The Story Behind the Stories

Building a Meaningful Life

For much of my life, I believed that a meaningful life was something I could build. Study hard. Work honestly. Pursue worthwhile goals. Raise a family. Make a difference. I imagined that if I made the right choices, I could shape the life ahead of me.

I loved learning. At Adelphi University, I studied economics and mathematics, graduating magna cum laude. I went on to spend more than two decades in fundraising, investments, and international partnerships, helping people turn ideas into opportunities. I found purpose in that work. I also found it in the classroom, teaching young adults at the Jewish Institute of Queens and exploring how timeless Torah wisdom could illuminate the responsibilities of ordinary life.

Lessons from Hospital Rooms

But the most important lessons of my life did not arrive in a classroom or a boardroom.

They arrived in hospital rooms.

They arrived in hospital rooms.

First came chemotherapy. Then a prolonged battle with COVID. Later, a bone marrow transplant. Three times, the future I had taken for granted became uncertain. Plans gave way to treatments. Confidence gave way to questions. The ordinary things I once hurried past—a breath, a familiar voice, a moment at home—began to look different.

I thought I was learning how to survive. Slowly, I began to realize that I was also learning how to see.

Family and Faith

At the center of that education was my family. My wife, Michal, and our children taught me lessons no degree could confer: how much love can hold, how little control we truly possess, and how extraordinary an ordinary day can be. My parents, teachers, friends, and the people who appeared at unexpected moments all became part of a story I could never have written for myself.

Torah had always mattered to me. But through these experiences, it became more than something to study or teach. It became a way of looking beneath appearances. A delay was not necessarily emptiness. Dependence was not necessarily weakness. A disappointment was not necessarily the end of a story. I did not suddenly understand why everything happened. I began, instead, to ask what each experience might teach me about living.

Why I Write

Writing grew out of those questions. I did not begin with a plan to produce a collection of books. I began with moments I could not forget, questions I could not put down, and a growing desire to share what I was discovering.

The Clearing of Illusion asks what lies beneath the surface of the things we think we understand. The Canvas of Possibility explores the lives we plan, the lives we are given, and the choices we make within them. Man’s Search for Kindness invites us to recognize Hashem’s generosity in the gifts that have become so familiar we barely notice them.

These books are not declarations that I have found all the answers. They are invitations to keep looking, questioning, learning, and becoming. They reflect what I have come to believe: that the world is filled with meaning, that gratitude can change the way we experience it, and that Hashem may be present even in the moments when His Hand is hardest to recognize.

Holding Life Differently

I still work, teach, learn, and try to become a better husband, father, and human being. I still make plans. But I hold them differently now.

I still make plans. But I hold them differently now.

Because perhaps the greatest discovery is not that life unfolded as I intended.

It is that even the chapters I never would have chosen have something to teach me about the life I have been given.