs the money stuffs it into his pockets he runs out of the door he runs down the 11 flights of stairs all the way to the gra runs out of that building and he's running he's running he's running he doesn't know where he's running he's just running away and he runs all the way down to the low east side of New York City where all the Jews came off the boats from Europe and he's just running down this little side street down there on the low side somebody steps out of a small stable and says at Center at Center man someone needs to say Kadesh for their father and they can't find a tenth man and he's just running down the street literally they drag him in off the street and he's standing there and he hears his his heart shes inside him he finds himself standing there with tears pouring down his face he hasn't heard kades in 23 years and he stands there for a very long time everybody else leaves the shoe if I fin gets himself together walks out into the street he walks a few yards down the street 50 yards and he finds himself looking in the window of a Jewish Bookshop in the window of that Jewish book shop my friends was a book called the path of the justes was born in Italy and died here in Earth Isel about 280 years ago and as he looked through the window he knows what he's going to do goes into the Bookshop buys the book he goes out in the street he hails down a taxi cab he says take me to the airport take me to Kennedy he gets to the airport he buys a tick he flies to where it's is Royal he gets off the plane he finds another taxi cab says take me toam take me to the coil they climb up the ancient hallowed Hills of UDA and he gets to the coal and he walks up to those ancient hallowed stones and he's standing there crying his eyes out for his life and somebody walks up Taps him on the shoulder and says are you Jewish and he says yes I'm Jewish he says to him would you like to come for shabas and he says yes I think I would I think I would and he leads him back through the streets of shabas anybody who's done this knows what it's like to walk through the middle of a major road you do this any other time of the week you'll be instantly moaned down by a number three bus and now there's nothing there except little children dressed up in there shab's finest and the odor of diesel fumes has been replaced by the aroma of shabas cooking wafting on the night air and he's led into this beautiful Humble Home and the light that Shone off that shab's table I was fascinated by this novel so I got off the beach in cavan Lucas flew back to Los Angeles I was fascinated to know what was this book that the hero of this novel what was this book The mcil is sh him that had such a powerful influence that the M buying of the book so I went down to a Bookshop I think it was some onong Fairfax and I bought a copy of sarim with an English translation CU my Hebrew at the time certainly wouldn't have been able to manage it in Hebrew s sh was my my bedtime reading for the next 3 months which if you think about it is an extremely amusing statement because mcil is nobody's idea of a bedtime book is a very very difficult safer and as the author himself says you won't find why is it so difficult because you won't find anything that you didn't already know before and my friends that is the most difficult kind of knowledge to inculcate you see we're all born with certain innate life wisdom we know it very early on in our lives we take those essential life lessons that knowledge and we lob it into this leadline chest in the back of our heads we slam the door lock it up with a few P padlocks and and and and and and chains and that there that essential life information will stay till the day we die unless we make a positive proactive effort to get back in contact with that innate knowledge that we're all born with with that pin yid m is the way one of the ways you can get in touch with that essential life information that you know all about but to the extent that these truths are well known by everybody so are they completely ignored they cease to have any power on us this is what misham tries to do tries to get you back into that leadline chamber and really m is really not a book at all it just looks like a book it's a blowtorch it's a blowtorch that gets gets you into that leadline chamber but like a blowtorch it doesn't work at once like a blowtorch you have to keep going at it and going at it and going at it and going eventually you get in there similarly missil sharmas the author says you get nothing out of this book by reading it once you have to keep reading it and reading it and reading it and reading itam was my bedtime reading is there any more superficial reading than a bedtime reading when you read a book at bedtime you don't want to read the book you want to fall asleep and yet if I have to point to One Moment On my journey a moment of a crucial moment a changing of the path it was reading so that was the the pre that was the fruit inside the novel but what about the novel picture yourself you're in Hollywood you've read this great novel what do you do no huh theth more than that what you make a movie right come on we're in movie town here so picked up the phone I found out who the uh agent of this author was we started to talk yes the movie movie rights were still available I thought oh hang on a second this is this is a major project here you know maybe you should find whether this thing has actually got legs I bought 10 copies of uh this this novel I gave them out to 10 people whose opinions I trusted I said I'm calling you back in a week's time I want to know is this a movie I called them all back a week later their unanimous response was the equivalent of ah now I don't know if this uh novel was ever made into a movie I don't think it was but in a rather strange way rather than make the movie I became the movie scene one Copenhagen Denmark I get invited to play Dracula in a comedy musical in the tiv gardens in Copenhagen now every actor wants to play Dracula right if for no other reason you'll be able to say in Bella lugosi's deathless Transylvanian good evening so I arrived in Copenhagen and as the hash would have it they gave me to share an apartment with a guitar player in the band who just happened to be a Jewish boy from Manchester who was about exactly the same age as me and uh you know we're standing there first first time we're meeting in the flat we're talking to each other and he says to me uh are you Jewish I said yes I said are you Jewish he said yes he said you don't look very Jewish I said well you don't look very Jewish either so anyway after this um somewhat promising start to our our friendship we actually got on very well he says to me one Friday afternoon he said you know something I've got an idea there's a beautiful Sho here in Copenhagen why don't we go down tomorrow morning it'll be a lck so I said okay why not so we we trudged down we tromped down to this Shool following morning at the bright and early hour of about 11:00 we get in there and there's this beautiful Sho there in Copenhagen it's like this Egyptian Deco architecture and it's all very you know very European and very formal and everything and I'm sitting there looking around and I was thinking wow this is this is very very beautiful here so minding my own business suddenly I realized that the Shamus is making a beine towards me now this guy is very impressive looking he's got this flat Flemish painters cap has this long coat on and he's got in his hand this velvet cushion on which is a silver Ingot a silver plate with a Hebrew inscript I he walks over to me with tremendous aom he propers it to me I pick it up and I look at and I think wow this is really nice I give you a present the first time you come here this Danish fellow sitting next to me says he's giving you an ayia he's calling you up he's calling me up I'm 36 years old this is my first bmitzvah since this first my first Al my bmitzvah how many years is that it's 23 years since my last aah and I'm going to have to go up there and say the bras that's right there are broas there are bras before and the bras after I'm an actor where are my lines so I start to flick through the the Sido to find my lines I go up there I have my ear without making too much of a fool of myself come down sit back down in my seat and I think he to myself this is this is nice I like this as I'm lost in this Ry this Danish fellow sitting next to me turns to me he says would you like to come for chabas so I said yes I think I would I think I would and he leads me back through the streets of Copenhagen which I can promise you are far from being but you know maybe as we walked together there was a little bit of the same feeling I always like to keep shabas in places where maybe nobody ever kept shabas before there a very special feeling it's like you're walking in a shabas bubble you in completely other reality and that's what it felt like I was walking with this fell we walked back to his his um his his home and uh how are we doing walk back to his home and uh I walk through the door and two things struck me immediately as I walk through this man's home there are two things which are conspicuous in the traditional Jewish Home one's conspicuous by its presence the other is conspicuous by its absence what is conspicuous in the traditional by traditional Jewish Home I don't mean bagels and locks I mean the way the Jewish people have been doing things for the last three or Thousand Years two things are conspicuous what's conspicuous by its presence muza books I'd never seen a room so full of books in my life I promise you you couldn't wed a paperback anywhere between these books I looked at that wall of books in front of me I thought you know you're such a wise guy with your Malina a Fastback Bentley but you can't read a word of that and I was filled with this tremendous sense of my own ignorance I think it was Muhammad of all people called us the people of the book The problem is most of us can't read it anymore and by reading it I don't mean you know going to the Hebrew University and having some innan conversation with a taxi driver K Brit or parrot fashioning your way through some unab Blen bitzer in the Hamptons and getting 300 iPhones as a prize for your labors I'm talking about understanding what's what was the secrets locked in those F in those books those hundreds and thousands of years ago and as I looked at that wall of books I had this tremendous sense of loss I didn't even know what it was that I lost that that's what's conspicuous in a traditional Jewish Home by its presence while we're on the subject what is conspicuous in a Jewish a traditional Jewish Home by its absence television I don't think the two things are unconnected next time you're in a room where people are watching the television do yourself a favor don't look at the television turn around and watch the people watching the television you'll see something like this now take that picture and we'll leave aside any discussion as to content let's just talk about form talk about the the way the the method of the transmission of ideas you take that picture and contrast it with what goes on next door the the first time I walked into a base m i was terrified there people jumping up and down you think you're going to St people to strangle each other you know a person seriously I consider it a miracle that I've had the to teach in boys who've been brought up on an undiluted diet of Once Upon a Time it was television then it was movies and night it's Tik Tok and whatever else that's out there and I can still this is an open miracle in my mind I can still teach a boy to learn toas I can still te because you know everything about the media it's not a subject for now is about defocusing now this now this now this now this instant forgetfulness the whole idea of learning is holding cop you know I often think that really that learning gamor is a bit like juggling you know you pick up an idea Omar Omar got it you know what rival says you got it clear Omar a buy you dropped om you dro and and then of course you know then we get the the the spinning the speeding flaming torches are spinning over your head there's nothing like it known to mankind when a person is licked in a sug he's really holding in it and all this these fireworks are going around it's the most beautiful exciting thing in the world but it requires holding cup it's a miracle an open miracle in my mind that you know people can still you can still te Teach some teach some and people can still learn Torah this is to me an open Miracle okay enough about this it's a big subject and I want to move on to the end because okay so there I am I'm in Copenhagen I'm in this play playing Dracula I before we W before I wake walk out of this shabas meal this shabas daytime meal they start talk about Kaneka Kaneka is coming up in a week's time so I think to myself you know something I'd like to have a manura this year so I walk out of that shabas it starts to snow I'm filled the streets are filled with these very tall Nordic looking people I start to feel somewhat uncomfortable I go down to the Jewish shop there in Copenhagen where they sell everything incl including C Torah One Stop I buy manora I put it in my window I start to light my candles now get this picture this is Copenhagen how Copenhagen is very near the Arctic Circle it gets dark in the middle of the winter at about 3:30 in the afternoon it's a very dark very Northerly place what is the word in Hebrew for North safon safon is exactly the same one as another word in Hebrew safon which means hidden because the north is always a place of Darkness of concealment and there one of the darkest times of the year one of the darkest places in the world there's a little pin lead who's lighting candles lighting candles but I have to get up from my candles and go down to the theat that most Greek of Greek inventions I light my eighth candle on a very stormy North Sea crossing the steward comes around he practically arrests me for fire hands that I get back to L I say daddy where are my toins yourin you haven't put ons since mitz Daddy I'd likes him to fill in come let's go down to Gold's green my father was shom takes me down to Gold's green he buys me to fill him what do you do when you have to fill him you don't leave him in the bag you put them on I put them on that day the day after I did get a call from my manager in New York she says come back don't go to Hollywood come back to New York I want you to work on Broadway find yourself an apartment and as soon as you're settled call me I pick up the phone with one phone call I managed to find an apartment on the somewhere in the middle east side on the east side of New York City which is exactly half a block from the nearest Orthodox sh I turn up there one Shas morning and the rabbi sees in me he has he has what we would call in England in England a likely lad he sees I'm dead Keen say why do you come to sh during the week as well I said people go to sh during the week says yeah yeah so okay so I turn up there one Monday morning I've got this you know the uh linear s I'm managing to find my way through it and then something really bizarre everybody does this because i' never seen takam before if that wasn't strange enough at the end of the doing something really bizarre happens they open up the bar there's whiskey there's borbon this is 7:45 in the morning now of course unbeknownst to me me this is a TI a very time honored tradition amongst CL Israel that uh we bring into the schnaps and the little bit of Herring and of course there's a deeper more mystical side to this because when we make the broas on the whatever it is the cougal so the N of The Departed one the soul of the person who's passed on literally has an alah in sham the soul Rises up in heaven well you know I didn't know anything about aah in shamay much just saw Booz up at 7:45 in the morning so the rabbi sees um a little bit nonplused by this he walks over to me with this very large uh whiskey says you're an actor actor's drink so purely out of politeness I took the whiskey from the rabbi uh and then he comes to me with an even bigger whiskey at about 7:55 I stagger out of the Sho and I think this is great I'm going back tomorrow so I get back there the following day and of course they've closed the bar but by this time the rabbi has me exactly where he wants he said look you know you have to come every week I have to come every day you see this is very this was a very minion you know when you're ding in aak Minion when you're the only person not saying Kadesh that is of course except for these three hobos that they kind of wielding off the street to make up the minion nobody's quite sure whether these guys are Jewish or not but they're delighted to get off the Frozen New York sidewalk and get a hot cup of coffee and a dut and my friends this was the minion that was marari me which is amazing because you know there there's something called the Guinness book of the world's worst kir of Minion this must have been minion number two too nobody in their right mind would think of sending somebody to a place like this to get them more interested in becoming religious and you know you know something puts each of us on our monoral what is Life For Me could be the opposite for somebody else this was perfect for me if You' turn me to the Upper West Side you know where they have these all whistles and bells kir where they announced the page in english four times I please get me out of here this was very Hamish very unthreatening so there I am I'm Ding and the rabbi calls me up we'll finish with this couple of weeks later it's about two minutes to he says quickly come down we need a a 10th Man for at Center I go down there and we DAV M and when we finish ding M I realized afterwards why is that they call it Min because that's about the length of time it takes them to DAV both of them when we finished daving so the r says look you see what it's like here come to every day say sure why not so there I am I'm living in New York City I'm ding three times a day well at least twice I'm trying to keep koser trying to keep shabas but I really have no information no input no knowledge why am I doing these things before I could really put it all together I get invited to go down to Baltimore to do a onean show that I had in Baltimore I find the identical minion that I left in New York City only the names have ch been changed to protect the innocent this is a part of Baltimore which was once a thriving Jewish Community all the Jews have now moved out of here except the last eight elderly Jewish gentlemen and they are not leaving for anybody if you want you want them out of there you're going to have to Tru them out every Sunday morning they have this thing called The Breakfast minion the breakfast minion consists of about 24 and A2 minutes of chakis and 2 and a half hours of breakfast and at this breakfast they have these conversations which you can honestly believe have been repeated verbatim for the last 35 years not a word has been changed the whole thing sounds like a tape recording so I'm listening to this conversation and this was really the thing that brought me here to whereis Royal I'm sitting there and uh I hear this conversation and it went something something like this you know I always wanted to go to Israel yeah so why don't you go I'm waiting yeah what are you waiting for I'm waiting till it's too late I thought to myself I'm not waiting till it's too late I went back to New York I packed up all my stuff I got on a plane I flew over here and I took a seat upstairs in the old base medish some 35 years ago and the rest as they say I once asked somebody why me why me you know if you take taken a picture of me back there 35 40 years ago and you said one of these guys here in this picture is going to be a rabbi in Jerusalem which one is it I would have been the last one that you would have picked so I once asked somebody this and he said could be there's an idea that our parents our grandparents our great-grandparents send us send us a certain that gets it in the door anybody who ends up in y has some kind of as well but he said maybe there's somebody maybe you know of that person blessed me and I was able to even at my age of 38 when I first opened the gamar I managed to learn to learn a little bit and to B to be to teach and to be Masia and uh really there's a lot more to it than that but if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them [Applause] Kam yeah any questions comments CRI