Woodsen ad: What a 96-Year-Old Rabbi Taught a Room Full of Billionaires

Our twins got sent home from kindergarten again, so we left them with my parents and went to a billionaire's longevity summit. The only thing I brought home was one word a 96-year-old rabbi wrote on my name badge. In September, the kindergarten called me three times in two weeks. The first time, James had pushed a boy off the slide. The second time, Serena threw a glue stick at the classroom aide. The third time it was both of them, fighting each other, in the middle of circle time, over a carpet square. They're twins. They're five. And at that point they had stopped listening to anyone, including each other. At pickup that third day, their teacher walked me out to the parking lot and asked, very gently, if we'd ever thought about putting them in separate classes next year. They have never spent one night apart in their lives. I drove home and sat in the garage for about ten minutes before I could go inside. Home wasn't much better. Bedtime took two hours. Every meal was a negotiation. My husband Tyler and I had gotten to the point where we only talked in logistics. Who's doing pickup. Did you call the pediatrician back. Are we out of milk. Most nights we ate after the kids went down, standing at the counter. Boxed mac and cheese reheated in the plastic container, stirred with the same black spatula with the melted edge we'd had since our wedding. I'm telling you that detail because I didn't think twice about it at the time. I do now. Then Tyler's sister called. She works in PR for a biotech company in San Diego, and her company had two passes to a two-day longevity summit in Los Angeles that she couldn't use. $3,400 each. She asked if we wanted them. I said we couldn't leave the kids. Tyler said, "Ask your mom." My parents live twenty minutes from us in Mesa. My mom said yes before I finished the sentence. "Go. Take the whole week. They'll be fine with us." I think she could hear it in my voice. So we drove to LA. Six hours of quiet. Tyler said it was the longest conversation we'd had in a year, and most of it was about nothing. I have to describe this event, because I'd never seen anything like it. It was in an old film studio in Culver City. Six hundred people. In the lobby, a man was selling a $40,000 hyperbaric chamber, and a woman in a cocktail dress was handing out cold plunge sessions. Tyler leaned over and whispered, "I think we're the poorest people in this building." The host made his money in software, and now he spends millions of dollars a year trying not to age. He has a team of doctors. He tracks everything. He walked onstage in socks and told six hundred people the exact minute he fell asleep the night before. 8:31. I won't pretend I understood half of the first day. Peptides. Stem cells. Swapping out your blood plasma. Tyler took notes on his phone mostly so he wouldn't fall asleep. Then, on the second morning, a researcher came on to talk about microplastics, and the whole room changed. She didn't use big words. She just put the findings up one at a time. Microplastics have been found in human blood. In placentas. In the plaque inside people's arteries, and a 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that people who had them there were more likely to have a heart attack, a stroke or die over the next three years. Then she put up one about babies. Researchers at NYU found that infants' stool had about ten times more of one common plastic than adults' did. She said scientists are still working out exactly what all of this does inside a child's body, and she wasn't going to pretend they had every answer. But one thing wasn't up for debate: heat makes plastic shed. And for most families, the place where plastic meets heat every single day is the kitchen. I thought about that black spatula. I thought about the mac and cheese. Then the host said, "Our next speaker is ninety-six years old. He doesn't own a phone, and he's the only guest this year I was nervous to invite." And an old rabbi walked onstage. Black coat. Black hat. A white beard down to his chest. No cane. He walked right past the podium, in a room full of $900 sneakers, and a stagehand had to run out and clip a microphone on him. His name was Rabbi Shimon. He'd come in from Brooklyn on the train, and he'd brought his own lunch in a paper bag. No slides. A stagehand brought out a folding table, five glass jars and an electric kettle. The rabbi put something in each of the first four jars. A black plastic spatula. A silicone spatula. A bamboo spoon. A dark, glossy wooden spoon he said "came from a store." Then he took a pale, worn wooden spoon out of his own coat pocket and put it in the fifth. He had the stagehand pour boiling water into all five, watched to make sure he did it right, sat down in a folding chair and said, "It'll be ready after lunch." Six hundred of the most health-obsessed people in America went to lunch. When we came back, the jar with the store-bought wooden spoon had turned brown. Like tea. The bamboo jar was a cloudy yellow. His jar was perfectly clear. So were the plastic and the silicone. Someone behind me said, "Well, at least those two look fine." The rabbi must have heard it, because he leaned into the mic. "That's the part you should be scared of. You can't see it." The host pulled up a chair next to him, and it turned into a conversation instead of a speech. The host asked about each jar, and the rabbi answered each one in about two sentences. The plastic: when it's hot and you scrape it, it sheds. And "BPA-free" usually just means they swapped in a cousin of BPA. The silicone: fine until it gets hot enough, then it sweats out chemicals called siloxanes. "No smell. No color. No taste. That's why nobody worries." The bamboo: "Bamboo isn't wood. It's grass." To make a spoon out of grass, you glue strips together, and a lot of that glue is made with formaldehyde. The store-bought wood: that dark, shiny look is a coating. "Heat and soap take it off. That's your brown." Then the host asked why his spoon was different, and the rabbi said the line I wrote on my hand: "Hot water is a teapot. Everything you put in it is a tea bag. The only question is what's in the bag." He held up his spoon. "There's nothing in this one. It's one piece of wood. Acacia. Nothing glued, nothing painted, nothing added. You can't steep a rock." The host, trying to keep up, said, "Acacia. That's the wood from Noah's Ark, right?" The rabbi smiled at him like a grandfather. "Noah's was gopher wood. This is the other Ark." He turned to the audience. "When God told Moses what to build the Ark of the Covenant from, He chose acacia. It's in Exodus. Look it up tonight." The host asked about mold. The rabbi said acacia is hard and the grain is closed tight, so it doesn't drink the water. "Mold needs somewhere to live. There isn't anywhere." Then the host asked the question the whole room was thinking. "Rabbi, you're ninety-six. Is this your secret?" The rabbi laughed. "I'm ninety-six because God is patient. The spoon is because I'm careful." The room laughed, and the host didn't get another word in. At the break, I went up to him. I don't really know why. Tyler stayed in his seat. I told him I was pretty sure I'd been cooking for my kids with all four of those jars for six years. He nodded. "So did my granddaughter." "Did?" "She married a nice boy from Ohio and moved into a house full of it. My wife, may she rest in peace, went to visit and boxed the whole drawer up the first week. My granddaughter was upset for about a day." He smiled. "Now she won't let anybody else stir." I asked where I could buy a spoon like his. He said his wasn't for sale. His wife brought it home from Jerusalem in 1956, and his great-grandchildren are already arguing over who gets it. Then he took my name badge, turned it over, and wrote one word on the back with a pencil from his coat pocket. WOODSEN. "My granddaughter found who still makes them the old way," he said. "One piece. Nothing added." Then he asked how old my twins were, and we talked about kids for a few minutes, and he went back to his folding chair. At the closing session, the host made an announcement. He's launching his own line of small-leaf acacia kitchenware. This Christmas. Tyler actually scoffed out loud. "Because he needs the money." At the reception, I asked one of the host's team what it would cost. She didn't hesitate. "$1,147 for the seven-piece set." Seven spoons. $1,147. Tyler laughed so loud people turned around. That night, Tyler was asleep by 9:30 like a man on vacation. I sat in the hotel bathtub with my phone and that name badge. First I looked up the rabbi's verses, because I grew up Baptist and I'd heard about the Ark my whole life without once wondering what it was made of. Genesis 6:14: "Make thee an ark of gopher wood." Exodus 25:10: "And they shall make an ark of shittim wood." Shittim is acacia. He was right, of course. Then I looked up Woodsen. Small-leaf acacia, the same family as the rabbi's spoon. One solid piece. No glue, no coatings. Third-party lab tested to FDA food contact standards. And a lifetime warranty: if a piece ever cracks or wears out, they replace it. The seven-piece set was $99. Less than one doctor's visit without insurance. I ordered it from the bathtub. We picked up the twins that Saturday. My mom took one look at us and said, "Well. You two look like people again." The set came the next Thursday. Before I let myself use it, I did the rabbi's test at the kitchen table, with the twins. I told them it was a science experiment. Five jars: our black spatula, our silicone spatula, our bamboo spoon, the wooden spoon from the set we got for our wedding, and one new Woodsen spoon. The next morning, James woke Serena up to go look. The wedding spoon jar was brown. Serena named it "the swamp." The Woodsen jar was clear. They spent twenty minutes at the counter explaining the jars to me, finishing each other's sentences. It was the first thing they'd done together without fighting in weeks. That afternoon I emptied the drawer. Nineteen pieces went in the trash, including the black spatula with the melted edge. Week two, Tyler made Sunday pancakes. He hadn't cooked a real breakfast since the twins were born. He used the Woodsen spatula on our nonstick pan, and for the first time in years there wasn't a new scratch in it afterward. He noticed before I did. He's made pancakes every Sunday since. Week three, we started eating dinner at the table. All four of us. No more standing at the counter. The twins each have their own little spoon now, and they argue about whose turn it is to stir. Around then, their teacher stopped me at pickup and said, "Whatever you're doing at home, keep doing it." I'm not going to tell you a set of spoons fixed my kids. The week at Grandma's helped. Sitting down at the table together every night helped more. But I know what got us back in the kitchen, and I know what got us back to the table. Week five was the parent-teacher conference. Same teacher. She didn't bring up separate classes. I did. She said, "Oh, I don't think that'll be necessary." I made it to the car that time before I cried. They're still five. They still fight. Last night it was over whose turn it was to flip the pancakes. But Tyler and I talk at dinner again, about things that aren't logistics. And when I'm standing at the stove, I don't wonder what's coming off the spoon. I know exactly what's touching my kids' food. Wood. That's it. If you only remember one thing from this, remember the rabbi's teapot. Plastic sheds when it's hot and scraped. Silicone sweats siloxanes past a certain heat. Bamboo is grass glued together. Cheap wooden sets hide a coating that comes off in your food. Every one of them is a tea bag. One solid piece of small-leaf acacia has nothing in it to steep. The name the rabbi wrote on my badge was Woodsen. Lab tested to FDA food contact standards, a lifetime warranty, and the seven-piece set was $99 when I bought it. The first set I bought after mine went to my parents, with a card that said thank you for the best week of our marriage. My mom called the day it arrived and asked why I'd sent her "fancy spoons." Then she did the jar test. She called back the next morning and said, "Okay." Then I bought two more for my best friends. Then one for Tyler's sister, since she's the reason we went. And honestly, I've figured out what everyone's getting this year. It's the hostess gift for Thanksgiving. It's Christmas for my in-laws. It's every birthday on my list next year. Everybody cooks, nobody thinks about their spoons, and it's the one gift I know they'll use every single day. One more thing, and this is just my opinion. When the host launches his line this Christmas, he's going to talk about it to millions of followers. Most of them aren't going to pay $1,147 for spoons. They're going to go looking for the version that isn't $1,147. And there aren't many companies making solid acacia with no glue and no coatings. Woodsen is a small company. Once he starts talking, I wouldn't count on them staying in stock, or staying at this price. If you're going to get a set for yourself, and for everyone you're buying for before Thanksgiving and Christmas, I'd do it now. P.S. Here's the exact set I bought. They were running a sale when I checked. https://woodsen.co/pages/ac2 P.P.S. Don't take my word for it, or the rabbi's. Put your spoons in jars of hot water tonight. By morning you'll know.