#8 Jeremy

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Speaker 5 People never believe me when I say I'm just like them. I take out the trash, do dishes, and I struggle with moderate obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA.

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Speaker 7 Hello. So I have a favor to ask of you.

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 7 I was wondering if, since this is the last episode of the season, if you could introduce the show. No, John.
I'm not going to introduce the show.

Speaker 7 From Gimlet Media, on behalf of Jonathan Goldstein, this is heavyweight.

Speaker 9 From Gimlet Media.

Speaker 7 On behalf of my best friend.

Speaker 9 You're not my best friend.

Speaker 7 Okay, my second best friend.

Speaker 9 No, hold on, let me think.

Speaker 10 Karen, Mary Claude. Oh,

Speaker 9 yeah, you're definitely second tier.

Speaker 9 Top five. Top five is pretty good.

Speaker 7 All right, here we go.

Speaker 9 From Gimlet Media, on behalf of one of my top five friends, Jonathan Goldstein, this is Heavyweight.

Speaker 7 Today's episode, Jeremy.

Speaker 9 Today's episode, Jeremy.

Speaker 7 Thanks, Jackie. Take it easy now.

Speaker 9 Take it easy. And I want you to know, okay, this is it, right?

Speaker 7 Be well. Promise me.

Speaker 7 Take it easy.

Speaker 9 Promise me?

Speaker 7 Be well.

Speaker 9 John?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 9 That's it, right?

Speaker 7 But you know what? Yeah. There's going to be season two.

Speaker 7 Pardon me?

Speaker 7 Season two?

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, no, no, no.

Speaker 7 It comes after season two.

Speaker 4 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 7 Oh, come on. You like talking to me.

Speaker 10 I do.

Speaker 10 I do.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 9 All right, my my friend.

Speaker 9 As San Diego.

Speaker 7 Thanks for introducing the show.

Speaker 9 You're welcome.

Speaker 9 From Gimlet Media, on behalf of one of my top five friends, Jonathan Goldstein, this is Heavyweight.

Speaker 7 Today's episode, Jeremy.

Speaker 7 770 is on that side of the street. You want to cross over here?

Speaker 7 Not long ago, I moved from Canada to Brooklyn, and while walking to the bank in my new neighborhood, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks.

Speaker 7 I'd walked the route dozens of times, but never once did I notice the building I was passing right by.

Speaker 7 Excited, I grabbed Emily to share with her my discovery.

Speaker 8 I'm still alive, aren't I? I'm well, lucky for you.

Speaker 7 We live down the street from 770 Eastern Parkway, the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters, the place where, 30 years ago, I came to meet a man many Jews considered to be the Messiah.

Speaker 12 And you had told me a few things,

Speaker 11 or sort of hinted,

Speaker 11 not ever really told, just hinted a few things over time about your sort of mysterious religious past.

Speaker 7 Emily and I were only married last year, so we're still in that early stage of marriage when you share things about your past.

Speaker 7 I long for a day when we'll have motored through all of this getting to know each other stuff, so we can move on to the more serious business of sitting in silence in cabs, bars, and restaurants where we can quietly and properly digest our meals with the added pleasure of depressing other patrons.

Speaker 7 But for now, we are learning about about each other. And so, I station us in front of 770 Eastern Parkway and hold out my arm to the place like a tour guide to my own life.

Speaker 7 I explain to Emily that the last time I stood on these steps, I was 15 years old and traveling without my parents for the very first time.

Speaker 7 I tell her that, for the first time in my life, I felt a sense of belonging. Judaism gave me that, so much so that I was going to synagogue every single morning.
I was considering becoming a rabbi.

Speaker 7 I had even committed dozens of blessings to memory. And to all of this, Emily says.

Speaker 12 It surprises me.

Speaker 12 You're not the kind of guy, like you can't remember how to get home from

Speaker 12 your gym to our house. You don't seem like somebody who would have all these blessings memorized.

Speaker 11 Like there must have been something about it that really

Speaker 1 spoke to you.

Speaker 4 It did.

Speaker 7 And although it no longer does, that 770 Eastern Parkway is so close to my new home feels almost too coincidental.

Speaker 7 It makes me feel like a character in a lazily plotted religious parable about a guy who'd given up on Judaism, but on whom Judaism hadn't given up. But lucky for me, I do not live in a parable.

Speaker 7 I live in Brooklyn, where random stuff happens all the time.

Speaker 12 Maybe it's not random at all.

Speaker 7 It honestly freaks me out.

Speaker 12 But if I'm saying maybe you were meant or maybe it's fate or something, wouldn't that mean that like God has a plan for you and the...

Speaker 7 Yeah,

Speaker 7 then God's plan doesn't include you.

Speaker 8 That freaks me out.

Speaker 12 Hi, why couldn't God's plan include me?

Speaker 7 Because you're not Jewish.

Speaker 13 Well, that doesn't seem very fair.

Speaker 7 Did you get that?

Speaker 7 My Gentile Minnesotan wife thinks my Hebrew lord, a deity so smitey that he cursed Cain's entire lineage because the meat he'd sacrificed was a little on the gamey side, that this guy wasn't fair.

Speaker 7 While her Midwestern take-a-penny, leave-a-penny sense of fair play is one of the many reasons I love her, Emily just doesn't get my people's lord at all.

Speaker 4 Fair.

Speaker 7 30 years ago, when I set out on my pilgrimage from Montreal to 770 Eastern Parkway, My family was convinced that I'd lost my marbles. What are you, a religious nut now? My father had asked.

Speaker 7 Although we were Jewish, we weren't religious. We didn't keep the Sabbath, eat kosher, or do good works.
But did we enjoy accusing people of anti-Semitism every chance we got? Absipha Coctalutely.

Speaker 7 My trip to Brooklyn was chaperoned by Rabbi New, a young charismatic rabbi I'd met the previous year. We'd talk about things never touched on in school.

Speaker 7 The important things like, why are we here and what was the point of it all?

Speaker 7 We were going to Brooklyn to see Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson speak. Rebbe Schneerson was the leader of the Lubavech Hasids, who many believed would one day reveal himself to be the Messiah.

Speaker 7 While for Christians, the Messiah had already come, the Jews were still waiting. The Messiah stuff really spoke to me.

Speaker 7 Life back then felt like a kind of foreplay, like it should be leading towards something big. When the Messiah shows up, Rabbi New said, God will be revealed.

Speaker 7 He'll revive the dead, put an end to death. As a teenager, death irked me.
Death was nothing, pointless, but the Messiah was something big.

Speaker 7 Revelation could happen any second, Rabbi New said. We just had to demand it.
He taught us a song called, We Want Mashiach Now.

Speaker 7 We chanted in his dining room after Sabbath dinner, pounding the table hard enough to make the dishes in the cabinets rattle. The Messiah was so close to coming that I stopped doing my homework.

Speaker 7 What was the point of homework when the world as we knew it was so close to ending? It was just a matter of the Rebbe Schneerson knowing that the time was right.

Speaker 11 Did you think about what your life would be like after the Messiah came?

Speaker 7 There would be no more doubt. Everything would be naked and exposed and...

Speaker 11 But I want to know like even more literally like what if if you were daydreaming like what were you wearing?

Speaker 7 I got to the point where I thought it was so gonna happen any minute that I used to go to sleep at night wearing sweatpants because I thought like I'm gonna hear the shofar.

Speaker 7 That's what the first thing that the ram's horn. I'm gonna hear that.

Speaker 12 That's how you know the Messiah's coming.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I'm gonna run out into the street. It's gonna be really sunny.

Speaker 12 Doesn't it seem like if there was a Messiah gonna come, they would have a more efficient way of letting everybody know than blowing a ram's horn.

Speaker 12 If you're a heavy sleeper and you sleep through the ram's horn.

Speaker 7 Why are you getting hung up on that?

Speaker 13 Just curious.

Speaker 12 I'm just curious.

Speaker 1 So, uh,

Speaker 10 hello.

Speaker 10 I'm sorry to

Speaker 10 see you.

Speaker 10 How are you? This is Esther. The Simon Esther.

Speaker 10 Nice to meet you.

Speaker 7 As Emily and I argue over the appropriate multi-platform rollout for a messiah, something happens that we can add to the uncanny Brooklyn coincidence file.

Speaker 7 Esther walks by.

Speaker 7 Esther is an acquaintance of Emily's, a friend of a friend. But what's notable is that she's the only Orthodox Jewish person Emily knows.

Speaker 7 It's the first day of Hanukkah, and Esther is out shopping for a menorah, the traditional candelabra lit for the holiday.

Speaker 7 No sooner do Esther and Emily begin to catch up than an eager Chasid approaches, asking if we'd like to go inside 770 and see his menorah. His prodigious, super colossal menorah.

Speaker 14 It's a real big one. It's really nice.

Speaker 10 Like, a huge menorah. You check it out.
It's right here.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I'll check it out.

Speaker 10 It's six feet tall. Cool.

Speaker 7 I'll be there in a little bit.

Speaker 7 And then he turns to me.

Speaker 7 I'm okay.

Speaker 1 See ya.

Speaker 12 Right away, you were just like, no thanks.

Speaker 7 I just find like

Speaker 7 proselytizing,

Speaker 7 even if it's well-intentioned,

Speaker 7 it gets my defenses up.

Speaker 6 Why?

Speaker 7 Well, because I feel like I went through it. You know what I mean? I feel like I went through it when I was a kid and it didn't work.

Speaker 10 What happened?

Speaker 4 What did happen?

Speaker 7 Standing outside 770 that day, I struggled to give Esther a good answer. And in the days that followed, I found myself stuck on the question.

Speaker 7 How did something that once meant everything to me come to mean nothing. All these years later, I still sometimes feel the absence.

Speaker 7 I'm not sure if it's an absence that religion left behind in its wake or whether religion created it. Maybe such feelings just creep in as you grow older.

Speaker 7 But in the myriad alternate universes out there, I wonder if somewhere there's a black-hatted Jonathan Goldstein who stuck it out, who doesn't feel anything lacking.

Speaker 7 Is that Jonathan Goldstein the kind of happy-go-lucky Chasid who wears his kippah at a jaunty angle? and possesses the kind of thick natural beard that retains the smell of varnishkas for days?

Speaker 7 That Jonathan Goldstein, I imagine, does not wonder about this Jonathan Goldstein. Though maybe, on some nights, he still feels the phantom pang of an Emily-sized hole in his heart.

Speaker 7 But he probably just shrugs it off as indigestion.

Speaker 7 If there's one person who could shed light on the moment when these two Jonathan Goldsteins went their separate ways, it's the man who was there, who chaperoned my 15-year-old self from Montreal to 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn.

Speaker 4 My old rabbi, Rabbi New.

Speaker 7 Hello, I'm here to see Rabbi New.

Speaker 7 So, I went back to Montreal to see him.

Speaker 7 30 years ago, when I was a teenager, Rabbi New was the rabbi of a tiny synagogue.

Speaker 8 I definitely should have asked where his office is.

Speaker 7 Now he's the rabbi of a large synagogue of many floors and offices.

Speaker 7 Hi there, I'm the same guy as before. I guess I should have asked where.

Speaker 7 Okay, thank you.

Speaker 8 Hi.

Speaker 8 Nice to see you.

Speaker 4 Sure, yeah.

Speaker 7 Rabbi News' beard is now white, but otherwise he looks the way I remember him. We catch up.
He tells me about his children and his children's children, and I tell him about my marriage to a Gentile.

Speaker 7 And even after all these years, I still feel myself fearing his disappointment. I struggle to ask the question I came here to ask.

Speaker 7 I mean, I...

Speaker 7 I don't...

Speaker 4 know if

Speaker 15 you're trying to understand what happened.

Speaker 4 A little bit.

Speaker 15 I do recall your parents were not supportive. They thought it would jeopardize your career, meaning

Speaker 15 it would compromise your career,

Speaker 15 that you

Speaker 15 become a rabbi or something, somebody envisioned.

Speaker 15 If there's anything, it's this.

Speaker 15 The wanting not to disappoint. I think that was a barrier

Speaker 15 that didn't allow you in all of this to be

Speaker 15 you in the fullest sense.

Speaker 15 To the point where

Speaker 15 you had to stop, kind of, because you weren't going to go further.

Speaker 7 It's hard to imagine my parents exerting that much control over what I ended up doing. Yes, they were against my becoming religious, but then they were against so many things that I persisted with.

Speaker 7 Certain friendships, my love of David Bowie.

Speaker 7 There was more than just my parents' disapproval at play. Something else was taking shape, too.

Speaker 7 At first, learning I had an everlasting soul was great. But because of who I am, my fear of death evolved into a new fear.
A fear of going on forever.

Speaker 7 Going on and on, past boredom, past nausea, through millennia upon millennia, and never being able to turn my brain off. That somehow felt worse than death.

Speaker 7 God or no God. Messiah or no messiah, it started to feel like maybe it all didn't matter anyway.
I might not die, but I'd always be me. Awkward, teenage, acneed, me.

Speaker 7 As that fear grew, I decided one night to go see Rabbi New. I was desperate to believe, desperate to just be a normal person like everybody else.

Speaker 7 Maybe if I was honest about my most secret, anxious thoughts, if I just put them out there, he might be able to help assuage them.

Speaker 7 At his house, I laid it all out, and in the ensuing silence, I remember Rabbi New simply saying that, this wasn't a good way to think.

Speaker 7 I walked home that night looking up at the stars, but rather than feeling cozy and warm as I used to, assured of my place in the universe, I felt the horror of all that going on and on forever.

Speaker 7 I was unable to make my peace with it, and I no longer felt that Judaism had the answers.

Speaker 7 Trying to will myself to believe was as futile as willing myself to fall in love.

Speaker 7 I was left feeling that if there was a God, he was too big to know with my small brain, too inhuman to know with my human heart.

Speaker 7 Was that disappointing to you?

Speaker 15 It must be on some level, of course.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Even after all these years, I have concern for your disappointment.

Speaker 15 Story's not over.

Speaker 7 It scares me to think of that, also. Like, I don't, I love my wife, you know, and I'm.

Speaker 15 You say she's not part of it.

Speaker 15 Everything is ultimately.

Speaker 15 So who knows?

Speaker 8 Who knows?

Speaker 7 One of the last nights Rabbi New had me over for dinner, there seemed to be a whole new crop of young people over at his house. They seemed more serious, more mature.

Speaker 7 One of them was a boy about a year older than me with a very rabbinic affect. His name was Jeremy.
At the end of the meal, he and I wandered the empty nighttime suburban streets talking.

Speaker 7 It turned out Jeremy was in the midst of converting from a secular Christian background to Judaism. Unlike a lot of other religions, Judaism doesn't really welcome converts.

Speaker 7 Traditionally, when a non-Jew comes knocking, he's supposed to be turned away over and over.

Speaker 7 And so while I was passively drifting away, Jeremy was actively pounding on the door in pursuit of a religion that didn't even want him.

Speaker 7 We walked around until very late into the night, and I remember him coming along with me to a gas station where I bought a pack of cigarettes, and because I had no matches left, I lit one off the other until half the pack was gone and my voice was hoarse from talking all night about God and life and all the other kinds of things I no longer talk about.

Speaker 7 And though I was never to see Jeremy again, I've always thought of him as the closest thing to the alternate universe me, a Jonathan who went all the way.

Speaker 7 I asked Rabbi New if he still saw Jeremy, and he said that he saw him all the time, that he was a part of his congregation. And I said I'd been thinking about Jeremy and wanted to see him again.

Speaker 7 I kind of want to know, you know, what his life is like.

Speaker 15 You'll find out, but not what you expect.

Speaker 7 After the break, inviting myself over to a man's house I only met once, 30 years ago, to see if what I expect to not expect is unexpected.

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Speaker 3 Everybody knows Shaq, but off camera, he's just a regular guy.

Speaker 5 People never believe me when I say I'm just like them. I take out the trash, do dishes, and I struggle with moderate obstructive sleep apnea or OSA.

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Speaker 5 I knew I had to talk to my doctor. Don't sleep on the symptoms.
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Speaker 7 I wondered what Rabbi News words meant. Why would Jeremy not be what I'm expecting? Was he no longer religious? We'd met at a crossroad, me walking away from Judaism and he walking towards it.

Speaker 7 I wanted to see what Jeremy's life is like, slash what my life is not like, slash what my life could, slash might have been, slash be.

Speaker 7 When I phoned Jeremy to see if I could come by, he said sure. Does he remember the night we hung out?

Speaker 4 Possibly.

Speaker 7 Is he just being polite?

Speaker 4 Probably.

Speaker 7 Does he think it odd that I've pretty much invited myself over to his home after meeting him one time several decades ago?

Speaker 7 Odds are.

Speaker 10 Hello.

Speaker 7 Habsafakoktalutly.

Speaker 10 Hi, I'm here to...

Speaker 7 My name's Jonathan.

Speaker 10 Oh, thank you.

Speaker 7 It turns out that when Jeremy converted, he adopted the Hebrew name Yirmiyahu after Jeremiah, the weeping prophet. He and his wife Chaya live in a close-knit Hasidic neighborhood.

Speaker 7 So far, there isn't anything here I wouldn't have expected.

Speaker 7 Yirmiyahu is bearded and handsome, and to the casual observer, looks like a rabbi. He's even got a rabbinically appropriate number of children.

Speaker 16 Our oldest is Menachem, almost 20. Then we have Hannah, she is 18.
Sve is 16. Dina, 12.

Speaker 7 Yermiyahu and his wife have six kids, and not that it's a competition, but that's six kids more than I have. So, put another way, he is beating me, six to zero.

Speaker 7 Or, to put it yet another way, if his children and my children were to face off in a game of Red Rover, his children would show up, see that their competitor had forfeited the match, and, in a show of victory, form a triumphant human pyramid atop which Yeremiyahu could seat himself.

Speaker 7 Whereas I was courted by Rabbi New, Yermiyahu, a convert, was barely tolerated. But it didn't matter.

Speaker 7 He jumped in, he says, feet first, going in a relatively quick conversion of eight months from being irreligious and atheistic to a life of orthodoxy.

Speaker 7 Thinking of how my Jewish parents tried to keep me from getting too absorbed in Judaism, I asked Yermiyahu what kind of pressure his non-Jewish parents placed on him.

Speaker 16 I had hoped initially that my parents could appreciate that this was something that enriched my life.

Speaker 16 But this was something that just we never got past until the very final days.

Speaker 7 You mean the final days of...

Speaker 16 Oh, my parents passed away last year.

Speaker 8 Both of them. Oh, I'm sorry.

Speaker 16 Within three months.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 my father, until literally the final years of our life together, would offer me a glass of wine or a steak from the barbecue or something like that.

Speaker 16 And it wasn't doing it, he wasn't doing it intentionally, just completely forgot. He just forgot I can't eat that because it's not not kosher.

Speaker 16 In many ways, I think it was actually better to be oblivious than my mother, who was upset that I couldn't.

Speaker 16 As loving as she was, she just couldn't respect what we were doing.

Speaker 7 But unlike me, Yirimiyahu wasn't derailed by his parents' disapproval. He wasn't afraid to disappoint, to become the person he was meant to be.

Speaker 7 While Yirimiyahu seems certain of the path he set out on, I'm still surprised by how precarious my sense of stability can be.

Speaker 7 There are times, often nice times, enjoying a good meal with people I love, when the darkness descends unasked for and sudden, and I need to hit reset in the bathroom with cold water on my face.

Speaker 7 I'm gonna catch her up. Do you have, do you take milk?

Speaker 7 Just as we had 30 years ago, Yermiyahu and I talk late into the evening, his wife Haya coming and going.

Speaker 7 And all the while, I try to share the best that I can, that feeling of just never being able to know the most basic things about my own being and how scary that feeling has been for me.

Speaker 7 I tell him about how I wasn't able to move through that fear, guided by belief, because I couldn't believe.

Speaker 7 There was a time when the first thing I'd always want to know. I was like, when I'd meet someone new, is whether they believed in God.

Speaker 16 So it's that idea, you meet a person and they say they believe in God.

Speaker 16 Well, what does that tell you about the person? Almost nothing. Or I just felt like they don't believe in God.
And what does that tell you? Nothing.

Speaker 7 But I felt like it was almost like the most important thing to know in order to live. You know what I mean?

Speaker 16 The least important thing.

Speaker 16 Because don't you want to just discover who the person is and then decide how close they are to God, regardless of what they believe or not?

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 It became kind of moot.

Speaker 13 Like, I felt like, well,

Speaker 10 um

Speaker 7 if you can't know or I couldn't know or

Speaker 7 or or feel that I knew then I had to figure out how to live an okay

Speaker 7 life

Speaker 7 anyway

Speaker 16 over time the idea of

Speaker 16 knowing what God

Speaker 16 who God is

Speaker 16 to getting to a point where it's just an absolute mystery mystery, and then wondering how people seem so comfortable with that mystery.

Speaker 16 None of it makes sense to me.

Speaker 16 As time's gone on, and particularly recently,

Speaker 16 I don't understand God at all.

Speaker 16 And I think that, I don't know, maybe

Speaker 16 there's something

Speaker 16 healthy in that.

Speaker 16 I think there's a real power to

Speaker 16 not knowing.

Speaker 16 And I think that if we're really honest with ourselves,

Speaker 16 we really have no clue who God is. And that should maybe

Speaker 16 shame us a little bit into not acting with such conviction.

Speaker 16 Like I'm probably closer to where you are at looking at the world than you're aware,

Speaker 16 right? That although our paths kind of, you know, took certain, you know, at a certain point is where I look at the world from now, there's absolutely no certainty.

Speaker 7 Maybe this is what Rabbi New thought I wouldn't expect. The similarities between Yirmiyahu and me.

Speaker 7 Though my inability to find certainty led me away, Yirmiyahu was able to embrace the uncertainty and find peace in it.

Speaker 7 When I asked him about the Messiah, if that was something that excited him, made sense to him, it doesn't seem like it was that important a thing.

Speaker 7 When you listen to the way he talks about Judaism, you can feel how deep it goes. While for me, all the rules and rituals were an impediment, Yermiyahu sees beauty in it.

Speaker 16 I fell in love and this is what I wanted to do.

Speaker 1 And you got the cha.

Speaker 4 I could say ch and tz.

Speaker 4 So that was okay okay too.

Speaker 16 I mean everything down to the letters, the look of the letters, the script, was a beautiful thing to me. It's like

Speaker 4 a fire.

Speaker 16 Each letter has a flame that rises up from it. And

Speaker 2 the people, something

Speaker 16 just felt like when I was around them, being at home. It really felt like coming home.

Speaker 7 Yermi Ahu, born in Nanju, had found his home among people he'd never have expected to as a kid. And I, born a Jew, was heading in the opposite direction.

Speaker 7 Hanukkah was winding down and Christmas was on its way. Emily had asked me to join her in Minnesota for my first Christmas with her family, and I was hesitant.
I might ruin the vibe, I said.

Speaker 7 You know, what with the jolliness and all that?

Speaker 7 But she wanted me, so I went.

Speaker 15 It's not even seven o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 10 I've been up for like two hours.

Speaker 12 Too excited that everybody's sleeping under the same roof. Or rough, as we say it here in Minnesota.

Speaker 7 And so, at my in-laws, in a house overlooking a frozen lake, in a guest room surrounded by baseball memorabilia, at some ungodly hour of the morning, I prepare myself for the rituals of Christmas morning.

Speaker 7 We get out of bed and have breakfast.

Speaker 7 In a bright kitchen, Emily's family lounge around in slippers and bathrobes.

Speaker 8 Bathrobes.

Speaker 10 Coffee?

Speaker 12 We've got Johnny bread, which makes great toast.

Speaker 7 Johnny bread. And no sooner than I'm offered some, we all run to the window to witness a Christmas miracle.

Speaker 4 Oh my gosh!

Speaker 12 It's the Christmas fox!

Speaker 7 The Christmas fox.

Speaker 13 He makes an appearance once every four years on Christmas.

Speaker 7 Then we exchange gifts.

Speaker 10 Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 You get the first present, Johnny.

Speaker 7 So I guess you're not saving the wrapping paper, though.

Speaker 7 I open gifts that would have made the 10-year-old me very happy. A book about Houdini, a box of cards with optical illusions, and a pair of my very own slippers, the first I've ever owned.

Speaker 7 They fit perfectly, too.

Speaker 7 Emily's parents must have measured my shoes the last time I was here. Who does such things? I ask Emily.
And as I put them on, my heart grows three times its size.

Speaker 6 Just kidding.

Speaker 7 Only indigestion.

Speaker 7 Here we go.

Speaker 7 After exchanging gifts, we gather around the piano.

Speaker 7 You know those assholes who, when they sing jingle bells in a group and they get to the laughing all-the-way part, how they have to be the ones doing the ha-ha-ha part?

Speaker 8 Turns out, I'm that guy. guy.

Speaker 7 All told, Christmas in Minnesota was absolutely the most goyish experience I'd ever had. And the weirdest part was it felt like coming home.

Speaker 7 Maybe as you grow older, religion becomes more about finding your people, your family, and less about fretting over the things you'll never know, cannot know.

Speaker 7 The God itch could not be scratched by religion, the Messiah, or for that matter, by God.

Speaker 7 But as it turns out, it could be scratched, a little bit scratched, by a book about Houdini and a pair of slippers.

Speaker 7 And in knowing that at least in a certain Midwestern corner of the earth, under a specific roof, I wasn't letting anyone down, and my existence mattered.

Speaker 7 And that being me, being here for a little while longer, wasn't so bad.

Speaker 7 Now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home

Speaker 7 Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damaged deposit

Speaker 7 Take this moment to desolate

Speaker 7 If we meant it, if we tried

Speaker 7 But felt around for far too much

Speaker 7 from things that accidentally touch

Speaker 7 Heavyweight is hosted and produced by me, Jonathan Goldstein, along with Chris Neary and Khalila Holt. The senior producer is Wendy Dorr.
Editing by Alex Bloomberg, Paul Tuff, and Jorge Just.

Speaker 7 The show was mixed by Haley Shaw. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Steven Page, Paul DeJong, and my number three best friend, Jackie Cohen.

Speaker 7 Music is by Christine Fellows, who has written a lot of beautiful original music for the show this season, and we feel extremely lucky to work with her, along with her occasional collaborator, John K.

Speaker 7 Sampson. Additional music credits for this episode can be found on our website, gimletmedia.com slash heavyweight.

Speaker 7 Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans, courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight.
This is our last episode of the season, but...

Speaker 7 We'll be back before you know it.

Speaker 7 In the meantime, if you have a story you'd like us to do for season two, a moment from your own past that you wish you could change that somehow derailed your life or set you off on a surprising path, send us an email at heavyweight at gimletmedia.com.

Speaker 7 And one last thing.

Speaker 7 At Gimlet, we have a membership program that you can join for $5 a month, and with it, you get early releases, bonus content, and you'll get to talk with Gimlet staff and our members' Slack group.

Speaker 7 In fact, I'll be doing a live online Q ⁇ A, that stands for Questions and Answers, exclusively for our members this Monday, November 21st from 3 to 4 p.m.

Speaker 7 EST, stands for Eastern Standard Time, I think. If you want to become a member, head to gimletmedia.com to find out how.
Thanks for listening. And if you feel up to it, leave us a comment on iTunes.

Speaker 7 A nice comment would be especially nice.

Speaker 3 Everybody knows Shaq, but off camera, he's just a regular guy.

Speaker 5 People never believe me when I say I'm just like them. I take out the trash, do dishes, and I struggle with moderate obstructive sleep apnea or OSA.

Speaker 5 And a lot of adults with obesity also struggle with moderate to severe OSA. You know those scary breathing interruptions during sleep? The loud snoring, choking, and daytime fatigue?

Speaker 5 I knew I had to talk to my doctor. Don't sleep on the symptoms.
Learn more at don't sleep on OSA.com.

Speaker 6 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 4 Honestly, honestly.

Speaker 14 Honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like PrEP.

Speaker 14 PrEP stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it.

Speaker 14 PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices.

Speaker 4 Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

Speaker 1 You've probably heard me say this. Connection is one of the biggest keys to happiness.
And one of my favorite ways to build that?

Speaker 1 scruffy hospitality, inviting people over even when things aren't perfect. Because just being together, laughing, chatting, cooking, makes you feel good.
That's why I love Bosch.

Speaker 1 Bosch fridges with VitaFresh technology keep ingredients fresher longer, so you're always ready to whip up a meal and share a special moment.

Speaker 1 Fresh foods show you care, and it shows the people you love that they matter. Learn more, visit Bosch HomeUS.com.
This is an iHeart podcast.