The first complaint reaches Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard by phone on a Sunday in February from a man who runs a kashrus agency and who wants him to know that the Malik boy has gone too far.<\/p>\n
Ezra Malik is nineteen. He has an agent, a manager, a lawyer his father made him get, and four million people who watch him do other people. He did the kashrus man in October, four minutes, the walk, the clipboard, the way he says the word standards, and it ran everywhere, and eleven mashgichim in three states have been doing the walk at each other ever since.<\/p>\n
“He grew up in your shul,” the man says.<\/p>\n
“He did.”<\/p>\n
“So you can talk to him.”<\/p>\n
“I can talk to anybody.”<\/p>\n
“Rabbi.”<\/p>\n
“I hear you,” Grossbard says, which is what he says.<\/p>\n
The second complaint comes from a day school head. The third from a matchmaker in Hancock Park with a following. The fourth from a philanthropist in Beverly Hills who has given the Barn nothing and whose foundation gives eleven million a year to things Grossbard cares about. The fifth arrives on the letterhead of a rabbinical council with nine signatures, one of them from a man who ate at Grossbard’s table in 2019.<\/p>\n
By April there have been thirty one. Two lawyers have sent letters. A donor has moved a gift to a different shul and told two people why. Somebody has called Ezra’s agent and mentioned a boycott and the agent has told Ezra, and Ezra, who is nineteen, has started asking his father whether this can hurt his sister.<\/p>\n
Grossbard sees the whole thing at once, and what he sees is 2011.<\/p>\n
There were forty people writing about this world in 2005. Blogs, most of them anonymous, some of them very good, one or two of them the only honest account anybody had of how the institutions ran. By 2011 there were none. Not one of them was sued. Nobody won a judgment. Nobody got an injunction. They got phone calls. They got a call placed to an employer. They got a father in law taken to lunch. They got a daughter’s shidduch that fell apart in the third week with no reason offered by anyone. Every one of them stopped, and every one of them told you he had gotten busy.<\/p>\n
Josh Adelman wants a statement.<\/p>\n
“Say we don’t control him,” Adelman says. “Say the Barn has no editorial relationship with a private individual. Say we support open expression.”<\/p>\n
“No.”<\/p>\n
“Why no.”<\/p>\n
“Because it’s a lie, and because it’s the lie they want,” Grossbard says. “The minute I say we support open expression, every one of these people gets to ask me why I support open expression about them and not about the eleven things I killed last year. And I killed eleven things last year, Josh. I pulled a youth minyan skit in November. I told the sisterhood newsletter to take out a paragraph about a divorce. I told Barry Teitelbaum to sit down twice. There is no open forum here. There has never been an open forum here or anywhere else. There’s a set of lines and we enforce them all week long and we don’t write them down, and not writing them down is what lets every macher in Los Angeles come to me one at a time and ask me to move one.”<\/p>\n
Marla Feig, who is eighty now and comes to every board meeting, says, “So write them down.”<\/p>\n
“Yes,” Grossbard says.<\/p>\n
He goes home and takes a book off the shelf that he has never admitted owning.<\/p>\n
He bought The Purpose Driven Church in 1998 at a Barnes and Noble in Woodland Hills because he was thirty one years old and had ninety families and no idea what he was doing. Rick Warren (b. 1954) is a Baptist pastor in Orange County who wrote it in 1995 and who wrote The Purpose Driven Life in 2002 and sold enough of them to fund a small country. Grossbard’s copy is annotated in three colors. The thing he took from it in 1998, and has used every year since without attribution, is that a crowd is not a congregation and a congregation is not a membership, and that people behave differently the moment you ask them to sign something.<\/p>\n
He calls Ezra in on a Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“You’re going to hate the first half of this.”<\/p>\n
“Okay.”<\/p>\n
“One rule. You don’t do members of this shul. Anybody who holds a membership at the Barn is off the table for as long as they hold it. Everybody else in the Jewish world is a free country and I will never call you about any of them again as long as I live.”<\/p>\n
Ezra sits back.<\/p>\n
“You’re leashing me.”<\/p>\n
“I’m arming you.”<\/p>\n
“You’re telling me who I can’t do.”<\/p>\n
“I’m telling you who you can,” Grossbard says. “Right now you can’t do anybody, because you’re nineteen and there are four hundred people in this city who can hurt your father’s business and your sister’s shidduch and none of them have to put their name on anything. Starting Friday, a man who wants you to leave him alone has to join a shul, in writing, with a check, at two thousand dollars a year, and I publish the list of members every year in the annual report like every shul in America. He has to buy it and everybody gets to see him buy it.”<\/p>\n
Ezra thinks about it for a while. He is nineteen and he thinks about it for a long time, which is one of the reasons he is good.<\/p>\n
“They’ll all join.”<\/p>\n
“Most of them.”<\/p>\n
“That’s a protection racket.”<\/p>\n
“That’s a membership organization,” Grossbard says. “The difference is that I’m telling you what it is. Nobody told the forty guys in 2009 what it was. They just got quiet one at a time and thought it was happening only to them.”<\/p>\n
The rush starts the second week of May.<\/p>\n
The kashrus man joins and tells the office his wife has cousins in the neighborhood. The matchmaker joins and asks whether there is a level above the two thousand and is told there is not. The day school head joins and asks for a receipt for the tuition committee, which the office cannot provide, and joins anyway. The editor of the Journal joins, and writes an editorial three weeks later about the vitality of institutional affiliation in Los Angeles, and does not mention it.<\/p>\n
The director of the kiruv outfit in Jerusalem that put Grossbard’s face on a cracked graphic in 2024 joins as an out of town affiliate, a category Grossbard invents on a Thursday afternoon and prices at two thousand dollars.<\/p>\n
The philanthropist joins. His assistant calls to ask whether the membership can be in the name of the foundation and is told it cannot.<\/p>\n
Membership runs from three hundred and ninety units in April to six hundred and eleven by October. Four hundred and forty two thousand dollars in new dues. Attendance does not move. The same eleven hundred people come on Yom Kippur. Adelman starts calling the difference the phantom shul and stops when it is pointed out that the phantom shul paid for the roof and the air conditioning.<\/p>\n
Every Friday at noon Grossbard emails Ezra Malik the updated membership list. No message in the body. Just the list.<\/p>\n
Ezra’s editor prints it out and tapes it to the wall.<\/p>\n
In September a man named Nathan Sperber, sixty two, who joined in the second week of the rush and who has never been inside the building, is discovered to have been running Sperber Capital for nine years on money from later investors paid out to earlier ones. Eleven families at the Barn have money with him. Two of them have all of it.<\/p>\n
Ezra calls at 7:40 in the morning.<\/p>\n
“He’s on the list.”<\/p>\n
“He’s on the list.”<\/p>\n
“I have forty minutes on him. I have him at the Hilton in 2022 telling a room of retirees that he doesn’t take fees from Jews.”<\/p>\n
“He’s on the list, Ezra.”<\/p>\n
“You’re going to let a two thousand dollar membership cover a man who took the Fishbein’s retirement.”<\/p>\n
“I didn’t say that.”<\/p>\n
Grossbard calls Sperber in on Thursday. Sperber comes with a lawyer and Grossbard says the lawyer can sit in the hallway or the meeting doesn’t happen, and the lawyer sits in the hallway.<\/p>\n
“Your membership is terminated as of this morning. The office will refund you nine hundred and sixteen dollars, which is the prorated balance, and there’s a check on the desk.”<\/p>\n
“You can’t do that.”<\/p>\n
“Article nine. The rabbi may terminate a membership for conduct injurious to the congregation, and the determination is his alone and is not appealable.” Grossbard slides the check across. “I wrote article nine in November. I wrote it for a Thursday like this one.”<\/p>\n
“You built the whole thing to sell protection and now you’re pulling mine.”<\/p>\n
“Yes.”<\/p>\n
Sperber stares at him.<\/p>\n
“At least say something about it,” he says. “At least tell me it’s about the Fishbeins.”<\/p>\n
“It’s about the Fishbeins,” Grossbard says. “And it’s also that I want every other man on that list to spend tonight rereading article nine. Take the check.”<\/p>\n
Ezra runs the forty minutes on the second of October. It does four million in a day. The Hilton footage is in it. A reporter at a business paper in New York watches it, makes three calls, and files in November, and the receiver is appointed in March, and the Fishbeins get back about a third, which is a third more than they had.<\/p>\n
Nobody thanks Grossbard, because most of the room has decided he is the man who protects the mockery, and the rest have decided he is the man who allows it.<\/p>\n
He says the true thing once, in December, to a room of forty at the annual meeting, and it goes past them like weather.<\/p>\n
“I want this in the minutes. I am the censor here. I made myself the censor in May. Before May there were four hundred people in this city who could quietly ruin a nineteen year old and not one of them had to sign anything. Now there is one man who decides, and it’s me, and you can see me, and you know my address, and you have my email, and article nine has my name on it. That is an improvement. It is not freedom. There is no such thing available and there never was. The only question in front of a community is who does the deciding and whether you can find him.”<\/p>\n
The minutes record that the rabbi discussed membership policy.<\/p>\n
The rabbi in Teaneck writes eleven hundred words in January on the corruption of a pulpit that sells indulgences and names it a shanda four times. He does not join. He says so in the piece. He says a man of conviction pays for his convictions.<\/p>\n
Ezra does him in February. Six minutes. The cadence, the pause before the word shanda, the way he holds a paperback with two fingers. It is the best thing Ezra has ever made and it is not cruel, which is what makes it unsurvivable.<\/p>\n
The Friday list goes out at noon on March 14.<\/p>\n
Ezra reads it in his car outside the studio on Fairfax, the way he reads it every week, scrolling with his thumb down the new names at the bottom, and he stops.<\/p>\n
He calls his editor.<\/p>\n
“Take him off the wall.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first complaint reaches Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard by phone on a Sunday in February from a man who runs a kashrus agency and who wants him to know that the Malik boy has gone too far. Ezra Malik is nineteen. … Continue reading