If This Prince Can Do It, So Can You

Inside OBKLA, the Pico-Robertson Kitchen Where Royalty and Rabbis Roll Cookie Dough Side by Side

The tall man with the red hair is rolling cookie dough into balls.

That's the first thing you notice. Not who he is (not yet), just the concentration on his face, the way his gloved hands work the dough with the practiced patience of someone who has done this before, or who has decided, in this moment, that he will learn to do it correctly. He's wearing a navy quarter-zip over a gray t-shirt, a black baseball cap with a white logo, and the same black apron as everyone else in the room. The apron is the great equalizer. In that apron, he could be anyone.

But he isn't anyone.

He is Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, fifth in line to the British throne, grandson of the late Queen Elizabeth II, and right now he is standing in a converted fancy restaurant in Pico-Robertson, surrounded by Orthodox Jews and volunteers from the Archewell Foundation, making snickerdoodles in a kosher nonprofit food kitchen called Our Big Kitchen Los Angeles, otherwise known as OBKLA.

A few feet away, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, in a gray sleeveless top and white cap, leans down to say something to her daughter. Lilibet (four years old, auburn braid, plaid dress, black OBKLA cap perched on her head) is scooping cookie dough with the focus of a surgeon. Whatever Meghan whispers, you can't hear it. The acoustics in this place are terrible; it's a gutted warehouse with high ceilings, hard surfaces, sound bouncing everywhere, but you don't really notice, because you're too busy working. That's the point.

That's the whole point. You're too busy doing to notice anything else.

Nearby, Archie, six years old, in a yellow t-shirt and a black apron, works alongside his father. Harry leans over and shows him something with his gloved hands. A technique, maybe. A correction. The boy nods and adjusts. Father and son, side by side, in matching aprons, rolling cookie dough into balls that will be bagged and distributed to people they will never meet, in shelters, senior centers, and schools across Los Angeles.

You could see Harry and Meagen filling up their children's souls. You could see them teaching something that cannot be taught with words.

This is how values are transmitted. Not through lectures. Not through sermons. Not through the inheritance of titles and the weight of tradition. Through doing. Through showing. By putting your own hands in the dough and letting your children watch.

This is what it looks like when a prince learns what his great-grandmother's generation called "service."

This is what it looks like when anyone does.

But before the cooking begins, before the gloves go on and the hairnets come out, and the industrial mixers start their grinding hum, there is a story. Every volunteer session at OBKLA begins the same way. OBKLA’s greatest servant gathers the group, sometimes twenty people, sometimes fifty, sometimes a roomful of tech executives on a corporate team-building retreat or teenagers fulfilling community service hours, and tells them about Margaret Feder.

Margaret Feder survived Auschwitz by working sixteen-hour days in the camp kitchen. She smuggled scraps of food in her skirt to other prisoners. She stayed alive, and she kept others alive, one handful of stolen potato peelings at a time. After the war, after everything, she came to America and lived to be ninety-nine years old. She never stopped believing that food was more than sustenance, that the act of feeding someone was an act of defiance against cruelty, an act of love, an act of resistance against a world that would rather let people starve than see them as human.

OBKLA is, in a way, named after her. Her name, which appears above the logo, honors a woman who faced the machinery of industrial murder and fought back with a skirt full of scraps.

When the story ends, there is silence.

Not an awkward silence. Not a sad silence, exactly. The best way to describe it is: the silence of people about to do something with great reverence. The quiet before action. Not the quiet before a storm, nothing is about to be destroyed. The quiet before building. The quiet of a room full of people who have just been given a reason.

And then the gloves go on.

The story of Our Big Kitchen begins not in Los Angeles, but in Sydney, Australia, in February 200, when a family friend had become extremely ill. The community came together to help, not with cards, not with well-wishes, but with the most practical form of love: food. With meals. With Rabbi Dr. Dovid Slavin and Laya Slavin saw what happened when people showed up with casseroles instead of condolences, and they created a place where that impulse could be channeled and multiplied: Our Big Kitchen.

Fifteen years later, in March 2020, as the world was grappling with the Covid pandemic, a couple in Los Angeles felt a deep sense of responsibility to bring that ethos here. They started small, packing snack boxes in their garage, of all places. Just a garage in Pico-Robertson, a husband and wife, and a conviction that someone had to do something. Their determination inspired others. The garage became a movement. The movement became a kitchen. And the kitchen became a community of 17,000 volunteers producing 105,000 meals a year, distributed to dozens of charity partners across Los Angeles.

• • •

The space itself tells a story. It's a former restaurant. You can see the bones of its previous life in the bar-height seating along one wall, the pendant lights hanging from the high ceiling, the chandelier (yes, a chandelier) that still presides over the prep tables like a confused dowager at a construction site. The floors are concrete. The walls are white with classic molding. The stainless steel baker's racks stand ready for trays. The exposed industrial ductwork snakes across the ceiling in matte black, and, during the day, the whole room is flooded with that specific Los Angeles light that comes through tall windows and makes everything look like it's waiting to be photographed.

It's industrial-chic meets kosher-kitchen meets Holocaust-memorial meets community-center. It shouldn't work. It works beautifully.

The smell hits you before anything else. No matter what is being prepared at Our Big Kitchen Los Angeles (turkey meatballs, fresh vegetables, rice, cranberry sauce), the smell of freshly baked cookies is impossible to ignore. It saturates everything. It is the first thing every volunteer remembers. The cookies are what OBKLA is famous for, and the cookies are what hang in the air like a sweet fog, overpowering the industrial-kitchen clatter, the thwack-thwack of dough being kneaded, the murmur of conversation, the occasional chef-like command from staff: "More trays! We need more trays!"

The mission statement on OBKLA's website reads like a creed: Everyone is entitled to a nutritious, tasty, and high-quality meal made with compassion. Not just food. Not just calories. A high-quality meal. Made with compassion. There's something almost defiant about that insistence on quality. Anyone can feed the hungry with slop. OBKLA operates under a seasoned chef's guidance, producing what they call "restaurant-quality meals"—because they believe that dignity is part of the meal, that the way food is prepared is part of the gift.

And there's another line in that mission statement that cuts to the heart of why this place exists: Kind deeds not only enrich the individual who performs them but also have a multiplying effect on improving the world.

A multiplying effect. The person who volunteers goes home changed. They tell someone. That person volunteers. They tell someone else. The ripples spread outward. The meal feeds one person; the act of making it transforms dozens.

And the people. Oh, the people.

Look around the room on any given session: there's a woman in a burgundy headscarf working alongside someone in a bright blue jacket. There's a teenager in a pink beanie next to a grandmother who could be her great-grandmother. There's a Netflix executive (you can tell by the Patagonia vest; they travel in packs) chopping peppers next to a seminary student who davens under her breath while she works. There's a Persian real estate mogul—the kind of man who normally has people to do this sort of thing for him—wearing the same hairnet as the gap-year kid from Shalhevet. And sometimes there are even Princes and Princesses

This is the radical democracy of the cutting board.

When the aprons go on, the hierarchies come off. The rings come off, the gloves go on, and everyone looks slightly ridiculous in a hairnet. For two hours, the only thing that matters is whether you're scooping the cookie dough correctly. For two hours, a Prince and a dishwasher are equals. For two hours, the entire elaborate architecture of status that governs Los Angeles life—the cars, the neighborhoods, the school waiting lists, the reservation-impossible restaurants, the who-do-you-know and the what-can-you-do-for-me—all of it dissolves in front of a tray of snickerdoodles.

In the last year alone, OBKLA held 335 cooking sessions. Each session produced 300 meals. More than 17,000 volunteers passed through these doors. And, as I mentioned before,  105,000 people (one hundred and five thousand) were fed.

That's enough to make a difference you can measure. That's enough to matter.

• • •

There is a tendency (and this is said with love, with genuine love for a community that has preserved itself through centuries of persecution) there is a tendency among observant Jews to rest on certain merits. To believe that davening three times a day is enough. That putting money in the pushke is enough. That the rituals of observance, performed correctly and consistently, fulfill the obligation.

And perhaps they do. Perhaps that is enough for the letter of the law.

But the spirit?

The spirit says: "Studying and understanding are not the main things... the main thing is actions: to simply do it, stubbornly, constantly, to turn it into an integral part of our way of thinking." That's Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, a tzaddik whose teachings have echoed through two centuries of Jewish thought. And what he's saying, what the tradition has always said, if we're willing to hear it, is that the debate between talmud and ma'asim, between study and action, was settled long ago. Study is greater because it leads to action. Action is the goal.

Not intention. Not prayer. Not the check you write to make yourself feel better. Not the donation that lets you put your name on a building without ever setting foot inside it. Not the tzedakah that fulfills the letter of the obligation while missing its spirit entirely.

Action.

The act of showing up. The act of putting on the gloves. The act of chopping the vegetables and rolling the dough and packing the meals into containers that will go to people you will never know, whose names you will never learn, whose gratitude you will never receive. The act of doing it anyway.

This is not an argument against prayer. Prayer is work, real work, spiritual work, the effort of turning inward and upward at the same time. And this is not an argument against tzedakah. Giving money is a commandment, a mitzvah, an act of justice (tzedek) that transforms both the giver and the receiver.

But there is something that money cannot buy. There is something that cannot be delegated, outsourced, or written off on your taxes. There is something that requires you to actually show up, to put your hands in the dough, to feel the weight of the ladle and the heat of the oven and the ache in your feet after two hours of standing.

That something is presence. That something is embodiment. That something is watching a four-year-old princess scoop cookie dough onto a tray and watching a six-year-old prince learn from his father how to roll it into a ball. That something is watching a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor's memory live on in the hands of 17,000 strangers who never knew her but who carry her legacy forward every time they put on the apron and pick up the spoon.  That something is the difference between believing in chesed and actually doing chesed.

That's what action looks like.

That's what ma'asim looks like.

That's what a life of service, real service, not the performative kind, not the kind you post about on social media and then forget, that's what it actually requires.

• • •

This is what the founder of OBKLA told me he wanted to emphasize while I joined him on one of his daily walks in the Faircrest area. I would quote him directly, but he told me not to. He gave me explicit orders not to make this story about him. He said it a hundred times during the two or three months I talked to him about doing this article. He also says it every time he talks about OBKLA to anyone who will listen, or, I should say, not listen: "This isn't my story. It's the story of the volunteers. It's the story of the staff. It's the story of the 105,000 meals and the 17,000 pairs of hands and the memory of a woman named Margaret Feder who survived the unsurvivable and taught us that food is love."

So, like Moshe Rabbeinu in the Haggadah, his name hasn't appeared in this article. Not once. And that's deliberate.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, the Haggadah is the most important story in Jewish history. It is the story of the Jewish people’s Exodus from Egypt. And therefore read every Passover at the table before eating. Moshe plays a very important role in the Exodus. He is the one who confronts Pharaoh and ultimately leads the people out of bondage. Moses parted the sea. Moses received the 10 Commandments at Sinai and brought them down to the Jewish people (twice). And yet, in the Haggadah, Moses's role isn't mentioned at all, which is odd, because most good stories follow a template called the hero's journey. And every hero's journey, naturally, requires a hero. A person who goes through an external struggle that changes (or rather, transforms) their inner soul, and the story of Moses, a Hebrew man raised as a prince of Egypt (there are a lot of princes humbling themselves in this article), who ends up leading his people out of bondage, is a paragon example of such a tale. And so, whenever a movie version of the Exodus is made, Moses is naturally the hero.

But the Haggadah is not a movie. And the authors of the Haggadah understood something profound. Something that differentiates the story of the Exodus from the founding stories of every other religion. And that is that the story of the Exodus isn't the story of Moses. It's the story of the Jewish people themselves. A people who walked through the sea on dry land. It's the story of what happens when the oppressed rise up and the enslaved go free (both internally and externally).

The message is bigger than any messenger. And in this case, Moses was simply the messenger.

But here's the thing: Moses's name is mentioned once in the Haggadah. In the section that speaks of the sages' various opinions regarding the number of miracles that the Jews experienced in Egypt and at the Red Sea, Rabbi Yossi brings proof to his words from the verse: "And the people feared the Lord, and they believed in the Lord and in Moses, His servant."

But this fleeting mention doesn't do justice to the major role Moses played in the story of our Exodus, just as the fleeting mention of Yossi Segelman's name doesn't do justice to the major role he plays every day at OBKLA. But that’s O.K., because we have princes and princesses to talk about.

• • •

The Sussexes stayed for hours. Not the thirty minutes of a photo op, not the quick handshake and smile of royal obligation. Hours. Long enough for the novelty to wear off. Long enough for the other volunteers to stop sneaking glances and start focusing on their work. Long enough for Harry and Meghan to stop being celebrities and start being just... volunteers.

Somehow, Harry made it seem like he'd been there before. Like he'd always been there. And in a way, he had.

Princess Diana used to take her sons to homeless shelters. She wanted them to see that the world outside the palace walls was harder, colder, more complicated than the world they knew. She wanted them to understand that privilege comes with obligation, not the obligation of waving from balconies and cutting ribbons, but the obligation of showing up.

And now, decades later, in a kosher kitchen in Los Angeles, her grandchildren are learning the same lesson.

The meals prepared during the Sussexes' visit went to Los Angeles Mercy Housing, to Pico Union Project, to PATH—People Assisting the Homeless. They went to people who are struggling, who are hungry, who are trying to survive in a city that can be unforgiving to those without resources. They went to people who will never know that a prince and a duchess packed their food. Who will only know that someone, somewhere, cared enough to do something.

And that's the point, isn't it?

The anonymity of the act. The humility of the work. The understanding that service is not about recognition, it's about the thing itself. The meal. The cookie. The hand that made it and the hand that receives it, connected across an unbridgeable distance by the simple fact of a human need met and a human hunger satisfied.

Margaret Feder understood this. She smuggled scraps in her skirt, not because anyone would thank her, or because history would remember her name, but because the people in front of her were hungry and she could help.

The volunteers at OBKLA understand this, too. That’s why they show up week after week and session after session. Not for the recognition or the social media content, but because, simply put, 105,000 meals a year means 105,000 moments when someone who was hungry is not hungry anymore.

And the Sussexes understand this, too. They've said it themselves, through the article their foundation wrote about the event:"Food is more than sustenance—it is dignity, stability, and care for one another."

Dignity. Stability. Care.

These are not abstract concepts. They are concrete realities that emerge from concrete actions. In the case of OBKLA these actions involve rolling dough, chopping peppers, and packing containers into black crates that will be loaded into vans and driven across the city to people in need.

If the Haggadah reminds us that every Jew is a prince and princess of the one True King, then Prince Harry and Meghan remind us that even a prince and princess can serve. Not just pray. Not just give. Serve. They remind us that if they can do this, so can you. Actually, not just can, but so should you.

Because this story, this article, isn’t about how a man started a kosher food service for the homeless in LA. Nor is it about an English Prince and an American Duchess.

It’s about the volunteers.

It’s about the importance of volunteering.

It’s about you.

Because that is ma'asim.

That is action.

That is, finally, the main thing.

Our Big Kitchen Los Angeles serves over 105,000 meals annually and welcomes more than 17,000 volunteers across 335 cooking sessions. To learn more or to volunteer, visit obkla.org.

*The author would like to apologize for talking about Pesach so early, especially when he should have been talking about Chanukah.

Justin Oberman is the Marketing Editor of the LA Jewish Home and founder of Oberman & Partners, a Persona Branding Agency that caters to high-level executives, founders, and entrepreneurs.  With a long history of working in advertising, he is also available as a marketing and copywriting consultant. He can be found on LinkedIn or on Substack, where over 4k subscribe to his OberThinking newsletter. You can email him at justin@obermanpartners.com