The Greatest Challenge

Seventeen years ago, when Rabbi Greenwald began writing a guidebook for helping baalei teshuvah more easily integrate into mainstream Orthodox Jewish life, he based his original manuscript on a lecture series he was asked to give to couples who’d made the leap and were now navigating uncharted territory, young families straddling new hurdles no one in Neve Yerushalayim or Ohr Somayach told them about when they committed to a life of Torah and mitzvos.

It took close to two decades until the just-released Life After Teshuvah: Five, Ten and Twenty Years Later, was finally published by Mosaica Press. (For Rabbi Yaacov Haber, head of Mosaica and always open to publishing material that deals with complex yet important realities, the book was close to his heart; he is currently rav of Kehillas Shivtei Yeshurun, an integrated “BT-FFB” community in Ramat Beit Shemesh.) The book, says Rabbi Greenwald, is part of his own answer to the clarion call of his longtime rebbe, Rav Shlomo Wolbe ztz”l, who told his talmid on many occasions that the integration of baalei teshuvah into the frum world is going to be the next great challenge of the generation.

Rav Wolbe (who was himself raised in a secular German home and became a baal teshuvah while at the University of Berlin in the 1930s, going on to study in the foremost European yeshivos and becoming the voice of a sophisticated version of traditional mussar that spoke to yeshivah bochurim and newcomers alike) understood that people who have made life-changing decisions will at some point find themselves second-guessing their choices. Rav Wolbe made it clear that it’s almost impossible not to go through this process, the internal struggles that come with questions and doubts, especially when new life situations and challenges arise. People might even ask themselves questions like, “Was my life really so bad then?”

“Rav Wolbe recognized that many of those extraordinary people who have turned their lives upside down and inside out will face times of confusion and disappointment, disillusionment and frustration, even five, ten, or twenty years later,” Rabbi Greenwald says.

Rabbi Greenwald wanted to create a guide for those who have made the transformation from a secular to a Torah lifestyle, helping them to navigate their new life with confidence through the challenges, doubts, and questions that commonly arise, especially when the beauty of a perfect Torah society seems tarnished by inevitable human failings. He addresses topics such as marriage, family, integration, and education, while acknowledging that the dreams and expectations of baalei teshuvah can also mingle with disappointments.

“They were raised in one world, switched over to another, and are raising children in yet another, their background providing no frame of reference to where they are now,” Rabbi Greenwald says. “For anyone who went through such quantum changes that are absolutely in contrast and contradiction to who they were and where they were, and this applies to anyone who’s made serious changes in life, there will naturally be questions, insecurity, fear, doubt, and a need for lots of support.”

It’s no secret that a lot of things in the frum world work on the system of “protektziya,” of knowing the right people, and newcomers to the system generally don’t have a famous grandfather or well-connected relative that can help advocate for them, especially when it comes to challenges like getting kids into the school of their choice.

“A common grievance I’ve heard from baalei teshuvah over the years is that they have no protektziya,” Rabbi Greenwald says, “but really, it’s the way the entire world works — you want an appointment? You call someone who knows someone. And in certain areas, the frum world works the same way. If I don’t know you, how can I trust you? Who can vouch for you? Knowing the right people makes a difference — and that’s just a fact of life, everywhere. Of course, it seems to lack honesty and fairness, and many times it does, so we just expect more from the Torah world. But learning to accept the realities of our society is part of finding our place. By the way, I’d say that 80 percent of those frum families don’t have protektziya either.

“You know, I once represented my father, meeting with Professor Moshe Mandelbaum, former Governor of the Bank of Israel, about some international deal my father was interested in. At one point in the discussion, we hit an impasse regarding some regulations. I asked him how we could overcome that hurdle, to which he responded,   ‘You know what I like about Israel? If you know the right people, you don’t need protektziya.’”

So Many Questions

Rabbi Greenwald says he felt particularly motivated to write a book about the integration of baalei teshuvah because he himself has straddled both worlds from the time he was born.

His mother, Miriam, became Torah-observant back in the 1950s, long before it became a movement, or even a phenomenon.

“My mother, raised in a secular American Jewish home, discovered Yiddishkeit while in college — one of those extraordinary individuals who searched and found — and she’s been an inspiration to everyone around her ever since,” Rabbi Greenwald says. “My father came from a frum Hungarian family, so I grew up in a home that had that presence, too. But we also had non-frum grandparents who never became shomer Shabbos — when we’d come over, they would buy Meal Mart and paper plates. And while I was growing up, our home was famous for its open-door policy — we’d have kids from the street living with us for weeks or even months at a time. So the outside world was never really foreign to me.”

Zecharya went to Toras Emes in Brooklyn as a child, and when his family moved to Monsey, attended Yeshiva of Spring Valley before moving on to the Yeshiva of Staten Island. But it wasn’t always a smooth ride for him.

“Intellectually, I’m very much a baal teshuvah, too,” he acknowledges, recalling how, as a teenager, he was filled with questions and doubts. “I’m a rebel by nature. I never would just accept something without analyzing and understanding it. But I also realized that being a rebel is not an end in itself. Hashem gave us those kochos so that we should let go of the things that are not right, are not emes, and fight for emes.

“On the outside I always toed the line, never acted out, never went off the derech, even though on the inside I was on a very serious journey; and being a very emotional and passionate personality requiring engagement and purpose, I was turned off by anything that felt fake. I didn’t break the rules, but I didn’t have a geshmak in them either.”

When Rabbi Greenwald graduated 12th grade, he joined Rabbi Berel Wein, who’d opened a yeshivah with a vision of creating rabbanim and mechanchim, as the first bochur in the beis medrash. He then went to study in Eretz Yisrael, where Neve Yerushalayim founder Rabbi Dovid Refson, a close friend of his father who realized that Zecharya was searching for a rebbe,  introduced him to Rav Shlomo Wolbe, the mashgiach of a world-class yeshivah in the town of Beer Yaakov.

“Rav Wolbe became my rebbe for life,” Rabbi Greenwald says. “It put me on a whole new trajectory. He held my hand for the next 25 years.”

Integrate or Alienate

A young Israeli Sephardi girl from the southern town of Dimona — with the very American-sounding name of Linda — was an au pair for family friends of the Greenwalds who were living in Bnei Brak. One of the family members suggested the shidduch, and soon Zecharya and Linda Greenwald were standing under the chuppah, on the threshold of building a home that would turn out to be a drop-in place for hundreds of new baalei teshuvah over the years, in addition to their own 15 children.

Initially, Rabbi Greenwald learned in Rabbi Aryeh Rotman’s kollel, a three-year program after which the avreichim are required to find Torah-based positions. Rabbi Greenwald took over a faltering yeshivah for weak/on-the-fringe boys called Ateres HaTorah, and after two years, once the yeshivah was on its feet and growing, he moved on to another yeshivah that was essentially a holding block for boys on the edge.

“I felt that we not only needed to keep them off the streets, we needed to push them forward into a more positive place,” Rabbi Greenwald recalls. “I got those kids into other yeshivos where they really did progress, so I guess I basically closed down my own yeshivah.”

After that, he started what for Israel was a revolutionary institution: Darchei Shalom, a yeshivah outside of Jerusalem, catered to boys who learned carpentry, photography, electronics and other crafts in addition to Torah learning. He headed the yeshivah for 12 years, until the financial burden became too great, and a year later, Rabbi Refson encouraged him to open up a Bais Yaakov seminary under the auspices of Neve Yerushalayim.

“I told Rabbi Refson, ‘Why should I do that? It’s not my thing. And is it really necessary to have another seminary?’ He said, ‘There’s always a need for another good school. We need many schools, so that every girl can be in a good school.’”

Rabbi Greenwald indeed started Me’ohr Bais Yaakov, which is now beginning its 26th year — and he has great hakaras hatov to Rabbi Refson, who gave him the opportunity and the financial backing for the first ten years.

When the Greenwalds were a young family living in Jerusalem’s Kiryat Sanz neighborhood, Rabbi Meir Schuster would drop off a few backpackers from the Kosel on Friday night and again on Shabbos.

“Hundreds of newly-awakened young Jews came through our home, and for many it was their first introduction to Yiddishkeit,” Rabbi Greenwald says. “And later, as I started working with kids who were having a hard time, I realized that many of them were children of baalei teshuvah. In my 38 years in chinuch — 25 at Me’ohr and another 13 with struggling kids — I would say that about 30 percent of my students over the years have been children of baalei teshuvah. So I’ve gotten to see the wonderful and beautiful integration of many, and the very confusing and challenging integration of others. And that’s when I started seeing what my rebbe was talking about.”

Rabbi Greenwald emphasizes that it’s not only second-generation children of baalei teshuvah who have such challenges: Frum Americans who have moved to Israel are also a group with a disproportionate percentage of children who are struggling.

One commonality among these groups, he explains, is a kind of cultural conflict in which there are demands and expectations of behavior and observance with which the parents themselves are not yet comfortable.

“This kind of conflict is extremely challenging,” he explains. “Our children need to see us conform to what we are demanding from them. We have to be comfortable with the values with which we’re going to raise them. If, for example, we send our children to schools with a certain dress code, we have to dress that way, too. If we send them to a school that teaches certain values, we have to live with those values, too. Because sending conflicting messages to children destabilizes them.

“No one wants to feel like an outsider,” he continues, “and it’s really the same for anyone who moves into a new system, be it a new immigrant or a newcomer to frum life. If you don’t join the crowd, you’ll remain an outsider and your children will be outsiders. And outsiders don’t feel comfortable. So either the kids dig in and push you away, or they rebel because they don’t like the new system.”

While he says he can’t overstress the importance of integration, there are so many cues that even the most acclimated can miss.

“Look, I myself am married to an Israeli and made a conscious effort to integrate, but still, my kids always saw me as an American,” he relates. “Just recently, one of my kids asked me, ‘Tatty why are you wearing that yarmulke?’ Now, I’m wearing a typical black cloth yarmulke that I’ve been wearing all my life, that all American rabbis wear. ‘But Tatty,’ he said, ‘here everyone wears velvet.’ And you know, I didn’t even notice. One day I looked around in shul, and saw only one other yarmulke like mine: it was another American rabbi.”

His cloth yarmulke notwithstanding, Rabbi Greenwald says the key to the success of the next generation depends to a great extent on how integrated the parents are.

“My book is definitely an attempt to encourage people to integrate as completely as they can — not to wave the flag of individuality, making a point of standing apart and saying ‘this is me’ — for their children’s sake.”

He tells the story of Manny, originally from the rodeo town of Mesquite, Texas. Manny, who still enjoys wearing his cowboy hat and riding boots, made aliyah with his family and is trying to raise his children as best he can in a frum community in Israel. Manny has had to negotiate his way through the demands and expectations of his new community, while still holding onto what was important in his former life. For example, he wants his children to love horses and sports, and he’d really like to live on a farm. At the same time, the community he lives in has its own challenges in coping with the slew of negative influences from a morally-compromised general society, and has therefore taken steps to draw some of its own clear lines of defense, including a certain style of dress, topics of conversation, and certain restrictions on recreational activities.

Manny, who has dedicated himself to Torah and mitzvah observance, can’t understand why his son is embarrassed by his father’s clothing and refused to go to shul with him. Because really, what does the color of your shirt or your cowboy boots have to do with Yiddishkeit? Manny, for his part, complains to the school and ridicules the rules of acceptable recreation, giving his children mixed messages, instead of quietly taking them riding in the summer or buying some pet rabbits for their yard — ways he could accomplish his goals without causing confusion or tension.

“Some parents,” Rabbi Greenwald says, “are inclined to send their kids to the frummest schools, but don’t realize that in that school, the teacher is going to preach that the child’s own father, who might be a professional and not an avreich, is second-class. Some schools even take a certain protective stance over the kids, helping them to understand that they have to be more than their parents, so how is a child supposed to feel, under such ‘protection’? Instead of helping the child to understand the true greatness of their parents, and to understand the extraordinary sacrifices and upheaval they made to attach themselves to a G-dly life of Torah and mitzvos, these children are left with a sense of alienation.”

They Didn’t Teach Us That

Rabbi Greenwald, who had authored Preparing Your Child for Success in 2005, gleaned an even more penetrating sense of the struggles of the baal teshuvah community when he was invited by Mrs. Rena Orlowick of Project Tvunot, an organization that helps Anglo olim deal with the challenges of Israeli life, to give a series of classes to English-speaking baalei teshuvah on successful acclimatization into the frum communities in both America and Eretz Yisrael.

“I was excited about that, because back then I wanted to write this book, and I thought I’d base it on those shiurim,” he relates. “So I gave a set of shiurim for ten core couples. They were young, capable, intelligent, trying to navigate a world that didn’t make so much sense to them, that wasn’t exactly the perfect picture they thought.”

One of those core couples was Moshe and Gail Finkle. (Moshe is a well-known chiropractor in Har Nof). It was close to two decades ago, but Gail still remembers what she calls “his perceptive and practical advice in his approach to chinuch and integration.” Decades back, she says, “we couldn’t seem to get beyond the baruk ata, but still, we really tried hard to do the whole shebang, we were going to be chareidi in the Israeli system. But over the years, I learned that it doesn’t exactly work that way. Whether as chutznikim, and more specifically as BTs, you’re never really going to be like them, and nor will they want to take you as mechutanim. And that was like, wait, they didn’t teach us that at our baal teshuvah seminary.

“I remember when my husband was sitting shivah for his father, a good Jew-at-heart who had fought in the invasion of Normandy in World War II. Moshe was telling some war stories about his father, and one of the avreichim from next door who came to be menachem innocently asked Moshe, ‘How did your father manage with kashrus?’ Moshe just looked at him blankly and thought to himself, ‘We will never understand each other.’”

Sometimes, though, there is so much internal self-pressure to integrate that a person can no longer acknowledge their own struggles.

“But if you don’t acknowledge who you are, and this is part of who you are, then you’re also not living a fully genuine life, and you lose out,” Rabbi Greenwald says. “A big part of the problem is that a few years down the line, some people don’t even want to admit that they came from that world: When a person feels they have to hide and run away from that past, that’s an indication that our society at large hasn’t fully accepted and appreciated the baal teshuvah world.

“When I went to Rav Aharon Feldman to ask him for his haskamah on the book, he told me, ‘You know, people are so well adjusted and integrated these days that the other day I went to a bris of someone who learned by me in Ohr Somayach years ago, and he didn’t even come over to me, because he didn’t want anyone to think he had any shaychus to that world. He passed for a full-fledged chareidi FFB.’

“I told him, ‘Rosh Yeshivah, this fellow is denying who he is. That’s called well-adjusted? Sounds more like he’s afraid of who he was, and he’s embarrassed by his past, afraid he’s not going to be accepted. Instead of hiding, why isn’t he proud of the cataclysmic change he made in his life, how he had the wherewithal to turn his life around? That shouldn’t be something to be embarrassed about! Do you realize what that says about our community, how judgmental we are, if he needs to deny a legitimate part of himself to be accepted, as if he had a criminal past he wants to erase?’”

So it’s really the frum community who’s holding on to the second part of the issue. “While the book was written for baalei teshuvah,” says Rabbi Greenwald, “many friends and peers have told me that this book will help the frum world to become more understanding and less judgmental, more accepting and less afraid.

Allay Your Fears

Those who are afraid to divulge their past are living with double pressure: their own reputation, and how their children will turn out. Will they be able to wave the flag of nachas, or will those children eventually “give them away” because of their own struggles?

Rabbi Greenwald breaks the pressure into increments. There are the challenges at five years in: It means building a family in a society that’s very different from how you grew up. There are grandparents involved, they want to buy your kids the things that all the other kids have, but you don’t want your children to have lifelike dolls or certain kinds of electronics. You’re starting off without the same support, whether emotionally, physically or financially.

At ten years in: There are financial burdens, new struggles and new questions. Am I doing what I should be doing, or should I reevaluate? Also, you begin feeling the imperfections of the frum world, especially as you’re now dealing with schools and social nuances. It looks like everyone else figured it out, but you don’t even have a frame of reference for these new situations. In truth, everyone at this stage has these challenges, but to you, the newcomer, it looks like everyone else has it worked out. You think to yourself, “Maybe I’m in the pickle because I became frum. Wait, what did I do? Why did I change my life around?”

“And then,” says Rabbi Greenwald, “there’s 20 years in: There are teenagers, yeshivah gedolah, shidduchim. It’s hard for everyone, and so much more for the baal teshuvah. Over the years, I’ve had conversations with at least 300 girls who’ve asked me to help them figure out how to help their parents get them married. Their parents are clueless about how the system works. So these parents need to reach out to their former mentors to help them, because this is an area where you can’t go alone.”

These are the years when the second generation starts to struggle, and the parents feel helpless: I don’t know how to give my kids direction, I don’t know how to help them through the system.

“Of course, this is a feeling not relegated to the baal teshuvah demographic,” Rabbi Greenwald says. “Every parent seeing their child struggle faces intense fear and panic, and all those feelings of dread and intense discomfort often cloud compassion for the child’s own suffering.

“And unfortunately, that’s one reason why so many kids don’t make it. What every person in the world needs when they’re in tzaar is someone to understand them. And what our children need more than anything else is that unconditional love. And as soon as we start thinking about ourselves and not them, when the focus is turned to us, we can no longer help them. So the challenge is how to get past your own pain, your own fear, so that you really can help your child.

“What do you want to do when your child is suffering? You want to help. And the way to help is to let him know that he is all you’re concerned about. And if you’re worried more about what the neighbors think than about who he is, you have just turned him into a non-entity. You convince yourself that you want it for him, that you want what’s best for him, that’s your morah heter, that’s how you answer yourself, but that’s not always the truth.

“The truth is that he has become something that bothers you instead of someone who gives you nachas. And that’s a terrible feeling for a child, who thinks, ‘She doesn’t want me. She’d almost rather I wouldn’t be here, because I cause her tzaar. She’s embarrassed walking with me in the street, doesn’t want people to see what I’m not wearing or what I am wearing, because she’s worried about herself, not about me.’ And it doesn’t matter if that child is 15 or 25 or 40. Every child wants one thing from their parents: total and unconditional acceptance.”

Yet with all the angst, all the self-questioning and recriminations, with all the disappointments and shattered hopes and frustrating limitations that have come along on the journey, Rabbi Greenwald is optimistic.

“Go back to the beginning,” he says. “You’ll see that in essence, nothing has changed in your need for meaning in life. If you were suddenly deprived of everything you have now, everything you have gained, even the parts of life that challenged you, you would again feel bereft and empty. Go back for a little while, open your eyes, and see how it really is in that other world. I cannot say that your life today is more comfortable, more fun, or more pleasurable than before. Hopefully I can say that you are living more honestly and closer to the truth.”

Because when the difference between possible and impossible is just 15 more minutes of effort, each of us has the capacity to separate the core of truth from the issues that conceal it, break out of whatever shackles us, and reach heights we never thought possible.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1032)