Rabbi Mel Silverman

Born Jewish... Becoming a Jew: Living with Sages a Memoir Rabbi Mel Silverman

Faced with a thoroughly modern choice - adopt the religion you were born into or ignore it - the author chooses to embrace his four-thousand year old legacy and with it the enthralling and troubling consequences both personal and professional. His guides throughout: lay, academic, and seminary mentors - to whom he pays homage. The larger lesson: someone, somewhere, sometime will touch your life - follow the resonance.

This is the story of a man/rabbi's ongoing struggle to cobble together identities born of American and Jewish selves generated in the Golden Ages of American and Jewish life in the most dazzling nugget of the Golden State - Southern California. Raised in mainly blue-collar Boyle Heights, East LA, at the time (forties to early fifties) the third largest Jewish community outside of New York City and Chicago, the author one day discovers his community suddenly dispersing westward to middleclass suburbia. Bereft of the "hood,", his buddies off to college and his family migrating to the ocean, he finds himself in a state of psycho-social limbo. Three words from his high school English teacher profoundly change the derelict youth. Transformative mentors, academia and the world of ideas, marriage, his former life in the Heights and an emerging Jewish self-consciousness, bring him to a career crossroads: Juvenile Hall or the synagogue? "Juvey" and the synagogue community combine in a match devised only by a retributive heaven - state prison chaplaincy! The struggle deepens, disenchantment and discovery proceed on and off course. His own three words to the reader: The moment awaits.