Silk says the move away from his New York haven and the law firm he’s partnered in for two decades, to what he calls “the self-imposed exile in Washington from Monday to Thursday,” is all in the name of public service. He sees it as hashgachah (Photos: Eli Greengart)

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ast October, when Reb Moyshe (Mitchell) Silk left his influential position as a senior partner in the global law firm Allen & Overy to become Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Department of the Treasury, he arrived for his swearing-in ceremony holding an ancient tome. Instead of the Bible typically used for such ceremonies, Silk — bearded, black-hatted, and ever-connected to his chassidic roots — brought along his treasured ancient Tikkun Korim that had belonged to Rebbe Mordechai of Nadvorna, a tzaddik and miracle worker who passed away in 1894, and was from Silk’s grandfather’s ancestral town.

Using the precious sefer for the ceremony indeed captured what Moyshe Silk — the first chassidic Jew in a US Administration senior slot — is all about: a brilliant attorney and international negotiator equally comfortable as a chavrusa with his rebbe (Rav Shlomo Leifer, the Nadvorna Rebbe of Boro Park) as he is walking the halls of the White House or advising Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin or Undersecretary David Malpass.

These days have found Silk — an expert in Chinese law and finance who spent over a decade as a partner in his former law firm’s Hong Kong office — heavily involved in the negotiations with China that have dominated the press over the past few months. Silk heads the Treasury’s Office of Investment, Energy, and Infrastructure, where he formulates and implements American policy relating to international investment and designs international programs for US exports of energy and infrastructure — and China features heavily in his investment portfolio.

Today, the US is at a critical juncture in its trade and investment relations with China, which not only impact US-China relations, but also global economic stability.

The US is pressing China to address numerous long-standing issues, including reducing the enormous US trade deficit with China, measuring over $375 billion; granting greater market access to US firms in China; and effective and enhanced protection of US intellectual property in China and China’s predatory practices regarding sensitive US technology.

“Addressing these issues will ensure a fair and reciprocal trade relationship, benefit the global economy, create more jobs for US workers, provide greater access to US investors to capitalize on opportunities in the China market, and protect US innovation and creativity,” Silk, the Treasury’s lead negotiator in energy trade matters, tells Mishpacha.

President Trump’s decision last week to impose tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese goods, and China’s immediate retaliation, bring an additional level of challenge to the task at hand.

As a senior negotiator, Silk was part of the delegation that traveled to China last month with Secretary Mnuchin, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, US Trade Representative Ambassador Robert Lighthizer, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, and White House Director of Trade and Industrial Policy Peter Navarro, as well as the same US team that met with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He in Washington mid-May and again in Beijing two weeks later.

Silk says the move away from his New York haven and the law firm he’s partnered in for two decades, to what he calls “the self-imposed exile in Washington from Monday to Thursday,” is all in the name of public service. He sees it as hashgachah — as the next stage in the roundabout route his own life has taken. The appointment came soon after Silk returned from a trip to Taiwan with then-law partner Heath Tarbert, where they met with senior government officials and regulators — including President Ma Ying-jeou — regarding matters of money laundering and terrorist financing. Shortly after the trip, Mr. Tarbert was appointed as Assistant Secretary to the Department of the Treasury. Undersecretary Malpass and Mr. Tarbert were looking for someone like Silk, with his proficiency in Chinese and accomplishments in China, as well as his expertise in energy and infrastructure.

But Silk never imagined that an unintended and chance opportunity to learn Chinese back in high school would one day lead him to the most influential corridors of Washington.

China Beckons

For Moyshe, father of eight, currently working on translations of the chassidic works Kedushas Levi and Ma’amar Mordechai (Nadvorna), the China odyssey started back in high school in Florida, where his family moved from Chicago when he was 12. “So many people ask how it is that a nice Jewish boy learned to speak two dialects of Chinese fluently,” Moyshe relates. “It just happened.”

A Chinese family had moved into the Silks’ housing complex, and while Moyshe helped them transition to life in the US, they, in turn, offered him much-appreciated after-school employment in their family’s Chinese restaurant. Moyshe worked first as a dishwasher, then moved onto prep cook, busboy, and finally a full-fledged waiter. “By that time, without really trying, I became fluent in Cantonese, and it was a real plus — I was able to get my food out of the kitchen quicker from the Chinese-speaking cooks,” he remembers.

But that’s about as beneficial as Cantonese would be to him. As he soon discovered, nearly all of Mainland China speaks Mandarin, a radically different dialect. And so, enrolling in an intensive summer course at Vermont’s Middlebury College, Moyshe, with a combination of determination and innate talent, became proficient in Mandarin in just nine weeks. With his language skills and a dream to pursue a degree in East Asian Studies, Moyshe spent the academic year 1979-80 in university in Taiwan, and then returned to the US where he enrolled at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, known for its excellent programs in international relations and China Studies. Moyshe’s Chinese skills were so advanced that he was asked to teach Chinese students while completing his degree.

Throughout those years, Moyshe, who grew up under the influence of grandparents with chassidic roots, maintained a daily Torah learning regimen. “I’ve had regular chavrusas every day since then,” he says, “in college, then in law school, and later during the years in Hong Kong.”

Moyshe lived in the Washington area for five years, first while studying at Georgetown and then at the University of Maryland Law School where he earned a doctorate in law and was mentored by a Chinese professor of international law, who hired Moyshe as assistant director for the law school’s East Asian Legal Studies Program.

During his two years at Georgetown, Moyshe attended shul at Kesher Israel, then the only Orthodox shul in the capital. “Shabbos was always a surprise since there were so many interesting people who would come to shul — academics, professionals, and government workers and officials. “My big treat was to chat with author Herman Wouk after davening,” he says. “And a number of families would look after us and have us over for meals.”           For the next three years in Baltimore, Moyshe lived in the Park Heights suburb, where he became close to Rabbi Yitzchok Breitowitz, a star talmid of Rabbi Ruderman and a noted law scholar, and other rabbanim, including Rabbi Amram Taub, Rabbi Mendel Feldman, and Rabbi Moshe Heineman.

In 1986, with his JD in hand, Moyshe applied for a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship with the US Government’s National Academy of Sciences. Of the 1,000 applicants in all disciplines, only nine were chosen — and of those nine, only one in law: Moyshe Silk. And so, Moyshe was again off to China, this time to Beijing and Shenzhen Universities and the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade, where he taught graduate classes in International Law.

Today, with burgeoning trade and business opportunities in China, Jewish travelers can find each other all over the country, but then, the closest community was Hong Kong, to where Moyshe would make sure to travel regularly. He returned to the US after his nine-month fellowship, and began his legal career with the Wall Street law firm of Hughes Hubbard & Reed. But in 1991, in the wake of China liberalizing foreign investment in many sectors, including energy, headhunters were canvassing law firms for lawyers with a Chinese background. Moyshe had the requisite language and cultural skills, but the firm he’d interviewed with — Chadbourne & Parke, well-known for energy matters and tobacco litigation — was looking for someone with project finance experience and exposure to the power sector. (Moyshe quipped at his interview that he was highly experienced for the position, given that he had been dutifully paying his electric bills for a number of years.) In the end he secured the position, which entailed moving to Hong Kong to assist in building the firm’s newly opened office there, which would represent power developers seeking to expand into the emerging markets of China and India.

This twist in Moyshe’s professional journey would eventually equip him with the sector expertise that would be vital to his present position in the Treasury. He was constantly traveling with power developers and learning the ins and outs of the energy business. The challenges were mainly in the backwaters of China — Gansu Province in China’s northwest at the edge of the Gobi Desert, Heilongjiang, Shandong, and Liaoning Provinces in China’s northeast. Constantly being on the road with leading foreign developers afforded Moyshe the ability to learn the power and infrastructure business from some of the world’s leading developers, engineers, and financial analysts. Moyshe forged an especially close relationship with James Wood, then a senior executive at Babcock & Wilcox. Jim, who started his career at B&W as a boiler engineer and slowly worked his way up, taught Moyshe the ropes of power development and finance, and went on to become the CEO of B&W and a senior official in the Department of Energy. Moyshe, meanwhile, became a consultant for the global law practice Allen & Overy, eventually making partner and, after his return to the US in 2005, heading the firm’s China group out of their New York offices.