Chayim Chayim Chayim.

Chayim’s spiritual journey was so long and rich

His impact as a teacher and guide so profound

His transformative effect on those who loved him so widespread

His loving presence so clear and embracing and grounded

His love of life so exuberant and wise

I want to speak of Chayim’s voyage through this beautiful and fragile world.

Early in Chayim’s journey—in his suburban Minneapolis home in St. Louis Park—Chayim was introduced to the powerful presence of the natural world. There were countless family road trips, our father Stanley at the wheel. With a canoe tied atop the tightly packed family station wagon, we explored campgrounds, lakes and rivers in the upper Midwest. Sometimes it was just a weekend in a pop-up camper. Sharon would pack up the camper kitchen. Chayim, Lynn and sometimes Uncle Bruce would climb in the backseat. As a family, we would spend a weekend roasting wieners and toasting marshmallows in a crowded lakeside campground. It was Minnesota, so there was always a lake.

Other times it was a longer trip in the wilds of the Boundary Waters, portaging canoes on his shoulders and drinking directly from the lake. Or on the shore of Lake Superior or Banff and Lake Louise. Wherever the destination, the frequent family camping trips were filled with Earth, Wind, Fire and Water—and loving devoted parents and his big sister Lynn and little Danny and trees and lakes and small boats.

Chayim developed a lifelong appreciation of the wisdom and holiness that can be achieved in the presence of nature.

Chayim was exceptionally strong—physically strong and he had lightning fast reactions. Even his earliest athleticism was informed by an appreciation of the beauty and spirit of the moving human body.

Chayim was a competitive diver in high school, performing flips and twists with precision off a springboard. He perfected his inwards and reversals, with constant practice and a gymnast’s appreciation of form.

He excelled in judo. He would look his opponents deeply in the eyes and he always had several moves ready. He would watch, wait and strike. He intuitively understood the physics of a throw or footsweep. Always intensely competitive, he had the strength and speed to compete ferociously on the judo mat. Chayim competed in the United States National Judo Championship as a young teenager.

Judo translates as “The Gentle Way” and includes a powerful culture of discipline, respect and contemplation. Chayim saw his judo instructors as personal guides. Senseis. Chayim was an eager, quick and passionate learner. And he was also a teacher, instructing me and my cousin Phil in judo beginning when we were five years old.

After high school and a brief stint at the University of Minnesota, Chayim’s journey took him to Snowmass, Colorado. Chayim loved skiing. He always loved skiing. He was an expert. He was fast and fearless and insatiable on the slopes. He loved deep light powder and high-velocity dancing with the trees. He liked moguls and groomers and steep faces. He loved the cold and wind.

What was intended to be a year of freedom and ecstatic skiing became the starting point of Chayim’s adult spiritual journey. It was in Aspen that Chayim met Shamaya—his ski buddy, his companion, his lover, his light. his rock, his muse. his soul-mate, his co-spiritual traveler. At the end of the ski season, the two young seekers travelled together pursuing a life of joy and healing, a life with meaning and wisdom and enlightenment.

They drove their 1960 red Volvo 4-door named Amelia across the country in search of their path. They went to Minneapolis where Chayim worked as a lifeguard at Cedar Point Beach. They travelled across the west and down the Baja Peninsula. They took jobs at Meadowlark, a holistic healing center in Hemet California, where Chayim learned the arts of massage and polarity therapy and bodywork and yoga and treating the whole person. Eventually, they went to Santa Cruz, where Chayim resumed his formal education and also took up surfing.

The University of California at Santa Cruz is situated on a redwood-covered hilltop, close to where we just buried my big brother. Chayim often ran up the hill, racing to his psychology and religion classes. He was always eager to learn. And Shamaya too returned to school, to become a nurse and to take her passion for healing to the labor and delivery room. They were two motivated and mature students who saw their education as a step on a spiritual journey of healing others and personal growth.

Chayim took a break from school to travel to India and Nepal. He studied for three months at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. He and Shamaya travelled the Buddhist path and trekked the Himalayas. Chayim rode on the tops of dilapidated buses and roofs of rickety trains. Shamaya stayed inside the buses and trains, but Chayim loved living close to the edge. After 9 months on the road, Chayim and Shamaya arrived to Barcelona, Spain, penniless and free, to reconnect with his big sister Lynn.

On the way back to Geneva to return to the United States, on the train just before they crossed the border out of Spain and into France, Chayim proposed to Shamaya. She thought about it for a few minutes before she said yes.

The spiritual journey brought Chayim and Shamaya back to Judaism—but it was not the conservative Jewish ritual that was celebrated at Beth El, the synagogue in St. Louis Park where Chayim was bar mitzvahed. It was an idiosyncratic mix of living Jewish ritual, reinvigorated by a spiritual journey that traveled through meditation, Buddhism, yoga, holistic healing, Native American tribal cultures and the Kabbalah.

It was Chayim and Shamaya’s own flavor of Judaism. It belonged to both of them. It was inclusive, performative, and musical. It was alive and tangible. It was infused with love.

Chayim was a lover of the world. He found joy in the sacred and the absurd. He loved telling a good story and leading a good ritual. I have never seen him happier than on the day he married. Shamaya lovingly and meticulously knitted her wedding dress of fine cotton thread—a labor of love and meditation that took many months. She was splendid. She also made Chayim a kittel. My brother knew he had found his Bashert.

With Chayim and Shamaya’s mentor and inspiration Rebbe Shlomo Carlbach singing and chanting and playing guitar, and singing and chanting some more, Chayim and Shamaya exchanged their wedding vows under a chuppah in my Aunt Reva’s back yard.

Chayim and Shamaya lived in a tiny cabin deep in a shady damp redwood forest in Felton, California when they were blessed with the birth of their son Yakov Ariel. Chayim was such a devoted papa. He lived and breathed for his beautiful son. He adored his baby, sang to him, and told him the most amazing and mystical bedtime stories, even when Yakov was already a young man.

Chayim completed his education, receiving a PhD from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park. He wrote a dissertation about the Tibetan Buddhist concept of igniting the inner fire. After graduating, he set up a psychotherapy practice in Santa Cruz and Soquel.

Chayim and Shamaya raised Yakov in a house with vibrant and abundant Jewish ritual—there were Shabbos dinners with Chayim’s signature challah dance and Passover seders that went on forever but left everyone with a Passover experience they had never felt before. Every day at their home was a uniquely joyous and reflective expression of the beauty of life.

I said it before, but Chayim lived a good ritual. On Yakov’s becoming a bar mitzvah, Chayim created an unforgettable ritual to show four different paths to experiencing religion.

—Shamaya expressed her religious sentiment through her boundless maternal love.

—Loic Jassy experienced religion through the path of the heart.

—Our cousin Joel Kaminsky used intellect and rational thought as his path.

—And my wife Maica Folch performed a dance with Yakov’s tallit, showing movement and flight as a path to inspiration.

Chayim and Shamaya brought Yakov to the wilderness. Chayim and Yakov did yearly father-son wilderness trips that continued to this last summer, this time including Shamaya in a Yosemite back-country adventure. Chayim and Shamaya lived a model of mindfulness, love and devotion.

Chayim was so incredibly proud of the loving, inspired, healing, caring, intelligent young man that Yakov is today. And Chayim couldn’t wait to celebrate Yakov’s upcoming wedding with Cynthia Wennstrom, whom Chayim adored. Fortunately, Chayim blessed their marriage at an engagement party in August in Los Angeles—with a blessing like only Chayim could give.

Chayim’s healing and inspiring influence affected untold number of people. As a doctor of psychology, he counseled hundreds of people—sometimes helping deeply troubled people find illusive meaning in their lives, sometimes helping couples communicate and save their relationships, sometimes acting as a guide for people who saw Chayim as uniquely wise and enlightened. Chayim used his healing abilities with the family too, mediating conflicts and helping everyone when we reached some interpersonal dead end. 

With his dear friend Brian Winkler, Chayim led week long vision quests in the deserts and mountains to set the stage for people to see their lives more clearly and to seek out deeper meanings. He drew from Native American traditions to reconnect people to the Earth. He sustained a community of people who have experienced a vision quest and continue to work to integrate their visions into their lives.

Chayim was a spiritual role model. He charged head first into his spirituality in a genuine, deep and unself-conscious and quirky way. It was a gift that transformed every family gathering. He compared the Hashem to a motorboat at Tammie and Phil’s wedding. As he presented my daughter Chelo with her tallit, he told her that God never says, “Do these mountains make me look fat?”  He extolled the power of sighing. He officiated my wedding ritual and helped Maica and me create naming ceremonies for our children. No family event will be the same without him.

Chayim’s eyes reflected the presence of God so brightly that he deeply touched the lives of his friends, his patients, Yakov’s friends, and his congregation. He had such a powerful presence that sometimes he touched the lives of those he met in the street or at the harbor. .

Chayim was a man of a million talents and here are aspects of Chayim’s life that few people knew. He was an inventive and capable craftsman, creating chairs from old skis, CD racks of bamboo, stonework from pebbles and mortar. Chayim was an avid drummer and lovingly crafted ornate drums and rattles from buffalo hides and sticks and plants. He was a fearless sailor who, after several misadventures and rescues by the harbor patrol, became a proficient boatsman. He learned to ride a unicycle at 58 years old.

And Chayim loved to have fun and he knew how to have fun. Whether he was whitewater rafting or skiing the trees or kayaking in Monterey Bay, Chayim loved the adrenalin of high adventure. He got a charge out of sailing big rollers on the ocean and scuba diving at the bottom of the sea. Chayim loved to bike to work and arrive at his office satisfied and clear after a vigorous ride.  In one inspired moment, he danced atop a table in a restaurant. Chayim lived his life unencumbered by fear. He was never afraid to live his life exactly as he thought it should be lived.

Chayim had an irrepressible smile and an easy laugh. Like many in our family, he loved to laugh heartily at his own jokes and stories. He saw humor in the world where not everyone was able to see it. Maybe that is because Chayim knew that we exist in many planes and the physical world is not everything.

For us this happened way too soon, and I’m sure it happened too soon for him too, but I don’t think Chayim feared his death.

Chayim, Chayim, Chayim.

The world is a sadder place without you. There is an unspeakable void in our hearts without you.

We all miss you, Bro.