“We’re always looking for more sources, so if you see something, say something! (To us, no one else — we take only exclusive material)”

Moment columnists Shmuel Botnick and Yosef Herz work together on rounding up the buzz in the frum world for Mishpacha readers weekly. Shmuel lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he writes for a living. A contributing editor of Mishpacha, he is the second seder shoel u’meishiv in the Mesivta of Cincinnati and has authored an ArtScroll biography about Rav Nota Greenblatt.

Yosef Herz is an attorney in a transactional law firm in Lakewood, New Jersey. In addition to The Moment, he writes full-length features. Between the two of them, they offer a weekly smorgasbord of inspiration and uplift, capturing the moments that make us proud to be part of our nation.

My ideal work environment

YH: In my house, late at night when there are no incoming emails or distractions, and I can just focus on writing.

SB: Coffee, chocolate, couch ’til I can afford a massage chair.

Deadlines make me…

YH: Suddenly motivated.

SB: Daven.

I learned the most from writing about

SB: I was zocheh to do Question and Answer articles with several gedolim including Rav Dovid Cohen, Rav Reuven Feinstein, and Rav Uri Deutsch. The experience with Rav Dovid Cohen was surreal as it was in person (the others were on phone or Zoom) in his home in Yerushalayim, and he showed me every source inside the text.

YH: A car shortage in Lakewood. It was a rather benign topic, but it was one of my first features, and Deputy Editor Gedalia Guttentag pointed out certain elements that need to be included, advice which has helped me in structuring many articles since.

The best piece of advice I got

SB: “It’s not enough to write. You have to write with style” — meaning, writing isn’t just the art of stringing sentences together: It has to have color, heart, and personality. An English teacher told this to my father who in turn told this to me. It has shaped my entire perspective on writing.

YH: I’m still waiting for it.

1

What is your weekly schedule for putting together The Moment?

We submit The Moment on Sunday evening and answer any questions from the editors on Monday morning, before the magazine goes to print later on Monday. We probably speak/text/voice note several times a day — usually about anything but The Moment. On Sunday we’re like, “Omigosh! The Moment!” That’s only partially a joke; it does happen sometimes, but we’re usually more responsible and begin our efforts earlier in the week.

We have a shared Google Doc called “Next Week’s Moment,” which has very cryptic coding on it, like “story with guy and dog lost necklace maybe good but prob not.” All week long, as we get emails, texts, and tips about anecdotes that might work, we copy and paste them into that doc. On Sundays, we open that doc, try to make sense of it, and start formulating our text. Once we do, we place it in a separate doc to send to the editors, allowing “Next Week’s Moment” the space needed for, um, next week’s Moment.

2

How do you find material for The Moment

Oh, if only we knew. There are some easy leads — a dinner usually yields a nice story, quote, or photo, and we’ve gotten a surprising number of great stories from scrolling through WhatsApp statuses, including one from someone in Berlin (technology has made the world much smaller). We’ve made some acquaintances along the way who always seem to have the perfect story. But aside from those feeders — which probably account for 30 percent of our content — every week it’s another story (that’s a pun, in violation of Mishpacha policy). Sometimes, we just hear about something, coffee room hock type (like a great quote from askan and philanthropist Ralph Herzka at a Torah Links/Olami event), whereas other times, we ourselves observe something interesting or inspirational (like the time Yosef was davening Minchah in a Lakewood office building, and a businessman there was regaling with his peers with a story that had happened to him, so he waited for him to finish and asked if we can publish it, which he happily agreed to). But we’re always looking for more sources, so if you see something, say something! (To us, no one else — we take only exclusive material.)

3

Are you ever short of material?

It’s interesting — sometimes we have an overflow; after October 7, there was such an outpouring of chesed and beautiful stories from around the world, we literally had several months’ worth of content. We realized we couldn’t use it all — The Moment needs to be current — so Mrs. Shana Friedman suggested turning all those tidbits into a full feature, which we did. That week, the magazine ran “Embrace from Afar: In an outpouring of care and concern, Am Yisrael has stepped up to the plate with Torah, tefillah, and chesed,” in addition to a regular Moment. There are also a lot of Sunday nights when we still don’t have anything that makes the cut — until it comes down from Heaven right into our lap(top)s.

4

Who is the most interesting source of material you’ve come across?

SB: You know the term “mikveh hock”? I can’t remember when it was, but the mikveh hock revealed what I think, to date, is the craziest story to go in The Moment. The scoop came from Rabbi Gershon Avtzon, the rosh yeshivah of the Chabad yeshivah in Cincinnati. A friend of his, who is a Levi, was in desperate need of money. Out of the blue, some non-Jew expressed his desire to give “tithes” to a Levite, tithes that totaled $42,000! Just plain old mikveh hock, and it made for a great Living Higher with no effort required. Ah, I should have thought of this line earlier: It was a “Moment of Purity.”

YH: Last year, we got a lead through an email that came into Mishpacha’s Israeli headquarters about Crypto Jews who attended a Sephardic shul somewhere out in the Far East. It sounded fascinating, so I called the writer, who was in India. Although he was Jewish and very scholarly, he was very distant from Yiddishkeit. “Where are you calling from?” he asked. “New Jersey,” I said. He grew worried. “Is that near New York?” He’d read in the news about anti-Semitic incidents in New York, and he was under the impression that we were all hiding in bunkers from marauding mobs. His pitch, predictably, was way off: The “shul” in question wasn’t a religious one, as far as I can tell.

5

How do you divide your roles for the column?

SB: Yosef provides the talent, networking capabilities, intellect, and initiative. I supervise.

YH: We don’t. It’s a joint effort every week, and our messages look something like this: You’ll follow up on that lead, and I’ll take care of Item #3 — ok? The Moment always has a Living Higher segment, which takes up the entire front of the page and contains one solid inspirational story that occurred that week. B’siyata d’Shmaya, that usually comes in in good time. We then have two other pieces, most often a “Happening In,” focusing on something notable that occurred in a frum community. Those come in with relative frequency, so we’re usually covered. It’s Item 3,  either a quote (“Overheard”) or a great picture (“The Lens”), that can be challenging, as it needs to be a good fit — something light and relevant that will resonate with our readers.

Other than collecting content and writing, which we both do, if you ever see a reference to a little-known, mystical Chazal or if a story ends with a particularly poetic flourish, you know Shmuel either wrote the story or at least gave it his gloss before sending it to print. And that applies to humor as well; for several months in 2022, we ran a humor-inspired “Ballot Box,” and my contribution there was limited to reading it after it was published.

6

Have you had to do interesting or challenging research for the column?

YH: To be honest, most of the research in this space involves verifying people’s positions — are we quoting a rosh yeshivah, rosh hayeshivah, or menahel?  — and double-checking the spelling of someone’s last name.

I once heard a great story about one of the ziknei roshei yeshivah in the United States which involved a mesorah he had personally heard from one of the prewar gedolim about how to perform a particular minhag on Yom Tov. I remembered another variation on this mesorah, so I emailed the rosh yeshivah’s wife with my dilemma. She answered me very graciously and did the research for me, finally verifying which source was accurate, and we were able to print it.

Another time, I saw a photo on someone’s WhatsApp status of an antique golden aron kodesh that had been imported from Italy to Lakewood, and I reached out to him for more information. He sent me one contact who sent me another, and I started reading historical records about the aron’s origins and why it had fallen into disuse before being transported across the Atlantic. It was fascinating material, and it took a lot of time for one item in the Moment, but the end result was very gratifying (Issue 931).

SB: Every now and then we drop references to Chazal, which actually takes some work. It’s not uncommon to have something registered in your mind as a midrash, only to discover that it doesn’t exist — so where does it come from? Turns out it’s a Maharsha explaining an obscure aggadeta gemara. Two years ago, we had a really beautiful picture of a soldier shielding a child from a rocket in the Shavuos issue. The problem was that the picture had been pretty widely circulated at that point, plus it was a week or two old, so we knew the only way to make it work for The Moment was to somehow fit it into a Shavuos theme. We went with the gemara in Shabbos that sees three inferences in the word “Sinai”: (1) that it shares the letters of “nissim,” miracles, (2) that it shares letters with the word “siman” to connote that it is a “siman tov,” and (3) that it shares similarity with the word “sinah,” hatred. We shared this Chazal and wrote how the photo depicts all three interpretations.

7

Which Moment item has drawn the most feedback?

We don’t have an official tally, but it might be the story about the Gateshead Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Avrohom Gurwicz who said shiur despite a blaring fire alarm overhead (Issue 970). The noise was so loud, his own talmidim couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it became apparent after the shiur that Rav Avrohom was so engrossed in learning, he hadn’t heard the alarm at all. That really struck a chord, because it’s the type of story we hear about tzaddikim of old, and here someone in our generation had demonstrated that level of greatness.

Another big hit was the story about a frum businessman who wound up in a dangerous location and was understandably on edge when he was approached by a tough-looking thug (Issue 965). The fellow duly informed him that he was the head gangster in town and that he had put out a directive that none of his underlings bother this businessman. The gangster explained that years earlier, he had been employed by a frum store owner who had been especially kind and caring, and this was his way of paying back that favor.

In Issue 1036, we wrote a story about a college student who attended a business conference where many Orthodox Jewish businessmen were present, and ended up taking on Shabbos observance not as a result of overt religious programming, but because of a consistent message that Shabbos allowed them to start the workweek with a new focus. We obviously didn’t have any great photos to accompany that story, so we used a photo of him and some friends right before a shabbaton. I had all but forgotten the story when I was at an event and a friend introduced me to a young professional. He explained that this professional was one of the friends in that photo, and the week the piece published, he was in Passaic for Shabbos, where several people in shul recognized him as “the one in Mishpacha’s Shabbos story.” He became an instant celebrity — everyone in shul danced with him, and the Rav even gave him his shtreimel to wear. That experience boosted his commitment to Shabbos observance, and to date, he’s been keeping up his streak.

8

What have you written about that has stayed with you or means a lot personally?

SB: Our themes usually fall into three categories: exceptional chesed, exceptional Torah accomplishment (e.g., a young handicapped man who finishes Shas), and exceptional glimpses of Hashgachah pratis. I find the Hashgachah pratis stories really boost my emunah. The one that shocked me was the story of Pamela from Oregon, who, on a fluke trip to Toronto, went to visit her uncle but found out he had just passed away and was scheduled for cremation (Issue 1010). It is utterly baffling how Hashgachah pratis led to his kevuras Yisrael.

YH: Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s yahrtzeit falls out on 27 Teves — December 31st in the English calendar, which is significant because his kehillah paid him in advance in quarterly installments, and toward the end of his life Rav Hirsch instructed his family not to deposit the checks until the end of the quarter for fear that he may not serve out the full period the check covered. Many people saw his petirah on the last day of the secular year as a Heavenly stamp of approval of his integrity. This story isn’t well known, and as my family is of German descent, I was looking for an excuse to publish it for some time. Shortly before we went to print on our last issue in 2023 (Issue 922), I realized it was Rav Hirsch’s 135th yahrtzeit, the perfect time to share the story.

9

Are there items you wanted to run but were unable to?

Actually, this is not that uncommon. The Moment needs to be balanced so we won’t do too much of one theme in a single issue, but it also has to be current. So if there’s a beautiful picture of Rav Malkiel Kotler visiting a school in Cleveland, and a great story about Rav Yerucham Olshin in Houston, we won’t use both in the same week as they both pertain to visiting roshei yeshivah of Beis Medrash Govoha. And by the following week, the one we didn’t run is no longer relevant. There was one month where we received no less than four submissions with beautiful stories about Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky. Each one was a treasure, but we couldn’t feature Rav Shmuel week after week.

We also once had an inside scoop of a story that ended with an individual making an exorbitant donation to a mosad — we’re talking tens of millions — and literally minutes before we submitted it, the mosad messaged us a request not to print it.

10

Who is The Moment’s target readership? Any readers who have surprised you?

Our target readership is all of our readers, which seems to have seen some success. We’ve heard several times that “right after the Kichels we turn to The Moment.” It’s great being second best.

Shmuel once received a call from a New York number, and when he answered it, he heard a very familiar voice saying, “Hi, this is Paysach Krohn.” We had put an item in The Moment about a group from Manchester, UK who traveled an hour to recite bircas ha’ilanos in the yard of a fresh almanah, commenting that the brachah thanks Hashem for creating trees “Leihanos bahem bnei adam — to give people pleasure,” and that their kindness was a true fulfillment of this message. Rabbi Krohn liked it so much, he asked for permission to put it in his upcoming book, The Grandeur of the Maggid.

11

How do you balance Moment duties with your other roles at the magazine?

The Moment is a shtickel l’maalah min hazman. It takes up tons of time but doesn’t take any time, if that makes sense. Meaning, we’re both pretty busy with other Mishpacha duties, as well as other full-time jobs, but even when we’re deeply engrossed in an 8,000-word article, we’ll get random texts or emails with various leads which we then copy and paste into the “Next Week’s Moment” doc, all to be dealt with come Sunday.

12

How did you get involved in this column

SB: It all began in November of 2021, when Rav Sholom Kamenetsky spoke at an event in honor of the newly founded Mesivta of Cincinnati and shared how this experience feels like he’s coming full circle because Rav Leizer Silver ztz”l, the venerated rav of Cincinnati, was his sandek. A woman in attendance shared this anecdote with the Mishpacha office that evening — the night before Mishpacha goes to print. “Who can write it up for The Moment?” they asked her. Around midnight, I got an email from the office in Israel, asking if I could give it a shot. It went to print the next day, in that week’s issue. And I guess Mishpacha liked it because, shortly thereafter, they asked me to take over the column.

YH: I wrote my first Mishpacha piece — about a tzedakah initiative set up during the pandemic — in March of 2021. A few months later, I was on a Zoom meeting with Rabbi Naftali Miller, of the Agudah and Chasdei Lev, when the baby of another participant started crying. She tried talking over the sobs but Rabbi Miller told her we would wait while she tended to her baby. As she gratefully did so, Rabbi Miller shared that a similar story had occurred with his grandfather Rav Avraham Pam many years earlier, a lesson that stayed with him all these years. Rav Pam’s 20th yahrtzeit was that week, so I jotted down the basic outline of the story and sent it off to Sruli Besser, who put it in that week’s Moment. A few weeks later, Mrs. Nomee Shaingarten informed me that after a run of several years, Sruli was ready to hand over The Moment — would I be interested in taking over the column with a certain Shmuel Botnick from Cincinnati? I guess she realized it would take two writers to replace one Yisroel Besser, and also that we would make a good partnership.

13

Who thought of your “shidduch”?

YH: Mrs. Nomee Shaingarten set us up.

SB: When I got the offer, my initial concern was simple: I live in Cincinnati. This quiet little town in Southwest Ohio is somewhat of a distance from the hubbub of Tristate Judaism, and we’re usually a few decades behind the action (there’s this great new song, Shomati, have you heard it?). Mishpacha understood this concern, and drafted Yosef, who lives in Lakewood (Manchester to be exact), and is very up-to-date on the latest hock. For me, the greatest blessing in this experience has been getting to know Yosef.

14

How often do you meet in person?

Whenever Shmuel travels to Lakewood, and whenever Yosef travels to Cincinnati (Yosef: Where’s Cincinnati?).

15

Do each of you have a niche in the Moment: this sort of material comes from Yosef Herz, and that from Shmuel Botnick? 

Not so much. Yosef lives right out of Lakewood and is privy to a lot more “hock.” Otherwise, it’s very much a 50/50 arrangement.

16

Do you ever debate/argue/disagree about what should go in?

Us? Never! We do disagree but — given the distance between Lakewood and Cincinnati — we never actually throw any punches. The disagreements are usually about whether or not something is inspirational, which is a weird thing to argue about because different people are inspired by different things. For all our eloquence, these arguments are rather brusque.

YH: It’s so blah.

SB: It will bring tears to readers’ eyes.

YH: It makes my eyes roll.

SB: So close them. We’re doing this. It’s great.

17

If someone wants to submit something to The Moment, how do you explain what you’re looking for?

Ah, great question. What we say is it needs “punch,” because many people do many inspirational things but to be in The Moment, there needs to be that “whoa” element. We get lots of submissions like “a boy lost his tefillin, davened Minchah and begged Hashem that he find them — and then, ten minutes later, they were found.” That’s a nice story, but it doesn’t hit hard. We need the secular businessman who found them to be so inspired that he, too, started putting on tefillin, after which he celebrated his belated bar mitzvah in the boy’s shul, a lost soul found along with the tefillin.

It’s often hard to explain our rejections because, when you actually experience something, it feels much greater than it sounds. They’ll be like “No, you don’t chap! It was mamash 15 minutes after Minchah! We were looking for hours — it’s crazy Hashgachah!” True, but when you write it, the “mamashes” and exclamation marks have to go, and you’re left with a story that’s nice but falls kinda flat.

We also need a story that has identifying details and a great photo, so a story about two roshei yeshivah who met on Shabbos — sans a revealing photo or a clear definition of their roles — will lav davka resonate with readers the way it did with those present, even if those present felt it was very uplifting and special.

18

It’s not that common to find yeshivah alumni who are passionate about writing. What was your primary inspiration to pursue writing as a career?

SB: The secret to writing is similar to producing crude oil: read, baby read. As a kid I read tons — and I’ve been writing for almost as long as I’ve been reading. In second grade, my teacher called me to the side and handed me a notebook. “Fill this with stories,” she said. “Whenever you write a story, bring it to me and I will grade it.” I started writing, and I never stopped.

YH: I don’t know if it’s that uncommon to find yeshivah graduates who are passionate about writing. It’s just that if parnassah is on your radar, writing alone won’t really make the cut, and most yeshivah alumni have masechtos to finish, families to raise, and money to earn, so there isn’t that much time left in the day for writing, a very, very labor-intensive and time-consuming effort.

19

Does your legal experience contribute to your writing careers?

SB: I’ve been asked many times if I regret going to law school, given that I no longer practice. The answer is no, for three reasons. First, it required me to read thousands of pages of very sophisticated literature, as well as to write multiple papers, which helped upgrade my writing skills. Second, and more fundamentally, being an effective writer requires one to understand his readers. Had I never entered the academic and corporate worlds, my exposure would have been limited to the yeshivish community, and crafting messages that appeal to all spectrums of the frum community would have been a struggle. Third, and most fundamentally, writing for Mishpacha ultimately comes down to a celebration of who we are. Every article I write is a salute to Torah and the People who honor its Word. And if you’ve never seen the other side, you don’t truly appreciate just how fortunate we are. When I write about a rebbi collecting money to help his student attend summer camp, I think of my law professors and how, in a million, gazillion years (so much for sophistication), they would never think of doing such a thing. There’s no greater lesson in the beauty of Yiddishkeit than exposure to the icy apathy of secularism.

YH: Actually, yes, on several levels. I started writing before law school and in my first year, once proudly told a professor about my side hustle. Unimpressed, she told me legal briefs are very different from magazine features (an understatement, by the way). She also told me that law school, and her class in particular, would “beat all the creativity out of me.” I don’t know that it did, but law school did impress upon me the importance of laying out the facts and building a logical storyline rather than relying only on flair and drama to engage the reader — those elements are important, but you can’t forget the basics (Mrs. Racheli Bachrach, Mishpacha’s Deputy Editor par excellence, also drilled this into me). Moreover, I am from a generation of writers who (thankfully) didn’t grow up reading secular magazines and/or newspapers — we had a plethora of frum material. One of the recurring themes in chareidi media is the beauty of our community, but the irony is that when you don’t have anything to compare it to, you might think some of it is hyperbole. Law school quickly banished that thought. I had great professors and excellent classes, and my schooling provided me with insight into modern society’s legal structure, but it also gave me a new appreciation of how our own nation, molded by an allegiance to Hashem and His Torah, has developed into the most beautiful of People, one we should be supremely grateful to be part of.

20

If you weren’t writing, what would you be doing?

SB: Still suffering as a corporate attorney, which I did for two years before going into writing full-time.

YH: Writing. I work in a law firm, so the bulk of my day is spent writing, usually contracts or operating agreements.

Questions for 20 Years

Coming up:

Dovi Safier & Yehuda Geberer

The Graphics Team

Send your questions to 20years@mishpacha.com

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1053)