Avraham Loewenthal in his studio / Photo Alexis Wolff

You likely wouldn’t look twice at 39-year-old Avraham Loewenthal if you passed him on the narrow cobblestone streets of Tzfat (also spelled Safed, Safad and Zefat), the ancient city in northern Israel that was the birthplace of Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism.

Avraham’s head is covered by a large knit yarmulke, his face masked by a thick beard so long it hides his neck, and behind each ear hangs the curled tendril of hair that is custom of Haredi men.

In other words, Avraham fits right in.

But if you were to follow Avraham into his studio in Ma’ayan Haradum Square, the Tzfat Gallery of Mystical Art, and ask about one of the scores of contemporary paintings strewn about the small space, you might stand in shock as he speaks passionately about his works’ representation of basic principles of Kabbalah.

What he’s saying is interesting, but just as interesting is how he is saying it. This man who looks like any other Tzfat resident sounds American-Midwestern, in fact. That’s because before he was Avraham from Tzfat, he was Robert from Detroit.

I was so intrigued by a visit in March to Avraham’s Tzfat studio that I reconnected with him to discuss his thoughts on place, Kabbalah and art.

BNT: Tell me, first of all, a little about your life in America and how you ended up in Tzfat.

AL: I grew up in Southfield, Michigan in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family. I went to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, taking different undergraduate classes with a psychology major. Then I studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

During college I found myself interested in meditation. I started looking into Eastern meditation and then someone told me about the book Jewish Meditation by Aryeh Kaplan.

I was surprised to see that there is a very deep tradition of meditation within Judaism.

Sunset in Tzfat / Photo phogel

Over the next few years I read three more of his books, and collectively they changed my life. In simple and clear words he explains the deepest and most meaningful ideas I had ever encountered, and I wanted to learn more.

While I was in art school, I came to Jerusalem to study for a month in a yeshiva. It wasn’t a Kabbalistic yeshiva, but it was still the next step in my spiritual journey.

After art school I wanted to learn more about the Kabbalah, so I came to Israel for six months as part of an artist-in-residence program in Arad, a city in the Negev Desert.

While I was there I visited Tzfat, and I knew immediately that this was what I had come to Israel for. Tzfat is one of the holiest cities in the world and the world center of Kabbalah. I found teachers here and a most beautiful community of spiritual people.

I came to Tzfat to learn Kabbalah, but there also happens to be an artist colony here. This allowed me to open up a gallery and combine my Kabbalah learning with my painting.

I have been living here now for about 13 years, studying Kabbalah and painting pictures based on ideas I am learning in the Kabbalah.

BNT: As someone who has called two very different places home, how much or little do you think where we live affects who we are?

AL: It says in the Kabbalah that a person’s environment influences him or her so much.

What people around us give importance to, think about and desire start to become the things that we talk about, give importance to and desire-so much so that even though we always have free will, on some level we only make one major decision in our lives… where we live and who we spend our time with.

The books we read are also considered people we are spending time with, as we are connecting to the consciousness of the author.

This is one of the reasons that Tzfat is such a spiritually powerful place. Since so many people here are giving great importance to their spirituality, these are the conversations going on.

BNT: Even though Tzfat felt comfortable to you from the beginning, was there anything difficult about adjusting from your American life to your Israeli one?

When I first realized that I wanted to live in Israel, I thought I would need to give up a lot of material comforts. But I haven’t. I have found only blessings living here.

Painting by Avraham Loewenthal

I do miss some of my old friends from where I grew up, but I married a woman, Rebecca, from Baltimore, who I met about six years ago at Shabbat dinner hosted by some friends down the block.

We have been blessed with two children, Ashira Rachel who is now three years old and Hillel Netzach who is nine months old.

One thing that did take some getting used to was my name. I was given the Hebrew name Avraham when I was born, but I was also given the English name Robert. I went most of my life using my English name.

One day before I was thinking about it, and I had a realization that my deepest name is Avraham.

I like the name Robert, but I realized that the name Avraham was given to me after my great-grandfather, who was named after his ancestor, who was named after his ancestor, and so on for 4,000 years.

When I game to Israel for the artist-in-residence program, I started to have people call me Avraham instead of Robert, and at first that was strange for me. Someone would call my name and I wouldn’t even know they were talking to me. But I soon got used to it, and it was a very big transformation.

It actually says in the Kabbalah that a person’s soul has a deep connection to their name, and one piece of advice given for someone (in certain circumstances) wanting to make a big life change is to change their name.

BNT: How interesting that you married a woman from Baltimore. Does Tzfat have a large American expatriate population, and if so, what about Tzfat do you think appeals to Americans?

AL: There are many former Americans here of all ages. Whether they come for a few hours, a day or two, weeks, months, years or forever, they become part of a community that is like a big family.

There is a distinct English-speaking community and a distinct Hebrew-speaking community, but these communities overlap and intertwine. Most everyone is here for the vibrant spiritual environment.

BNT: Tell me more about how your express your spirituality through your artwork. Can you explain how the principles of Kabbalah are represented in one particular piece?

AL: The main theme of the Kabbalah expressed in most of my artwork is the idea that at the root of all of our spiritual work in this world is coming to truly care for one another as we care for ourselves.

The picture here is a quote from the Torah. It can be translated as, “There is nothing but G-d.” There is a great deal of discussion in the Kabbalah about the meaning of this verse, but one of the ideas is that nothing in our life is a coincidence.

Even the most difficult and painful situations are actually on the deepest level hidden blessings because they help our souls come to a place that will be ready to finally experience infinite goodness.

BNT: I have to ask, what do you think about celebrities like Madonna taking up Kabbalah?

AL: Many people are critical of celebrities studying Kabbalah and also of it coming out in the world in different “pop” levels of learning. I don’t agree with this criticism. We have no idea what anyone else’s spiritual work is, so we cannot judge their path. We can only look inside ourselves.

Ancient prophecies say that the revelation of the inner teachings of the Kabbalah to everyone will be part of the spiritual transformation in the world, when six billion people finally come to truly care for one another.

I think that the Kabbalah coming out in the world today in a very big way, even if a lot of it is on a very “pop” level, is the beginning of the fulfillment of these ancient prophesies.

BNT: I’m curious how Avraham from Tzfat, formerly Robert from Detroit, defines himself these days: as an American expatriate, a Tzfat resident, a Jew, an artist? None of the above?

AL: At this moment I would define myself as an eternal soul trying to realize my spiritual essence and connect to the unconditional love that is the divine source of our every moment.

To see more of Avraham Loewenthal’s art, visit The Tzfat Gallery of Mystical Art.

On the trail / Photo Dan White

Dan White was 25 and working an unfulfilling newspaper job in small-town Connecticut when he dropped everything and headed west with his girlfriend Allison for what he envisioned as “an American safari.”

Their terrain was the Pacific Crest Trail, which begins in the Mexican desert and stretches north through 24 national parks, 33 wildernesses and six out of the seven North American climate zones to end 2,650 miles later in Canada, which by the time hikers arrive is in the middle of winter.

Never mind that Dan and Allison were novice outdoorsmen.

Never mind that they started their walk late in the season, which meant many of their days would be short and cold. They were determined to walk the entire PCT, no matter what obstacles they encountered-and they encountered many.

Dan’s humorous yet poignant tale of these misadventures, The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind – and Almost Found Myself – on the Pacific Crest Trail, has received much attention and praise since it was released in May.

I caught up with him to talk about his book and how the trail made him a better person.

BNT: It’s becoming increasingly common for 20-somethings to take a break from their professional lives and spend a year or so chasing an adventure. Were things different in 1993 when you took off for the PCT?

Dan: In some ways, they were scarily similar. Allison and I decided to hike the trail during another national recession. It was quite a bad one.

Businesses were folding left and right, and there were these avalanches of layoffs. This meant that when you did something impulsive, there were immediate consequences if you messed it up.

The moment we left our newspaper jobs, those jobs were erased from the rolls forever. It was a very serious situation – and it underscores our impulsiveness at the time, and our desperate need to escape from our lives.

When you leave a stable job to do something on a whim, and the economy is booming, that’s one thing. But we inadvertently set up a situation in which we had no choice but carry on with the trail, no matter what happened to us out there.

We had no place to live and no jobs that someone was holding open for us. Our life aside from the trail was kind of a blank slate – and that’s one of the reasons we stuck with doing it, even though we were obviously in over our heads.

Let’s talk about your book. When you were writing it, did you conceptualize it as a work of travel writing, humor, memoir, or something else?

I think of the book as a “hero’s journey’” but with an odd hero and heroine. Take your classic hero traits and at first it seems you won’t find any of them here.

At times I was a kvetcher and a navel-gazer, not a likely survivalist, and Allison was this clean-scrubbed Midwestern girl who was forced into this crazy situation. And I think all those elements make this book a memoir-comedy, with some tragic elements thrown into the mix.

Let me put it this way. Nothing about this journey was the slightest bit funny during the actual journey.

I had to set aside the memories and let them marinate for a while. After a few years, I got to the point where I could look at myself – and at Allison – with the right amount of distance.

You are an endearing narrator in large part because of your mistakes. Is there one you still can’t believe you made?

Well, I have to say that the cactus sucking and chewing incident is the one that still gets to me.

I am referring to an infamous scene in which I shove a large piece of cactus in my mouth and start chewing on it without even trying to remove the spines beforehand.

I should be grateful that the incident provided a title and central focus for the book – that moment where anyone else but us would have said “forget this” and given up – but I must admit that the scene still embarrasses me, and I get so thirsty when I read it out loud.

It’s considered a comedic highlight of the book, but I still haven’t forgiven myself for doing that. In fact, the incident was so extreme that I emailed Allison and I asked her, “Did this really happen? Could I have done such a thing?” She said, “Oh yeah, you sure did. You were out of your mind!”

Do you think your journey-and your book-would have been different had you been more experienced?

Starting to lose it / Photo Dan White

Well, I do think that it’s possible to have a really strong adventure story and be an extremely competent outdoorsman, mostly because nature is so unsentimental and nature can make fool of us all, no matter how much we think we know.

I read a book by John Haines, a poet who worked a trap line in Alaska.

It’s hard to imagine a more seasoned survivalist, but there are still moments of tension because he’s up against irresistible forces, such as hunger and gnawing cold, and his need to kill, and use a certain amount of brutality, just to survive.

The same holds true with Alone, the book about Admiral Richard Byrd trying to survive a Polar winter. No matter how competent you think you are, you always come up against the elements and your own weaknesses.

In my case, being a greenhorn and being impulsive served the story because it increased the scale of the adventure, and the likelihood of failure. Inexperience forced me to compensate in a big way with other traits, such as perseverance and obsessive dedication.

In some ways, I went really overboard. I know that it’s a “warts-and-all” portrait of a walker who in some ways was silly and terribly self-involved. But the PCT was kind of a finishing school for me. It might sound sentimental to say it, but I’m a better person for walking the path.

So this trip was pivotal in your life?

Absolutely. It shaped me in many ways. I know that the subtitle implies that my vision quest was kind of a wash, but really, I learned more about myself – about my flaws, about the best and worst sides of me – from that one walk.

Some of the lessons did not even unfold along the trail. It took such a long time for the lessons to really sink in – and some of them really came to me following a very difficult post-trail adjustment period.

There’s this American tradition that started with John Muir, this whole idea of using the wilderness to mend the broken pieces of yourself. For me that is definitely true.

I’m much more patient because of that trail. I have more empathy now, because in some respects I failed to show proper empathy on the actual walk and regret that. Even my pain threshold is somewhat higher now!

Did you think at the time that the experience might be something you’d one day write about?

Well, I had some sense, but it was the wrong sense. I had this vague idea that I might do a silly, cutesy little book of fumbling around in the woods.

Yosemite National Park / Photo Dan White

The strange thing is, you can see that self-consciousness, that searching for material, when you read the first two or three diary entries from the trail. But I soon abandoned the idea of ever doing a book at all and started concentrating on just surviving out there and trying to finish what I started.

The diary entries get much more raw and more “real.” So I ended up doing most of the journey while having no idea that a book would come out one day.

Sometimes I even feel a little guilty that I’ve co-opted the writings of a younger self who didn’t know that his foibles and excesses would be read by thousands of people.

Do you think good travel books can come from experiences where writing is the intention?

I am sure that Bill Bryson had a book contract prior to setting off on the Appalachian Trail – and that book is a true classic as far as I’m concerned.

But my book would not have been the same if I’d set out with the idea of writing something about it. I think it would have been much more self-conscious and constricted in some ways.

What made you decide that you wanted to tell this story?

It was one of those situations where you’ve lived through something but aren’t done with it. In one respect it was interior; it was this whole idea of writing something out so I could make sense of it.

How did things go so haywire? Why was I so ridiculous sometimes out there, and so extreme? Why didn’t I just up and quit? And why didn’t Allison just up and quit? What was in it for her? Why didn’t she quit the thing – and why did she stick with the trail – and me?

Do you still hike?

Yes, but on a much smaller scale and with fewer expectations.

What would you tell someone who’s considering making a similar journey?

Prepare yourself. Be open to beauty and wonder, but brace yourself for chaos.

For more Dan White, check out his website.