Written by Michael Liebermann
Michael Ben-Hain gripped the steering wheel with one hand, his 300-pound frame smushed into the front seat. The other hand? On his chest. Feeling it thump. Like he was about to pass out.
And his eyes? They flicked over his left shoulder, frantically checking his blind spot, hoping that if he went down — if he blacked out and lost control of the car — nobody else would go with him.
On that drive home from work in 2015, Ben-Hain reached an inflection point. It became the moment where he left it all — the overeating squeezing his life, the smoking that seemed destined to kill him, the suicide attempt that once nearly did — in the rearview mirror.
“It was just a point where something had to give,” Ben-Hain says.
The journey of renewal began then — or the alternate timeline, as he refers to it. A decade later, Ben-Hain, a 49-year-old from Miami, is a few months away from his second Maccabiah as a weightlifter, this time as Maccabi USA’s weightlifting chair. But he never forgets how he got here.
“I’ve been in some really tough spots,” he says, “and I’ve come out of some really dark places. And I never lose sight of that. So it’s always fresh in my mind.”
The goals, as the months and years passed from that harrowing car ride, kept mounting. Eat a salad. Last one minute longer on the treadmill. Enter a weightlifting competition. Run a half-marathon. Qualify for this weightlifting tournament. Qualify for that tournament.
Make the Maccabi Games? That was never on the list. Not because he never wanted it, of course. A young and baseball-crazed Michael, during one summer at Camp Judaea in North Carolina, instantly started dreaming after a Maccabiah alumnus’s visit.
“I was like, Hey, do they play baseball there?” he remembers. “And they’re like, yeah. I was like, oh, that’d be really cool, one day to go play baseball in Israel.”
But baseball passed him by, and weightlifting, Ben-Hain’s passion since a friend suggested he try CrossFit training early in his recovery, would not work either. It exited the Maccabiah after 1989 and had not returned since.
Then in December 2021, USA Weightlifting posted to Instagram. The organization, the post said, was helping to recruit for the Maccabiah. Just at the same time Ben-Hain had reached a peak. The thing he dreamed of as a little kid.
And he hardly gave it a thought.
A couple friends sent him the post. Dude, you need to apply for this.
“I was like, hey, man, I appreciate the vote of confidence,” Ben-Hain says. “I’ve accomplished a lot in weightlifting. I went from being morbidly obese to, hey, I’m gonna go compete in my first Masters National Championships in the spring. It’s kind of dope. It’s nothing to sneeze at.”
But still.
“They’re not looking for me. They’re looking for a kid that can snatch a school bus.”
No one could shake that belief from his mind — not his friends, not his wife. But they kept pushing him. He protested, arguing that three weeks away from home would be too much. His wife, a schoolteacher with summers off, shrugged off that argument. She told him he had to apply. One friend told him, in no uncertain terms, to shut up and do it.
So he did. But he never really believed, and it had been a while without hearing back. He was sitting at the breakfast table one morning, talking about summer plans. Los Angeles? New York? His wife stopped the conversation right there. What about Maccabi?
“I was like, I haven’t heard anything,” Ben-Hain replied. “I told you they’re not looking for me.”
Two days later, some progress. Ari Sherwin, the weightlifting chair back then, called him, and they talked for about 20 minutes, the upshot being that Ben-Hain was a finalist. He would find out about a week later whether he made the team. He tears up recounting the story, even now.
That week ran out on March 1, 2022. It was Ben-Hain’s late father’s birthday. He was going to find out whether he made the team on his late father’s birthday.
So he was reading his daughter a book. And Michael Ben-Hain has a rule about using his phone while he reads to his daughter. Namely: he doesn’t use it. Ever. Not for anything.
The phone buzzed.
“Shoshana, give me one second,” Ben-Hain told his daughter. “I want to take a look at this.”
His eyes saw the subject line, and they scanned about the first half-sentence of the actual email. He put the book down. He could not speak. He hurried out to the kitchen, toward his wife, and threw the phone down on the counter.
The moment will last him forever.
“One day I’m going to be 90 years old. I’m not going to know what I had for breakfast,” Ben-Hain says. “But I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.”
In 2016, Ben-Hain and his then-fiancée traveled to Israel for the first time, with the rest of his family, for his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. They visited the Kotel, and there they prayed for a daughter. Six years later they brought her to the wall, to the same spot.
“We were a little bit older,” Ben-Hain says of the time when they prayed “We hadn’t had a kid yet, and we knew that ship had probably sailed. It was the only thing in my life that I felt like was missing, and for her also.”
That moment, the culmination of it all, capped quite a comeback. It came after years of struggles coming from a few different directions.
Ben-Hain attempted suicide in 2010, battered by job turnover in a melting-down accounting industry, his life “held together by duct tape, a wing and a prayer.” His first wife had moved out, and he was living alone, job-less, smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, lying to his parents about everything. “First bad gust of wind comes through, the entire house of cards comes down.” It did. He survived.
He overcame a caffeine addiction in 2016, his habit so bad that he’d been drinking seven or eight coffees a day, and doubles at that, and one night he ended up on the landing halfway up his home staircase, at 11:30 p.m., standing and sleeping, the next cup of coffee still in his hand. The trip to Israel forced a detox. When he came back and tried to resume his coffee-drinking habit, it left him so high on caffeine that “I could smell sound.” He dialed it back after that.
He suffered atrial fibrillation in January. His heart stopped beating, and the doctors slapped big sticky pads on his chest to save his life, like in the movies. Ben-Hain likes movies. The Star of David Superman shirt he wears in competition is straight out of a Seth Rogen movie. But this? A different kind of movie. One with a man’s watch suddenly buzzing one day and then him on a hospital bed, coming that close to death.
“I’ve had three major episodes in my life,” Ben-Hain says, “where either one of them could easily have killed me. And I’ve come out of each one of them that much better.”
Now he runs his own accounting business, and he is leading the weightlifting team to Israel. He had the meet of his life, he says, at the 2022 Maccabiah, inspiring an Israeli girl into a weightlifting career. She calls him “weightlifting dad,” and he will walk her out for her first lift this summer.
Random people come up to him at meets, recognize him. Oh, man, you’re superjewban, they say, calling him by his Instagram handle, itself a reference to his Jewish and Cuban heritage.
The first thing in that Instagram bio, above the hashtag #GirlDad and the links to the accounts of his wife, his gym, his personal weightlifting club and the accounting firm he owns, is a tagline of sorts. “YOLO AF,” it says.
You only live once. Michael Ben-Hain knows that. He felt the pressure of it in the car, his heart thumping, and on the stairs, caffeine surging through his veins, and in the hospital, his heart frozen, and in his parents’ home, recovering from his suicide attempt. He feels it now.
But now it is not a pressure. It’s a purpose.
Michael Liebermann is a second-year student at the University of Virginia from Westfield, N.J. He is the sports editor of The Cavalier Daily, where he primarily covers men’s basketball, soccer and lacrosse. You can find his work here and follow him on Twitter or Instagram.