My career as a singer-songwriter, writer, speaker, and co-host of Transitions Radio Magazine was a long time in the making. At a young age I knew that there was more to life than what I observed in my Long Island home and the surrounding community. It was not until I started college at SUNY Buffalo in 1976 that the tension between what society and family said I should do with my life, and a deep yearning to touch and live in harmony with what I knew in my bones to be an unseen spiritual force, or God, began to dominate my thoughts and actions. I completed my studies in 1981 earning a B.S. in Quantitative and Computational Systems Analysis.

My search began with an exploration of the faith I was born into; that is Judaism. That search led me to spend a year in Israel working in my profession at the time (computer programming) as I studied and tasted Orthodox Judaism. After returning to the States in 1983, I moved to Boston, dropped my Jewish practice, and immersed myself in the blossoming New Age movement. I continued to work in high tech, first for major corporations, then through my own consulting business. I fell in love with Tai Chi Chuan and studied it intensively for 5 years under 2 masters of the art. Meditation, yoga and conscious eating became additional mainstay practices. A vision I received one crystal clear sunny day on the docks of the old naval ship yard in Charleston, Massachusetts, led me to attend MIT and receive a master’s degree in economic development in 1989.

At times God has interesting ways to catch our attention. Even though I stopped any Jewish practice, I knew there was a diamond buried in the rules and intricate rituals of my ancient birth heritage. I met a beautiful French-Moroccan Jewish woman at an Israeli folk dance in Brookline. Her English was poor, as was my French. We discovered that Hebrew was a common language. Soon after meeting we became a couple. Speaking Hebrew again reignited my interest in integrating Judaism into my life. This time, it had to fit my growing understanding of the interconnection of life, and the depth of Spirit that I had experienced through my Eastern practices.

A friend mentioned seeing an advertisement for a Kabbalah lecture at a local synagogue. Attending that lecture changed my life. For the first time I heard someone speak about Judaism in terms of energy, divine light, and how I could connect to God without getting bogged down in rituals that made little sense to me. The next year I became friends with Michael Kagan, a chemist on sabbatical from Israel who was developing a system to make Judaism a path for personal growth called Holistic Judaism. Our many discussions and my attending his first workshop on Holistic Judaism were critical steps that connected me to a deeply meaningful Jewish path. After moving to Israel in 1991, I had to wait another 5 years before meeting my Kabbalah teacher in Jerusalem, thus beginning the work that transformed me from Larry Blieberg, the name I had been called most of my life, to Levi (“Lay-vee”) Ben-Shmuel.

Under the guidance of Hadassah Ben-Yishai, I was privileged each week for close to 4 years to sit across from a woman who had a direct connection to God. Under her loving teaching, I learned to use Kabbalah’s Tree of Life to help strip away the blocks that prevented me from having my own direct connection. It also set me on the path of moving into my life’s work with the understanding that service for the good of the whole is a sure path to true freedom.

I married my teacher in 2001 (she is now called Matananda) and soon after we moved to the States. Now that I live with her, the stripping away continues at an accelerated pace, as does my growth as a father to our son Jacob, and as a spiritual musician, writer, speaker, and radio host in Santa Fe, New Mexico.