Love Your Neighbor. But Please Slow Down.

The other day I was driving through Tarzana, a Los Angeles neighborhood with a large Israeli-American community, behind a Toyota Sienna with a Hebrew sticker across the back window:

ואהבת לרעך כמוך

V’ahavta l’reacha kamocha.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

It’s from Leviticus, which has quite a bit to say about how we’re supposed to treat one another.

I started putting on tefillin every morning last year, when I turned 50. One of the prayers I say begins with that same word, V’ahavta. In my prayers, it’s a commandment to love God. On that minivan, it’s a commandment to love each other.

I’m starting to think the second one is harder.

My Colombian wife, Laura, has a theory about the Israeli families in our neighborhood: two or three kids, a dog or two, a big house, and a Tesla or an F-150 depending on whether the husband is in construction, with that verse across the back window.

It’s become a running joke between us. A house on our street even hung the verse on a banner while it was going up.

I love the sentiment. My problem is with some of the people displaying it.

They drive like maniacs.

Forty, forty-five miles an hour on residential streets where the limit is 25, with kids, dogs, and people walking.

A kid chasing a ball doesn’t read Hebrew. And neither does the dog.

Yes, I’m generalizing from bumper stickers and my wife’s theory. Israelis do that to ourselves constantly, so I’m in good company.

Tarzana was named after Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fictional ape man. Today, you can’t stand in line at a Starbucks around here without a decent chance of hearing Hebrew.

I’m Israeli-born, so I get to laugh at us. I’m also, to be honest, not that Israeli. I generally drive the speed limit, don’t own an Escalade, and have never put a Bible verse on anything I drive.

I speak the language, eat at the bakeries, know the habits, and still find myself explaining it all to my American friends and my wife.

Sometimes I’m defending us, sometimes I’m criticizing us, and sometimes I’m doing both in the same sentence.

What the Bumper Sticker Leaves Out

A man once challenged the sage Hillel to teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot.

Hillel told him: What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. Everything else is commentary.

Pretty good advice for someone balancing on one leg.

But the bumper sticker leaves something out.

In the same chapter of Leviticus that tells us to love our neighbor, we’re also told not to stand idly by while someone’s life is in danger, not to carry hatred in our hearts, and to rebuke a person who has done wrong.

Love and confrontation sit side by side.

The Torah doesn’t ask us to smile politely when somebody behaves badly. It asks us to care enough to say something.

Israelis have a word for that: dugri, straight talk.

We’ll tell you your haircut is terrible, your business plan makes no sense, and you parked like an idiot, usually before we’ve learned your last name.

We are considerably less talented at hearing the same advice.

But there’s another side to this personality, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

The Neighbors Who Show Up

During the Syrian civil war, Israel ran a humanitarian effort called Operation Good Neighbor. Israeli hospitals treated more than 4,000 Syrians, including hundreds of children.

Syria was an enemy state with no diplomatic relations with Israel, and wounded people were still carried across the border for treatment.

In February 2023, after the devastating earthquake in Turkey, Israeli rescue and medical teams arrived to help despite strained relations between the governments.

Anyone who has sat shiva in an Israeli or Jewish neighborhood knows what happens when tragedy hits. Food appears before anyone asks. People you haven’t spoken to in years show up with trays. Somebody takes over the kitchen, somebody else takes the kids, and nobody asks whether you voted for the right candidate before bringing you dinner.

I’ve known people who would argue with you for an hour over something insignificant and then show up at your door with enough food for a week because they heard someone was sick.

I love that about us.

The Neighbor I Don’t Know

Leviticus 19 has another instruction: love the stranger who lives among you, because you were once strangers yourselves.

That one lands hard for me.

I was born in Israel and raised in Los Angeles. My wife was born in Colombia. Our daughter is growing up with Hebrew, Spanish, and English in the house.

Our neighbors are Armenian, Korean, American Jewish, and people whose families came from everywhere. We share supermarkets, schools, playgrounds, and traffic lights.

That’s Los Angeles.

But the stranger in that verse has another face in Tarzana.

He’s standing outside Home Depot at six in the morning, hoping somebody will offer him a day’s work.

Some of those men are undocumented. Some aren’t. I have no business deciding which is which from the driver’s seat.

They build our houses, maintain our gardens, repair our roofs, and remodel our kitchens. Some send money abroad. Others are raising children here.

Southern California depends on their labor.

Some work in a cash economy with little protection if a contractor refuses to pay them. Undocumented workers without a path to legal status are especially vulnerable to exploitation.

My grandfather was born in Romania. Long before Israel became a country, he helped build a home in Ness Ziona. He was an immigrant building a future.

Nearly a century later, I watch immigrants building homes in Los Angeles, knowing some may be deported from the country they’ve helped build.

Are we telling the story of pioneers, or are we getting closer to the story of Egypt, where people built homes for others but had no freedom of their own?

If someone works hard, does good work, and contributes to our community, we should figure out how to let them stay. Maybe we can forgive them for the terrible crime of being desperate enough to come here in search of a better life.

I believe in secure borders and immigration laws that mean something. I also believe we need a workable path to legal status for people who have built lives here and contributed to our communities.

Enforcement, wages, and fairness to legal immigrants matter. So does treating people with dignity.

My neighbors include people with papers and people without them, Trump voters and people who can’t stand him. They don’t have to vote like me, pray like me, or agree with my views on Israel.

They don’t even have to like me.

I don’t get to choose which neighbor counts. Neither do you.

The Big House on the Block

I have complicated feelings about those big houses, the ones with beautiful kitchens, Jerusalem stone, double sinks, oversized showers, and custom cabinetry.

Plenty of the people building them are contractors who spent years remodeling other families’ homes. After years of making someone else’s dream house, they want one for their own family.

In the San Fernando Valley, that house is probably their biggest asset, their retirement plan, and what they hope to leave their kids.

Look at it one way and it’s a show. Look at it another way and it’s a family trying to make it in America.

My mother was modest and fiercely independent. When she considered enrolling me at Valley Beth Shalom for elementary school, she saw the other mothers pulling up in Mercedeses and decided that wasn’t a competition she wanted to join.

I went to Fairfield Elementary instead.

She valued real friendships over appearances and had no patience for people trying to impress each other.

Years later I attended The Buckley School, where I graduated in 1993.

My mother sometimes picked me up around six in the evening, and I’d be one of the last kids left, waiting by the library with the security guards.

There were no cell phones. I couldn’t call to ask where she was, and she couldn’t tell me she was running late.

I just watched for her car.

School had ended around three. By six I’d been waiting nearly three hours, wondering when I was going home.

These days, when I see someone racing down a residential street, I wonder where they’re going. Maybe they’re late picking up a child. Maybe somebody is waiting for them.

I understand the urgency. But everybody on these streets is late for something.

And somewhere a kid is watching for a car.

A Jew From Kentucky, a Jew From Tarzana

In the 1990s, my friends Henry, David, Ran, and his younger brother Tal were part of a circle that included a young musician named Dan Bern.

Dan coached tennis at Buckley, where David, Ran, and Tal played. Somewhere along the way he traded tennis coaching for folk music, and we became his fans.

Groupies, really.

We’d catch him at Genghis Cohen on Fairfax, back when you could watch a guy with a guitar in a small room and feel like you were seeing something special.

Dan was funny, irreverent, unmistakably Jewish, and a little ridiculous in the best way. He could make fun of Jewish identity without making you ashamed of it.

I remember Dan’s song Jew From Kentucky. It’s been running through my head lately, a reminder of how strange it can be to carry an identity that doesn’t match other people’s expectations.

Back then I was an Israeli-born kid from the Valley who’d lived in Israel, gone to school there, and returned to Los Angeles.

I was American, Israeli, Jewish, and Californian, and wasn’t sure how those identities fit together.

Now I have a Colombian wife, a two-year-old daughter, and a house in Tarzana.

I hope my daughter never feels she has to choose between the parts of herself.

You don’t have to stop being one thing to become another.

You can be a Jew from Kentucky. You can be an Israeli-born American with a Colombian wife.

And you can be a Jew from Tarzana.

The Beam in My Own Eye

If I’m going to criticize my neighbors, I should probably say something about myself.

I’m 51, I’m Gen X, and I smoke cannabis.

There. I said it.

My wife isn’t a fan. I have a two-year-old daughter, and being a responsible father comes first. I take precautions to keep smoke and residue away from her.

Cannabis has sometimes been part of my writing process. I’ll smoke, brainstorm, and edit the next day. But I recently went 45 days without it and wrote almost every day. Some of that work was excellent.

My daughter, wife, and father were doing well. We’d finally recovered from a miserable stretch of October respiratory bugs.

Baruch Hashem. Life was good.

Then I decided to smoke again.

On the way to the cannabis store, I spotted that Toyota Sienna with the Hebrew commandment across its back window.

That’s where this essay began.

For years, I’ve had more ideas than the patience to finish them. Creativity was never my problem. Productivity was. Large language models helped me close that gap. They’re frequently wrong and too eager to agree with me, but they’ve helped me turn unfinished thoughts into actual writing.

Cannabis sometimes helps me wander creatively. AI helps me get somewhere.

I’m stubborn, impatient, opinionated, and sometimes too pleased with something I’ve written.

The ideas are mine. The decisions are mine. The mistakes are mine, too.

Wherever I Wander, Tarzana Is Home

My mother is gone and my father is still here.

I’m raising a daughter, writing books, running a business, and occasionally running for Congress.

Somehow I’m still that Israeli-born Jewish kid from the San Fernando Valley trying to figure out where he belongs.

Except these days, I think I’ve figured it out.

I’m a Jew from Tarzana.

I shop in Northridge, get a burrito in Reseda, work out at the Y in the West Valley, hear Hebrew at the bakery, and Spanish at the hardware store.

The Israeli families, the Armenian families, the Korean families, the immigrants, the people who’ve been here for generations, the Democrats, the Republicans, and the people who’d rather talk about anything but politics.

These are my neighbors.

Some agree with me. Some don’t. Some probably think I talk too much about Israel.

They’re entitled to their opinions, and I’m entitled to mine.

When I ran for Congress in 2026, I didn’t run to represent only the people who liked me. I wanted to represent my neighbors, including the ones who disagreed with me.

And if I run again, that won’t change.

Leviticus 19 doesn’t tell us to love only the people who look like us, worship like us, or have the right paperwork.

It tells us to love our neighbors, care for the stranger, speak up when someone is doing wrong, and not stand idly by when another person is in danger.

That’s a lot to ask of anybody, especially someone as opinionated and imperfect as I am.

My mother taught me not to worry so much about impressing the neighbors.

Becoming a father has taught me to worry a lot more about what happens to them.

I want my daughter to grow up in a neighborhood where people look out for one another, where immigrants have a chance to build a life, where disagreements don’t become hatred, and where children can play outside without their parents worrying about speeding cars.

Being kind doesn’t mean being quiet. Being honest doesn’t mean being cruel.

Which brings me back to that Toyota Sienna.

Somewhere in Tarzana, a guy is probably doing 40 down a residential street with V’ahavta l’reacha kamocha displayed proudly across his back window.

For all I know, he’s a wonderful guy.

We might even become friends.

I love my neighbors. All of them. Including him.

And the next time I see him, I’m going to tell him to slow down.