Health & Heels - Winter 2021-2022

healthy soul
Winter Issue
Sunny Levi
Recap:
Sunny Levi is one of ten
certified female seventhdegree
black belts in
the country. In addition to being a Taekwondo
master and an elite athlete who was once
on a path to the Olympics, she was also a
professional actress, appearing in numerous
commercials and films and aspiring to work
her way up to what she thought was “the top,”
becoming a Hollywood star.
Then Sunny made some major turns in her life.
She is now a mother of six, fitness trainer, selfdefense
and yoga instructor, and emunah life
Well, to understand me better we need to put
some things in context. Let’s go back in time to
1968 when my story began.
Picture the scene: a cold day in January at
the University of Illinois in Chicago. The
lobby outside the Pier Room was packed
with students, some brandishing signs, some
shouting demands to end U.S. Marine Corps
recruitment on campus. The university police
surrounded the protesters. Amid the sea of
faces opposed to America’s war in Vietnam,
two protesters laid eyes on each other.
The guy, a few years older, oddly enough in a
suit and tie, and an adorable economics major,
trendy for the era in her tights and mini dress.
The grad student approached her, flashing
a bold smile and asked, “Are you a
demonstrator?”
To which she responded, teasing the suit getup,
“Are you a narc?”
He liked what he heard and asked her out, and
the rest is history. Mine.
It was instant fireworks for my parents. Love at
first sight.
And exactly one week later,
Beverly Kolodny and Gary
Siegel—socialists, sometimes-
Marxists, often radicals,
counter-cultural hippie
activists, liberals—were
engaged to be married.
Now keep in mind
that despite their
quick engagement
this was not shidduch
dating, nor were they
necessarily looking to
marry within their
faith, nor were they
coach who is passionate about eating clean,
the outdoors, and being best friends with G-d.
Her daughter, Eden, at age 17, wrote and
published a book on emunah for teens, and
her husband, Daniel, a former Reform Jew
gone Buddhist, meditating in the ashrams of
Thailand, is now a psychotherapist who spends
his Rosh Hashanahs in Uman.
Sunny shares her interesting and inspiring
story with us about her past, her life lessons,
and how this all came to be.
even looking to get married! It was purely
coincidence, fate, the hand of G-d, or whatever
you call it when things just work out.
And after a few happy years of marriage, Bev
and Gary jubilantly welcomed their first child
to the world—Adam Montag (or as we call him,
Moon-tag!).
All was groovy for the new family of three.
Adam was born in Champaign-Urbana, main
campus of University of Illinois, where Bev
and Gary went for grad school. My mom went
into a master’s program in journalism, and my
dad, having abandoned a graduate program
in accounting, switched into PhD studies in
sociology, both all the better to change the
world.
Then a little while later my mom got pregnant
again.
This time, however, they were in for the shock
of their lives.
Because upon meeting their second child, Josh,
they discovered that things were not right with
him.
Like, really not right.
How not right?
Well, for one thing, he had a strange condition
going on in his eyes that the doctors couldn’t
identify. His retinas were deteriorating. He was
a baby going blind, and no one knew what
else to expect.
Now let’s just pause for
a moment and try to
imagine this: Two young,
carefree, hippie spirits,
loving up their son, building
up their careers, thrilled to
welcome another baby to their
clan, and then, all of a sudden, like a storm
of cement bricks raining down from the top
of a ten-story building on an otherwise
totally clear and sunny day, baby
number two pops out like a wrecking
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