February 12, 2009
Rabbi Noah Weinberg, who died last week at 78 in Jerusalem, was described by JTA as “the founder and dean of the sprawling global outreach operation Aish HaTorah.”
He was also one of the most influential figures in my religious life, although I don’t know how pleased he would have been at the suggestion.
I stumbled into Aish’s Jerusalem yeshiva in 1983, ignorant of Orthodox Judaism as well as the network of Jerusalem yeshivas like Aish devoted to creating “ba’alei teshuva” — newly minted Orthodox Jews who had been raised in non-Orthodox or secular homes. I was a recent college graduate with a full backpack and largely empty brain. Aish offered a bed and three squares, and only asked in return that you sit in on their beginners’ classes.
“Reb Noach” taught the signature class, “The 48 Ways to Wisdom.” Imposing, with a snowy white beard that grew down his chest, Weinberg looked like God Himself. His mission, I would learn (mostly from a famous Rolling Stone article about him), was not adult ed, but winning converts, from Judaism to Judaism. His famous question was “How do you know what you know?” In order to convince us about the truth of the Torah (and truth claims are central to Aish’s vision), he’d have to make us doubt the things we already “knew.” Humanism? Pluralism? Feminism? If Weinberg could shake the foundations of our secular and Jewish educations, that might leave some of us ripe for his vision of Jewish truth.
And many of us were ripe. Jerusalem attracts seekers and turns tourists into pilgrims. The plaza in front of the Western Wall was a spiritual bazaar of ecstatic hasids, post-’60s burnouts, Christian missionaries, New Age loonies, and guys like me — suburban kids trying to get a handle on why the site was so moving, or, the flip side, why it didn’t move them at all. The Orthodox rabbis offering Shabbos meals and a place to stay or learn inside the very walls of the Old City were scratching our itch to connect to this place we had been told was ours.
I ended up staying for four weeks. I began writing excited (and overheated) letters home, saying I was being introduced to a tradition that was mine all along but that had never been taught to me in Hebrew school. I described how I was keeping kosher, learning the prayers, and observing Shabbat, but mostly discussing The Big Ideas with guys who had more on their minds than sports and partying and rock and roll. I sounded like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now: “Sell the house. Sell the car. Sell the kids. Find someone else. Forget it. I’m never coming back.”
Except I did come back. Two opposing forces took me away from Aish. One was a tutor/mentor — on orders from Aish I can’t say for sure — who pushed too hard when I told him I wasn’t ready to become a full-time yeshiva bucher. The other was my girlfriend, who had grown up in a Jewish home more traditional than my own. She wrote me that Aish offered only one of many ways to embrace Judaism. There were even traditional communities — could I believe it? — where women and men were given equal roles. Sharon presented me with a choice — a Jewish life that we could explore and grow into together, or one without her. It was no contest, and we’ve been married for 22 years.
I left Aish, but in a sense it never left me. My short stay and Reb Noach’s disorienting lessons began a journey that put Judaism and Israel at the center of my life. I accepted Weinberg’s critique that young people like me embraced secular culture and the assumptions of a liberal arts education not because we had done the intellectual heavy lifting of justifying them, but because we lived in default mode. Weinberg had asked the right question — “How do you know what you know?”
But I rejected his answer — that having lived the “examined life,” we would naturally see the unassailable truth of the Torah and accept the yoke of the mitzvot according to his Orthodox interpretation. I embraced tradition in my own way and became part of Jewish communities that accepted me for who I was. I found teachers who were every bit the Torah scholars of those working at Aish, but whose inquiries led them to a more expansive definition of Jewish possibilities. When they asked, “How do you know what you know?” it was not only an invitation to examine my own assumptions, but a warning to be wary of those who were absolutely certain in theirs.
Over the years I’ve had plenty of opportunities to criticize Aish. I found their “Discovery” seminars, which use the so-called Bible codes to “prove” the divine origin of Torah, to be just so much numerological mumbo-jumbo. And their forays into politics — the organization’s fingerprints were all over a virulently anti-Muslim video sent to thousands of homes during the presidential campaign — were off-putting.
But I’ll never forget Rabbi Weinberg, and I’ll forever remain grateful for his gift to me. It’s the gift of Torah — maybe not on his terms, but on terms that have enhanced my life in more ways than I can count.
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