The Bobby Bones Show - (SPONSORED) On the Job – Mazel Tov: Stories from a Late-In-Life Rabbi

Episode Date: February 21, 2018

Jay Shupack wore many hats throughout the course of his professional life – actor, door-to-door insurance salesman, psychologist, and more. But nothing prepared him for his latest and greatest career move: becoming a Rabbi. After years of soul-searching and some unexpected twists and turns, Rabbi Shupack now believes he’s performing his life-long mission where the synagogue is his stage and the sermons his monologue. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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apus.edu-ed-ed-U-slash military. When I was 25, or even 30, or even 35, if you asked me, what was more likely, would you be a rabbi or would you walk on the moon?

I would have said walk on the moon. Because I had no inclination to be a rabbi. I had no desire to be a rabbi. And it just was this path that I started on. I had no concept probably for the first 80% of the journey that I was on a journey. It's a total surprise. Careers often take surprising turns. Before Jay Shupak became a rabbi, he sold life insurance and worked as a psychologist.

And before all that, he was almost a professional actor. Now he's been a rabbi in Central Oregon for the past 18 years, by far his steadiest job. On this edition of On the Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals, we'll hear his story of finding meaningful work in the last place he would have thought to look. I'm your host, Steve Menscher. If you want to find your next job, or if you're a company hoping to grow your workforce, Express Employment Professionals is for you. Find more information at expressprose.com. Now, among those surprised by Jay Shupak's decision to become a rabbi, his son, producer Joel Shupak.

who brings us this story. It's Friday afternoon, just before sunset, and I'm running down a quiet street in Bend, Oregon, with Jay, my father. Why are we running? We're running. We're not interviewing. Seventy. I have to count my steps. This is new. He's always been a serious walker.

He walks every day for at least an hour. But now running? 285. That's good. Earlier in his office, I did notice a small sign on his desk that my mom, have painted. She's an artist. It read, Jay can run. Why did mom make you that sign? Because I asked her. I wanted an affirmation that says Jay can run because I was always told I couldn't run when I was little.

When my dad was a kid, he had asthma that was so severe he really couldn't run. On the other hand, if you tell Jay Shupak there's something he can't do, there's a good chance he'll make a special effort to prove you wrong, even if it takes 50 years. It doesn't say how far on the sign. 285 steps, at least. After the short run, we're back to walking, off of the neighborhood streets and into a park. Although, it's less of a park and more of a sliver of undeveloped land, full of juniper trees, sagebrush, and craggy volcanic rock outcroppings.

Is this always where you write your sermons when you're walking? Um, ever since I got a smartphone, yeah. If I wasn't there walking with him, my dad would certainly be talking to himself. It's a trait I've picked up too. He uses this time alone to compose his thoughts, speaking them into his phone when he comes up with something good. I just hit record and there it is and it automatically saves it into a file. He shows me an example of the sermon he's working on. And God says, come, I will take your hand together to see fair.

So this is a god of loving kindness. But long before Rabbi J. was talking to himself in a tiny stretch of wilderness, he was a boy, a boy who was told he couldn't run. I was born in Berwick, Pennsylvania, and we lived on a nice little street, very middle class. Burwick is a small town on the Susquehanna River. A few years after he was born, they moved up to Kingston, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles up river. His father, my grandfather, Charlie, had his own business.

business. He was good with numbers and he was good with people and he was persistent and he worked hard and he made a living. He didn't make a great living, but he made a living. And that work ethic really made an impression on my dad. It was a particularly entrepreneurial work ethic that you created something out of nothing that you saw an opportunity or you risked your time and your money to multiply both. I mean, that's the idea. When Jay was quite young, he took that spirit

and started selling TV guides throughout the neighborhood. He could buy them in bulk for 13 cents a piece and sell them for a quarter. Was that your first job? It wasn't a job. It was a business.

I mean, that's the difference, you see, because I was responsible for ordering them, and I was responsible for, they would deliver them once a week to my house, and I had to count them and make sure if I ordered 27, I got 27,

and let's say two of the covers were ripped. I had to get credit, and then I would deliver them, and then I'd have to collect at the end of the month. I had to keep records. I had to keep track. I had to understand the profit and loss. Now, these are very small numbers. You understand a TV guy was a quarter,

but it's the same exact idea. You just add a few zeros, and you got a real business, you know. How old were you when you were doing that? I think I was eight. Later, he mowed lawns, sold flowers. I worked at restaurants. I was scrubbing pots and dishes, and, you know, I did bus boying where I would clear the tables and scrape all the food they didn't eat.

I worked in a shoe store for a while, and then I ran the bowling alley at the JCC for a while. These were all just summer jobs that he did up through high school, a way to make some spending money, but nothing he was ever very excited about. But then, in his senior year, he tried something new. He went out for the school play, Fiddler on the Roof. You know, I almost didn't go into that play because they were going to do tryouts or something. I couldn't, I didn't know where they were. You know, they were like downstairs.

All the doors were locked, except one door was open in the whole high school. And I almost went home, and I wouldn't have been in the play. But I just like went, I tried one more door, and it was open, and I walked in, and I heard voices. And there they were. And, you know. He found the audition and got himself apart. Nowadays, my dad has a saying, the most securely locked door

is the one you don't even try to open. Good advice. I couldn't have a big part. I didn't want more than a few lines because I didn't have time to learn it and I wouldn't be able to rehearse. He was on the gymnastics team and their practice was at the same time

as the play rehearsal. So I had the smallest part, which is the rabbi. That's right, the rabbi. He only had a handful of lines, all of them, comic relief. In the opening scene, someone asked the rabbi if there's a proper blessing for the Tsar, the ruler of Russia, who is certainly no friend of the Jews.

The rabbi says, of course. May God bless and keep the Tsar, far, far away from us. The rabbi role is a very minor role so that I could go from the gym and I could run down the hall and jump on stage and do my little thing and then run back to the gym. I mean, when you talk about Fither on the Roof when I was a kid, you talked about like

you were like, you stole the show. I think it's a strong statement to say I stole the show because there were some wonderful actors, but I was special. I had a special presence. You know how when everyone comes out for the final bow and everybody comes on to stage and there was a very,

very significant rise in the level of applause when I, I came out. You know, that was, that's for sure. And then when people wanted my autograph, that was a big deal, because that was like, what? Are you kidding? Autograph? What, I'm Frank Sinatra all of a sudden, you know, what is that? He thought that theater could really be something to pursue. Well, I really like theater. I mean, it was, it was great. I could learn lines really well. It wasn't a problem for me. I'm good with my voice, you know. So after he graduated from high school,

He saw an opportunity, and he took it. There was a traveling Shakespearean company that they would, once a year they'd come through, they'd go through all the little towns, and they'd look for talent, and they came to Wuxbury, and they had a tryout at the YMCA, and I went there, and I tried out, I sang something for them,

and I did a little monologue thing, and they said, great, you know, you're in. We'd like you to come back to New York. But as acting ambitions were about to collide with one of the biggest natural disasters of the time. And then I drove, home and it might have been 9 o'clock at night and my tires got wet on the Pierce Street Bridge. His tires got wet because the Susquehanna River had risen to the height of the bridge.

It was Hurricane Agnes, which was flooding much of the East Coast. That night, the river continued to rise. And the next morning, Pinky Shemwell came over and knocked on our door very loudly to wake us up and to tell us that we had to evacuate, that we were being evacuated. And then we went to Hazleton. which is where my parents are from, and we had a place to stay there. And we lived in Hazleton for three months

until we could go back home. The destruction of his town was severe. We had 21 feet of water on my street, and there was someone else's roof was on our front yard when we came home, and our garage had floated and turned around so that we used to drive into it was now a wall.

I mean, it was uninhabitable, and we had to clean everything out. Wet carpet with six inches of mud on it, everything was ruined. It was a biblical end to his acting career. Instead of moving to New York and joining the Shakespeare troop, he stayed home with his family and helped them rebuild their lives. He never got back into theater.

This was also a time he grew further away from the religion he grew up with. You know, I was raised very Orthodox, and then I really went very far away from it. I didn't really want much to do with it. I didn't go to services for a long, long, long time. Despite that, he did have a strong connection to Israel and lived there in his early 20s. Then he met my mom in California.

They got married and moved to Israel together, where my dad worked as a psychologist. And I did. I was licensed there as a psychologist, but then it didn't, it just wasn't that fulfilling and it didn't pay very well. I made like $300. month. Then we came back to America. I didn't really have a path. I didn't really want to be a,

you know, fill in the blank. I didn't want to be a something. I never really wanted to be a something. Then what motivated you? What do you mean? I mean, what drove you? If you didn't have some passion to be something, then what was motivating you? Um, so my motivation was money, I guess. In other words, I had to pay for things. I had a wife and a kid, and we had basically no money. So I had to find a job. So I joined this thing called Haldane, and they taught you how to find a job, how to network.

You write letters, you tell people, I understand you don't have anything for me, but I'd like to come in and show you what I'm trying to do, and maybe you'll know someone who might, or maybe you could refer me. It was this whole referral network thing. And I borrowed money to do it. That was like $3,000 in 1981 or 82. That was a lot of money for us. And one thing led to one thing, led to one thing. And I got into the insurance business at Northwestern Mutual. All these insurance agencies will hire anybody because if you work out with them, then they make money from you. And if you don't make commissions, you're going to quit. And they don't care. It's a mill. 90% of the guys are gone within a year and a half.

Anyway, so I made a living, selling life insurance for a while. It was hard. You know, it's prospecting and calling people, making appointments. Nobody wants to see you about life insurance. So I shifted my focus from death benefit to life benefit. In other words, that's how I shifted into pension planning. I started to do pension plans because you were not talking about they didn't have to die to get the benefit. They could live and get the benefit.

How much better is that? It would still be over a decade before he would find his true calling. In a moment, you'll hear about one night that sent him on a very different path and what his life sounds like today. After the break. You're listening to independent producer Joel Shupak and his father, Rabbi J. Shupak. On the Job is brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. One company is on a mission to put a million people to work each year.

Sounds like a big number, doesn't it? Not to Express Employment Professionals, seeking a skilled labor position, or administrative work. Maybe you're an executive looking for a career that fits. We take pride in connecting the right people with the right company. Express Employment Professionals is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Let us help. We'll open doors for you. Go to ExpressPros.com to find a location near you.

And now back to Rabbi J. Shupak's story of finding meaningful work. When we last heard from him, he was self. life insurance to support his young family. My dad sold life insurance for 10 years. At some point during that time, he started to fill a pull back to Judaism, the religion of his childhood. I was 28 and it was Yom Kippur and I hadn't been to services maybe in a decade. And I wanted to go to services.

Yom Kippur is one of the most important Jewish holidays. If you're Jewish and not religious, but wanted to do you. something, you'll probably go to services on Yom Kippur. Some synagogues even have these removable walls that they open just so they can fit all the people that only come once a year. And Naila is the name of the service that concludes Yom Kippur after a full day of fasting and prayer. It's the final hour of the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. I went for Nail. I went for the last hour of Yom Kippur, the most holy hour of the year, the most powerful hour of the year.

And I had a very strong experience. I really felt a connection to God. I felt communicated with. In other words, a lot of times you pray, or at least in the tradition, you pray, which means you're sort of talking to God. And that's a one-way conversation. That's a monologue.

And you don't know if you're heard. You don't know what it means. You don't know if there's any connection. You don't know anything. But on that day, I felt that I asked and I got an answer. And I said, you know, God, this is what I need in my life. And I felt I got an answer. Pretty soon our whole family was going to services every week.

And pretty soon the rabbi there was asking Jay to take part in the service. After all, he knew how to read Hebrew and had a great singing voice. Even though it had been 10 years since he'd been to a service, he still remembered all the songs and prayers. Eventually he became what's called a canter, someone who leads the prayer and song. Meanwhile, he continued to sell life insurance, then got into some other business ventures.

Many years passed, and one day he was asked to lead a service at a Jewish retirement home. And I led it, and then I did another one and another one, and I realized, oh, that this is what I want to do. I really like to do this. I don't want to be a canter, so much, which is just someone who sings, turn to page 64, the canter will now sing,

la. You know, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to, I liked being the rabbi. I decided what was in the service, what wasn't in the service, the pace of the service, the jokes, the whole thing, the style, and I wanted to do that. And before then, it was just whatever was convenient, whatever worked, whatever I can make a buck at. It didn't matter to me. I'd sell flowers. I'd sell shoes, I'd clean pots and pans, I would sell life insurance. I didn't have any passion about any of it, really. But then the rabbi thing was different because it was like, oh, this is what I want to do. This is who I want to be.

Because of all of the Jewish education of his childhood, he was able to get into this sort of fast-track rabbinical program. And in a few years, he was ordained. He started looking for a small town that needed a rabbi. And one of those places was Bend, Oregon. When your dad first showed up, the first time when he interviewed with us. This is Alice Husky. She was part of the synagogue in Bend. He and your mom came up and they had a thing that they did at the Sunday school.

And so your mom and dad were in my classroom doing a puppet show. It's true. My mom is known to do puppet shows. And I was like, who are these people with puppets? And then I realized, oh my gosh, these people are fun. This is not the normal rabbi kind of guy you're expecting. I've been Jewish my whole life. When I became bat mitzvah, the rabbi was this lofty person who you went into his office

and you sat across the big desk. And, yeah, there was not a whole lot of warmth and connection. Rabbi Jay, he is really truly a good leader in that respect, that he's a person and a rabbi. I have many rabbis that I love. but Jay's my rabbi. He took that job 18 years ago and has been there ever since. What I really like to do is to engage people in song and in prayer and a little talk and to give people an experience that if I'm really lucky,

they get to experience what I experienced when I was 28 on Yom Kippur. And I'm not even sure if the people that come. come, even have any idea that that's what they're supposed to get. Some people go just because their father went or their mother went or because their friend is there or something else. But I go because I want to create the environment, create the space for people to get what I got so many years ago. And sometimes I succeed at it.

And sometimes I don't. What Jay has definitely succeeded at is creating a welcoming synagogue, without any of the things that drove him away from religion. Put your feet flat on the floor and you can reach and allow yourself to feel safe. I had memories that the rabbis were all about restriction, they were all about boundaries, narrowness, all that stuff that I didn't like. And some things this week we got done, and some things we didn't get done. And we forgive ourselves for what we didn't get done.

I mean, we had a service yesterday, and we sang songs, and we read from Torah, and we had a lot of joy. And it didn't matter how anybody was dressed. They were non-Jews, too. I mean, there's Christians that pray with us. There's non-Jews. There's people that aren't sure what they are.

They're kind of becoming Jews. They're not sure. They're, you know, very interesting people. We have a wonderful cross-section. It's joyful. It's humble. it's, as I say in Yiddish, it's Hamish, it's warm, it's modest, it's not demanding, it's all the things that were not there when I was a boy.

And in a certain way, it all connects back to the first time he tried on the role of being a rabbi, on stage in his high school musical. I see the rabbi work as theater. It's a one-man show. There's blocking. There's stage. Agecraft, there's props, and there's a script. I mean, the script is the Cedar, the script is the prayer book, creating the theater of communicating

with God, and there's a lot of rigamarole. I mean, we take the Torah out, we make a pronouncement, then we do a march with the Torah, and there's a certain rhythm and a style about it, and the same thing with, when you read from the Torah, it has a certain melody. So actually, it's not just theater, it's actually musical theater. it's a musical every time. Did you know that my dad, after high school, was going to be an actor? Yeah, oh yeah.

This is Alice Husky again. That probably doesn't surprise you at all. Not at all. Most rabbis and teachers are frustrated performers. They have a captive audience who have to put up with whatever they do. So I'm pretty sure that's par for the course. Yeah, and he could be a terrific actor. I think he did play in Fittler on.

the roof at some point. Do you know what his part was? The rabbi. It was typecasting or foreshadowing of things to come, I believe, yeah. So after all the years in different jobs and businesses, in a certain way, my dad did end up on stage with the only role he'd ever had. But instead of playing the rabbi, he lives it. I've watched people grow up, I've watched people grow old, I've buried people's parents, I've bar mitzvied their sons. So there's lot of deep connection and we get to share and we get to enjoy each other's lives. You know, we get to cheer and laugh about our successes and we get to cry and console each other about our losses and our sadness. So it's very rich. It's a very rich life.

Walking is a single best thing you can do for yourself. Three miles, four miles a day. Cuts your mortality in half. Here we'll turn right. And we're back to where we started, walking in the park behind my parents' house. And then I read another thing where if you take 50 grams of fiber a day, that cuts mortality 50% too. I think it sounds like you're going to live forever if you do both of those. Well, that's what I'm saying. You're stuck with me for a long time. The place where my dad spends over an hour a day on a meandering path that always leads him home.

This is where I always say a blessing right here. Look at it. Isn't it gorgeous? See that bird just landing there on the tree? And the sun's going down, the sun's down already. There's light in the western sky. And the trees are just, you can't even tell they're green anymore. All the colors out of them.

It's just so beautiful. And I always say a blessing here. Barakata, Adanae, Allahehahelah al-Halam. Asha Osehle-Nunu Nifla-Ot. The one who makes for us wonders. and then I open my arms wide. I just embrace the whole thing. I just love it so much.

I'm so blessed. You've been listening to independent producer Joel Shupak presenting Mazel Tov stories from a late-in-life rabbi. And that's all for this edition of On the Job from Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at ExpressPros.com, and you can listen to every podcast this season at Expressprose.com slash podcast.

This podcast is produced by your host, Steve Menscher, for Mensh Media, IHeartRadio, and Red Seat Ventures. You can subscribe on IHeartRadio and iTunes, where we hope you'll leave a nice review. That helps other folks find us. And, of course, you can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time, On the Job.

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