No More Reservations
| October 24, 2012
It was an Indian chief named Buster Yellow-Kidney who brought Binyamin Klempner back to his source.
An Indian reservation in Montana isn’t the most likely place for a Jewish awakening, but for Ben Klempner — a teenager trying to make spiritual sense of the world — all the mysterious tribal symbols and rituals were a bridge to sorting out his own ambivalent, even hostile feelings toward traditional Judaism.
Eighteen years later, Reb Binyamin Klempner heads his own organization called the Yad L’Shuv Foundation to help other baalei teshuvah and geirim navigate the intricacies of the Orthodox world, using the patterns of communal support and advocacy he actually learned about on the reservation.
He might be young for heading an international support and mentoring organization, but Binyamin Klempner has been an activist since he was a kid. “I was raised to be a protester and an advocate,” he smiles, remembering how his picture graced the front pages of New Jersey papers as a 14-year-old protestor against America’s invasion of Iraq in 1991. When he was in high school, he brought the administration to its knees over some students’ rights issues. And at 17, he left his suburban Teaneck to spend the summer on the Blackfeet Indian reservation in Montana to help the tribe secure land rights.
It was there that he met his first “rebbe.” Buster Yellow-Kidney was the ceremonial wartime chief of the Blackfeet, a kind, refined, insightful man who was employed as the local FBI agent for Glacier County, responsible for Glacier National Park and other vast tracts of federal land, to make sure hunters weren’t poaching (shooting animals without a permit).
After a summer with the tribe, Ben Klempner was so taken with the spirituality of their rituals and their interpersonal support structure that he wanted to stay close and be a part of that, and so he decided to attend college at the nearby University of Montana. “I went to the reservation to contribute, but then I found I needed them as much as they needed me. They offered a level of spirituality, community, and real connection with people, and not just the pursuit of a career, which all my friends on the East Coast were into.”
Prior to reservation policy, the Blackfeet’s vast domain stretched from Montana all the way up to northern Alberta, offering them tremendous resources and vast hunting grounds. But even on the reservation, the Blackfeet people today feel fortunate to be one of six Native American tribes whose reservation is on their native lands.
And although life on the reservations is typically plagued by poverty, alcohol, gambling, and other unsavory activities, the Blackfeet have maintained their strong spiritual connections, and ritual is still a central part of their lives. They believe in a Creator, know that He has laid out a path of good and evil and has sent down holy spirits to guide them, and believe that participating in holy ceremonies will not only strengthen their spiritual ties but will enhance their relationships within their families and strengthen future generations.
“I guess you could say that Buster and his sons Nolan and Tiny Man were ‘mekarev’ me,” Reb Binyamin continues. “They adopted me. Did I want to become one of them? I don’t know if I wanted to, but it was just sort of happening, I was fascinated by their ceremonies, until Buster put a stoplight in front of me. He and his sons began to tell me, ‘You yourself come from a very distinguished tribe, more distinguished than us, and no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be a Blackfeet.’
“He eventually told me, ‘You’ve got to find your own people.’
“I remember how much I wanted to have the ceremonial pipe — they pray with it, hold it a certain way. They said to me, ‘What do your people have that’s ceremonial like our pipe?’ Now, I didn’t know much about my own people, but I remembered that my dad had tefillin from his bar mitzvah that were sitting in the back of a closet. I found them the next time I was in Teaneck and brought them back with me — later I discovered they were still kosher — and someone in Montana showed me how to put them on. So I started putting on tefillin every day and saying the two sentences in Hebrew I knew — Shema and Oseh shalom, from the Carlebach song.”
One ritual young Ben found especially intriguing is the ceremony of the “sweat lodge,” a ritual shvitz bath made to clean out the spiritual impurities of the soul, just as a bath cleanses the body. “I wanted to join them in their sweat lodge, but that was off limits. They said, ‘What do you have that is a purifying ritual like a sweat lodge?’ I looked into it and found out: a mikveh.”
In the university town of Missoula, there was no Chabad and no Hillel, so Ben — with the encouragement of his Blackfeet friends — started to search out Jewish themes on his own. “They said to me, ‘When you come to our ceremonies, teach us your songs. Bring us your stories from your grandparents.’ So I had to learn the songs and the stories. They said, ‘Your history is special, so surely you were only put off by the way you were told about Judaism. But what was the Judaism of your grandfathers? And if they’ve forgotten, go back further until you find the authentic tradition.’
At the time, the library at the University of Montana had three books on Judaism: an English translation of the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov; a biography of the Meor Einayim, Reb Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl; and Tzfat: The Mystical City. Eventually Ben began to keep Shabbos to the best of his limited knowledge and crude self-education, while his Blackfeet buddies were supporting him on the sidelines. It was an ironic double challenge because, he says, when he was growing up in Teaneck, he hated religious Jews.
Ben was dividing his days between campus in Missoula and any free time he had on the reservation, when he decided it was time to see what a real Shabbos was like. He was friendly with a Conservative rabbi who used to come to Montana once a month for fishing. “We went hiking together, and I told him I wanted to find out about Chassidus,” Reb Binyamin remembers. “Those were the books I had and that’s what I knew about. So he told me he has a friend, a chassid, who lives in Boro Park.”
The next time he was back on the East Coast, Ben spent his first authentic Shabbos in Boro Park with the family of Rabbi Tzvi Mandel. “That Shabbos was the turning point in my life, and taught me the lesson I’ve used until today,” he says. “I became miskasher to this family and they never let me go. We still speak once a week. Later on, this became the platform for Yad L’Shuv — taking long-term responsibility. You can inspire 500 people to become frum, but who will take responsibility for them in the long run? Too many times they’re left to fend for themselves.”
Goodbye Montana
When Ben Klempner returned to Montana, he was a changed man — perhaps a little more … “rabbinic.” “I became the university’s resident expert on Jewish topics. Even the professors would approach me about issues related to Judaism.”
But his ties to the Blackfeet still ran deep, and they asked him to travel to Washington DC on their behalf. Oil conglomerate Texaco (which was eventually bought out by Chevron) was sparring for drilling rights on Badger Mountain, considered sacred land to the Indians, where they would go for ceremonies and prayer. Klempner, passionate lobbyist that he was, appealed to big government on behalf of his Native American friends and managed to get a ten-year moratorium on the drilling, which was recently extended for another ten years.
“After that fight, I sort of lost interest,” Klempner remembers. “Or maybe I’d been losing interest all along. It’s hard to tell. But what I know is that it wasn’t necessary to advocate for the Blackfeet anymore — their land claims were settled. Then came spring break, and I had heard about the Bostoner Rebbe, so I decided, ‘Why not meet him?’ So I went to Boston, to the Rebbe, and when I came back to Montana, I was so lonely for Shabbos that I arranged to transfer to Boston for my senior year.”
If there was one thing he learned from the Indians, it was that there are no substitutes for relationships, and he knew that if he was going to make an attempt at integrating into the religious Jewish world, he’d have to create those family ties. The Mandels from Brooklyn were one such family (they still are), but he needed something local, in Boston. “So I adopted the Bostoner Rebbe and Rebbetzin, zichronam livrachah. I made them into my zeideh and bubby.”
For Binyamin Klempner, the relationship was transformative. The Rebbe sent him off to yeshivah in Zichron Yaakov, and when he returned after a few years, the Rebbe saw to it that he got married and settled in a warm, nurturing community. After Binyamin married Chaya Rubinstein of Washington Heights, the two spent the first few months of their shanah rishonah in the Bostoner Rebbe’s home, as gabbai and personal assistant to the Rebbe and Rebbetzin, in the last year before she passed away. The Rebbe suggested they move to Milwaukee, a warm, nurturing chassidic community, and to this day, Rav Michel (the Milwaukee Rebbe) and Rebbetzin Feige Twerski and their children are the Klempners’ ongoing mentors.
Chaya, a petite, soft-spoken, yet determined woman who is the devoted, low-key backbone of her husband’s endeavor in creating the Yad L’Shuv support organization for baalei teshuvah, was an unlikely shidduch for the fresh Orthodox newcomer who had just returned from Israel. She was a “frum from birth” Breuer’s seminary graduate, and even as they were driving around looking for a quiet spot to talk on their first date, Binyamin said to himself, “I think this girl needs a Lakewood kollel avreich instead.” But somehow he managed to accrue two parking tickets that night and didn’t get upset. “I viewed it as an opportunity to show off my good middos,” he says, “and I guess it worked. The rest is history.”
“You Don’t Need a Coach”
Always an activist and people-person, Binyamin — with the Rebbe’s encouragement — picked up his university studies again, got an master’s degree in social work and became an addictions counselor and life-coach. He eventually putting his clinical training and hands-on experience into five books he’s written over the last few years on personal empowerment and better family communication: Speak to Your Child, Speak to Your Spouse, Power Tools, The Self-Help Companion for Abundant Living, and The Uplifting Passover Haggadah (available through Amazon).
After Binyamin completed his coursework in Miami, the Klempners returned to New York, where Binyamin worked for Rabbi Yakov Horowitz’s Project Yes and began private life coaching. It was there that he realized the shift that would push him to create his own organization.
“Most of my clients were baalei teshuvah,” he says. “They were coming to me because they were feeling overwhelmed or disenfranchised and couldn’t get moving in a positive direction. But as good a therapist as I might have been, I realized that what they needed was not a therapy relationship or a coaching relationship, but something much more dynamic, a surrogate family that would be there for them and help them feel part of the bigger picture. There is an Indian word for it — they call it ‘tiopsei’ — which means a sense of community. I had created those relationships through the Bostoner Rebbe and his wife, through the Mandels, and through the Twerskis.
“I found out that what most of my clients needed was advocacy, but as their coach I couldn’t help them because that wasn’t my role,” Reb Binyamin continues, explaining that a coach is not a therapist digging into the past nor an outside advocate for the client, but rather works on empowering him to access his own strengths and talents. “If someone couldn’t get his kid into school, I, as his coach, couldn’t be the one to make the call. So I decided to put on a new hat. I would make the calls and find out who the right contacts were who could put on pressure. They were in need of tzedakah funds? I would find out how to get on the lists. A hundred years of coaching wasn’t going to put them on their feet.”
Binyamin Klempner went back to his own teshuvah process to understand the most deep-rooted needs of his clients.
“What seems to make it or break it for the success or failure of many baalei teshuvah is the amount of maintenance or follow-up they receive after becoming frum,” Reb Binyamin explains. “For many, becoming Torah and mitzvah-observant is just the beginning of a long journey, whereas from the popular kiruv perspective the mission has already been accomplished.
“After making the leap into Torah observance, many baalei teshuvah find themselves alone in a world that they know very little about and in which they are awkward and lacking in essential knowledge and literacy. Who’s keeping tabs on them? Who’s accounting for them? A person might be at the top of his career path and then suddenly find himself at the bottom end of functionality within the frum velt. This is the type of transition that can adversely affect the positive self-esteem of even the most balanced individual and can have long-lasting negative consequences.”
What they need, says Klempner, are mentors — families that will be with them through the long haul of integration, not just dropping them off at the door. And all the coaching in the world won’t put them on their feet like a frum family or mentor who can advocate for them, help them get their children into good schools, and give them the social and familial stability they might have left behind — a primary resource for almost everybody.
“Once you’re in, you’re in,” says Rabbi Yom Tov Glazer, a senior lecturer at Aish HaTorah International who talked about his own return and integration to Torah Judaism close to 20 years ago. “Most baal teshuvah yeshivos will get you to the chasunah, which is great, but after that is when you need the most help. Being a single baal teshuvah? Anyone can do that. But to be frum and to start having kids — and lots of kids — and then keeping up with the Schwartzes is not pashut at all. That second stage of the teshuvah movement — marriage and family — is where it gets complicated. The difference between baalei teshuvah and geirim being deadweight on the frum system, or a contributing dynamic within the frum world, is the help they get. It’s a fact. The frum world is a system, and you either know the system, or you’re afraid of the system and need someone to help you navigate it.”
The Klempners know it first-hand. When they made the move to Israel and settled in Beit Shemesh, they faced the same problems: no money, no family, no schools.
“Things were really tough for us,” he says. “We had no one to advocate for us, to go to the different tzedakah funds and say, ‘There’s a family that has nothing, they need help, they’re baalei teshuvah, see what you can do for them.’ One Shabbos morning I said to myself, ‘It was so tough making Shabbos this week — we didn’t know where anything was going to come from. So I told myself, if I have to advocate for myself to tap into different funds, I might as well do it for others in the same boat as me.”
Actually, the Klempners were in a better position than many other baalei teshuvah who come to Israel full of idealism and then land with a thud because the struggle is so overwhelming. Chaya, the oldest of many siblings, has several married sisters and brothers in the country, and Reb Binyamin’s connections to the Bostoner Rebbe’s family and the Twerskis are international. Still, the struggle has been daunting, and they admit they still haven’t mastered the system.
Last Chanukah, the Milwaukee Rebbe was visiting Eretz Yisrael and Binyamin shared his idea with his mentor: would it be feasible to start an organization that would match baal teshuvah families with families who are integrated and experienced in the nuances of the frum world, and create an advocacy network to help them negotiate the services the religious world has to offer?
“The very next day, the Rebbe told me he had a family he wanted me to advocate for. They were destitute, and needed help negotiating the maze of funds and grants that were available. He gave the marching orders and our organization was formed. Believe me, I’m still no expert, but I’ve managed to locate key people that can help out.”
Today Yad L’Shuv, run out of the Klempners’ humble Beit Shemesh apartment with branches and representatives all over Israel and the US, provides a family-to-family program, a shidduch service, advocacy services, and gender-separated and moderated talk-line support groups.
Trusting Your Higher Self
When Reb Binyamin was studying for his MSW in Miami, he worked in a drug rehab facility located right alongside the crack corners and heroin dens. People were coming in off the street, totally broken after hitting their rock-bottom, some of them having spent years in that crazy environment totally disconnected from their higher selves.
“The most beautiful thing was seeing these young people slowly get back to themselves, watching them those first few clean weeks as they began getting reacquainted with their humanity,” says Klempner. “But the shocking thing was that, even as they began to touch and rediscover a cleaner, purer side of themselves, a few weeks later they were back on the street. I was so shocked the first time I saw this. I couldn’t believe it, but my supervisor just smiled sadly. ‘This girl is going to get so spooked by her real self, it will be so frightening and unfamiliar to her, that she’s going to go right back to the garbage on the street,’ the supervisor predicted. Still, I saw this as a success. This girl, for a few fleeting days, was able to access a vision of herself in a better place. People slide back wherever they are, because the unknown is more frightening than the garbage of the known. It’s the same thing for many people tasting Yiddishkeit for the first time. It’s a higher vision of themselves, but the transition is too scary. That’s why a support network is so vital.”
In today’s digital global village, the Klempner’s cluttered dining room table serves as international headquarters. But that doesn’t stop the constant ringing of the telephone or the beep of the inbox.
“We get calls all the time,” says Reb Binyamin. “Someone was mekarev them. Now what? Kiruv has largely become a numbers game — how many people can you get to a seminar? — which of course is great. But follow-up is a whole different ballgame, a totally different skill set, and the kiruv organizations aren’t equipped or set up for it. So we’ve created an organization for follow-up. We’re not dealing with numbers, we’re dealing with human beings who are suffering. When I was a life coach, so many people crossed my threshold, but what they really needed was a family to be interested in them, to invite them for a Shabbos meal, to know the names of their children, to give them direction in a new and confusing, nuanced world. The relationship doesn’t take away the hard times, but it does make getting through it easier.”
Chaya, who is in touch with many mentor families across America, is careful to explain that the organization isn’t looking for bossy teachers. “This isn’t about being a teacher. It’s about being a friend, being a support when life gets overwhelming. It can be big things like where to send their children for school, or seemingly smaller things that can be just as overwhelming. Shavuos is coming and she never made a cheesecake in her life and doesn’t have a dairy oven. She needs a suggestion! The baal teshuvah needs direction in so many things others take for granted.”
There is no standard formula for assistance, because crisis takes on so many forms. One family, new immigrants to Jerusalem, had made some bad investments and wound up facing a court order confiscating all their belongings. After seeing an on-line message about Yad L’Shuv, a family member contacted Binyamin Klempner and within 24 hours there was a pro-bono lawyer at their door. “We’re still in a very difficult financial situation,” said the man, “and we have no family to rely on. I’m a baal teshuvah and my wife is a giyores, so we’re pretty much alone.”
With Klempner’s intervention, jobs for both husband and wife were found, but they didn’t have a cent for transportation. The jobs were there, but how would they get to work at the other end of the city? “Then we received another delivery,” said the husband. “Two monthly bus passes.”
If they’d have stayed in touch, Chief Buster Yellow-Kidney would be proud of his first talmid. The boy who was searching for meaning and community anywhere but his own back yard learned that the ancient Indian tradition of tiopsei works best when you bring it back home.
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 431)
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