Voices for Voices®

Present Tense Judaism: Rabbi Michael's Journey | Episode 237

• Founder of Voices for Voices®, Justin Alan Hayes • Season 4 • Episode 237

Share episode

Present Tense Judaism: Rabbi Michael's Journey | Episode 237

MERCHANDISE SHOP: voices-for-voices.org/3QnokLU
SUPPORT VOICES FOR VOICES®:
https://www.voicesforvoices.org/shop/p/supporter

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross shares his journey from Los Angeles journalist to Reconstructionist Rabbi, providing insight into how his experience with dystonia led him to Jewish meditation and community building. His story weaves together family traditions, medical challenges, career transitions, and spiritual awakening.

• Growing up in Los Angeles with meaningful Jewish traditions, particularly Shabbat dinners at his great-grandparents' home
• Developing dystonia as a teenager, requiring over 100 doctor consultations for diagnosis and creating a spiritual crisis
• Learning biofeedback techniques to manage involuntary muscle spasms, which later connected to meditation practices
• Working as an assistant managing news editor at the Oakland Tribune before a life-changing personal transition
• Finding healing through Jewish community and meditation practices after his first marriage ended
• Transitioning from journalism to Jewish education and rabbinical studies after rediscovering spiritual joy
• Receiving transformative deep brain stimulation surgery that dramatically improved his physical abilities
• Currently serving both Kent State Hillel and Temple Beth Shalom in Hudson, building community across generations
• Finding mindfulness and connection through baseball, especially playing catch with his teenage son

#PresentTenseJudaism #RabbiMichael #JewishJourney #FaithJourney #ReligiousLeader #SpiritualGrowth #JewishCommunity #JewishIdentity #JewishLife #ReligiousExperience #FaithfulReflection #SpiritualTransformation #JewishLeadership #JewishEducation #JewishInspiration #VoicesforVoices #VoicesforVoicesPodcast #JustinAlanHayes #JustinHayes

Support the show

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

Welcome to another episode of the Voices for Voices TV show and podcast. I'm your host, founder and executive director of Voices for Voices, Justin Alan Hayes. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for the love and support that you have given us over the years over 228 episodes, probably over 229 episodes when this airs and premieres, episodes when this airs and premieres. And again, we wanna also thank everybody, whether you're watching, listening, checking out our transcript, and then also whether you're local here in Northeast Ohio, across the nation or even across the world. As we know, we're reaching over 50 countries and one of those is Israel, and that'll play a role in our conversation. So thank you for joining us, whether this is your first episode or whether you've been with us since the beginning. So we are very excited for this episode and we had to reschedule how things go. But we do have in studio Rabbi Michael Steven Ross. He splits his time between Kent State and Hudson. Just from a geography standpoint. He is a Reconstructionist Rabbi, a senior Jewish educator at Kent State. Hello.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

Hello.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

Hello, okay, thank you. A rabbi of Temple Beth Shalom Hudson. One area we're going to also touch on is meditation, and Rabbi Michael is an individual who teaches meditation, so we're really happy to have him for so many reasons. He is married. His wife is also a rabbi, lives in Beachwood Again, he's a senior Jewish educator at Kent State, hillel and rabbi of Temple Beth Shalom Hudson.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

He is an adjunct professor at Kent State University. He teaches Hebrew, bible and modern Jewish thought. He is also a Jewish meditation instructor who has developed a number of meditation groups, which another one is going to be getting started here soon. He directed a private learning center, hayom, dedicated to present tense Judaism for five years and he's also directed synagogue schools in Delaware, pennsylvania and North Carolina. Rabbi Michael is a member of the founding cohort of Rabbis Without Borders. He is a published curriculum writer. He co-edited the recent children's prayer book how do I spell it? Kol Hanoa, the Voice of Children. He's married to Rabbi Rachel Brown and together, rachel and Rabbi Michael are busy celebrating family life with their child Gabriel, and education wise, the RRC, the American Jewish University.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

So a lot of words, but thank you for joining us for Michael glad to be here yeah, I think we can get started on kind of your early life and how that led to present tense, and then we'll jump into kind of current state and how different events have added to kind of your workload. And again, thank you for being here, sure.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

So I was born in Los Angeles, which is how I became a Dodger fan. I grew up in LA, and one of my foundational experiences as a kid was Shabbat dinners every Friday night at my great-grandparents' house. So I grew up with three great-grandparents alive and all my grandparents alive, so intergenerational conversations were the norm every Friday night at this Sabbath meal, and every Sabbath meal is a feast. It's a time of real celebration, and so one of my big loves as a kid was being at those family dinners every Friday night and watching my great grandmother light the Shabbat candles. My great grandfather had two girls. His two girls had two girls.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

I was the first boy in three generations, so when I was a couple years old, he sat me right next to him at the head of the table. It'd be like about a dozen people at our Shabbat table right next to him at the head of the table. It'd be like about a dozen people at our Shabbat table, and so I was treated like royalty from a very young age. My sister, on the other hand, sat at the other end of the table.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

I don't think her experiences were nearly as positive as mine, but just being in that warm embrace of family and celebrating the Jewish Sabbath was a big piece for me. As a kid, I grew up as a conservative Jew at a conservative synagogue in the San Fernando Valley in North Hollywood and then as a teenager, I started showing symptoms of a neurological disorder called dystonia. Dystonia is a very rare neurological disorder and it was challenging to have something so rare because doctors didn't know what it was. It took over 100 doctors to get a diagnosis in several years. So this is the 70s In several years. So this is the 70s.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

And one of the things I remember was that after the diagnosis losing my ability to pray to God that I just felt like it was no longer a conversation I needed to have. I was upset and angry. I was a teenager and I had wanted. I dreamt of being a basketball player and the dream felt like it was being ripped away from me. So, luckily, the other piece of my managing the disorder was finding some coping mechanisms. So this is a disorder that creates involuntary muscle spasms, like a twisting and a turning of the right hand, a twisting and turning of the right ankle, and these were not spasms that I was asking for. It was again involuntary. So one of the things I learned very early on was that some basic ideas about biofeedback, that in the middle of a spasming I could relax the hand and then just focus on relaxing the hand. I could relax the ankle and the toes and focus on relaxing the ankle and toes and then spasms would come in and I'd relax it again and I would go through almost this daily practice of noticing where the spasming was happening and trying to just be in a more relaxed experience so that the spasming would be less engaged. That seemed to be helpful. I also had some medical therapies. I had Valium and other therapies to kind of calm down my nervous system a little bit and that was helpful as well. So this combination of therapies really allowed me to get through. I had an unusual gait, but outside of that I was okay. So I want to now fast forward that after a couple decades of living life I moved on to become a journalist and I was a newspaper editor in the San Francisco Bay Area and I was doing pretty good. I was designing the front page of the newspaper, I was one of the assistant managing news editors, coordinating the daily production of our paper, and so I was with the Oakland Tribune and its five sister papers and all of our production centers was pretty much under my control each evening and all of our production centers was pretty much under my control each evening. And so in the 90s this was a very fascinating time to be in as a journalist, to be covering local news and world news, and I was a big one. Of my passions is international and national news, so that was one of my editing strengths was to be the national and international editors, wire editors for the stories each evening, and I think I was in the film industry.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

I want to push this to about 1998 when my ex-wife and I decided to part ways. We'd been married at that time for about seven years and she was born and raised Catholic but we had had an agreement in our marriage that we would have a secular marriage where we wouldn't be practicing and if we had kids we would raise them as Jews. So we didn't have any children up until that point. And seven years into the marriage she had some very severe medical crises and her sister was in town and her sister was part of a very strong church community. My wife went through this really wonderful healing journey for her in her sister's church to navigate these complexities. I remember noticing that I was a bit envious of her communal support and the communal embrace she was giving. It wasn't my community, but I could be there and watch some of her support and it was coming up on the Jewish holidays every fall.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

And in that year it came up and we had a conversation about children because she was no longer able to bear children and she'd become a born again Christian. And I asked her I said I think we need to talk about if we adopted, would we raise the kids Jewish? Because it feels like because of this Christian community she was so well-connected to and supported by, she would no longer feel comfortable. And she said that's in fact true. She would want to raise kids both, with both Christianity and Judaism. And I said you know, I think you're asking me to renegotiate the terms of our marriage and I can't.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

And I walked away and that night was the Jewish Day of Atonement, yom Kippur, and I literally walked in and cried. I just sat with the book because the first prayer we say on Yom Kippur is a renunciation of all our vows to set them aside for the day so that we can really explore our spiritual dynamics. And I was looking at this vow I'd made before God, before my family, before my friends, and I had realized I couldn't go through with this vow. And I was just broken hearted and I returned to that synagogue every Friday night for the next year just to cry, just to begin that healing journey, just to negotiate what I needed to do because I could no longer be in this space. I had planned and thought I was in. So as I went through that healing journey I noticed a few things. I noticed first the warmth of community that my wife had found and I had not sought out. So I think that was a big piece for me, was feeling embraced and that I could navigate the spiritual work I needed to do to feel connected to the community and to my own prayer life again as I began to find a way to pray to God.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

The other thing I was living in the East Bay of California, so just east of Oakland, and there at that time in the late 90s, was a wealth of wonderful Jewish meditation teachers and I started attending Choch Mar Halev, which is a meditation center in the Berkeley area, and felt like I could ground myself in Jewish meditation practices and as I began to learn them I realized that some of the relaxation methods I'd learned were somehow helpful here as I was learning basic breath meditation and I could kind of connect the dots and I slowly felt connected to that community and I started volunteering to plan their big community Passover savers and these were like lovely gatherings for I don't know 75, 85, 95 people for the second night of Passover. And I did this for two years in, I guess, 01 and 02. And what I realized as I was planning those two beautiful experiences was the joy I used to feel designing the front page of the Oakland Tribune had shifted and now it was designing this ritual for Seder. And I had to pay attention to that because I really had a great passion for journalism. But now it seemed to be shifting and changing. And so as I looked at that and explored this re-emergence of joy around here, I thought the best manifestation of that would be to end my journalism career, go down to Los Angeles, get a master's in Jewish education at the University of Judaism, which was a really well-known, well-respected university, and learn how to become a Jewish educator. And so I did that.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

I left the Bay Area, went down to Los Angeles and about six months into the program, my mentor, ron Wolfson, who's just a wonderful teacher and mentor, turned to me and said so how's it going? I said, ron, I love learning the theory, I love learning the teaching skills, but I want to teach more than kids. I want to teach teens, I want to teach young adults, I want to teach elders, I want to teach everybody. He says oh, for that, michael, you're going to have to go to rabbinical school for five years or you're going to have to go to Jerusalem for five years. And I kind of held that as a fascinating question.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

That summer I was doing an internship at a Jewish retreat center in the Catskills in New York and we built community every week. We'd get a group of retreat participants each week to come and learn with a local scholar and the interns. The dozen of us would help build a loving, warm community. And I realized the joy of creating community really spoke deeply to me. And so after Ron's initial question and then that experience, I said all right, I'm going to apply to rabbinical school. The one school I thought would be a perfect fit for me was in Philadelphia, it's the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. And I applied and a year later I was beginning the program in 2004. So that's like the long journey of how I got into the study of becoming a rabbi. As I was moving through that program, two years in I married my current wife. Rachel is a conservative rabbi. We met back in Los Angeles in that master's program. I was concluding the master's work, she was concluding her rabbinical studies, and she then followed me out a year later to come to Philadelphia. She would get a pulpit in Phoenixville, which is a tiny suburb of Philadelphia. She was there for 10 years while I was in rabbinical school.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

The third year of rabbinical school I then had a miracle surgery. I had what's called deep brain stimulation. It's DBS is the shorthand that we call this. This is a therapy that was initially developed for Parkinson's patients and the idea is you put stimulators, kind of like pacemakers, in the chest, you connect wires to electrodes in the brain at the exact place where there is a problem with the brain's expression of information, and a tiny current is released and in that tiny current then the electrical stimulation quiets the noise of the disorder, and so for Dystonia. It was radically successful and a month after the surgery I noticed that my gait was beginning to smooth out. I was walking much better. I was able to go up and down stairs without any kind of issues. So that was the first noticing.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

And then that summer I was studying in Jerusalem and for anyone who's been to Israel knows it's a walking area. You don't drive, you have to walk from place to place, and I really wasn't a walker until then. So I really spent the summer walking the streets of Jerusalem and that was a way for me to reclaim my gait and really feel like I could get full extension on my ankles and that I was able to kind of do all of that rigorous walking. And it was a real joy to feel like my body was re-emerging as a fully functional body that could then do what it needed to do. So that's kind of like the journey piece of the story.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

I graduated from RRC in 2010. I worked in the Philadelphia area for about four years. Then we moved to North Carolina. We left North Carolina to come up here to Northeast Ohio in 2018.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

And for the past seven years I've been splitting my time with Hillel at Kent State, the Jewish student organization on campus, and Temple Beshalom here in Hudson, and it's been this lovely collaboration where both groups only get me half-time.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

Because Hillel is a big group, they can provide benefits and the synagogue can pay for those benefit pieces, and so often half-time jobs don't add into one-half one-half equaling one. In this case it does. I feel like it's a wonderful way to continue doing community building, because half my week is with students, 20-year-olds, trying to figure out what their needs are around community, and right now their needs are profound, and so I just try and figure out how the student leaders and I can figure out how to do the things we need to do to celebrate Jewish life and Jewish time. And the same thing on the weekends here in Hudson where I can work with the lay leaders and my cantrol soloist and figure out how to serve the needs. So I kind of tell folks I'm with college students and their parents and they don't understand each other, so I'm the translator between one and the other because they should be aware of the conversations.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

Yeah, that's fascinating. And to talk about the medical side at least I found for me and my depression and anxiety and all that initially it was hard to just talk about it because it's intimate details and things going on in our mind. Others may look at us and say, oh, there's nothing wrong or you're fine. What are you worried about? Why are you anxious? Why are you down and was that as you were? And you're still going through it now? But to talk about it, was that a natural progression for you where you had to think or you were?

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

just like you know what I'm, I'm just gonna give all of me to this it's an interesting question.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

I remember being, uh, maybe in high school and um having other people in my life who were dealing with really severe physical, physical issues, like one friend of ours was a polio victim. He was going through great depression and he asked me a number of times how do you remain so upbeat and positive, you're not beat up by life? And I would say I've got the support of my family. They're not questioning me, they're loving me and I'm trying to kind of use that as the wind under my sails, so to speak. So early on I realized there was like a level of resilience that I had because of that psychological dynamic of being in a well-loved family where I could do what I needed to do and they would be there to support me and walk with me. So I realized that that was a gift and that was alongside.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

that intergenerational piece was a piece that could really nourish me tremendously, and that probably led to you being comfortable talking and speaking in front of people people you don't know, and it's something that one of the things that people I guess fear the most, you know, dying and public speaking.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

So I did spend my high school and college years as a basketball play-by-play announcer.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

So I think the public speaking piece really was developed as I really wanted to be the next Vince Scully, chick Hearn. I wasn't, but it was a lot of fun being at USC basketball games and being there when they won the women won the national championship, and being with the men's football team when we had Heisman Trophy winners in national championships. It was a great joy to find a way to connect my love for sports at the time with communicating and transmitting the story that was unfolding before me. So that was kind of like my entry into journalism. I dovetailed the sports announcing into becoming a journalist who could tell not just sports stories but all stories.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

So you have a love of sports. Can you just talk about that, the team that you obviously fought, or maybe there's more than one? As I was doing some research on your background, I came across one of the posts talking about each year you try to go to a different park, different ballpark, where the Dodgers Los Angeles Dodgers are in town.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

So I'm a baseball fan and baseball and basketball are my two big sports, and my son, who's now 13, has been playing Little League baseball fan. Baseball and basketball are my two big sports. My son, who's now 13, has been playing Little League baseball Ever since he was tiny. We have been watching Dodger games together. I made a promise to him when we moved to Northeast Ohio that every year we'd make a journey to a new baseball stadium, so he's now been to, I think, nine different stadiums. My count's up to about 21 or 22. And my wife joins us and we get to go on this family outing every summer to see the stadiums in Cincinnati, pittsburgh, new York. The Dodgers are coming here to Cleveland for Memorial Day weekend, so it's been a great experience.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

He's a Little League player, so this year he's moved from Little League to Pony League and for the past four summers I have been like the volunteer assistant coach on his team and for those two hours like the hour of practice and the hour of the game I'm not Rabbi, michael, I'm just a dad and Gabe, my son, gets to play ball and the focus is on him, and no one wants me to rush to the hospital or deal with their crises. I can just throw the ball with my son and enjoy the game and not be in that crazy busy lifestyle that we succumb to. It's been this wonderful place where I can take a little vacation. It's really been a joy for me to be part of his baseball journey. We got this nice connection where we can go out on the front lawn and play catch, and just like I did with my dad.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

There's something magical when parents and kids get that opportunity to just be together. From the mindfulness lens right when I'm playing catch with my son, he's playing paying complete attention to me, and I'm paying complete attention to him because if he doesn't, he's going to get hit in the head with a ball. It's going to hurt. It's going to hurt, yeah. So there's a reason to be attentive. But we get to be in that space of noticing how we're throwing the ball, noticing how our body feels as we throw the ball and noticing what we might want to work on if we're trying to improve skills. So it's a very fun experience.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

And I was just thinking how that translates the mindfulness into the meditation and, like you said, just grounding yourself as being present in the moment, that there's going to be time to think about the future and what's going to happen. Just to be present is it, is, it's, it's powerful. Yeah, yeah, uh, we're coming close to the end of this particular episode. We'll we'll come back with with part two, but before we close, uh, do you want to share any contact information, any information social media-wise, so how people can find you reach?

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

out to you. Sure, so I'm on Facebook as Michael Steven Ross I think I'm the only one on Facebook with that full name, so that's easy to connect to. The synagogue in Hudson is. Tbshudson. org and kenthillel. org are the two groups that I spend my days with, and so that's the easiest way to track who I am and where I'm doing my different pieces.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us, riley and Michael, and look forward to our conversation on the next episode.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

Thank, you so

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

much. You're welcome. We want to thank you, our viewers, our listeners, wherever you may be. Thank you for joining us this episode. Again, if this is your first episode, welcome. And if you've been with us for the duration, thank you for being a part of the show. If you're able to give a thumbs up like share, subscribe all that fun stuff, it's free, easy to do and we would greatly appreciate that. And we're going to come back with episode or part two with Rabbi Michael. So definitely stay tuned next week because you'll be seeing or hearing part two with Rabbi Michael or hearing part two with Rabbi Michael. I want to thank him for joining us in studio. It's really a blessing to just have a conversation and talk about life and growing up, and the next episode will be a little bit deeper talk about some current events that have intertwined into Rabbi Michael's work. But until then, I am Justin Alan Hayes, founder and executive director of Voices for Voices, and please be a voice for you or somebody in need. Thank you.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Justin Alan Hayes

Host