12
OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
53
THE BALTIMORE JEWISH HOME JUNE 4, 2020
N
es and Ari Blau are living out their dreams – not the dreams they had when they were kids, nor the dreams manufactured by Hollywood. An actress and a writer respectively, Nes and Ari were two rising stars who found each other and together found Torah. Just on the cusp of success, they walked away from their burgeoning careers and the goals that they had chased for many years. 1 Jew in Cape May
friends, Ben and Izzy, along. “That Shabbos was life-changing for me – everything about it. I davened in Beth Medrash Govoha Yeshiva. I didn’t know what that was but for the first time I saw people really praying.” His only prior experience with communal prayer was attending a Conservative synagogue in Margate. Ari was also struck by the sense of community when he saw people greeting each other on the streets. “Everything about it was so amazing that I started going back time and time again to Lakewood for Shabbos, as a 12-year-old boy. I started wearing a kippah out of school and put on tzitzit.” Though they kept a kosher home, Ari’s family would eat at non-kosher restaurants. Ari began keeping fully kosher, and his mom would accom-
modate him with kosher food on paper plates. Ari wanted to continue his Torah studies at yeshiva high school with Ben and Izzy in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, Ari’s parents had divorced when he was around nine, and his father had eventually left the family completely. It was a really difficult period, and Ari decided it was best if he didn’t leave home; he reasoned that he could go to public school and still keep up with Ben and Izzy and learn with them by phone. Ari started off strong as he entered high school with a kippah and tzitzit, the only Jew in a school of 1,500 students. There were no other Jewish families in Cape May; it was largely a “summer” community with racism pervasive amongst the yearround families. It wasn’t long before Ari became the subject of anti-Se-
mitic bullying – from having pennies thrown at him to swastikas being drawn on his locker. Ari found protection and camaraderie among the few black students at school. He also began to rely on comedy as a defense mechanism, responding to derogatory comments with clever retorts. Yet it soon became too much for him to handle. He eventually removed his kippah and tzitzit, and dropped his attempts to keep kosher and observe Shabbos. “I even stopped talking to Ben and Izzy on the phone… You get a new group of friends and you’re into different things,” he recalls. “I thought that phase of my life was over.” Ari’s affinity for comedy led him to follow the work of Jewish comedians like Adam Sandler. He attended film school at New York University
B A LT I M O R E J E W I S H H O M E . C O M
Ari Blau grew up in a Conservative Jewish household in Cape May, New Jersey. He attended Jewish day school near Atlantic City where his mom taught third grade. It was there that he learned to read Hebrew and received the fundamentals of Judaism, skills that would prove invaluable later on in life. As his bar mitzvah approached, Ari began questioning the meaning behind “becoming a man” in Judaism. He wasn’t satisfied with the simple answers he received such as “just be a good person”; at that young age he already understood that “good” was subjective. Several of the teachers at his school came from the Lakewood Jewish community, and one of the rabbis invited Ari to spend a Shabbos in Lakewood to learn more. Ari accepted and brought his best
