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things from great people, a lot of it goes easy. Rav Soloveitchik didn%u2019t teach me directly, but he was the example of how to give a lecture. Nobody would fall asleep in the middle! The Ponevezh Rav taught me how to collect money, and Rav Ya%u2019akov Kamenetsky taught me how to read a pasuk in the Chumash. The Satmar Rav taught me how to care for the Jewish people. That%u2019s immeasurable %u2013 there%u2019s no way to measure what that%u2019s worth, but that%u2019s what made me. We were in Miami Beach for nine years. My children grew up; it was a different world then. We never locked the front door, we never locked our car. There were 300 days a year that the sun shone, our kids were outside every day. We never worried about anything. It was healthy, beyond belief. Then I worked in New York; it was a different universe.You%u2019ve held various rabbinic roles, but your teaching of Jewish history brought you international recognition. When did that come on your horizon?Well, what happened was, I was the head of Kashrut for the OU (Orthodox Union) for five years, which was very challenging, and in many respects very rewarding. But it was not something I wanted to do permanently. We were living in a relatively new neighborhood in Monsey, New York. On Shabbat, I would give shiurim in the minyan we davened in, and eventually that minyanturned into a shul. The shul was wonderful, with wonderful people. I%u2019ve had a very easy ride with the rabbanus (rabbinate). When I was in Miami Beach, I developed a lecture series in Jewish history for women. When I came to Monsey, it was also for women. After a period of time, the husbands came to me and said, %u201cIt%u2019s embarrassing, my wife knows all these things, and I don%u2019t know anything. So you have to give a class for us.%u201d So I said yes, but for the men%u2019s class, everyone should pay a $50 registration fee, and the money would go to the local yeshiva. About 30 people signed up, among them a number of physicians. We had a wonderful shul %u2013 we had 25 doctors in shul; every disease known to man was in our shul. After a few weeks, some of the doctors came and said, %u201cWe paid the $50, but we%u2019re on call, we have to be in the hospital. Why don%u2019t you record the lecture and give us the recording?%u201d And they came back two or three weeks later and said, %u201cIn the hospital, everybody comes to hear your recording! You should do something with it.%u201d And that%u2019s how it started.I remember I had a rebbe in yeshiva who said to me, %u201cYou can learn anything in university, but don%u2019t learn Judaism, because if you start reading professors, it can challenge you.%u201d Did you ever find it challenging when you read Jewish history academically?First of all, every historian has a bias. And if you%u2019re not an observant Jew, then your bias is obviously against observance by nature. The people who wrote the history books were not personally observant and did not believe that Torah was the main folklore in Jewish life. However, all of them had bibliographies in their books, and most of the bibliographies were from great rabbanim. You want to know Jewish history? Look at the rabbinic responsa of the time %u2013 they%u2019re telling you what happened there. They phrase it halachically; they%u2019re not there to tell you stories, but the story is there if you figure it out. That was my main source of history: the rabbinic responsa. Everyone studies the Rambam%u2019s Yad HaChazakah, but the Teshuvot HaRambam is even more revealing %u2013 you can see the person from it. And then I had the idea that we should make films. So we made three large biographical films: Rashi, the Rambam, and the Abarbanel. Tens of thousands have seen them, and they%u2019re in many schools throughout the world. When the internet came, I created a foundation. We have a platform called %u2018Jewish Destiny.%u2019 I always said, %u201cOur job is to tell the story of the Jewish people to the Jewish people.%u201dWhy? If you are talking to people who do see Torah as the folklore of Jewish history, who are observant, what is the need to learn Jewish history?Because if you don%u2019t know how we got here, you%u2019ll have no idea what to do now. You%u2019ll have no perspective. History is perspective. Many times there are problems that are insoluble, and they%u2019ve been insoluble for 2,000 years. So you have to know that%u2019s the kind of problem you%u2019re dealing with, and you%u2019re not going to solve it. You have to learn to live with it. And then there are problems that we have solved, but they reappear. So what do we do now? And history tells us that all of the non-traditional, non-orthodox streams eventually disappear: the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Christians, the Frankists %u2013 all of them. They%u2019re around for a while, but they don%u2019t last. In 1960, it was all about Reform and Conservative being the future of the Jewish people. Nobody says that today %u2013 they don%u2019t even say it! In that context, I%u2019d like to ask about American Jewry. As a non-American, I remember my first visit to America %u2013 it felt distinct from other Jewish communities in the Diaspora. I grew up in a time when there was antisemitism, but it was on the wane. You could be an Orthodox Jew without penalty. An Orthodox Jew could be nominated and run for Vice President of the United States. And the guy who was running for president was a Shabbos goy. That time is gone %u2013 that was a false spring. I grew up in a time when support for the State of Israel in the Jewish community was almost complete, and there was very strong support from the non-Jewish community too. That also has changed. The very success of the State of Israel has contributed to this. And the influence of the survivors of the Holocaust was immense. They were driven people. We don%u2019t have that anymore. In those days, the entire Orthodox spectrum, from Mizrachi to Satmar, the common denominator was that they were going to rebuild the Jewish people. They didn%u2019t have that much time to fight amongst themselves. But now that the Jewish people have been %u2018rebuilt,%u2019 now we have time for all of this. We exist inside political parties in the State of Israel. It%u2019s a deterrent to the coming of the Messiah. If I had to do it all over again, I never would have had a religious party.That immediately allows the majority of the Jewish people to say, %u201cWell, that%u2019s not for me. I don%u2019t have to put on tefillin, because I don%u2019t vote for this group.%u201d And that%u2019s a killer. On the other hand, my colleagues have told me many times that if there had never been religious parties, there never would have been any religious Jews left in the State of Israel. They have a point on that too. But overall, I think there%u2019s more negative than positive. But who am I?Historically, internal divisions were common during the time of the ancient Jewish state. Now that we once again have a Jewish state, do you think we are reliving those same divisions today?46 |