Give It a Go

For the young Shaul Rosenblatt, spiritual pursuits were not exactly on his agenda. When he was a teenager, his plan was to study aeronautical engineering and become an astronaut (as a high school senior, he’d even received a scholarship to a university in California).

He grew up in Liverpool, England, in a traditional family. His mother would light Shabbos candles, they’d go to synagogue on the High Holidays, and they kept a minimal form of kashrus. He went by Stevie back then, and although he was a student at the Jewish-affiliated King David High School, his Judaism didn’t mean much to him and he had no desire to explore it.

Until he met Rabbi Yitzchak Sliw, an Aish-inspired rabbi and newly-appointed Jewish studies teacher at King David. Stevie was a tough nut who didn’t think belief in G-d had anything to do with Judaism, but Rabbi Sliw was undaunted by the self-proclaimed atheism his students fashionably professed.

Still, Stevie refused to attend Rabbi Sliw’s Jewish studies classes, specifically because the arguments were too compelling and Stevie had no desire to shake up his personal inner world. But when his classmates were beginning to be influenced by Rabbi Sliw, Stevie felt a responsibility to save them from becoming indoctrinated. And that was one reason he agreed to accept Rabbi Sliw’s invitation to a Pesach Seder.

When they stayed up talking until 4 a.m. as the rabbi explained that the Seder was less about what happened thousands of years ago and more about what was happening in one’s own life, Stevie felt that maybe Judaism did have something to say to him after all.

Meanwhile, his plan was to take off a year to become a ski instructor in Austria before starting university, and when the rabbi got wind of the fact that he had some extra time before the skiing season would start in November, he convinced Stevie to go to Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem for six weeks.

“I figured that before I kind of throw Judaism away completely, I’d give it a go,” Shaul says. (Rabbi Sliw was asked to leave King David after the community became alarmed at the number of boys going off to yeshivah.)

Under the wings of the indomitable Rabbi Noach Weinberg, Shaul’s six weeks in Jerusalem turned into seven years.

It was a full shemittah cycle, where he went from a proverbial seedling to a full-grown tree — able to provide others with shade and nourishment. He came into Aish bareheaded, chilled, noncommittal, and came out a rabbi, husband, and father.

Dive into Destiny

Rabbi Rosenblatt received semichah in 1991, and the following year, went back to England with his wife Elana and young family. He went on to found Aish UK, the largest informal Jewish education network in the country. He knew firsthand about the country’s huge numbers of assimilated Jews — not so many years before, he’d been one himself.

Busy with his Aish work and family, he was surprised when a couple of years later, his dad, who hadn’t really changed religiously, expressed a sudden interest in going to Poland. His father had been a soldier in the British army and fought in World War II, landed in Normandy on D-day, fought through Europe, and was one of the first troops to liberate Bergen-Belsen.

“I have a letter that my father wrote to his parents as a 19-year-old in a trench in France. I love you, he wrote, I’m not a Jew who’s just going to stand by and watch as my people die, I can protect my people.”

Shaul had actually made his own trip to Poland when he was just 20 and beginning to explore his heritage.

“To this day, I can’t say where that came from — my family had not been through the Holocaust, they’d left in the early 1900s from Ukraine to the UK, but for some reason it was in my heart, in my soul, to go.”

Poland of 1987 was under Communist rule, virtually no one spoke English, and traveling there was not like going today.

“I asked friends to come along, but nobody wanted to go. They thought I was crazy,” he says. “In the end, I so badly wanted to go, I went on my own — and in so many ways it was a trip back in time. I spent hours in the Polish embassy obtaining a visa and used maps to figure out where I was going.”

Shaul made it to Birkenau, but when he arrived, the entire area was empty. Unlike today, when the area is always filled with tour groups, there wasn’t a soul in sight. Alone, he saw the ruins of the camps, the crematoria, and then he just flung himself upon the grass. “I lay in the field of Birkenau and cried and cried. It was… G-dly.”

It was so beyond him — the horrors or the past, the silence of the present, the whys — so utterly incomprehensible as to be G-dly. Touching the unknown felt like meeting G-d. “It was powerful, humbling; I knew there was so much to learn about who and what we are. I would go back to Israel, learn about that, and one day I’d bring others back here. I knew there was something here, that it could be an incredible education opportunity for Jews.”

The senior Mr. Rosenblatt’s sudden desire to go back to Poland was surprising. During his time as a soldier fighting in Europe, he’d seen more than the mind could cognize, and                                                                                                                                            never spoke about his wartime experiences.

“When he asked to go with me, I felt it would also be so personally meaningful, and it was also an opportunity to engage him religiously. We flew off together, and as we stood there in a concentration camp similar to the one he had liberated 50 years before, for him the floodgates finally opened, he spoke and recounted and cried. For me, I felt again what I’d felt at Birkenau: the grass, the sky, the mountain of ash. The unfathomable. Why? Why us? But I understood more this time, and my understanding has only deepened with every visit since — now over 50 times!”

The next time Shaul confronted the camps, just a year later, there was the semblance of an answer. Under the auspices of Aish UK, he took his first group of Jews at various levels of religiosity to Poland. It was 1995, and Poland was little-visited at that time.

“I led that trip all on my own, even driving in 1,000 miles with the food while the students flew in. And when we met up, I was going to be the tour guide. I really should’ve gotten onto the bus with them and started to talk, but someone said, ‘Hey, what about the car with the food?’ So, what could I do? I got back in the car and drove behind the bus, for another 1,000 miles around Poland.”

Once they got to Auschwitz, though, the setting did its own talking, and then he said softly: “Why us?”

“I spoke about how the greatest modern-day anti-Semite said it as it was. He hated us because of our spirituality, our morality, our higher conscience. He hated those things — they obligated him and the world. That’s why he wanted to do away with us. So what does it mean that he hasn’t won? It means that we actually live up to those ideas. That we become the full-blown conscience of the world, by being a light unto the nations, a mamleches Kohanim v’goy kadosh… that would be our victory.”

As to why it happened like this, both then and now? Why so much pain, sorrow, loss? Of course, there’s nothing to say; it’s G-d’s world and G-d’s plan.

And yet, continues Rabbi Shaul, “It’s so sad that Jews are hiding who they are, trying to integrate and assimilate. That’s giving Hitler the win. We’re not here to keep our head below the parapet. We have an incredible message for the world. So why the Jews, why us? Because we have a mission. That rasha wanted to quash it, but we ourselves must embrace it.

“A few weeks later,” says Rabbi Shaul, “a girl who was on the trip told me that she’d been about to get engaged to a non-Jewish guy, but when she got back, she realized she just couldn’t do it. She wanted to tell me that she’d just broke off with him.”

Find the Light

After getting Aish UK established in 1993, it was full-on involvement in kiruv, together with the busyness and the joy of a young family. But about five years after coming to England, that ultimate, unanswerable Why struck in the Rosenblatts’ own life.

Rabbi Shaul’s wife, Elana, just 27 years old, was diagnosed with cancer. They had four little kids, including a baby. For three years Elana fought the beast in her body, growing weaker but also stronger. As ever, it was back to those two Whys. Why this? We don’t know. But also, Why us? Why her? And there she rose to face her challenge.

“Elana used to say that cancer was her best friend. It taught her so much about life, about what was important. She became a better mom, a better wife, a better teacher, and she grew so much closer to Hashem,” Rabbi Shaul relates. “Look, we don’t control what happens to us in this world. All we have is our reactions. For me, after my own process, I choose to see how the pain and loss we went through together, and then on my own, added to who I am. It humbled me like nothing else, it brought me to my knees. It made me more human, more caring, less judgmental of other people. I’d come to the end, I’d looked pain and hardship in the face, I could relate to people telling me they’d reached their end point, they had no more rope. I’d been there. Humility is a great place to find Hashem. Imo anochi batzarah — Hashem is with us in our tzaar, says Dovid Hamelech. Elana was able to say that about her illness, and in the end, it brought me much closer to Hashem, too. When Hashem takes you all the way there, to face death… it forced me to take a long and hard look at myself. What am I here for?”

He’s able to articulate these words now, and mean them. But getting there wasn’t easy.

Several years after Elana’s death in 2001, he wrote the book Finding Light in the Darkness, subsequently republished as Why Bad Things Don’t Happen to Good People, in which he talks extensively about looking for the good in even the worst situations. But it wasn’t easy in the beginning.

“During the shivah,” he says, “I had signs up around my house to remind myself of those ideas that I knew intellectually but wasn’t always able to integrate in the crushing pain of the moment. There were times when I physically couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to suffocate.”

In his book, Rabbi Rosenblatt talks about how his spiritual resilience was chiseled through his trials, and by being married to a righteous woman who helped him approach their incredibly challenging circumstances in another way. As he writes, “We all go through pain in our lives. No one is exempt. What makes some people different from others is how they rise to the challenge of their pain… Elana and I made a decision when she first became ill. We didn’t have a choice as to whether or not she would have cancer. But we did have a choice as to how we would respond to that cancer. We knew that we could allow ourselves to despair, that we could hide ourselves away from the world and accept our fate. Or we could decide to be happy with the goodness that we had. We could make sure we enjoyed our time with each other and our children and enjoyed our lives in general. We knew that we could grow closer to G-d at this time or we could move further away — and, while we were human and there would be times that we would lose perspective, nevertheless that choice was within our hands much of the time.”

Two years after Elana’s passing, Shaul married his second wife, Chana, the mother’s helper from Jerusalem who’d stepped in to help care for his children when Elana was ill. A year after Elana passed away, the shidduch was suggested to the energetic girl — one of 12 siblings — who cared for the Rosenblatt children during their mother’s illness and for several months after her petirah. She was 20; Rabbi Shaul was 36, and an already-built kiruv personality in London. Theirs is a story of a focused and forward-thinking ability to pull together, move on, and keep building.

“Our oldest son, who was nine when he lost his mother, absolutely hated not having a mother. He was a sensitive boy and didn’t like the family being unsettled,” Chana Rosenblatt told Mishpacha in an interview several years back. “I had built a very strong relationship with all of the kids during the time I spent with them, and so our decision to get married filled the kids with relief. I never saw myself as a replacement for Shaul’s wife Elana — I knew Elana and loved and respected her. I was so much younger, that to compare myself to her was never an option. In my mind she was always special, wise, good-hearted and kind — an amazing mom. I didn’t see us competing for the same spot but rather as different parts of the same unit. I tell our kids all the time that we have enough room in our hearts to deeply love many people. I don’t think feeling love for one needs to compromise feeling love for another. Being open and comfortable with Elana’s presence has always been helpful for our family.”

Issues of the Heart

IN 2006, Rabbi Rosenblatt, who had been personally helped by the Three Principles approach to well-being as conceived by Syd Banks of Salt Spring Island, combined that mindfulness approach with timeless Jewish wisdom to found the Tikun organization. Tikun is a center of wellbeing and spirituality with the aim of helping people live better and emotionally healthier lives.

“Understanding the very nature of thought helps people rise above their thoughts,” Rabbi Shaul explains. “There’s this false premise, an expectation that there’s something out there, something outside myself, that can create my happiness and well-being, and if I don’t get it, I’ll be miserable. That I need the world to be a certain way or else I’ll be lacking in my life. The flip side, which I believe to be true, is that I have all that I need to be happy, to find my own well-being. It’s all there for me, inside of me, available for me, right here and right now, even if life isn’t working out the way I wanted it to.”

“In relationships,” he says, “those expectations of how things should be, or how my spouse should behave, actually create limitations, and they will always limit the relationship you’re in. Without expectations, your relationships become emancipated and so much more genuine.”

Tikun eventually segued into the Rabbinical Training Academy, an innovative course that assists newly qualified rabbis through the first 18 months of their first jobs (including helping them secure those jobs in a community or outreach organization).

It started around six years ago, when Rabbi Shaul’s grown son, Akiva, received semichah at age 26. He, together with a few other friends, had mastered the requisite learning and had their hearts set on becoming outreach rabbis.

“They knew the Shulchan Aruch cold, but I felt they were missing a certain element that would make them into teachers and leaders,” says Rabbi Shaul. “In my 35 years as a rabbi, I can count on my fingers the number of times I’d been asked a question on milk and meat, but other things, human things, for which one needed a leader, were coming up all the time. Mental illness, suicide, gender issues… Rabbis today are dealing with issues of the heart, and for that, they need a very different education and a mentorship period.”

The RTA is a mix of psychology, keys to emotional health, leadership, and Torah learning. For the latter, they work through various sugyos in Gemara, specifically those discussing the role of a Jew, the meaning of being a Jew, and how to relate to non-Jews and the outside world.

“The rabbis in our program are post-yeshivah and post-kollel,” he says, “and the way we learn fosters independence in learning, so they can stand on their own feet with Torah learning, outside of a framework, acclimatizing them to a new stage in life; they learn not just how to keep up a learning seder but to continue to grow in learning.”

The first thing the RTA starts with, says Rabbi Shaul, is the rabbis’ own well-being. “Rabbis are human beings like anybody else, but we often expect them to be superhuman,” Rabbi Shaul admits. “We expect them to be emotionally healthy, have a good marriage, to be good parents, but that’s not necessarily true — they’re a cross-section of society like anybody else. We’ve had rabbis with anxiety or addictions, rabbis whose marriages are falling apart. Our first job is to help them with this.”

When you’re okay with and understand yourself, Rabbi Shaul explains, you can be more human with other people. “If you’re humble, you’ll be sensitive, you’ll see the person, not just the law. The living Torah. Toras Chaim. Humility is the greatest quality a rabbi can have. Humility makes space for G-d.”

Many rabbis start out their careers with a level of shelteredness, coming from yeshivah backgrounds. But generally, it behooves a rabbi to know the gravitas of issues, to know when to refer clients to professionals, and when to liaise with others.

“And there can be very real collateral damage if our rabbis are not fit for purpose,” Rabbi Shaul says, recalling a story that happened when he first started out. “A young man came to me saying he was deeply depressed and feeling down. I spoke to him about hopefulness and positivity, told him he’ll be okay, but two weeks later he took his own life.”

People are up against all sorts of challenges and it’s not about condoning their behavior, especially when they turn to things that are against the Torah’s way. But today’s rabbis, says Rabbi Shaul, need some sense of where to go with issues like these.

“The bottom line,” he says, “is that when a person turns to you as a rabbi, they need your support, not your judgment.”

The RTA also has a women’s cohort, which has its own distinct and parallel program run by Rebbetzin Chana Rosenblatt. Additionally, Chana also runs CR Practice, an outgrowth of her own journey of self-discovery and development. A gifted and gentle teacher, she has 20 years of experience in social work, as both a family counselor and as a Three Principles practitioner — a system used in tandem with Tikun, centering on the fundamentals of personal well-being and the role of the mind in generating our feelings and perceptions and in overcoming daily challenges.

To help people focus inward and beyond, Rabbi Shaul wrote a guide to prayer entitled Mean What You Pray, a powerful book that breaks down each brachah of Shemoneh Esreh, showing how each section is truly a means to a deep, meaningful, and enduring relationship with Hashem.

Why Us?

For Rabbi Rosenblatt, it’s the trips to Poland that, several decades later, are still a pivotal part of his inspiration efforts. Today’s trips are open to rabbis along with their own community members, providing a deep and shared experience for both. The rabbis, for their part, are generally young, while congregants can range from middle age to pensioners in their 70s and up, and together with their own children, it’s often a multigenerational experience.

Rabbi Shaul shares how his father once worked with a fellow named Dario, who it turns out was a survivor of Birkenau where he’d been a member of the Sonderkommando — the ones who transferred the bodies of the gassed victims to the ovens. It was rare for a member of the Sonderkommando to have survived; eyewitnesses to mass murder, the Nazis didn’t want to leave them around.

“I met him, and encouraged him to come back with us to Poland,” Rabbi Shaul relates. “He was totally irreligious. He’d never said Kaddish for his family, but when we got to the camp he broke down and cried out the Kaddish. He told me the next morning that for decades every night he’d dreamed of Birkenau and last night had been the first time he hadn’t.”

But when the group asked him whether he believed in G-d, he answered, “How can I, after what He did?”

Two days later, they were at the Rema’s grave in Cracow, when Shaul noticed an older religious fellow together with two younger men walking around the graveyard. When Rabbi Shaul discovered that this man was a survivor who had come back to Eastern Europe with his children, he told him, “We have a survivor with us, and when asked about his belief in G-d, he said, ‘How could I believe in G-d after what He did?’ So I’m asking you, how do you deal with that question?”

“Well,” said the elderly survivor, “how could I not believe in G-d? Hashem was with me every single moment in the camps. I don’t believe that there’s any survivor that doesn’t believe — and if you say there is, let me speak to him.”

Shaul approached Dario and told him the other survivor wanted to speak with him. “I could not tell you a word they said,” Rabbi Shaul recalls. “You had to be there. It was so intense, so experiential. But I remember what Dario said at the end of it. Of course, I believe in G-d. I’m just angry.”

This year, significantly more people joined the trip along with their rabbis, and when Rabbi Shaul asked them at a pre-trip meeting why they were coming, many said they’ve been feeling more connected as Jews since October 7.

“I wasn’t really expecting that,” Rabbi Rosenblatt says. “But that most brutal and horrific day for Jews seems to have awakened a Jewish identity in many that has lain dormant perhaps their entire lives.”

As Jews far from Israel, alienated from Torah, are coming out of the woodwork, wanting to hear, finally open to engage and explore, it’s part of what Rabbi Shaul knows. Nothing is all bad and everything has a reason. Bad things don’t happen to good people. There are many questions of course, and so much we don’t know, but for Rabbi Shaul, it’s back to answering the call of the questions he’s made his own: Why us? Why the Jews?

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1030)