Even rabbis get the blues...

On the holiest night of the Jewish calendar, Michael Shefrin opens a conversation about mental health in his temple

Rabbi Michael Shefrin of Temple Emanu-El in Sarasota, Florida.

Michael Shefrin had what can only be called a bifurcated childhood. After his parents divorced when he was 5, his time was split between his mother, a “second career rabbi” whose home was rich in Jewish tradition and often full with his “bubbe” (grandmother) and 13 cousins, and his father, an entertainment publicist with a Hollywood client list that included Don Rickles, Enrique Iglesias and and Dick Clark. For an only child growing up in Los Angeles, it was the best of both worlds.

“I had these two ways of being very immersive in my life,” says Shefrin, now the associate rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in Sarasota, Florida. “One weekend I would be deeply immersed in a traditional Jewish household, celebrating holidays and going to temple and being involved in the Jewish causes. And on the other side, I’d be doing homework in Dick Clarke’s dressing room on the set of ‘American Bandstand’ as Madonna, Prince or the Beasty Boys were performing nearby.”

Initially it was the exposure to the entertainment world – and music in particular -- that had the biggest influence on Shefrin’s life and career path. When he left home to attend Sonoma State College in California’s Napa Valley, it was to pursue his passion for music. He worked at record stores and for a local radio station, learned to play the guitar and formed a band that made a successful record and toured around and across the country.

“I found my identity there, in music and in playing music,” he fondly recalls. “I loved, loved, loved it; music was my whole being. It was where I found purpose in life.”

Eventually, following in his father and grandfather’s footsteps, he worked his way into music management and began representing the very successful band, Lincoln Park.

“I was a total Hollywood scene kid, but I had found my space in the industry that was not necessarily under my father’s tutelage,” he says. “The night my Dad was working the American Music Awards pressroom and Lincoln Park won an award and I was taking them back to do interviews – it was like these two worlds colliding in this beautiful way.”

Though Shefrin continued to celebrate Jewish holidays and enjoy traditional family meals at his mother’s house, he wasn’t involved with his temple nor did he have “much of a Jewish life at all.” The relationships and fulfillment he found in the entertainment industry helped fill the need for community that might otherwise have come from his spiritual life. But much as he enjoyed his work and the relationships that developed from it, he was also aware of a growing sense of loneliness.

One moment in particular stands out in his memory. It was during a sold-out Lincoln Park show in a huge arena when 25,000 joyous fans joined together to sing along with the band. Shefrin, standing behind the sound board remembers simultaneously marveling at the sound and sight of the crowd -- “this amazing moment of thousands of people engaged and connected through art” – and also feeling utterly alone, wondering “Why am I here? What is my purpose?”

Eventually the grind of the music industry – “the rat race, the long hours, the lack of sleep, the exhaustion” – took its toll and Shefrin, who at the time was running the upstairs room at the Roxy on Sunset Boulevard, decided  a change was in order. It was his mother who suggested he contact a friend of hers, an entertainment lawyer who worked in the music industry and was looking for an assistant.

Six months into his tenure at the law office, the lawyer, who led a nonprofit Jewish volunteer organization in Los Angeles called Limud (the Hebrew word for learning), took his assistant to lunch and suggested he become involved with the group. Shefrin, who had not really engaged in Jewish life for more than 20 years was dubious. He was even more perplexed when his boss added: “And when you decide to become a rabbi, please let me know.”

“I looked at him as if he’d lost all sense of reality,” he recalls. “I was like, what are you talking about?”

To his own surprise, Shefrin found in the organization a connection to his spirituality and “a freedom to explore Jewish practice that wasn’t my Mom’s or my family’s, but my own niche, my own way of being that gave me a different sense of purpose.” It not only changed his life, but his career path. Four and a half years later, he found himself asking his mentor for a letter of recommendation to rabbinical school, just as the lawyer had predicted years earlier. Even today the unexpected turn of events can make Shefrin shake his head.

“Six plus years into my rabbinate, I’m still a bit shocked that I went to rabbinical school for five years and am now loving this journey so much,” he said. “It’s been unexpectedly wonderful and purpose-filled.”

But finding his place in his faith did not entirely vanquish the underlying anxieties that had always remained hidden under Shefrin’s bubbly exterior of success and competency. From a young age, he’d engaged in therapy on and off, initially struggling with his parents’ divorce and a number of moves during his childhood years that left him feeling “unsettled, not necessary comfortable in my head and my skin.”

“There was often the sense that this wasn’t as good as it could be, that I don’t feel the way I want to feel…that I was seeking a connection in my life that was lacking,” Shefrin says. “There was always an underpinning of stuff, but I never really had to deal with it because it was never detrimental to my career, nor was it causing a crisis in my life.”

Ironically, it was only once he had found a connection with God and faith and community that the crisis came to a head. During his time in rabbinical school -- “on a random day, at a random moment” -- Shefrin experienced what he calls “a breakdown” that left him “crying on the floor in a ball for months.”

“There was just a day where it all fell apart,” he recalls. “And what was diagnosed for me was severe depression. For whatever reason, all of the things that I had been covering for decades no longer worked, the floodgates opened and I had no control. It was a very lonely and scary place and one of the first things in my life I couldn’t wrap my head around.”

Shefrin remembers feeling “absolutely embarrassed and ashamed and out of control.” There were days he simply couldn’t stop crying, or function even at a minimal level, which further undermined his self confidence.

“I’m somebody who really wants to do life well and be successful,” he says. “I believe in leaving a legacy and doing good work in the world and the family and the community and I believe I had a God given opportunity to be a vessel of goodness. So when that became blocked and inhibited, when that capacity to fulfill some sense of mission and calling was disrupted, it made everything worse.

“It rocked me in a way and for a longer period of time than anything I’d ever experienced.  All of my coping skills just sort of vanished and the way I walked in the world was dark and uninspired.”

Learning to overcome his own self-stigmatization of his illness was part of the process. With the support of his wife, his family and his temple colleagues, he dove into therapy, engaged in a support group and found a doctor he believed in who helped him come to terms with accepting the need for medication, not just temporarily, but perhaps for a long time.

“I didn’t have self stigma about taking medication in the short term,” says Shefrin, who tried a variety of drugs before finding one that helped him feel “normal-ish.” “But the idea that this might be something I might have to do for the rest of my life was like, ‘No, not me!’

He found encouragement in a routine by a standup comic named Gary Gulman, who used his own struggles with clinical depression to make fun of the absurdity of letting stigma, shame and self-consciousness stand in the way of living a healthier, happier life. It helped Shefrin see things in a different perspective.

“I must have listened to his routine like 15 times in the course of a week and he was so funny and open, it made a huge difference for me, especially in crossing the line from ‘I’m OK taking meds until I’m better’ to the possibility that it might be a part of my life going forward.  I now accept that whatever those sacrifices are that I have to make that allow be to be out in the world, to be a present husband and father and rabbi who can show up for people without placing my own stuff on someone else, I am willing to do that.”

The dark period put a strain on Shefrin’s relationship with his wife, Shana, and kept him from being as present with his young son as he would like to have been. The fact that he continued to work toward a solution instead of melting into a puddle of self-pity saved both him and his relationship.

“My wife said something to me that made all the difference in the world,” he remembers. “It was so extreme that there was a possibility our marriage wouldn’t make it – it was not something she’d signed up for and it wasn’t something I’d dealt with prior to our being married. But she could see I was trying and she came out with one phrase, “It would be different if you weren’t doing the work.” She could constantly see that I was building new skills and tools and resources and support networks and I think that gave us hope we could get through this and be able to walk on higher ground again.”

Two years after Shefrin joined Temple Emanu-El, the Covid pandemic hit and the entire community went into lock down. Watching the effect of the isolation and estrangement on members of the temple, Shefrin remembers thinking, “This feels like a small version of what I was going through.”

“People were sad,” he said, “and there was loneliness and there was a cycle where people were ending up scared. People were coping, in a hundred different ways, but they weren’t talking about what was making them need to cope.”

This year, as the pandemic lingered into its second year and Yom Kippur, the holiest night of the Jewish calendar, approached Shefrin decided the time was right for him not only to share his own story, but to engage his parishioners in an open and frank conversation about mental health. In a powerful sermon still viewed regularly on Youtube, he delivered to temple members an emotional call to action, encouraging a more open conversation about mental health and more support for those who were struggling.

“This was about making sure that the people around you who are struggling are seen and heard,” he says. “It was about trying to get a little bit of empowerment so that people would stand up and say, ‘Me too.’”

The reaction from the congregation was immediate and enduring. In the weeks following his sermon, Shefrin estimates that over a third of the temple’s 1,400 members shared their own personal or familial struggles with mental illness and proudly wore the green ribbons he handed out that night asking everyone to “have the conversation.”

“It was one of the most affirming things I’ve ever felt in my life,” he says. “Because hundreds of people, just with the simple act of putting on a ribbon, were saying, ‘We see you. We love you. We’re here for you.’ I am still hearing those stories to this day.”

In some faith communities, mental illness remains a taboo topic, even, in extreme cases, a target of ostracization and exclusion. Shefrin feels it is particularly important for faith communities to initiate the mental health conversation themselves and break down the silences and the barriers for those who need help.

 “When people ignore it, they’re doing a disservice not just to the parishioners, but to the traditions they’re following,” he says, referring to many religious stories that reference individuals with mental health struggles. “If you’re going to have faith in your community, not just in God or yourself, you should be able to help and support and walk through those spaces of discomfort.”

Shefrin references a fellow rabbi who once told him: “We all have our ‘ands.’ You know, ‘Everything’s great, I really love my job, the family’s good … and…and…’

 “There’s always something that isn’t perfect, or we perceive it as not,” he says. “To create a space where we can explore those ‘ands’ and support each other is so important. You never know who’s going to benefit by listening, but I promise you, the more you talk about this, the more it will benefit someone. If that conversation remains silent, it can cost lives.”

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