The Moth Radio Hour: Question Marks

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This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jennifer Hickson.
In this episode, stories about questions: the ones we ask, the ones we don't, and what happens either way.

There's a Chinese proverb that says: he who asks a question is a fool momentarily, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. Storytellers in this hour may or may not agree.

Our first storyteller is quite young when he first steps up to question authority.

This is Shahab Asta, or Hobby, as his mom calls him, at a moth showcase in Chicago, where we partner with public radio station WBEZ. Here's Shahab.

When I was a kid, I used to get in trouble from time to time.

I'm sorry, we

start that over? Because when I was a kid, I used to get in trouble all the time. It's not that I was a bad kid, but

I was a kid. I liked to talk and play, and I wanted to make people laugh.
That was what was important to me.

And in the first grade, I had Miss Worth. Anybody out here have Miss Worth?

She was amazing. I love me some Miss Worth.
She always had candy in her pocket. Sweet old lady.
So nice. I love Miss Worth.

Well, my mom used to get called into conferences with Miss Worth all the time

and this time my mom says miss worth has pictures of you up out of your seat just at someone's desk talking and playing in the middle of class

and I actually let's take a minute let's take a second

miss worth had pictures

this was the 80s y'all

She didn't have no camera on the supercomputer slash phone chilling in her pocket.

That means that Miss Worth had to come into class with a 35 millimeter camera, take some pictures, bring them to Walgreens, drop them off, wait a week, come back later, pay $6.95, pick them up, call my mom in,

and show her exhibit A.

If nothing else, that's dedication.

I love Ms. Worth.
But my mom said Ms. Worth would like cry and she would pull out her hair as

as she told her how hard it was to get me to stop misbehaving in class. I didn't feel good about that.
I didn't feel good about that. I love Miss Worth.

She'd think I don't love Miss Worth.

My mom, my mom was a purveyor of guilt trips, though. So I didn't believe my mom, if I'm being honest.
I couldn't trust my mom. I caught her slipping money under my pillow once.

You ain't the tooth fairy. Come on now.

But my mom, she decided she's not going to use the guilt trip this time. She says, No, I'm going to reason with this kid.
I'm going to use logic and reason. And she says,

Hobby, you're not funny.

Yeah.

Nobody thinks you're funny.

Everybody's laughing at you. Nobody's laughing with you.

Hobby, you're not funny.

I don't know what to say to that.

Man, at the time, I'm only six, but I dedicated my whole life to making people laugh. That was everything for me.
That was everything.

I'm not funny.

So I decided then and there

that I needed to up the ante, y'all. Because if I was at a 10 before, I was at a 12 now.
I was at everybody's desk talking about, I was like, set up, set up, punchline, set up, set up, timing,

punchline.

People love me. People were laughing.
I had so many friends. It was good.
It was good. I'm not funny.

Fast forward many years. This is, I'm probably, I'm in my mid-20s, probably like 27-ish.

And my mom is in the hospital, and she's always in the hospital when we were kids, so we didn't think anything of it, you know.

It was like Thursday, you know.

She was in there for a week, though, and she was going to be getting out. And she was supposed to be getting out like the next day.
And remember, I mentioned

her being the purveyor of guild trips, right? She was amazing with guild trips. I knew I was going to be at the receiving end if I didn't show up to the hospital and visit her.

It was late one night. I was tired.
I was... sweaty and whatever.
I just coming home from the gym and I decide I got to go see my mom or I'm never going to hear the end of it. So

I go to the hospital, I go into a room and she's there. Also my little brother, my little sister there.
And my family has this thing where it's not,

we used to play the dozens, right? If any of you are familiar with it, it's just where you make fun of each other.

Some of y'all, forgive me.

They're just cracking on each other, making jokes.

It's never malicious and mean. It's always, this isn't one of the jokes, but it would be something along the lines of, your breath is so bad.

If Colgate was the actual gate, I slam it shut on your mouth.

Silly but sweet, whatever.

Let me tell you, I did my best set that night. My little brother was rolling, my little sister laughing, my mom, and my mom, my mom got this loud, bellowing laugh, permeates walls, floors, and doors.

We were all a loud family, but she was the loudest one.

Nurse came in three times, told us, y'all need to keep it down.

Third time she comes in and tells us, you know, it's time for y'all to go. It's busy hours over.

And we're like, yeah, we get it. We're sorry, you know, whatever.

And I don't remember saying it, but I know, I know I said to my mom, bye, I love you. Because that's just, that's a habit of mine.
And it's a habit that I intentionally created because

when I was a kid, my little brother's uncle died, and I couldn't remember.

Yeah, he's my little brother's uncle. He's not my uncle.
He's a different father. You know, that's a different story.

But so my little brother's uncle died, and I couldn't remember the last thing I said to him, and I felt really bad about that.

So I decided I will always say to people that I care about, but I love you.

So I knew I said that. Bye, I love you.

I'm glad I went to see my mom that night

because it was the last time I saw her alive and conscious.

About a week later, my brothers and I,

my brothers, my sisters and I, there's six of us, we're standing around her bed, and we're making the tough decision to let her go.

And

I remember I took her hand, I put it on my cheek while we're waiting for her to take her last breath.

And I always thought of myself as a rebel.

I don't know, maybe I was looking for acceptance. I don't know.

About a year later, out of nowhere, I mean,

apropos of nothing, you know what I mean? Just sometimes spirit comes to you when it comes to you, you know.

But I'm driving, and

I hear my mom's words in my head:

Hobby, you're not funny.

Nobody thinks you're funny.

Everybody's laughing at you. Nobody's laughing with you.

Hobby,

you're not funny.

And I thought to myself,

that's what I thought.

That's never what I thought.

I said, really, Ma? I'm not funny?

Because I literally had you dying laughing. You literally died laughing.

I did that. That was me.

And it dawned on me for the first time in my life, I won an argument with my mom.

And I could hear her laugh in my head. And it was beautiful.

I loved hearing it one more time, you know?

Hearing her laugh.

You don't know how much time you have. It's cliche, whatever.
We're gonna do that.

You don't know when you see someone if it's gonna be the last time you see that person.

So, when it's somebody that you care about,

I'd say make it a point to

make those words count,

make them meaningful, you know.

I'm gonna leave you with

Bye, I love you.

That was Shahab Habi Asuka. Shahab titled this story, There's Nothing Bigger Than the Little Things.

As you could probably tell, Shahab has maintained his status as class clown well into adulthood.

He does stand up and improv around Chicago. A U.S.
Army veteran, Shahab co-owns Pastense Custom Woodworks, where I'm sure he makes all his clients crack up to.

Shahab says his mom had six kids, so six sets of eyes remember her and they love to get together to talk about her epic laugh.

To see a picture of Hobby and his mom, visit themoth.org where you can also download the story.

Our next story is from a Grand Slam in Asheville, North Carolina, where we partner with Blue Ridge Public Radio.

The theme for the evening was Comfort Zone, and the storyteller had some questions about that. Here, live at the moth, is Grace Ambrose.

When you are young, divorced, and never talk about a partner, it's fun to watch people try to figure you out through a series of what they'd like to think are very casual questions.

After being as elusive as I can for fun, they typically just come out and ask,

do you date?

The phrasing of the question is funny to me. Like, do you run? Do you bike? Do you date? Dating, an active verb that we try on for sport.

This is something that I warned my friend about when he called to tell me that he too was getting a divorce.

We had been friends for many, many years, but we had never had a conversation quite so personal.

In the first phone call, I told him a little bit more about how my ex and I had gotten to that point. In the second phone call, he told me their version of that story.

And the phone calls just kept coming. It was delightful to find camaraderie with an old friend about something that's usually so isolating.

After many months of this, he said that he would love for us to spend even more time together, but that given everything, he thought we should date casually.

Now,

being asked if I'd like to date casually is a little bit like me picking up a novel that's written in Latin and being asked how I feel about it.

It might be good.

It might be exactly what I'm looking for.

The problem is, I have no fucking idea what it's about.

Instead of telling him this or asking a follow-up question of literally any kind, I agreed emphatically.

And I agreed emphatically to casually dating because at this point we were talking every day. I'd known him for years.
I trusted him intrinsically, and I had already told him my hardest stories.

Let's just get to kissing already.

So I followed his lead as he taught me how to casually date.

And a key thing I learned in this process is that in order to keep it casual, one of the things you have to do is just keep telling everyone that it's casual.

People would be like, oh my god, how's it going with that guy? Oh good, you know, it's good. We're just keeping it really casual.

And if you say casual anytime anyone says his name, then you're good. No other adjustments need to be made.

In fact, other than the overuse of the word casual, it looked quite like a real relationship.

Early on, I told him I was having terrible insomnia, up every night from 1 to 3 in the morning.

Each night after that, he would send me an audio recording of him reading from a book on evolutionary biology, so when I woke up in the middle of the night, I could be lulled back to sleep by the bore of science.

Casually.

We were long distance, but would talk on the phone for hours at a time. I got to be the person that he called in those tough early days of divorce, which is something I'll always be proud of.

We planned and took trips together, knew every minutiae of each other's day-to-day lives, and were, you know, just super cash.

We had rented this little cottage in the middle of nowhere, and we were laying in the sun listening to our oh-so-casual shared Spotify playlist of all the songs that remind us of each other.

I snuggled into him, took a deep breath, and thought,

Hmm, I am so in love with this man.

Ooh.

That's not good.

Because

while I may not know Latin, well, I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to love them.

What happened next was a series of terrible conversations.

In the last of these, he told me that when he thinks about dating me in a real and honest way, it sparked feelings of...

And per the rules of the moth, I'd like to emphasize here that this is a true and direct quote, feelings of quote, an impending sense of doom.

We don't talk anymore.

And I miss him.

But when you take a friendship out of its comfort zone like that, it's super hard to put it back.

Turns out that when you start dating someone because of that trust and friendship and camaraderie and vulnerability shared, that is exactly what you miss the most in the end.

These days, when I wake up at 1 in the morning, I roll over, turn on my light, and take out my book on evolutionary biology. That shit's fascinating.

But no, the answer to the question is that I do not date.

I do not know Latin. And the only difference between him and me is that I know that about myself.
Thank you.

That was Grace Ambrose. She says she continues to learn her lessons one dramatic scene at a time.

These days, she's much more likely to be found hosting parties for a gaggle of children or traveling around the world solo than making playlists with a man.

She's a social science researcher and a huge fan of storytelling.

In a moment, a situation where endless questions are unavoidable, the job interview, when the Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jennifer Hickson, and we're hearing stories that involve questions.

Our next one was told at the Charleston Music Hall, where we had help from our friends at South Carolina Public Radio. Dr.

Tanya Matthews is an important voice in Charleston, and here she is live at the Moth.

Okay, picture this. Medium-sized conference room, and I am sitting at the head or maybe the foot of a medium-sized conference room table.
The setting is classic, right?

Crown molding, low light, single window, books and awards on the shelves, newspaper cut out celebrating the accolades of this institution that I'm sitting at.

Across from me at the table, three white men. Classic.
Okay.

So I am in the final stages of my first executive interview process for a museum. I'm competing to be the vice president.
If I get it, I will be leading three museums, three research centers.

My division alone will have more than 100 staffers at this institution whose annual budget challenges the $20 million mark.

It's endowed, it's got a centuries-long history, and I will be the only of two ever African-American executives.

In fact, I would be the first African-American female executive and potentially the youngest executive they have ever hired. All right,

so

the first gentleman is the would-be boss, right?

So he is the CEO if I get the job.

The other two gentlemen gentlemen in the room at the table are, shall we say, critical stakeholders in the work that I will be doing if I am successful at getting the position.

And this is what you need to understand about executive interview processes. One, they are very, very long.
But the longer you stay in there, the more interested they are in you.

Two, if you ever make it to the room with the big dogs, you are in the running. Them's the big dogs.
I'm in the running. Let's do this.
All right, so it's been a very long day.

We are coming to the end of this day, but the energy is still high. The interview has gone really well.
The reporte has been good. And I'm already working on my concluding remarks

in my head. Okay, so then we begin the dance of the conclusion of the interview.
And one of the gentlemen says, you know, thank you, Dr. Matthews.
We were so excited to have you in this process.

Classic, standard, yada, yada, yada. And we are excited to see that you are also as interested in us as we are in you.
Classic standard, yada, yada, yada.

And then he turns to his colleagues and he said, but I also want to share with the group that I have done some of my own independent research on Dr.

Matthews, and I have found out a few cool new facts about her.

Not classic, not standard. Dear God, Google, what have you done? Okay.

So I'm wondering where we're going with this. And the gentleman continues.
He says, so I have discovered that Dr. Matthews is a poet, one of those performing poets.

You know, they call them spoken word artists. So please understand that at this time and period, this is the rise of the era of slam poetry, competition poetry.
Deaf poetry jam is on the television.

Poets are loud and challenging the status quo in every other verse. This is what he's talking about.

And he he says, well, but you know, I mean, I like what she is doing so much better than some of this other stuff that I've been hearing lately.

Her work just seems so much more nuanced and intelligent and articulate.

And he goes on, you know, making it clear that he prefers this.

And I'm thinking, you know what, I'm going to let this left turn just wash over my shoulder, get back to practicing my concluding remarks, and then

we'll be good to go. But then after he finishes sharing all of this with his colleagues at the table, he turns to me and he says, so, you know, Dr.

Matthews, given all of this, I was thinking how wonderful it would be. Would you mind closing out our interview today by reciting some of your poetry for us?

I have always been good. at hearing the question behind the question.

It's one of the reasons I'm good at school. It's not just about understanding the material.
It's about understanding the particular answer that the teacher actually wants.

And so I was listening and I heard the question behind the question. And to my read and my understanding, the question was not, would I recite

a poem? The question was, would I perform.

Luckily for me, I had figured out my answer to this question about 10 years earlier in a raucous debate about Bill Clinton and black people.

I was a freshman at Duke University when Bill Clinton first got elected president.

And sometime shortly after the election, I'm wandering through my dorm and I overhear a conversation between two of my classmates. Male classmate, female classmate, both happen to be white.

The gentleman is in a complete tizzy because he has decided that since Bill Clinton went on to the Arsenio Hall show and played the saxophone, all the black people voted for Bill Clinton.

And so now Bill Clinton owes the entire election to black people. And to pay them back, he is going to have to fill the White House and all of his cabinet with a whole bunch of black people.

My female classmate thinks this entire premise is absolutely ridiculous. And she says, okay, okay, okay, okay.
So let's say that's true. What difference does that make?

He can just hire a bunch of qualified black people to fill all those positions and the country can just keep moving on. To which he replies, no, no, that won't work.

There aren't that many qualified black people to fill all those positions.

And this is when my female classmate catches me out of the corner of her eye and she says, look, there's Tanya. What about Tanya?

We just elected her president of our freshman thing and even you didn't have a problem with that. He could just fill the White House people like her.

Without missing a beat, my male classmate says, no, that doesn't make sense. That's not right.
Tanya is different. She is not like everyone else.
Tanya doesn't count.

That, of course, is when I got into the conversation.

Laced up my tennis shoes and everything.

What had happened as I stepped into the conversation was an amalgamation of a lot of things.

And as I spent several hours in this debate with these with these two of my classmates, I went through all the sensations from hurt to anger to guilt to finally epiphany.

See, I was raised with the cultural concept of black excellence. This is excellence with a tinge of responsibility.
Black excellence is about understanding that your excellence is not yours alone.

It's about understanding why you must be excellent, which is code for you grow up, you do good, you do well, people will see you, they will change their mind about you, and when they change their mind about you, they're going to change their mind about all black people.

This, yeah, right, you two. So if you are a certain kind of kid on a certain kind of trajectory and you have a certain kind of grandma, you have had this conversation.

A nice little to whom much is given, much is expected, shouted with a dose of heaps of all of the sacrifices that were made to get you to that point. But the sacrifices aren't the point.

The impact is. And what had happened when that gentleman told me that I didn't count,

a lot of that shattered, right? Because apparently me just showing up and being in his world didn't change the way he thought about all black people.

Yes, it changed the way he thought about Tanya, but I had simply become his exception to the rule. And that's when I started to understand the gravity of the situation.

That was the moment I decided I was not going to walk away from that or any other conversation. I was raised not to be the exception to the rule.
I was raised to change the rule.

I was not naive enough to think that I could change his whole worldview, but I do think I managed to sow in a seed or two of doubt into his perspective, just as he had sowed a seed of a new realization into my perspective.

See, I was at Duke University living the dreams of my ancestors. I was showing up and showing out every day, all day, on the day by instinct, right?

I was raised to do this but what I was understanding is you don't change the world by moving through it instinctually you change the world by moving through it intentionally

and that when I decided to stay standing in that conversation and debate There was no difference between that decision and when I decided to stay sitting in that conference room chair and recite a poem.

The first line of the poem that I recited was,

Jesus is a 12-year-old black girl with pigtails from Greenmount Avenue.

The poem was called Lazarus.

It was an extended metaphor about a little black girl trapped inside an urban environment, suffering through the American institutionalizations that would keep her there, and she is working to save her father from death row.

The reception to the poem was

contemplative.

If you are ever asked to perform in an interview and you choose to do so, do so intentionally.

It is the only outcome that you can control.

Now, arguably someone who looks like me that spends time in spaces like that will always be required to do some level of performance, but that is not the point.

The point is about how we choose to show up.

FYI,

I got the job.

And it turns out that the gentleman who asked the poetry question, well,

that was my CEO.

And I stayed in conversation with him through all of those years and to the point where to this day we are now the best of colleagues and he is one of my strongest sponsors in my career as a museum professional.

And so it turns out that Black Excellence does a lot of things. He even sent me a birthday card a couple days ago.
Fun final fact.

In preparing to tell this story, I was using my AI assistant to read through my drafts. Forgot to say I'm an engineer.
Yeah, I love AI. Yeah.

So I'm using my AI assistant to read through the drafts of this story. And the AI, doing its own thing, is summarizing the key takeaways.

And I kid you not, one of the written-out key takeaways was Tanya decides to stand her ground, define herself, and because of this, probably does not get the job.

So it turns out that not only does black excellence know how to change the rules, it also knows how to break the algorithm.

That was Dr. Tanya Matthews.
She's now president and CEO of the International African American Museum in Charleston. Side note, her former boss was one of the references that helped her get the job.

The museum is located at the historically sacred site of Gadsden's Wharf, the former port where nearly half of the enslaved Africans brought to the United States first landed.

In addition to being a published poet, Dr. Matthews is also the founder of the STEM Anista Project, a movement to engage girls in their futures with STEM careers.

To see a picture of Dr. Matthews at the museum, visit themoth.org where you can also download the story.

Ever get a question that stopped you in your tracks, or maybe an especially harrowing job interview? We want to hear about it.

Please call the Moth Pitch Line and leave us a one to two minute message with the relevant details.

We listen to all the pitches, and maybe one day you'll end up on one of our stages and later on the Moth Radio Hour. Don't be shy, you can pitch us a story right on our site or call 877-799-MOTH.

That's 877-799-MOTH. We hope to hear from you.

In a moment, a man questions whether he has what it takes to be a caregiver, and a rabbi in training fields an inquiry that is way over his head when the Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jennifer Hickson.
Some of the toughest questions you'll ever encounter are internal. Can I do this? Do I have what it takes?

Our next storyteller, Ladi Loera, had to wrestle with a few. He told this at at the Miami Grand Slam, where we partner with public radio station WLRN.

Here's Lottie.

I am not a fan of scatological humor. I find it to be kind of tasteless.

In my family, we were not raised to talk about bodily functions.

If anyone happened to pass gas and we were all in a room together, everyone just stared forward and no one talked about anything at all.

Then I met Chris.

Fart jokes, poop jokes, whoopee cushions, he thought they were hilarious.

And I admired his braveness.

And while I was never able to take part of those jokes with him, I did fall in love with him.

Today, Chris and I are headed to the hospital. He's about to have several more feet of his insides cut out.
And because of this, the doctors have have decided to also install a colostomy.

They whisk him off to surgery, and they send me to another room to watch a video about the colostomy, which I think is weird because I'm not sure why I'm going to be that involved.

It's Chris's colostomy, after all.

But as I'm watching the video, I notice that everything is being done to

and for the person with the colostomy. by a pair of disembodied floating hands from my perspective.

Oh no,

am I the person that's in charge of this? Am I the one that has to empty the bags and clean the scrotum? Am I supposed to be doing all this myself? This is all kind of icky.

And shouldn't someone have told me this was happening? I mean, no one even mentioned this to me at all. This seems like a lot to be taking on right now at this last minute.

The surgery goes well.

And that night they wheel in a cot for me so that I can spend the hospital, the night in the hospital with Chris.

Sometime past midnight, Chris wakes up screaming, get a nurse! So I run to the hallway and say, Something's wrong, please come help. And two nurses come running in.

It turns out that Chris had managed to dislodge his colostomy bag as it was erupting. So he's all soiled on the left side of his body in bed.

The nurses start cleaning him up, and

I can only imagine how disconcerting it must be for Chris

to wake with a new orifice on his body that he has no control over and it's going to do whatever it wants to, regardless of whether he wants to or not.

And I look at him.

And his face is all twisted.

And it's twisted with the indignity of the situation.

It's twisted with the knowledge that this is our life now.

It's twisted with the realization that

things are not going to get better.

And he starts to cry.

The nurses are cleaning him up and they have no idea what to do in this situation. And I am still dealing with a horror that this is going to be my job when we get back home.

I don't have time for a crying Chris right now so I yell at him. Hey,

shit happens.

Chris whiplashes his head at me.

Did you just make a poop joke?

Yes, I did.

Chris turns to the nurse that is closest to him, and he is glowing with pride. 16 years together and that is his first ever poop joke.

Chris then lets out this giant laugh, and I cannot help myself.

I start laughing right along with him, and the nurses are looking at each other, trying to decide what is going on here, but there's too much joy. They start laughing with us too.

And I know in that instant, this hospital room is the happiest place in this entire hospital complex.

As the laughter subsides,

I go to stand next to the lead nurse as she starts to train me for my new job.

And I look at Chris

and he is not sad

because he knows that I will do anything and everything I can for him.

And I have learned that I am more capable than I ever thought possible. I have learned that sometimes biological functions are humorous.

And I've learned that love,

love has a weird way of making itself known,

even in the crappiest of circumstances.

That was Lottie Loer.

Lottie is a native Texan who calls Austin home and runs a storytelling show called Testify. Lottie sent me this update on his story.

Chris was given a year to live when diagnosed, but stayed around for four years instead. He passed away in August of 2010.
I told him stories about our pets and held his hand as he died.

Lott says he's a fan of the world but doesn't want to explore. His idea of traveling the globe is going down a new aisle at the grocery store.

Lottie was lucky enough to find love again and he's now happily remarried. To see a picture of Lottie and his first husband Chris, visit them off.org where you can also download the story.

Our final story was told in New York City, where WNYC is a media partner of the Moth. Questions are a big part of the story, as are the answers.
Here's Aaron Kotak.

So I'm accompanying the dean of my rabbinical school to a college campus to help him do some recruiting. We divvied up the roles.
He would give the inspiring talk, and I would drive him back home.

That's how that works.

So it was actually, it was an interesting talk that he gave.

He talked about how religious Jewish law or halacha actually comes from the same word as path and how the law should really be a path to God.

Afterwards, a student raises her hand and asks, is there a law that you feel isn't on the path to God?

And I'm thinking, wow, that's a tricky question. Thank God I'm not up there.
At which point he says, Aaron, come on up here and answer this question.

So there I am in front of a bunch of college students who are just a few years younger than me. I have no idea what I should say, what I could say.

So I take a risk and I say,

actually, I'm kind of bothered by Leviticus 18, 22,

the law that prohibits gay sex. I'm not gay myself, but I feel like that's not really helping anyone connect to God.

And I sit back down,

and the rabbi moves on. He doesn't talk about then, doesn't ask me to come up for another question.

That was cool.

Six months later, I'm the

scholar in residence at a conference in Washington, D.C.

for Jewish college students from across the country.

And a student comes up to me and says that he'd like to speak to me. And so I say, okay, we sit down.
I figure I probably offended him with something I said because I'm so radical

so we sit down and actually I was shocked because he he comes out to me

and he's an orthodox guy and he's struggling with how to reconcile these seemingly incompatible identities that he's holding

And orthodoxy has not been great to gay people,

to say the least. And

I'm kind of curious why he's trusting such personal and sensitive information with me,

the guy who's decided to make a life out of promoting and defending this world.

And I asked him why he told me, and he said that six months ago he was at that talk and that my answer about Leviticus 18, 22 somehow identified me as an ally, and he was hoping that I might be able to give him something that other Orthodox rabbis and leaders haven't been able to give him.

And I was kind of stuck because the truth is, there really is nothing I could say.

I can't just say, oh,

ignore that verse.

Don't worry about that one.

He was coming to me as an Orthodox Jew, and we both believe that the Torah, the Bible, was written by God, every part of it.

To reject a verse would be to deny a fundamental part of our identity. But at the same time, to just tell him that God discriminates against him for the way that God made him,

that was troubling for both of us. Now, this wasn't the first time that I was in completely over my head.
I've counseled married couples on their sex life, and I've never had sex myself.

Here it's great.

But something about this guy's

laugh at my life. It's real.

But something about this guy's question was particularly troubling and challenging for me. Because I knew he wasn't just asking about Leviticus 18, 22.

He was lonely. He was hiding his identity from his community.

And he needed to believe that somehow in the end, even though it seemed impossible, he'd be able to hold on to these religious values and it would all be okay. He'd find love in that community.

And it was so hard because that tapped into a deep insecurity of my own.

All I've wanted my whole life is to be in a healthy, loving relationship, but despite working so hard towards that goal, at that point I had nothing to show for it.

And I was wondering if God really cared about me finding love.

I felt like sometimes it might be easier to just throw away all these laws that felt so inhibiting and just maybe that way I could find love. But this wasn't the time to talk about my problems.

If you think you've got it bad, let me tell you.

So I shut it down and

I was there. I tried to help him.
I said, listen, I don't know what to tell you. I don't know why God would make a law like this, but I do know that God wants you to find love and that

the God that we believe in can be present in a gay relationship just as much as he can be present in a straight relationship. And that,

I don't know, that him and his future partner will figure out how to bring in all these religious Jewish values that he has into his relationship.

And I left and I wondered if maybe I should have told him that to just leave orthodoxy, but I didn't. And

about a month ago, I got a call from him. He wanted to talk.
I was like, okay, great. What is it this time?

We hadn't spoken since since that last conversation, and he wanted to tell me

that he

wanted to thank me for that conversation that we had had.

He was now in a relationship with another Orthodox guy, and because of our conversation, he was able to believe that love was possible for him.

I asked him if God was present in his relationship, and he said yes.

And he said that he was happy for the first time in a long time.

And I hung up the phone and I just started crying. It was really awkward.
I was driving.

Windshield wipers cannot wipe away these tears.

But I cried because I was just so overwhelmed by irrationality. It didn't make any sense how my one little throwaway line over a year ago had led to this moment.

How an Orthodox rabbi to be had counseled another Orthodox guy into a gay relationship,

how someone who had serious doubts about the existence of love was able to help someone else believe in it.

None of it made any sense, but somehow, through that irrationality, I reconnected to my faith: a faith in myself, a faith in God,

and a faith that I too would find love one day. Thank you.

That was Aaron Potek. He serves as the senior rabbi at a place called Sixth and I, which is a center for arts, entertainment, ideas, and Jewish life in Washington, D.C.

He reports that he's been dating someone special for the last few years and has even brought her to a Moth Story Slammer 2.

To see a picture of Aaron giving a sermon and another one of him officiating his first gay wedding, Mazel Tabda'al, visit themoth.org.

You can share these stories or others from the Moth Archive and buy tickets to moth storytelling events in your area through our website, themoth.org.

Find a show near you and come out to tell a story. And you can find us on social media, too, of course.

Remember, you can pitch us your story by recording it right on our site, themoth.org, or call 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-6684.

The best pitches are developed for moth shows all around the world.

I want to thank all the tellers in this hour and encourage everyone to be inquisitive inquisitive because there are a lot of great stories out there just begging to be told if only you'd ask.

That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour and we hope you'll join us next time.

This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Jennifer Higson, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show.

Co-producer is Vicki Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch.

The rest of the Moss leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Sarah Austin Janesse, Kate Tellers, Marina Clouce, Leanne Gulley, Suzanne Rust, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Patricia Urenia.

Moss stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift.

Other music in this hour from Diwali and Philippe Boudeau, Victor Krause, Adam Ben Ezra, Felix LeBond, and Croca.

We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including executive producer Leah Rhys-Dennis.

For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, and to learn all about the moth, go to our website themoth.org.

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