Ever since I moved here three years ago, the trash on Pico — especially east of Robertson — has reminded me of winters in Montreal. Everyone talks and complains about it, but it never goes away.

Boaz Hepner wants to change that.

So when I met him the other day at Pico Café, it didn’t surprise me that one of the first things he did was take me for a walk. The more we went east and the closer we got to his shul, B’nai David-Judea Congregation, the more trash we saw.

The funny thing is, Hepner, a frum, single Jew born and raised in Pico-Robertson, is more of a social animator than a social activist. His claim to fame in the neighborhood is a Yahoo social group called Camp Boaz, with about 350 “friends and friends of friends” for whom he plans regular activities, like theater outings, co-ed softball and Shabbat potluck lunches in his backyard.

A few months ago, he had an “aha!” moment. He was walking along Pico with an empty soda can and he realized, block after block, that he had no place to put it. It took about five messy blocks before he found a trash can.

That’s when his “clean-up Pico” journey began.

The thing that stuck with me about my liberal buddies in those years was their extraordinary venom toward the Bush administration. Every cell in their bodies oozed contempt for the "reckless cowboy" who had become the sad emblem of their country. They craved a change in the White House more than a heroin junkie craves another fix.

Now sweep wipe two years later, and I'm sitting at a Shabbat table in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood with a group of politically savvy Orthodox Jews, and, not surprisingly, I'm getting a whole different take on who should occupy the White House.

Clearly, most of my Orthodox brethren are in the Republican camp. There are significant exceptions, of course, especially at the more liberal B'nai David-Judea Congregation, but it's fair to say that the majority of Orthodox voters are an ideological world away from my liberal buddies at the Urth Caffé.