A Running Start

Rabbi Kalish had little time to bask in the headlines. The legislature was then considering empowering local school boards to control the expansion of charter schools, which could harm parochial schools long-term by limiting school choice. One of his first acts in office was to ensure that as long as charter schools fulfilled state requirements, local school boards would not get involved.

Another priority was to introduce a bill to simplify managing claims and billing procedures for the many nursing homes and long-term care facilities in the state.

Rabbi Kalish, who devotes five hours a week to CrossFit training, got off to a running start.

First, he had to learn the lay of the land. Even a new state representative is entitled to a full professional staff, including a chief of staff, a scheduler, and a district director responsible for communication with constituents; and a political outreach director responsible for campaign fundraising and even knocking on doors, which is an important part of politicking in the 16^th district, even if it’s impossible to reach all of its 108,000 residents.

“All this can entail anything from sending a mazel tov, or just setting appointments and events,” Rabbi Kalish said. He also set up a website with the help of a Jew from Afghanistan who lived in Israel for 15 years.

His early legislative accomplishments included laws protecting health care for citizens with preexisting conditions, toughening penalties for religion-based hate crimes, and expansion of a scholarship tax credit. However, politics can be a minefield, and as a fellow legislator once warned him, “In politics you will always be judged by your greatest failure.”

That failure came sooner than expected.

In March 2020, Rabbi Kalish lost his seat when he finished second in a three-way Democratic primary election, mainly due to backlash in this predominantly liberal Democratic district over his decision not to support a controversial bill expanding state abortion rights. In an era when single-issue voters can make or break an officeholder’s career, Rabbi Kalish failed a political litmus test he could never have passed.

He remains on the job until his opponent takes the oath of office in January 2021. While his relatively brief term in public office ended in a disappointing defeat, he took it in stride, drawing on another wellspring of inspiration — the connection he built with his rosh yeshivah, Rav Avrohom Chaim Levin ztz”l, a member of Agudah’s Council of Torah Sages. Rav Levin was niftar just two months before Rabbi Kalish took office, but his sage advice is very much alive.

“Never stop,” the rosh yeshivah told him. “You have to be a soldier for Klal Yisrael. A soldier listens. A soldier develops discipline to do what’s professional and what’s correct.”

“I think about that all the time,” Rabbi Kalish reflects. “Klal Yisrael is awesome, but sometimes people have their own negius [interests]. The rosh yeshivah said people will get upset. Some people will try to bring you down and some people will be jealous. He said just don’t stop.”

Thomas Who?

Rabbi Kalish credits Rav Levin with helping him keep his political head on straight more than once. The first instance came in the heady days following Rabbi Kalish’s involvement in President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.

Noam Neusner, one of Bush’s speechwriters and Jewish advisors, recruited Rabbi Kalish to campaign for the president in the Jewish sections of northeast Ohio, mainly Cleveland. Rabbi Kalish took a short leave of absence from the Agudah to help Bush. His work made an impact. Bush’s margin of victory in northeast Ohio enabled him to carry the state by a slim 2.1% over challenger John Kerry. Had Kerry won Ohio’s 20 electoral votes, he would have become president.

A grateful President Bush thanked Rabbi Kalish personally at the first Chanukah party following his reelection, and Rabbi Kalish kept an ongoing connection throughout Bush’s second term.

“I literally had unfettered access to the White House for four years,” Rabbi Kalish said. “I could send an email to the White House and say, ‘I’m coming today,’ and I’d get in.”

In many of these meetings Kalish advocated for issues of importance to the Orthodox Jewish community.

“We accomplished a tremendous amount, including obtaining grants for different communities around the country, plus saving the Pell Grant programs a number of times,” said Rabbi Kalish, referring to the federal financial aid program that has helped many Orthodox Jews study for college degrees.

With Bush ineligible for a third term, political jockeying to succeed him got underway quickly, and Rabbi Kalish was part of the intrigue. When Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) was contemplating a 2008 presidential run, he hosted a dinner for Jewish leaders in his private Senate dining room.

“Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb and I were the only two Orthodox members there,” Rabbi Kalish said. “We had kosher food, thanks to Norm Coleman [then a Jewish Republican senator from Minnesota].”

On his way to dinner, Rabbi Kalish called Rav Levin for his advice.

“The rosh yeshivah told me: ‘You have a mission. You’re there as a representative of the Torah world. They’re going to try very hard to get you to lose focus and take advantage of you in some way. Don’t lost focus.’ ”

The first test came in the blink of an eye.

“I remember, literally, the first second I walked in, Norm Coleman whispers in my ear, ‘This is the spot where Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office,’ ” Rabbi Kalish recalls. “Who wouldn’t be completely swept away by the history? Immediately, the words of the rosh yeshivah came back to me. Don’t lose focus. Think about the Torah world and what we could accomplish.”

Rabbi Kalish and Rabbi Weinreb focused on conveying the talent the Orthodox Jewish community has to offer and showing how the community can be an important political ally.

Frist never did run for president, but after Coleman left the Senate, he became chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition, remaining a close and important ally of the Orthodox community.

Bipartisan or Be Partisan?

So how did Rabbi Kalish, after such close affiliation with a Republican president, switch hats and run as a Democrat for the Illinois state house, in one of the country’s most liberal districts? Not that there’s much choice in Illinois. The Prairie State has delivered a double-digit victory to the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1992. Democrats hold supermajorities in both state legislative branches.

“We really shouldn’t be either Democrats or Republicans,” Rabbi Kalish contends. “We’re Orthodox Jews first and foremost. We serve the Ribbono shel Olam and not a political party.”

In truth, Rabbi Kalish has always been bipartisan, or perhaps a better term would be “a hybrid politician.”

I’ve followed his career since starting at Mishpacha in 2004 in my previous capacity as news editor. At the time, Rabbi Kalish was still Agudah’s Midwest regional director. We became better acquainted in 2007, when the Agudah promoted Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel to executive vice president, with Rabbi Kalish assuming some of Rabbi Zwiebel’s responsibilities as national director of government affairs before shifting to a state development role in 2012.

For most of those years, Rabbi Kalish preferred working “under the radar” and was usually an off-the-record or background source for me.

In those early years, Rabbi Kalish was always very well-informed but guarded in his public statements and in dealing with the media. He will be the first to admit that he is not the typical politician who gauges the person he is talking to and then tells him something he thinks he wants to hear. If anything, he is too honest and open, in a profession whose participants often thrive by being vague or using disinformation to keep opponents off balance. He therefore kept a tight lid on his on-the-record statements.

We kept in contact even after Rabbi Kalish left the Agudah in 2014 to start his own lobbying firm. So when January 2019 rolled around, and Rabbi Kalish was sworn in to his new position as state representative, I called him for an interview, during which I reminded him of an off-the-record conversation we had in 2006, when he told me he considered himself a Nixon Republican growing up, and a Joseph Lieberman Democrat when he got older.

“I was a Nixon Republican,” Rabbi Kalish said, “but there’s a saying, ‘If you’re not a Democrat when you’re young, you don’t have a heart, and if you’re not a Republican when you’re older, you have no brain.’ So I guess I’m still young.”

Fight or Quit?

But he acquired more gray hairs quickly. Any hopes for a 100-day grace period in office were dashed when, at the end of May 2019, a controversial bill cropped up on the legislative agenda.

Known as the RHA, or Reproductive Health Act, the measure was intended to decriminalize late-term abortions and safeguard a woman’s access to legal and safe reproductive rights. But faith communities, Jewish and Catholic, vehemently objected to language in the bill labeling this a “fundamental right,” phrasing rejected by the US Supreme Court and never adopted even by more liberal international bodies, such as the European Convention of Human Rights and the United Nations.

Rabbi Kalish and Catholic legislators worked behind the scenes to prevent it from coming up for a vote—and they had thought they succeeded. However, when nearby Kentucky passed a draconian anti-abortion measure, a group of freshman Illinois female legislators pushed it to the top of the agenda. Bending to pressure from the left, led by the powerful pro-choice lobby, the house speaker announced a vote would be held in two days.

The next 48 hours were a political nightmare for Rabbi Kalish.

As a Democrat, he was expected to fall in line with the supermajority and vote yes.

As a rabbi, he had to vote no.

There was a third force at play here.

Rabbi Kalish was bound by an imprudent promise he had made to the legislator he succeeded, Lou Lang: that upon accepting the position, Kalish would vote like a mirror image of his predecessor. Lang, an old-fashioned power broker, took that to mean Rabbi Kalish was bound to vote yes on the RHA, just as he would have.

Rabbi Kalish ended up voting “present,” which merely means a refusal to take sides. It does not count toward or against passage of a bill, but it contributes toward the quorum, or minimum number of members required in attendance for a legislative body to conduct business legally.

It didn’t matter that the RHA passed the state house easily by 14 votes and that Rabbi Kalish’s vote was not decisive. In politics, you can’t make everyone happy — but this vote made everyone unhappy.

His Orthodox constituents were dismayed, having expected he would vote no to stay in line with their common religious beliefs, and to prove that his brand of politics was based on values and integrity, not expediency. Lang and the overwhelmingly liberal Democratic district expected a yes vote on a hot-button issue that serves as a litmus test of for grading a legislator’s fidelity to progressive principles.

In retrospect, Rabbi Kalish admitted that in his zeal to help the community and retain this “Jewish” seat in the state house, he made a promise without calculating all of the potential consequences.

“For sure. The foolish mistake I made was thinking nothing could come up that I couldn’t find an answer for or explain,” Rabbi Kalish said. “That’s often how balabatim like me, lacking daas Torah, think. ‘We’ll do great things for the community and everything will be okay.’ ”

This time it wasn’t okay. In the aftermath of the vote, Lang vowed political revenge and recruited a strong progressive candidate to oppose Rabbi Kalish in the March 2020 primary.

Rabbi Kalish was faced with a fresh dilemma: to resign or run hard for reelection.

One Erev Shabbos, he had a heart-to-heart conversation with a friend and colleague in the Illinois legislature who grew up in the community.

The conversation ended with the legislator giving Rabbi Kalish the following advice: “You tried to separate church from state and you couldn’t do it. So why torture yourself? Why not step aside? Don’t run for reelection.”

This advice jarred him.

He had made major strides in Springfield to assist his constituents. He secured more than $150 million to upgrade local nursing homes; $17 million to fund reconstructions of a major north-south artery in Skokie; and obtained more than $3.5 million for capital improvements at 15 different nonprofits in his district, including a half dozen Orthodox Jewish ones.

The words “just don’t run” just didn’t jibe.

“It’s not that running for elections was ever something I craved,” Rabbi Kalish recalls thinking. “I devoted most of my career to public advocacy, lobbying if you will, mainly for governmental groups and agencies on behalf of the Orthodox Jewish community. I thought to myself: Who is going to speak for the religious community if not one of their own? Who is going to defend our rights to practice our faith in this country when we are under constant attack? That same sense of duty prevented me from dropping out.”

Mending Broken Fences

Having made his decision to run, the campaign quickly turned into a political pressure-cooker.

“Oh, my G-d, what attack wasn’t made on me?” Rabbi Kalish recalls. “Phone calls, protestors at public appearances, emails, direct mail, hate mail, anti-Kalish press conferences, articles in newspapers — you can’t imagine how they came after me. I became my opponent’s number one target.”

At no point did he succumb to anger or to lash out.

“Any time a feeling like that came up, I just thought to myself, I don’t want to lose the reward for staying quiet, for accepting responsibility for my actions and accepting Hashem’s outcome. We ran an exceptionally clean race. We focused on ourselves and on our issues and didn’t badmouth our opponents or their issues.”

He thanks Hashem for giving him strength to withstand the assault.

“Everyone who was involved against me was a shaliach from Hashem to send a message to me and the community. I believe, with a full heart, that we put forth every last effort we could and Hashem told us no, because, for sure, no would be better for me.”

Rabbi Kalish admits that some fences still need mending.

“Some people in the Torah community are convinced that I made these decisions on my own,” he said. “All I can say is that anyone who knows me, my background, and my connection to gedolei Torah built during my yeshivah years and during my tenure as director of national government relations at the Agudah should know that has never been, and never will be, the way in which I operate.”

Overall, he says, “The situation has calmed down.

“Maybe it’s because I’m not paying attention to it anymore,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot. As much as I regret saying that one line to Lou Lang — that my votes would mirror his — I don’t regret any of this. What I’ve learned has made me a better person. My family and I have gained so much through this entire process.”

Most of the Kalish children are young adults and politically savvy from all of their father’s years in governmental affairs. Two of his children hold degrees in political science from Touro College. His wife Shulamis and 21-year-old daughter Yehudis campaigned for his reelection vigorously, knocking on doors, while 22-year-old Chaim Tzvi researched issues and managed his father’s social media.

Handling all of the turmoil took much intestinal fortitude.

“We tried not to get bogged down by seeing all the terrible things people were saying about me, but one of my sons, and my daughter, were on the front lines of some of this negative blowback,” Rabbi Kalish said. “My wife was a rock in making sure we stayed focused on what was important to the community.”

In the process, the Kalish children learned something about their father that brought them positive reinforcement.

“When I was in the Agudah, I often had occasion to travel to Eretz Yisrael, or to the rosh yeshivah, to ask questions on behalf of the tzibbur. I used to say it was the best perk of my job.”

However, during his campaign, Rabbi Kalish was often in contact with the Novominsker Rebbe ztz”l and ybdlch”t Rav Elya Brudny, and the children were also on the front lines of this.

“They were involved in formulating the questions, and my wife was with me at the time the questions were asked, and my kids heard the reports right afterward,” Rabbi Kalish said. “It was awesome because it really validated for them all those other years when all they heard was that Tatty was talking to gedolim. It was very special.”

Three days after his March 17 primary defeat, the Kalish family, among millions of others around the world, were forced into quarantine due to the coronavirus.

“Everything stopped,” he said. “The message for us was clear: Hashem will show us a path, so in the meantime, let’s learn Torah. Our house became a beis medrash. It’s been awesome.”

Goodbye Springfield, Hello Israel?

While Rabbi Kalish will miss out on additional legislative opportunities to help his constituency, he won’t miss life in Springfield. Not the weekdays away from his family and kehillah in Chicago. Not the 17-hour days on the floor of the legislature, and certainly not asking the sergeant-at-arms to ensure he remained undisturbed when scrambling for a quiet spot on the house floor to daven Minchah. Nor will he miss the lonely nights in his small apartment near the state capitol.

“I was the ‘rabbi’ and I went to Springfield saying that at no point will anyone see me after hours, going out at night to ‘unwind,’ like many of the legislators do after session. I got a lot of learning done, but it was exceedingly lonely.”

What helped him persevere was another sage piece of rabbinical advice, this time from Rav Nissan Kaplan.

“He told me, ‘Your wife has to establish your apartment there. It has to be her apartment too. You wife has to be part of setting it up to make sure it’s a Yiddishe home.’

“I had a fridge and made myself meals,” Rabbi Kalish says. “Every Thursday, before I left Springfield, I would take pictures of the fridge and my cabinets. My wife would look at the pictures, go shopping, and then pack up what I needed in terms of food and clothing for the next week. She really felt part of it. It wasn’t like her husband had a different apartment, it was like we had a second apartment, and this all was very good for our shalom bayis.”

Soon, the Kalish family might start a search for a third apartment — this time, in Israel.

“When countries began shutting their borders, and Eretz Yisrael shut its border because of the coronavirus, I looked at my wife and said, ‘What kind of accusations will we face before the Kisei Hakavod?’ ” Rabbi Kalish said. “You davened v’sechezenah and you had an opportunity and you didn’t take it. Do you believe what you daven or not? Instead, you choose to live among people who don’t like you, even though you proved how much you could do for them.

“That’s not to say the State of Israel, in its current political climate, is perfect, but at least there’s a massive governmental support system for Torah Jews. It’s where we, as a people, belong, and we have an ability to make a difference. This is an inner reflection that has led to clarity, which may lead to a move, as a result of my loss.”

With telecommuting an ever-more popular option in the coronavirus era, and a new nonstop flight from Chicago to Tel Aviv, Rabbi Kalish is considering a return to lobbying in some capacity. He is also in talks with some major nonprofit organizations to see if they have a role where he can find sipuk hanefesh.

“When I walked away from the Agudah to start my own business, I think I stepped too far away from community work, which is one of the lessons I took away from all this,” Rabbi Kalish said. “That’s where my heart is, that’s where I had siyata d’Shmaya, and I want to keep giving to the community.”

The Party Line for Jews

With the Joseph Lieberman Democrats getting sidelined by the AOC Democrats, how does Rabbi Kalish feel about being part of the Democratic Party today, both personally after its progressive wing ganged up to vote him out of office, and in the bigger picture, considering that wing poses an ever-growing threat to the Orthodox Jewish way of life?

The answer to that question is not cut and dry.

“Jews and Democrats can trace their relationship back to Truman and FDR,” Rabbi Kalish says. “When Jews came to this country, they needed an education and jobs. FDR’s New Deal gave people hope. Truman, as a shaliach from Hashem, gave us Israel.”

Jews were also early activists in America’s labor movement, and even today, while the term “union” can carry a negative connotation, Rabbi Kalish notes that some of America’s strongest labor groups are organized in the health care professions, where so many Jews hold jobs. In addition, he contends that while the concept of taxing the wealthy to support the poor differs from the Torah’s prescription that the rich give charity to the poor, it is not antithetical either.

Having said that, Rabbi Kalish minces no words in saying that “the Democratic Party, as a whole is unwelcoming to organized religion.

“The Democratic Party will say we respect freedom of religion, but the radical left wants to remove organized religion from this planet because it gets in their way,” he says. “But we, as a community, also have to remember that the radical right hates Jews — all of us. Both sides have a disdain for the Orthodox community — the radical left because of religion, and the radical right because we’re Jews.”

He views the ongoing radicalization with much consternation and felt revulsion when watching a viral video of protestors in Washington, D.C., accosting restaurant patrons, forcing them to raise their hands in solidarity.

“This mob mentality exists strongly in the left,” Rabbi Kalish says. “You cannot disagree with them on any point and still be part of them.”

Yet that doesn’t mean that we can’t support some of their legitimate complaints. He says his interaction in the state house with black legislators gave him a glimpse of a picture he had never experienced.

“The black community is severely discriminated against. And I didn’t realize it, for many reasons. Most of us are sheltered. The discrimination against this community is fierce and it is ingrained in our society, and the number one reason for it is because they’re black.”

Three months into his term, Rabbi Kalish experienced this firsthand in his district. Skokie’s crime rate has risen in recent years, but unlike in neighboring Chicago, murders are rare. According to the FBI, eight people have been murdered in Skokie since 2010.

One of those murders occurred on Erev Pesach in 2019, just three months after Rabbi Kalish started his term.

You can Google the incident to this day, and information remains scant. A 22-year-old college student named Edward L. James Jr. was gunned down in what police termed an “isolated incident,” telling residents not to worry.

Rabbi Kalish knows better.

James was being threatened in his former neighborhood in Chicago’s dangerous South Side. His family moved to Skokie, hoping to shake the threats. The bad guys tracked James down and killed him, execution style.

“When the cops came, the shooters were already gone, but [police] drew their guns on the family members,” Rabbi Kalish said. “They didn’t even look at the victim. It took five minutes until they called for an ambulance. Why was that the reaction of the police? I’m not going to fault them for their training and their thinking, but that’s ingrained by society. I only know all this because I was a legislator and tried to work on this so that race relations didn’t blow up. Baruch Hashem, we avoided a massive protest, or even a terrible riot.”

Asked about those who criticize the black community and say they’ve brought their problems on themselves, Rabbi Kalish bristled.

“So what? Are we supposed to let them die, or kill each other, or should we show them a better way and fund programs that will help lift them? Isn’t it our responsibility as Jews to be a light unto the nations?”

Having said that, Rabbi Kalish supports a zero tolerance policy for rioting and looting. “People should be arrested the moment a rock is thrown, or break a window to steal something,” he said. “At that point, you’re no longer a protestor, you’re a looter and criminal.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 830)