There's a verse in the Psalm, Psalm 119, where the psalmas pray is,

Ghal E'nai, open my eyes, uncover my eyes,

and I will behold wonders from your teaching, from your law.

So that's our prayer tonight.

God would open our hearts and our minds.

Quick intro.

Born in Manhattan, we moved as a family to Long Island

when I was about seven years old. My dad was the senior lawyer in the New York Supreme Court.

And I remember as a boy sometimes traveling on the subway, and I saw scrawled on the wall.

It was, I don't know how the guy got across to the other side, but it was scrolled on the wall, Jesus saves.

I had no idea what it meant.

And you heard the joke in the Jewish community, Jesus saves Moses and vests.

I mean, it didn't, saves what, had no meaning to us.

And I grew up, going to school, lived in a Jewish community, went to school with Gentile friends,

hung out together. But I was bar mitzvahed at 13. However, I was raised in a very wishy-washy,

Long Island Judaism that was not religious. So when I was bar mitzvahed, I had to memorize a certain portion of the Hebrew

Bible and learned to chant it, but I didn't even know what I was saying. I learned the words

in Hebrew. I didn't even know what they meant, and it didn't occur to anybody to tell me what they

meant. I just learned it, went through the ritual, and so we had a big party and all this. It was more of a social event.

The event that changed my life at 13 was going to my first rock concert and seeing

Jimmy Hendricks at the New York Philharmonic.

That kind of rocked my world.

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