On a Friday afternoon, when Danny and I were broke and didn’t know where our next meal was going to come from, he said we should go to a place called Chabad for Friday night dinner.

“What’s Chabad?” I asked.

“It’s a Jewish organization at the rabbi’s house. They make free food for Jews. I’ll just tell them you’re a Jew.”

“OK, let’s go,” I said, excited at the prospect of a home-cooked meal.

When we arrived that evening at the walk-up building on Bedford Avenue, in Brooklyn, the Orthodox rabbi, Rabbi Shmuly, a thin man in a black hat with a dark, scraggly beard and kind eyes, greeted Daniel with a Jewish joke and introduced himself to me.

“It’s nice to meet you, Kylie,” he said, nodding his head and smiling. “Good Shabbos.”

“It’s nice to meet you, too,” I said.

Danny and I sat at the dinner table, which was full of other non-religious Jews, like an eccentric artist wearing orange-rimmed glasses and a free-spirited 20-something woman with wildly curly locks and a flowing flower dress. They were nice and welcoming to me.

The rabbi said some prayers in Hebrew. I tried a piece of bread.

“This is delicious. What is it?” I whispered to Danny.

“It’s challah,” he said.

I ate four pieces of this doughy, sweet bread.

While the rabbi spoke during the main course, I didn’t know what he was saying, even when he was speaking in English. He was saying something about the Torah, which I had never learned about.

I looked around at all the faces in the room. I felt a warmth inside of me that started in my chest and washed over my entire body. I didn’t know if it was the challah, the speech, or the sense of community, but I felt euphoric.

This was so different from how I’d grown up, where dinners were silent if we ate together at all.

Shabbat dinner was lively. People laughed loudly. The rabbi was nice to me, a stranger, even though he probably knew I wasn’t a Jew. I was opening up to people. The conversation was so natural. I was always more comfortable around Jewish people; this affirmed it.

On the way home, I asked Danny if this dinner was happening again soon.

“Every week,” he said. “Why?”

“I’d love to come back. It was nice.”

“Really? OK.”

“I can’t believe all that is free. It’s incredible.”

“Yeah, they get donors to make sure Jews have a Friday night dinner. It’s very nice.”

“How did you meet the rabbi, by the way?”

Danny then told me the story of how he came across Rabbi Shmuly.

He hadn’t been religious for many years, and he eventually became fully non-observant—save for never eating bacon or shellfish. As he progressed in his comedy career, he started performing on Friday nights, which you weren’t supposed to do if you were religious.

For ten years, he didn’t care about being observant or spiritual, until one Yom Kippur.

“I’d spent the day in synagogue, fasting and asking G‑d for forgiveness,” he told me. “As the sun was setting at the beach, I was so inspired that I said a prayer to G‑d. I told Him I’d keep one Shabbat over the course of the next year. I didn’t know why. I just felt compelled in the moment.”

A few months later, Danny was walking on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. He saw a rabbi approaching him.

“Are you Jewish?” the rabbi asked.

“Yes,” Danny said.

“Then come for Shabbat sometime. Friday night. We start at seven.”

“Well, I actually promised G‑d that I would keep one Shabbat this year. But not this week. I have a show.”

“OK, when you can come, come. We’re here every Friday night.”

But Danny forgot all about it.

A few months after that, he was walking on Bedford Avenue again when the rabbi approached him.

“I never saw you at Shabbat dinner!” the rabbi said.

“Oh, I’m sorry, rabbi,” Danny said.

“Don’t worry, you can still come. See you this Friday.”

Danny went and loved the experience. Not only did he get that delicious food, but also, he loved joking around with Rabbi Shmuly, who was incredibly nice, and he felt the magic of Shabbat he enjoyed when he was a kid.

“Wait. I thought you don’t believe in religion,” I said.

“Yes. But I still believe in G‑d. I still pray in my own way.”

“I haven’t prayed since I was a kid. I thought it was nonsense.”

“No, I think there’s something to it,” he said, smiling.

Maybe Danny was right, I thought. He was right about so many other things. Could I have been wrong about G‑d?

I thought about it. One thing was certain: I couldn’t wait to go back to Chabad. I was hungry for something, but it wasn’t the food.


One Shabbat meal led to another, and Kylie discovered the beauty of Judaism. She encouraged Danny to dig deeper into his heritage as she learned more about it as well. Today, they live a full Jewish life.

Excerpted and adapted from “Choosing to be Chosen: From Being an Atheist Non-Jew to Becoming an Orthodox Jew ,” in which Kylie Ora Lobell tells how she embraced Judaism.