On San Francisco’s Market Street, one will observe something, every day, that could elicit a cry of, “You don’t see that every day.”
Whether it’s the musclebound, shirtless man tap-dancing on a piece of particle board or revelers wearing costumes containing less cotton than the top of an aspirin bottle during the Castro Halloween fest, the city is nothing but eclectic.
And then there’s Te’Devan Kurzweil.
The first thing you do when you see Kurzweil is to look up. And up, and up. He has a basketball player’s build, wild blonde-tinged dreadlocks, a scraggly beard and a polo shirt hand-painted with a couple of phrases, including “Roll tide roll” (he’s not a fan of the Alabama college football cheer — he just likes the idea of going with life’s flows).
To top it off, he hoists a crudely scrawled sign composed of equal parts canvas, paint and duct tape reading “6 foot 7 Jew will freestyle rap 4 you!”
Well, you sure don’t see that every day.
“I like throwing people off guard. The stereotype is that Jews are doctors and lawyers and bankers. But why not freestyle rappers?” he asked with a laugh while compacting his long-limbed frame across a couch in j.’s offices during an interview.
What’s more, he pointed out, “six-foot-seven Jew will freestyle rap for you” rhymes, and it’s good to have a few standby lyrics while you’re making up a tune on the fly.
The 26-year-old wandering Jew found himself in San Francisco in January, perhaps the 30th city he’s spent time in following his graduation from the University of Michigan four years ago. Like Blanche DuBois, he often relies upon the kindness of strangers, residing upon the futons of friends old, new and very new, and living life on the shoestring budget befitting a professional freestyle rapper.
But as the Beatles put it in “Abbey Road,” “Oh that lovely feeling, nowhere to go.” When you don’t have an office job or a cubicle with your name on it, you never know where you’re going to end up. You may not even know what continent you’ll find yourself on.
Kurzweil, for instance, recently met some people who knew some people who worked with some people, and found himself speaking in front of a civics class at Berkeley High School.
“I talked about how there’s more out there than what they’ve been told to explore. They have gifts inside them no one is encouraging,” he said.
And they begged him to rap about anything and everything.
“People treat you like a windup doll. ‘Rap for me! Rap for me!'” he said with a weary grin.
Since he left Michigan (where he put his massive frame to work on the crew team), Kurzweil has decided the American dream wasn’t his cup of chai. His mother is a lawyer and his father a real-estate broker in Short Hills, N.J. They gave him the name Jeremy (which he never liked), and he grew up with many, many Jewish kids who are now, not surprisingly, doctors and lawyers and bankers. Not freestyle rappers.
He also considers himself a qigong healer, with an ability to solve medical problems by harnessing the energy (chi) we all have. This is an Eastern philosophy; Kurzweil learned it from a mystical Jewish couple and an old Chinese master.
His claims to be able to heal bodily ailments “weird out” his parents, though he claims an uncle vouches for him after Kurzweil did work on his back. At least 90 percent of the folks he’s “healed” — he claims to have worked on 15,000 people — initially thought he was crazy. But if he were a fraud, he noted, he wouldn’t be able to keep doing what he’s doing.
Not surprisingly, the notions of Jewish mysticism appeal to Kurzweil. And he believes what he’s doing fits in with the stories he read in the Torah.
“If you tell people that you’re into Eastern philosophies they’re open to it, but if you claim to be a modern-day Jewish mystic, they’ll walk away,” he said.
Or, as he told his parents, “You may think I’m crazy walking around New York City offering to heal people, but you spent $1,500 to send me to Hebrew school for nine years to read stories about Moses wandering, parting the Red Sea and making manna fall from heaven. You paid money to inundate me with miracles from times past, but when I started believing in miracles, you said I was crazy.”
Kurzweil doesn’t claim to be a “miracle worker,” and he doesn’t encourage people to stop taking their pills. He can’t always solve everyone’s problems but he feels that he can always help a bit.
“In the end, regardless of whether people think I’m crazy, I’m going to make people smile and encourage everyone to embrace life and be in the moment. I just want to do as many mitzvahs as I can,” he said.
His plans? To roll with the tide, naturally. He hopes one day to outfit an old tour bus with an engine that runs on vegetable oil and cruise through the country doing much of what he’s doing now: living life.
And you know what? You don’t see that every day.