Rabbi Berel Wein has become a household name through his widely distributed audio lectures and popular books on Jewish history. In Teach Them Diligently, the Personal Story of a Community Rabbi, Rabbi Wein tackles a subject close to home: his own history.
Written at the urging of his grown grandchildren, who wanted a more permanent connection to the story of their ancestors and their grandfather’s illustrious career, Rabbi Wein writes in the introduction that the book will not be a tell-all, gossipy tome. Indeed, he writes about the people he has known, including many great ones in the Torah world, but tells anecdotes that illustrate their worth, not their missteps.
Rabbi Wein’s choice of a title speaks volumes about how he thinks of himself and the values that he lives by. The command to teach diligently, from the Shema, has been the guiding force of Rabbi Wein’s life, through several careers and moves to new locations. He has been an attorney, pulpit rabbi, and author but notes that he has taught Torah every day for the last 60 years.
The trajectory of Rabbi Wein’s life unfolds smoothly in the pages and he gives us the insights he learned along the way. It’s a small book, at 161 pages, but if you enjoy reading about Jewish communities and personalities of the 19th and early 20th centuries, there’s a wealth of material.
Like the accomplished tour guide he is, Rabbi Wein weaves his history with interesting anecdotes and asides. He was told by an aunt that the family was descended from Spanish exiles and picked up the name Wein from a stop in Vienna on the way to Lithuania. His father studied in the top Lithuanian yeshivas before making his way to Palestine and then joining his teacher, Rabbi Shimon Shkop, in New York. After winning a substantial sum in a Torah scholarship competition, he was urged by his patron, Rabbi Dr. Bernard Revel, to visit Chicago and meet a Rabbi Rubenstein who had unmarried daughters. Rabbi Zev Wein married Esther Rubenstein shortly thereafter. Berel Wein was born March 25, 1934.
A product of intensive Torah learning and a graduate of the secular Roosevelt College, Rabbi Wein became an attorney at his father’s urging. He recounts: “I don’t see much of a future for the Orthodox rabbinate in America,” my father told me. “I don’t want you to be a rabbi in a traditional or Conservative synagogue. You’ll have to make your own way.” His father went on to say that a distant relative offered to hire Berel in his law firm if he finished law school and passed the Illinois bar.
Rabbi Wein writes about how law school exposed him to antisemitism and other real-world challenges. While he later rejected law as a career, he acknowledges the value of the education. “It helped train me in analysis and research, and greatly improved my writing. Because of my double schedule with the yeshiva, I learned to multitask before the word was invented.”
For each phase of his life, Rabbi Wein lets us in on what happened and why. He was not happy in his law career and moved with his wife to head a small congregation in Miami. He met many great rabbis who wintered there, including Rabbi Kahaneman, the Ponivezher Rav, and became his driver a few mornings a week while the Rav raised funds for his yeshiva. Rabbi Kahaneman asked Rabbi Wein to hold a meeting of young couples in his home. Although he was skeptical about the Rav’s chances of successfully raising money from this group, he did as he was asked and brought together 20 young couples. Rabbi Wein recalls how the Rav addressed his audience: “The Rav said, ‘One and a half million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust. The souls of those children are floating above us, searching for a body. Please give them bodies.’ The next year, a bumper crop of babies was born in our congregation. What a great man!”
Although the Weins were happy in Miami, they wanted to give their children the kind of yeshiva education that wasn’t available there. They sent their two older children away to yeshiva where they lived with relatives, but decided against that option for the younger ones. Rabbi Wein looked for a position in New York, close to appropriate schools, and accepted the position of Executive Vice-President of the Orthodox Union.
Rabbi Wein’s chronicles of his job at the OU and life in his new hometown of Monsey are the most fractious of the book. “I was running from one fruitless meeting of pompous and mostly useless Jewish organizations, to another,” he writes. “I was accomplishing nothing on behalf of Torah and the Jewish People.”
He became head of the Kashrus Division and lets us in on behind-the-scenes jousting with clients. On the other hand, he developed a strong relationship with YU’s Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. He fought many battles at the OU but is proud of what he accomplished there. “American, Israeli, and world Jewry owe a vast and eternal debt of gratitude to the OU for making kosher food plentiful and available almost everywhere—all at the highest halachic standards.”
He fought more battles at home. He began giving classes at the yeshiva where he davened, and found out that “rabbinic newcomers to Monsey were not especially welcome.” He was asked to leave town, and almost did, but supporters began a new shul where he could be the leader. Eventually, he left the OU and devoted himself to Bais Torah, and to the school he founded, Yeshiva Shaarei Torah.
It was in Monsey that he began producing taped lectures. He had been giving classes in Jewish history to women and was asked by the men to do classes for them. A physician who frequently could not make the class asked if he could place his tape recorder there. He shared the tapes with colleagues and that’s how Rabbi Wein’s series of audio lectures on Jewish history came into being. The tapes led to his writing Triumph of Survival, three centuries of modern Jewish history.
The current chapter of Rabbi Wein’s saga began in 1994 when he and his wife made aliyah. In Israel, Rabbi Wein taught at Ohr Somayach, a yeshiva for Baalei Teshuva, for 10 years. Students often brought their visiting non-observant parents to his classes to show them “that Judaism was relevant and meaningful; that observing the commandments and values of Judaism and studying Torah was normal, not anachronistic or foreign.”
In Jerusalem, Rabbi Wein once again began teaching classes at the shul he attended and after several years as the “unofficial rabbi of Beit Knesset HaNasi,” he became the official one.
Life has not been without wrinkles. He has borne the passing of his parents and of his wife. Now remarried, Rabbi Wein is continuing his career of teaching and writing and has added film producer to his résumé. He confidently uses innovative technology to bring ancient wisdom to today’s generation. He created the Destiny Foundation to produce and distribute all his products.
In the beginning of his book, Rabbi Wein writes about going to the Chicago airport with his father to welcome Rabbi Isaac Halevi Herzog, the chief rabbi of Palestine after World War II, and then attending a lecture he gave in the yeshiva. Rabbi Herzog said he had been to the Vatican and asked Pope Pius XII to return the thousands of children who had been placed there by Jewish parents who hoped that they would survive the Holocaust. The Pope refused, saying they had been baptized. Rabbi Herzog cried but then forcefully addressed his audience. “I cannot save those thousands of Jewish children,” he declared, “but I ask of you, how are you going to help rebuild the Jewish people?” Rabbi Wein writes that all his life those words “echoed in my ears and soul. They have continually inspired and challenged me, shaping many of my decisions and actions.”
Rabbi Berel Wein has done his part to rebuild the Jewish people with his teaching in shul, in the classroom, in his books, and in his media projects. Most of all, he has raised new generations of observant Jews who now have their family history and are sharing it with us.
