By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Shawn Balva
“This is a very crazy story – it’s not going to be something that you guys will hear normally.”
So went the provocative introduction to an even more provocative presentation by Shawn Balva, who on this late afternoon of May 18 was addressing an audience gathered in the Fleischaker-Greene Family Community Room at the Trager Family JCC.
“I’ll start off by saying that I found Hashem, and I found Judaism, and I found Torah spending six years in Federal prisons,” said Balva, who was appearing under the auspices of Congregation Anshei Sfard. It was probably safe to assume that his tale of robbery, rumination and eventual redemption would not be regarded as a typical path toward spiritual fulfillment. Yet listening to Balva’s story – compressing half a lifetime’s ignoble experiences into a roughly half-hour’s narrative – a listener might have thought this guy, improbably, was on to something.
The facts of Balva’s descent into criminality were straightforward enough. Born in the northern New Jersey town of Englewood Cliffs – just across the George Washington Bridge from upper Manhattan – he was the son of an Israeli father and a Russian-Hungarian mother, herself an Ashkenazi Jew.
When Balva was five his parents divorced, a fraught circumstance “that was so painful to my young spirit, I didn’t know how to deal with it,” he recalled. His response was a classic example of extreme acting out. “I became very angry,” he said. “Even though I was a good kid growing up, I became the bad kid.”
Three years later, now eight, Balva found what was to be his salvation: a love of football. More accurately, it was an obsession. Inspired by TV images of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady shredding the opposition, Balva decided on the spot that he, too, was destined for a career in the NFL.
“He showed me what it is to be resilient, to be strong at heart,” Balva said. His obsession became his own brand of spirituality, substituting for a conspicuous absence of God’s grace anywhere in the Balva household.
“I was born Jewish, but there was no talk of Judaism, no talk of God at all,” he said. “I was the type of kid that, after going to any type of Jewish event, couldn’t wait to leave.”
Balva did end up having a modest Bar Mitzvah, by which time his parents had decamped to Las Vegas – divorced, but somehow still functioning as a paired-off mother and father. He eventually enrolled in a Catholic high school boasting an especially strong football program. “It was like a miracle that, as the only Jewish boy in that school, I was never (bullied).”
For various reasons, as a rising sophomore Balva transferred to a nearby Lutheran school – where he played more football and at age 16 began his descent into mistake and misery.
“I speak to high school (students) and young adults, about how one choice, one bad decision, can ruin your life.”
He told how, after one Friday night football game, “some friends came up to me and said, ‘Shawn, let’s go party; let’s drink.’ They had smiles on their faces, and I didn’t want to be left out. So I took my car, went out, and drank my first beer.”
Before long, beer had given way to prodigious alcohol consumption, blackout drunk episodes, and worse.
“Those Friday nights turned into Saturday nights, and then every single day – to the point where, going into my senior year, I’m a 17-year-old kid and a full-blown drug addict.”
For a brief interval, after praying to God “please give me a good football season, and I’ll stay away from drugs,” Balva pulled himself out of the pit.
It was not to last. After the third game of what had been a brilliant start, another friend persuaded Balva to “go out and smoke some weed.” The very next game on the opening play, he threw an interception. “My mind was messed up,” he said.
What followed was worse: being kicked off the football team and abandoning school in favor of a criminal life.
“That was a black hole,” Balva acknowledged. To feed a five-drug-a-day habit, he became a dealer and full-time holdup man – “on October 25, 2015, arrested for committing eight armed robberies in one night.”
Looming in front of him was an extended prison sentence. Out on bail, wearing an ankle monitor, Balva contemplated what lay ahead. He realized that if he was to survive, he had to change – radically.
“I said to myself, the only way I’m going to get out of all this impurity is to get closer to God and to learn about my Jewish roots. That was the answer for me. That’s what came into my heart.”
Figuring he might as well begin serving time, Balva voluntarily returned to his Vegas jail. There he was introduced to literature from the Miami-based Aleph Institute, which tends to the needs of Jewish inmates.
It was not an immediate hook.
“I’m reading all this information, and I don’t know anything they’re talking about,” Balva said. “But it said something about how you could fast over Yom Kippur, which was coming up. I was like, ‘Okay, this is a good place for me to start and commence my Judaism.’ So, the following day, I fasted on Yom Kippur – and afterward, broke the fast with a pork-and-cheese-nachos bowl.”
Collective curiosity began to build among his fellow inmates. “Everybody’s nosy in prison; everybody knows what you are. Mind you, all these gang members were in there, some with Nazi tattoos, swastikas all over the place.”
Then came an epiphany of sorts.
“One afternoon I’m sitting down eating my pork and cheese thing, and one of these Nazis comes up to me and says: ‘I don’t understand you Jews – you fast and pray, but you eat non-Kosher food. You’re a hypocrite.’ He was the first person to tell me I was a Jew, and I believed him. So, if anybody ever had a Nazi be their first rabbi, it was me.”
Five months later, a federal judge handed Balva an eight-year sentence, to be served in California’s Federal Correctional Institution, Victorville. He was all of 21 years old.
One day at Victorville, Belva looked in on a Shabbat service where a lone African American inmate – wrapped in a tallit and sporting a tattoo of the Hebrew word אַדִיר (“mighty”) under one eye – was deep in prayer.
“I introduced myself, told him I was Jewish, and the following morning he starts showing me how to eat Kosher, bringing his tefillin every single weekday morning,” Balva said. “He would teach me to the best of his abilities. I was thinking about all those thoughts I had in the beginning when I went to jail, how I wanted to live this happy, positive life, to not be a criminal or drug addict anymore.”
Snaring a transfer to FCI, Otisville in upstate New York, Balva suddenly found himself in what counted as Jewish prison nirvana. “There were 20 Jews in Otisville, 15 (of them) religious Jews, and four rabbis who were inmates for financial crimes. It was like a yeshiva for me.”
He spent the next five years in Otisville, writing a book he titled “Conviction,” finally gaining supervised release in 2022.
These days Balva works in medical device sales, sharing his story via in-person appearances and electronically on shows like the Meaningful People podcast (“very big in the Jewish world,” he declared).
“It’s been an amazing opportunity” reaching out to his broad-based constituency, Balva said. Prison may have been “the worst thing that ever happened to me, but at the same time it was the best. If I truly believed in G-d, He was exactly where He wanted me to be.”