It's 2007, 5:30 am, and a fancy car is pulling into the alley behind the "War Room" at the Kabbalah Center on Pico and Robertson.

I watch a known celebrity enter the center through the back kitchen door.

He is tall, handsome and, dare I say, humble? Maybe I am projecting humility.

Either way, I watch him enter the empty prayer room, unsleeving his left arm. There are a few people around him to help, they open up the prayer book and point him to the exact spot. I can taste the ass-kissing energy, or is it my projection again?

It is less than a year since my Escape from New York journey and here I am in a Los Angeles Synagogue watching a tv-personality wrap Teffilin around his left arm. Is he actually reading the Hebrew text? I am not sure if he is mumbling something the same way I used to fake-pray as a kid, or maybe he is just talking to one of the “Chevres” (full-time volunteers) tiptoeing around him.

I usually stay in the back, I don’t get closer. I was specifically told to keep out of the Center and not get too involved. Eyes out, heart in, or something like that. Underground marketing guy and all that jazz. Why do I always exist in the shadows?

For a minute there, I get dizzy, I am not sure if this is a dream from my childhood or the inverse of it?

Is this guy even Jewish? Is that how he thinks he is getting and maybe even protecting his good karma and fortune- by praying to the Jewish God? Maybe by practicing Kabbalah? This all seems very confusing to me.

What’s confusing me is the fact that 13 years ago, I was in a Jewish Boarding school, sneaking around and hiding my small TV screen to watch Beverly Hills 90210, and now he is the one sneaking at dawn to Jew-pray in a Beverly Hills church-turned-into a Synagogue.

Who is trying to be who then?

I escaped Israel to become Somebody, and this movie-star is lip-syncing what knew by heart as kid. I wanted to be him, and he is trying to become an Israelite?

When did kid-nobody start dreaming of being Mr. Somebody?

Fridays, 13 years ago, at Yeshiva Or Torah, I had a choice to make - Michael Jackson videos or reading teen magazines at the beach.

You see, when you are 13, and in a super strict orthodox boarding school, and you have 5 free hours - you think very carefully how you want to spend those hours.

I always went to my grandma’s house, on Fridays, that was an easy decision, get the f out of the 7:30am to 10:30pm routine, for one magical day a week, at least until Shabbat Starts. I could go home every 3rd weekend or 6th, I honestly don’t remember as I type this. It wasn’t often.

My grandmother’s house has always been a safe haven. It still is actually. Iraka, a wonderfully solid and strong woman, she spent a few years in a concentration camp during the war, nothing like my boarding school that’s for sure, but as a 13 year old - I don’t compare, all I knew was I have a chance to get away from the tyranny of 12 hours of Talmud a day, 30 boys and a very twisted introduction to puberty.

That’s why I would choose to read Teen Magazines at the beach for a few hours or - watch Beverly Hills 90210, Save by the Bell and Michael Jackson Videos.

I felt completely trapped, especially since I knew that there was another world where boys meet girls and they don’t have to pray 3 times a day, eat only certain foods and study material that were paraphrased into holy books.

The teen magazines and TV shows, are my escape into a desired future of becoming somebody.As far as I was concerned, these TV shows is another reality. That is another reality that existed for everyone else but me. Girls, joy, fun and meaning.

I would take the real world drama any day over my being stuck in Yeshiva. Little did I know I would find myself in exactly that 30 years later. Be careful what you wish for, right?

Even after my escape to America, I still found myself under a blanket with a small black & white television, one of those handheld ones.

Dad, you didn’t know what to do with a 14-year-old religious boy freshly off the airplane. I get it; what could you have done? So you dropped me off in another boarding school, this time in Monsey, New York.

Shaarai Torah was a special kind of torture. Not only was it ultra-Orthodox, now it was all in English. I remember calling my mother, crying, “This is even worse.”

The next year, in Yeshiva Atlanta, Mr. Somebody got a particularly strong hold over my consciousness. Another boarding school, but this time without a dormitory of any kind - I just rented the basement of the Coca Cola Rabbi.

Yeshiva Atlanta was the Jewish version of Beverly Hills 90210 - my first mixed school, boys and girls! Talmud in the morning and math in the afternoon, and parties in the weekend.

Boys, Range Rovers and parents with Georgia mansions. That’s when I discovered Notorious B.I.G. and smoked my first joint. Ah yeah, daydreaming of becoming somebody, somebody cool, somebody who isn’t a nobody, somebody that can ask girls out who would respond with a yes!

I didn’t dare talk to girls that first year. I would see them put on dresses on top of their jeans in the parking lot. I would see the boys take Kippas (head coverings) out of their car’s glove compartments and put it on for the duration of the school day only to be taken off immediately after the last bell would ring, alongside the girls who would go right back to just jeans.

I must be somebody.

“Maybe you could be an optometrist,” my mom told me once.

“You don’t need any math for it.”

Now I am watching a celebrity unwrap a tallit, take off the kippah and go back into the “towncar” parked in the back.

Something isn’t adding up.