Blog: A Decade in Calabasas

Happy Birthday to us!
Happy Birthday to us!
Happy Birthday to Chabad of Calabasas
Happy Birthday to us!

We're ten-years old now...

Yep, I know, I know. We don't look a day over nine. Please. You're making us blush.

But facts are facts, folks, and it is a fact that this Sunday, at 5:30 p.m. at the Canyon Club, Chabad of Calabasas is throwing itself a gala banquet and concert, celebrating with the community it has served for a decade now.

We're honoring the great Mulwood couple who started it all back in 2003, Ariel and Dora Preminger; we're taking a jolly walk down memory lane; and we're looking ahead to the next decade.

It's been a great decade in Calabasas, both as an organization and personally, as a transplanted Minnesotan in Calabasas now for ten years. I will always miss the miraculous, intoxicating Minnesota spring bloom when, right around Passover, grass starts peeking through the melting snow (thankfully!!), ducks glide in and gather at the newly fluid lakes and everyone is running around in shirtsleeves because the temperature is reaching 40 regularly now.

On the other hand, lighting the Chanukah Menorah when it's 75 degress outside is just priceless.

I've enjoyed some wonderful experiences here in Pumpkintown. I remember one year at Kol Nidrei, we were in Calabasas High School and in middle of a song, a older gentleman in the front row fainted. The paramedics were there in minutes, and thank G-d, he was just fine and back in Shul the next day. And one of the paramedics, after tending to the patient, looked around the room and said to a friend who was praying there, "My mom told me 'Go to Shul, it's Yom Kippur!' and I kept insisting it's impossible, I'm on duty. Mom got her way!" And the patient is so proud of that Mitzvah to this day.

And Calabasas is where I tried to get a Palestinian man to put on Tefillin. To be sure, I sincerely thought he was Israeli. His Hebrew was impeccable and indistiguishable to a Midwesterner, and when he kept repeating, "This isn't for me," I thought it was just another Sabra giving an American rabbi a hard time, and I rose to the challenge. And he patiently and smilingly repeated and repeated, "This isn't for me." Cool guy and definitely a first for me. (Note: Tefillin are Jewish religious items used for prayer. They are small leather boxes containing biblical parchments and strapped onto the arm and placed on the head. They are often mistaken by flight attendants for powerful communication devices, and they're not so wrong.)

Once, I gave the motivational speech of a lifetime to our Hebrew School. I passionately explained the Mishnaic statement, "Who is truly rich? He who is happy with his lot." I spent fifteen minutes giving examples and parables and exhorting the children to understand the value of happiness and the transcience of material wealth. Then I paused for breath, and satisfied that they had internalized this vital life-lesson, I asked them, "So! Who is really rich?" And Eliott raised his hand and said "Bill Gates. Bill Gates is really rich!" Vunderbahr!

There was the couple who called up about six years ago. They said they were trying to have children but having serious challenges. Someone had suggested they check their Ketubah and they wanted me to check it. I went over and suggested we replace their old Mezuzahs too. We took care of that and - I kid you not - not a week later, she was pregnant with twins. Gotta love when that happens.

There are other sweet memories - my first earthquake, my first view from the top of Stunt Road, my first time paying a dime for a grocery bag - and I pray for many more to come. Some of the nicest people I have ever met are Calabasas folks. Some of my happiest moments have happened here, and many, many Mitzvahs have been done here in Chabad of Calabasas.

For all of that, I am very thankful to the city of Calabasas and its good people. (Including one of the greatest, the late, great Mel Baumwahl, or as I knew him "Uncle Moish," a loud, proud Jew who introduced me to the Commons Starbucks and its fascinating society. A more gregarious man I never did meet.) May Chabad and Calabasas continue our fruitful partnership and create ever more smiles, ever more Mitzvahs, and ever more happy memories.  

It may not be Minnesota, but there's plenty of ice to break, plenty of friendships to forge and plenty of good waiting to be done in the next ten years. Let's get her done!

P.S. To my friend Richard whose daughter was two when we started here and is celebrating her Bat Mitzvah this week: "MAZAL TOV!"