As we were coming to pick up our six-year-old Aviv from his third week in first grade last year, his new teacher pulled my wife Jody and me aside.

“He seems a little spacey in class,” Yael said. “Like he’s not really paying attention. I’m not sure he’s really ‘getting’ things. I’m a bit concerned.”

This is not something any parent wants to hear -- that their precious child may have learning problems.

“I’d like to do some tests on him,” Yael said. “Let’s talk after that.”
 
Yael didn’t seem particularly worried. But we knew that Aviv was not like everyone else. This was not the first time he’d been tested for having a few “differences.”

It started when he was an infant and refused to crawl. Instead he “scooted” on his tush. It was really quite remarkable the speed and agility this little spunk of a kid could manage while remaining entirely in an upright sitting position.

At first we thought it was cute. It was other parents who put out the alarm.

“You know my kid did that. I had to take him for years of occupational therapy.”

And:

“You really should have that checked out. Could be an early sign of autism.”

But he was such an adorable, loving, easy child…so much easier than his big brother and sister were at that age. How could there be anything wrong with him? And anyway, children in Papua New Guinea never learn to crawl either, choosing scooting as their preferred mode of pre-toddler transport.

Just the same, we took him to an occupational therapist.

“Low muscle tone,” Dr. Paz said, explaining that this condition gives him less strength in his arms and hands which is probably why he wasn’t crawling.

“It’s something genetic,” he reassured us. Nothing we did. He prescribed a number of exercises but warned that this would be with him for life and that he’d probably have difficulty handling a pencil and learning to write.

It’s amazing how such a minor disability can lead those who aren’t familiar with it to jump to conclusions. The year before, in kindergarten, Aviv’s teacher labeled him “slow” because he couldn’t cut with a scissors or color between the lines the way the other kids could. A specialist was brought in who suggested maybe Aviv would be better off in special ed when he went on to first grade the next year.

We weren’t willing to give in so easily. We knew he was bright. Let him try regular elementary school. If he couldn’t handle it, we could always make a change later.

As Aviv was about to begin first grade, though, a slight glitch was thrown into the plan. His big brother Amir had just had his Bar Mitzvah and his grandparents wanted to take the whole family on vacation to celebrate. Overseas, to Turkey, to boot. But the only time we could schedule it was the first week of that school year.

I admit that I agonized about it more than Jody. But then I was the kid who loved school. I went for twelve years with only two days off for illness. I just couldn’t stand to miss a day of learning.

My kids think I am so weird.

Despite my concerns, we took Aviv out of class and his teacher gave him homework to work on at the beach and in the airplane. Jody was particularly diligent about him getting through his alphabet and not falling behind.

Apparently too diligent.

The day after Aviv’s first grade teacher Yael administered the test upon our return from vacation, we called to get the results..

“Frankly, I’m shocked,” she said.

Alarm bells started ringing full force.

“He’s absorbing everything. There’s no problem at all. He just got too far ahead while you were on vacation.”

In other words, he was acting spacey because he was...bored!

“Lay off the workbooks for awhile and let the class catch up,” Yael instructed us.

Now we know this isn’t the final verdict. Aviv’s low muscle tone will most likely raise its weak arms again in entirely unexpected other ways. But for now, we were in the clear. And who knows? Maybe we have a little genius on our hands.

I wonder if Einstein used to scoot on his tush, too?

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It's been a year since I wrote this story, although I never had a chance to post it. Since then, Aviv has received his yellow belt in judo and is learning to play the electric piano (known here in Israel as the organit). He and his friend Oshra love kicking a soccer ball around. And, as you can see from the picture above, he is quite the "scooter boy" these days. We love you, Aviv!

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A follow up to my article on "10 Reasons I Still Love Jerusalem." A number of readers wrote in to say I was wrong in stating that there's no decent sushi in Jerusalem and recommended a small takeout place called Go Sushi on Luntz Street in downtown. I had a chance to try it this week and you know what...it was pretty good. Now there's no reason not to visit...or live in Israel's capital!

We were on the first day of a two week car trip through Europe. My wife Jody and I and our three kids had packed the rented Nissan Almera full of our gear and were settling in for the three hour drive from the Milan airport to our bed and breakfast in Italy’s picturesque Lake Garda area.
 
We hit the Autostrada and, after the initial excitement of all those “foreign” road signs (“What does ‘Uscita; mean?” and “Can we really go 120 on this road?”), everyone quieted down as we realized that a highway is a highway…even in Italian.
 
“Can you turn on the radio?” fourteen-year-old Amir commanded and I readily complied.
 
Now I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to listen to the radio in Europe, but it is a truly dreadful experience. Nothing but station after station of Euro disco crap, pardon my snooty American/Israeli attitude.
 
“Does this car have a CD player?” Amir asked. “Because I have a disc that Safta gave us. Some guy named…” (he looked at the disc)…“Matisyahu.”
 
Amir and his twelve-year-old sister Merav had spent the summer in California with their grandparents before meeting the rest of the family in Italy for our vacation together. The Matisyahu disc had been a parting gift from Jody’s mom.
 
“Hand it over,” I said excitedly. But as I took a look at the cover of “Live at Stubb’s,” I quickly lost my optimism.
 
The man going by the very Ashkenazi-sounding name “Matisyahu” (with the “s” in the middle rather than the more Israeli pronunciation of “Matitayu” with a “t”) was decked out in traditional ultra-orthodox attire: black hat, black coat, bushy beard. A little experience told me that the music on this CD would more likely lean towards old world cantorial-style or the type of bubbly “simcha” music heard at weddings and bar mitzvahs rather than hipper, more modern Israeli world music we generally favor: Idan Raichel and HaDag Nachash, that sort of thing.
 
I steeled myself for an hour of “oy va voys” and “we want Moshiach now.”
 
Imagine my surprise as the first track started to play: a reggae and rap-influenced number inspired more by Bob Marley and 50 Cent than Dudu Fisher or Tevye the milkman. The next track, “Chop ‘Em Down,” had us rocking in our seats with its mix of religious lyrics and kick-ass jam band riffs. Matisyahu, it seems, has traded in the “oys” for some authentic reggae “yo’s”
 
Or as Matisyahu might say, “yiggy-ay-ay-yo.”
 
By track five – “King without a Crown” (which I later learned had been released as one of the singles from the CD) we were hooked.
 
“One more time,” Merav begged when the disc concluded.
 
Why not, I figured. We still had another hour until we got to our destination.
 
Over the course of the next two weeks, we must have listened to that Matisyahu CD at least 35 times. Through three European countries, past the craggy peaks surrounding Lake Como and the snow-covered Alps towering above Grindelwald, over more than 600 miles of road tripping from Venice Italy to Freiberg Germany, we had the continuously repeating soundtrack of Matisyahu innovative rhymes:
 
“If you're cup's already full then it’s bound to overflow
If you're drowning in the waters and you can't stay afloat
Ask Hashem for mercy and he'll throw you a rope”
 
and...
 
“Exaltation, my G-d of salvation
The field and there in will be filled with jubilation
The lord's name will be proclaimed amongst the Nations
We don't have no time for patience”
 
Not surprisingly, when we got back home to Israel, I felt like I had a very intimate relationship with this mystery man. But who was he? I only knew his lyrics and the one black and white stencil drawing on the album cover. Was he frum – that is, religious – from birth? If so, where’d he learn his rock and roll chops?
 
The first website I surfed to when I booted up my computer after a two week absence was HasidicReggae.com where I learned that Matisyahu was born Matthew Miller in 1979, that he grew up in Berkeley CA and White Plains NY, attended Hebrew School a couple of times a week but had a penchant for disrupting lessons and was frequently threatened with expulsion.
 
By the age of 14, he fell in with a “Dead-Head” crowd, grew dreadlocks and played bongos in the lunchroom. He also started “beatboxing” – a type of musical street smarts involving a sputtering of seemingly inhuman noises that lie somewhere between imitation of electronic percussion...and spit – that is a highlight of his musical performances to this day.
 
A trip to Israel and a stay at the Alexander Muss High School in Hod Hasharon when he was 16 opened him up to learning more about Judaism in a positive way. “They took us to Mount Scopus to look at the view of Jerusalem,” Miller said in an interview last week in Haaretz. “It sounds a little corny, I know, but it totally does the job. You stand up there, overlooking this incredible city, and you sing `Jerusalem of Gold' and something big moves in your heart. It was the first time that I felt my soul, that I really felt it. I felt God.”
 
A few years later, Miller was studying at the Chabad yeshiva in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. But his restlessness and his life-long passion for music convinced him that he needed to be on stage. He had already performed at a few clubs before his yeshiva stint. Now he was back with a vengeance.

He hooked up with Aaron Bisman, co-founder of JDub Records (and a friend of ours) and now has two CDs out. With the latest, “Live at Stubbs,” selling over 100,000 copies, Matisyahu is considered the most successful Jewish recording artist ever to “cross over” into the mainstream. He's even got his own fan club. Now Sony has picked up the enigmatic haredi reggae-rapper and is investing six figures in a music video alone. His third disc is due out next month in January.
 
Despite all the success, the cynic in me still couldn’t help wondering if Matisyahu is for real. I mean, if he weren’t a black hatter who inexplicably sounds Jamaican, would anyone take notice? There are plenty of wannabe American Idols clamoring for their chance in the spotlight. And it wasn’t that long ago that Matisyahu was a drop out searching for a purpose.
 
Could the whole religious shtick be just a well crafted – albeit highly effective – publicity stunt?
 
Matisyahu doesn’t blame his critics. “If I were them, I’d think that I’m some sort of gimmick too,” he said in the Haaretz interview.
 
“He’s a gimmick until he opens his mouth,” his producer Bisman added. “But he doesn’t stand on the stage like a putz in some nonchalant pose. He goes nuts. He’s there because of the passion and the hat and the beard can’t hide that.”
 
So when I heard Matisyahu was coming to Israel to give a series of performances last week, I really didn’t have a choice…I had to be there, to check this guy out live and on stage.
 
Matisyahu’s show at the avant-garde Jerusalem performance space The Lab last week didn’t disappoint. The club was sold out and tickets were reportedly being scalped outside for up to NIS 500 ($110) each. Inside, the singer rapped, jumped and gyrated (modestly of course) his way through an hour and half of old and new material. But it was the audience that ultimately won me over.
 
Matisyahu’s fan base spans an extraordinary spectrum: girls in trashy spaghetti strap tank tops; yeshiva boys with their tzitzit (ritual fringes) flying as they tossed each other in the air as part of a decidedly unspiritual mosh pit; a goodly sprinkling of middle aged hippies; and a twelve-year-old friend of Merav’s – all of them jumping and grinding on the packed dance floor together, shouting out “Mat-is-ya-hu, Mat-is-ya-hu” at the Rabbiniclal-looking figure on stage as if he were Paul McCartney or Axl Rose in a tallit.
 
Regular readers of this blog know that there is just about nothing I value more than Jewish unity. On this end Matisyahu scored an unquestionable home run.
 
A few days later, I was listening to one of my favorite Internet radio streams – 99X, Atlanta’s home for “Everything Alternative,” by no means a religious station (it vociferously promotes its irreverent holiday “Mistle Toe Jam”), and there was the DJ mumble-mouthing “Ma-sit-ya-su” or something similarly tongue-twisted, and then playing “King without a Crown” with its “we want Moshiach now” refrain.
 
And I thought: forget about Jewish unity, can world peace be far off?
 
Does Matisyahu make extraordinary music? Absolutely. Is he the real deal? After 35 listens across Europe and a tour-de-force performance in Jerusalem, I’m still not sure. But he and his cross-generational multi-faith fans certainly seem to believe it. And that’s good enough for me.

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Click here to listen to previews of some of Matisyahu’s latest tracks.

Israelis love to get down on Jerusalem. Every time new statistics are published, pundits bemoan the steady decline of the city and how much better other cities in the country are – particularly those in the Greater Tel Aviv area.
 
The latest depressing numbers come from the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies (JIIS) in its 2004 Statistical Yearbook. While the city’s population as of year end was still a healthy 706,400, the report focuses on Jerusalem’s negative immigration rate: During 2004, 18,100 people moved out of Jerusalem compared with only 11,400 who joined the city.
 
This negative immigration is nothing new, says Maya Choshen, the JIIS Yearbook’s author: some 240,000 people have left Jerusalem over the past 15 years. While such a calculation is clearly intended for its inflammatory impact, the total negative balance of 93,700 is nevertheless significant.
 
And yet, despite the bleak numbers, the Blum family is not going anywhere. Jerusalem remains the greatest city in the world – and I don’t mean just historically and theologically. This is an eminently livable city. In fact, as I see it, Jerusalem is actually improving.
 
How can I say that in the face of hard data? Well, here are 10 reasons (not in any particular order) why we still love it here:
 
1. Jerusalem has the best selection of quality kosher food in the world. You can find everything from Middle Eastern meat-on-a-skewer to Indian-Asian fusion. The choice of gourmet burgers on Emek Refaim Street alone is staggering. And whether you care about kashrut or not, quality kosher dining is one of the most inclusive activities Israel has to offer. Everyone can enjoy and appreciate; no one is left out. Eating out in Jerusalem has perhaps the best potential to bridge the secular-religious divide. Now, if only we had some decent kosher sushi at an affordable price…
 
2. Jerusalem is on the cutting edge of traditional Judaism. There is more choice in liberal Orthodox places to pray here than anywhere in the world. From my synagogue, Kehillat Yedidya, to Shira Hadasha and the Leader Minyan, you could go to a different shul every week and never get bored.
 
3. Jerusalem has the Old City. My brother Dave, who recently visited us for Merav’s bat mitzvah, says our Old City is the best old city he’s been to, beating out others he’s been to around the world including Geneva, Stockholm, and Delhi. While it’s true when you live here you don’t visit that often, when seven year old Aviv had his mesibat chumash party in first grade, they received their copies of the Torah in front of the kotel – the Western Wall. It doesn’t get more meaningful than that.
 
4. Jerusalem has better educational opportunities for modern religious and traditional students than anywhere else in the country. Don’t let the reports of our worsening educational system fool you. Junior and senior high school boys can choose from Hartman, Himelfarb, Dror, Keshet and Reut. Girls have Evelina, Amalia, Pelech and the religious arts school Omaniyot, not to mention whatever Beverly Gribetz manages to pull off next year. Other locations in Israel just can’t compare.
 
5. Jerusalem is an English-speakers paradise. Some might not see that as a blessing, but I say there’s nothing wrong in immigrants wanting to stick together. We have English-language publications, email lists, story reading hours, the most active chapter of the AACI (Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel), English-language study institutions (like Pardes, Yakar and Elul), and no shortage of synagogues where Anglos make up the majority. No matter who you are, you can find your English-speaking niche in Jerusalem.
 
6. The city is built out of Jerusalem Stone. Mandated by law nearly 100 years ago, all buildings must be faced in this unique bumpy limestone. Detractors say it gives the city too uniform a look. But when the sun is setting, the Jerusalem Stone reflects back the light in shades of orange, pink, purple and peach. It’s absolutely stunning.
 
7. The greater Tel Aviv area may have the beach, but Jerusalem has the Haas Promenade. Known in Hebrew as the “tayelet,” the promenade overlooks the Old City and the City of David from the south and is one of the most picturesque views anywhere. And when the sun sets, well, see the previous point…
 
8. Jerusalem is to Tel Aviv as San Francisco is to Los Angeles. As a born and bred Bay Area resident, that’s important. Ours is still a laid back casual city, where you can go out for a bag of milk (or even off to work) in sweats and a t-shirt and no one will think the worst of you. When I used to work in Tel Aviv, I was dismayed by how much its residents dress up. There’s simply less keeping up with the Cohens and Schwartzes in Jerusalem.
 
9. There is nothing like a warm Jerusalem summer night. No matter how hot the day has been, when the sun goes down, the air feels positively silky. With virtually no humidity, the nights are the perfect temperature for a short sleeve stroll around the block or to one of the many outdoor art festivals, midnight movie screenings or rock concerts in Sultan’s Pool that the city sponsors in a spate of concentrated mid-summer culture craziness.
 
10. Jerusalem has an endlessly fascinating diversity of people. Where else could you find middle-aged Orthodox hippies, shaved head hip hop college kids, wanton wig wearing women, high school freichot, Amharic-speaking Ethiopian immigrants, bearded and bespectacled mathematics professors, Christian Bible Belt tourists and Palestinian doctors all under the same roof at the mall, sipping some chai masala with soy milk or chowing down on one of those gourmet burgers.
 
Yes, it’s a great place and if you haven’t been to visit lately, ignore the stats and head on up the hill.
 
All we need now is some decent kosher sushi.