"May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi." It’s an ancient blessing for a talmid — a disciple close enough to their teacher to walk in his footsteps, kicking up the same dust. I think about that with my own children more than anything else I’ve written.
I spent six years on what I thought was a sabbatical. It turned out to be Jacob’s wrestling mat with God.
The Wrestling Mats.
I stepped away from everything — business, ministry, momentum, the version of myself that had it together. Like Jacob, I found I wasn’t looking for more knowledge, more insight, more spiritual polish. I needed the Spirit to heal and fill a body that was completely spent.
I didn’t come out of that season with a plan. I came out with a conviction: healing, community, and discipleship aren’t relics of the early church we admire from a distance. They’re paradigms we lost — and they’re recoverable.
What I Saw.
I spent the first decade of my adulthood living almost exclusively in community not just in America — but around the world.
Then I married into it. My wife, Vio, grew up in a tiny subsistence village in Eastern Europe, the kind of place where everyone still knows each other — where a funeral procession stops at every house on its way through town and neighbors show up unannounced at all hours of the day and even the night. Because time is subordinate to relationship.
Even so, here is what I couldn't unsee: I didn't have a beth ab. Not really. Not yet.
I was still creating spiritual orphans instead of sons and daughters of a good Father. My own mentor told me that within five minutes of meeting me. He also gave me a word I couldn’t shake. We talk about being "used" by God — but what parent talks about their children that way? God doesn’t use us. He withs us.
That undid something in me. I realized the Church isn’t immune to the exhaustion of our culture. We’re not more whole than the world around us — often just as afraid, just as anxious, just as alone. For all we’ve gained in comfort and knowledge, we’ve spent down a currency of relationship and spirituality we can’t easily rebuild.
I didn’t want to just write another book about that problem. I wanted to help build the answer.
Don’t Tread On Jesus is dedicated to my children, Karis and Nehemiah.
Everything in that book — and everything Talmid is becoming — started as a question I couldn’t shake: what kind of beth ab am I actually leaving them? What kind of family, what kind of home, what kind of faith?
I’m a husband and a father before I’m anything else this movement might call me. Talmid isn’t a platform. It’s an answer I’m building for my own children, and for anyone experiencing the same holy discontent.
Where This Is Headed.
My focus now is turned outward — resurrecting healing, community, and discipleship, not as ideas, but as a way of life. That’s the beth ab. That’s a rabbi and a talmid, walking together daily, the way it used to be over 1,900 years ago. That's Talmid.
Join me in building — not a church plant, not another Christian resource, but a movement.
Because of Jesus — with you and for you,
Aaron
Join the Remnant.
Build Your Tribe.
Follow Your Rabbi.
You’ll get a short series of emails over two weeks, then our regular newsletter, Dust.