Englewood—Rabbi Berel Wein and Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schacter share similar histories as well as a friendship: Their fathers were American rabbis who fanned the embers of Orthodoxy in 20th century America to keep the flame burning. They continued their fathers’ mission, achieving great heights in Torah scholarship and academic studies, heading congregations, teaching students, and writing books. Rabbi Wein is a prolific author who writes popular books on Jewish history as well as Torah commentaries. Rabbi Schacter is University Professor of Jewish History and Jewish Thought, and Senior Scholar at the Center for the Jewish Future at Yeshiva University. In a wide-ranging conversation in front of an admiring audience at Englewood’s East Hill Synagogue on April 12, Rabbi Wein and Rabbi Schacter schmoozed about the old neighborhoods, today’s challenges, and the future of Modern Orthodoxy.
Rabbi Wein’s father, who immigrated to the U.S. and served as a rabbi in Chicago for 50 years, thought Orthodoxy had a dim future in America. His congregants were “traditional, not observant. They went to hashkama minyanim and then went to work.” Rabbi Wein recalled his father saying that “when you are a rabbi, half the time you can’t hear and half the time you can’t see.” He would tell the balabatim, “Behave because I’m going to be saying your eulogy.” He advised his son to go to law school, in addition to yeshiva, to make sure he would have a respectable parnassah.
The situation was not much different when Rabbi Wein headed a congregation in Miami Beach, after several years as a successful lawyer and businessman. In those days, many wealthy Jews wintered at Miami’s kosher hotels and many great rabbis came as well. Rabbi Wein asked the advice of rabbis about how he should handle the congregants who drove to shul to hear him speak. “They said don’t do anything different,” Rabbi Wein recalled. So he compromised. He told six people he felt uncomfortable with driving on Shabbos. “Four took Shabbos apartments, and two I never saw again.”
Rabbi Schacter was the first rabbi of the Young Israel of Sharon, Massachusetts, and made up the 12th family of the shul. In four years, the fledgling congregation grew enough to build a mikvah and a day school. From there, he served as rabbi of The Jewish Center of New York on the Upper West Side, a transition he characterized as “difficult.” He served there for 19 years, growing the shul from 180 to over 600 members. Now as a professor at YU, he works with pulpit rabbis and rabbinical students.
“It’s more difficult to be a pulpit rabbi today,” he noted. “You have to be a talmid chacham and be sensitized to the world around you. In semicha classes, we hire actors to play roles of all kinds of issues students will have to deal with.”
The Rebbetzin is also under pressure today, Rabbi Wein said. “It is hard for women to negotiate their role as wife of the rabbi. They have their own lives. And some don’t want to be called rebbetzin.”
Rabbi Wein said that one of the biggest challenges of our time is the attitude towards authority. “In the 1780s, a congregation in eastern Massachusetts had a burning issue and wrote a letter to the chief rabbi in Amsterdam for immediate advice. So we know we have been facing these issues with authority for a long time. We have to figure out how to keep the baby and throw out the bath water.”
Rabbi Wein brought up a book Rabbi Schacter is now writing: a new edition of Megillat Sefer, the autobiography of Rabbi Jacob Emden, a German rabbi who lived in the 1700s and had very public fights with the leading rabbis of his time.” Rabbi Shacter said he had a printing press in the basement so could print and make public all his complaints. According to Rabbi Schacter, this machlokes (disagreement) began to undermine attitudes to authority and we are still feeling the effects today. However, history has exonerated Rabbi Emden. “Today, if you don’t say that he was right, you are not a scholar,” said Rabbi Schacter.
Rabbi Schacter said Yaakov Emden had a troubled life, which only makes him more endearing. “We need role models we can emulate. If you think someone is perfect, you say, ‘I can never be like that.’ Rabbi Emden had three wives and 20 children; he buried 16 in his lifetime.” His daughter Chana kept his manuscripts and sold them, beginning a chain that left his works to posterity.
What will Jewish life in America look like tomorrow? Rabbi Wein said he “regrets the failure of the Conservative movement. It galvanized the decline of American Jewry.” And yet, trends can be misleading. Rabbi Wein said, “In 1964 Look Magazine ran an article on “The Vanishing American Jew” that predicted the disappearance of Orthodoxy. But it was Look Magazine that disappeared.” He said he knows Sephardim who think that in 50 years Modern Orthodoxy will be out—Judaism will be Hareidi or nothing.
“You can’t predict what will happen in 50 years,” Rabbi Schacter said. “We have to do what we can to strengthen authentic Judaism and make it stronger.”
By Bracha Schwartz
