Exclusive: NBA star Amar’e Stoudemire followed his heart and head and underwent a halachic conversion, putting himself under Hashem’s wing, where he’d really been the whole time

Photos: Ben Canter

First impressions are everything, and it’s nearly impossible not to be taken when you first meet him. As he walks through the door, the first thing that grabs you is how much taller he is than everyone around him, but if at 6’10”, it’s easy to get distracted by his size, former NBA superstar Amar’e Stoudemire — Yahoshafat ben Avraham — has a much higher story to tell.

I met Yahoshafat when he came to town to pick up a painting he had commissioned from Lakewood artist Libby Klein. He told me he was captivated by it the moment he saw her rare technique on social media, and that he appreciates the unique twist Mrs. Klein is able to give her pieces, and her clients.

“Art,” says Mrs. Klein, “is not merely a display of someone else’s talent and handiwork. It’s a part of you. Not just the artist, the buyer too. But in most art pieces, only the artist is reflected in it. What’s missing is a piece of the buyer.”

She fixes that.

In Libby Klein’s art gallery, the buyers help out. Think, l’havdil, of how a sefer Torah is completed, with each person joining together to fill in a letter to complete the Torah. That’s how she completes her paintings. A brushstroke here, a dab of paint there, and the buyers become their own artists, putting their soul into the art they will display.

Yahoshafat came to do that.

It only takes one look at the work of art that pulled him in to understand exactly what it is that drew him. You can see how his soul pulsates through what he told me would be the defining painting he plans to hang in his home.

The scene depicts a bunch of Yidden gathered together in shul for Megillah on Purim morning. But this is no run-of-the-mill shul with congregants uniform in look and style.

Here, there are people with different shades of skin. Here you can see the beauty of the harmonious medley that is Klal Yisrael, where we toss out the dividing lines of the world outside as we come together to serve Hashem. He points to a single figure at the top of the canvas.

“There’s Yahoshafat,” he says. “Standing in the back, so I don’t block anyone.”

Unique, but together. That’s what the painting illustrates, and that, in a way, is his life. There aren’t too many frum people who’ve brought the crowd at Madison Square Garden to its feet, inspiring raucous cheers while driving down the lane en route to a thunderous dunk. Not too many people in your shul were NBA All-Stars and it’s unlikely that anyone in your bungalow colony works as an assistant coach in the NBA, with a legitimate shot of being inducted in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

His life — and his story — is not typical, but perhaps he summed it up best as we walked around his painting, whispering to himself the words of the pasuk, “Ki beisi beis tefillah yikarei l’kol ha’amim.”

But while that might have been the first time I met him in person, it was far from my first impression. Because I had already known him for years.