W

alking up the wooden slatted stairs to the Baum* home you smell Shabbos even if you aren’t aware of its imminent arrival. A thick chicken soup is bubbling on the stove next to a tall pot stacked with saucy ribs. On the opposite counter a large bathtub-like Crock-Pot puffs that bean-potato-meat aroma that we’ve all come to love. On the floor is a delivery from the local grocery; cases of chips sodas plastic goods and bags and bags of chocolate chips all waiting to be put to use.

It’s a regular Thursday night at the Baum home.

“I used to fret when my baalei teshuvah walked in on Thursday night” admits Leah Baum. “I wanted them to arrive an hour before Shabbos when the table was set the Shabbos clothes were donned and the house looking like we were ready to greet the Shabbos Queen with grace.”

But her company enjoyed coming precisely when the challah dough was rising. The guests wanted to be there when the pile of Costco’s best fresh fruit arrived in stunning arrays and were laid on the counter. They wanted to be part of the “Yanky did you come out of the bath yet? Shlomo it’s your turn now” cheerleading.

“I learned a lot about hosting. I came to understand the benefit of showing baalei teshuvah the regular hectic parts of our lives and not just times we like to showcase like Friday night. They get to see behind the scenes: How much food does a family need for Shabbos? How does a family juggle five children under the age of ten? Who prepares the Shabbos candles; how much does the husband participate in domestic matters; how do you cook ten courses in one day; what do you do after Havdalah; are frum families really normal? These are all important questions for a person who has never lived this life. I’m happy to let people find out.”

Leah used to be afraid to let people see her children fight. Today she knows it’s perfectly okay to be comfortable and relaxed. Yes her children squabble. Yes she takes time out for herself after a taxing Shabbos. Yes her house looks the part when she has just made twenty-two dozen chocolate-chip cookies brownies potato kugels cabbage salad tomato dip teriyaki salmon gefilte fish challos chicken farfel meat pecan pie … and she still has a couple of recipes lined up on the counter. It’s all part of the waxing and waning of life. A mess happens you clean it up. A fight erupts you forgive each other. A shidduch doesn’t work out and life moves on.

The First Guest

This evolution from shy mother of five to shadchan, mentor, rebbetzin, and hostess was one Leah never expected. Her friend Esther Goldstein recalls: “I’ll never forget the first time I came to you for Shabbos. When you greeted me, your face was beet-red; you seemed shy and almost intimidated.”

Leah is the type of person who could forever stay in the background. She is content to listen instead of talk, and you won’t find her on center stage, ever. She would’ve laughed if you told her she’d be a sought-after rebbetzin one day. Kiruv was beyond her.

Leah planned to be a quiet stay-at-home-mother, perhaps serving food to a solitary guest her husband would bring home from shul. Yet she’s become someone others flock to, and she has, together with her husband, conducted huge Shabbatonim for people with backgrounds completely foreign to her own. How did that happen?

It all started with one college student who was looking into Judaism and visited the Baums’ rebbe. Rabbi Baum was waiting in the same fluorescent-lit room and struck up a conversation with the young student. He then extended an open invitation for Shabbos. How happily surprised he was when Steve actually accepted.

Steve became a regular at the Baums’ table and soon he evolved from jeans-wearer to wool-tzitzis-flying-in the-wind chassid, in rapid leaps and bounds. “Today, we would have seen this as a red flag!” says Leah. Then, they were happy their kiruv efforts were bearing fruits, and they went along for the ride. When Steve started crashing, they roller-coastered with him in heart-stopping brutality. Steve asked challenging questions and raised objections to their whole way of life. The Baums quickly realized they had bitten off more than they could chew. They reached out for help and asked Jacob, a baal teshuvah who was already part of the community, how to proceed.

Jacob, their new kiruv advisor, urged them to stay afloat and not to get swamped in a quagmire of questions. “Just send him a care package of tzvibel kugel, dessert, perhaps a warm steak. That ought to help.”

Figuring that Jacob, who had the menu all figured out, could probably use the same care package, they promptly followed his advice, wrapping packages in silver foil for both Steve and Jacob. They learned a lot from their encounter with Steve, but they learned the most from his departure. Steve left Judaism after his brief, turbulent foray, but Jacob, who had seen the devotion the Baums had shown Steve, put himself on their guest list.

At the time, Leah was recovering from a difficult birth. “I usually prepare more food than I need. I’d rather eat leftovers on Sunday than be short on Shabbos.” But that Shabbos, Leah had not prepared anything. They were going to subsist on whatever they had in the freezer, which was scarce. Jacob came over to Rabbi Baum right after davening and asked if he could join them for the meal. “We divided whatever we had. If the portions were beyond even skimpy, Jacob didn’t show he noticed.” He became a regular, often bringing his friends and family along.

Like Family

Eventually, Jacob asked to board at their house. They were living in a three-bedroom apartment, and could not completely give up their spare room. So Jacob kept his belongings in a laundry basket while the Baum children used his room to perform plays and cut paper.

“It used to bother me when he would bring his friends over precisely when activity reached a boiling point. But I now know that we gave him the most important training.”

Jacob stayed with them for half a year, and the Baums included him as family. And the family ties continued expanding as Leah found herself pacing the halls one afternoon, awaiting the arrival of Jacob’s parents.

“I made my house spotless, I cooked up a feast,” she recalls. “My bones were shivering from apprehension. What would I talk about with these elderly, not-yet observant people from LA?”

From meeting the parents, the Baums moved along to the next stage — meeting prospective matches. Jacob and his friends needed shidduchim.

“I never thought I’d be a shadchan,” laughs Leah. “Some of my sisters were already involved in matchmaking, but as far as I was concerned, the only matchmaking I was good at was pairing mismatched socks — of which I had plenty!”

But Leah did want to help Jacob and his friends.

“I recall my first shidduch call. I was really nervous while dialing the first number. But after a while I gained people’s trust, but most of all, I gained trust in myself — that I was doing a good job. People told me that they would meet a girl only because I suggested it. This made me appreciate the trust they felt in me.”

Today, Leah has many families who credit their happiness to her ideas and guidance.

Soon, Leah was getting guests every Shabbos and shidduchim appointments during the week. Friends came, followed by friends’ friends. When singles came to Leah for an appointment, she always invited them for Shabbos with her sweet smile, which could hardly be refused.

The balance between mother and rebbetzin became quite challenging. Although Leah made a rule that “the afternoons are for the kids,” there was always the shidduch that needed to be arranged, or some desperate guidance that had to be dispensed before that night’s date. There was often the old friend that popped in from Eretz Yisrael or Florida.

Leah could be busy with people all day. But as a mother whose plan was originally to be a stay-at-home-mommy, she insists on maintaining a sprinkling of crayons on her table, and homework spread out on the rug. Her children know she is there for them.

Expanding Circles

At one point, the Baums planned a big Shabbaton for guests who had come once but never had a chance to return, and at the same time, to give a chance for visitors to bring along friends. “For that first Shabbaton for boys, I started baking three weeks in advance and freezing fancy cakes and yodels. As time went on, and we had more and more weekly guests, there was no more time for such advance preparation. Besides, I learned that only Hungarians like pastries and cream cakes; the most popular treats are brownies and chocolate-chip cookies, which are easy to whip up and even easier to gobble up!”

The crowd diversified as it grew. Starting with college students and yeshivah boys from the local Ohr Somayach, the family expanded to include girls from the Upper West Side. Then, boys from that neighborhood joined as well, most of whom were professionals. Their parents followed, giving the group a healthy dose of maturity. An Israeli surgeon came and kept her first full Shabbos at the Baums. There was Jennifer, on the way to India, who stopped in at the behest of her stricken sister, and decided to go to Israel instead. Elyakim the musician, Moishe the artist, and Suzan who practiced Chinese medicine were all thrown into the mix.

Leah’s world was vastly different from theirs. She remembers the first guest who brought her flowers as a gift. Living a kollel life, she didn’t own a vase at that time, so she placed the flowers in a spare netilas yadayim cup. The guest knew what gift to bring her the next time: a crystal vase.

Though Leah did not know much about college, who went there, what they learned and why, she quickly forged a connection with all the graduates who visited. She was open to learning from her guests, and they had plenty to teach her. Therapists taught her how to negotiate shidduchim with sensitivity and how to set boundaries between her family and friends. A chef taught her how to braise her roasts to lock in the flavor. Doctors spoke of interesting ailments and the cures in their specialty. Historians fascinated her husband, who is a history buff himself. Leah still remembers the guest who taught her on which side of the plate to set the forks. There was the guest who taught her nuances of the English language, which she readily thanked him for, sinceEnglish was her second language.

They, in turn liked to come into her life and observe it. They liked seeing the Baum family relate to each other. They liked the interaction between the kids and Leah’s story of how she grew up in a chassidishe home. They liked hearing how she got engaged — “You met him for forty-five minutes?!” — and they loved the Shabbos atmosphere where no cars roam the roads. They enjoyed going to the tish and observing the chassidim sing and dance. They appreciated the warm welcomes they got in shul. They loved strolling the street, where men and woman have a separate designated side for walking. It was all so pure and novel.

They were taken by Rabbi Baum’s eloquent divrei Torah and rousing song. They even enjoyed the time Rabbi Baum spends with his kids, reviewing their parshah sheets and telling them stories in Yiddish. “The guests find it inspiring to hear Yiddish spoken. My husband’s story-telling is like watching a skit in a different language, so the body language is understood. My guests mention they wish they could learn Yiddish. They love the sound of it.”

Not All Answers Needed

When the Baums first started out in the world of kiruv, Leah approached anyone who understood the outside world with questions.

“I was worried whether we’d know the answers to the questions that were bound to come up,” she remembers. “As we got comfortable, I learned that we don’t need to know all the answers. When we get a hard one, my husband acknowledges that it’s a great question, and says truthfully that every question is great if one is curious and wants to learn … and then he says ‘Torah is alive, let’s look it up.’ If he still cannot find the right answer, he asks the rav. That too leaves a memorable impression, since we do not seem like know-it-alls. It leaves people with the feeling that it’s okay not to know everything. You can look it up or ask your local rabbi.”

When conversation gets too intense, Rabbi Baum breaks it up with a niggun and then comes back to the topic.

All this is what keeps people coming back, so many years later. They enjoy the exuberant hero’s welcome when they arrive back “home,” and the full buffets of food from which they can enjoy refills and doggy bags. They know Leah will keep them in mind for a shidduch date if she meets someone applicable. Whatever they wear, opinions they hold, degrees they have attained, crisis they have gone through — it all has a place in the Baum’s home.

Leah, who was content to stay in the kitchen and let her husband talk, now finds herself constantly surrounded by people who actively seek out her counsel. “If I don’t have what to say, I can always listen. I have found that that is always valuable.”

It’s often challenging though, when Leah finds herself with a situation that grew beyond her wildest expectations. “We’ve often thought of giving up,” she admits. “With my husband’s teaching salary, we can hardly afford to feed forty mouths a week. There have been other challenges that made us pause and beg to stop.”

However, Leah sees this as her calling and her source of blessing. “Obviously, Hashem dropped us into this situation. Who are we to put on the brakes?” Leah appreciates that Hashem has allowed her strengths to be developed in a most unusual way — by depositing seeking souls in her kitchen. If this is the gift Hashem has granted her, she accepts it with grace, and does all she can to live up to the task.

“The truth is that we are the ones who benefit the most,” she says. “When guests come because they appreciate our way of life, it makes us appreciate the things we take for granted. When a person decides to keep Shabbos for the first time after tasting ours, it makes us treasure our own Shabbos table.

“The usual Thursday evening question my boys ask is, ‘So who’s coming for Shabbos?’$$$SEPARATE QUOTES$$$”

Her children love it and while they are reticent at first, like their mother, they enjoy participating in a conversation once a guest has initiated one. The whole family pitches in to help with the work, the older boys with peeling, kneading the challah dough by hand, concocting garlicky dips, and vacuuming their rooms. The younger kids help with the cleaning efforts and tasting the goodies.

The Baums’ community took note of their hosting habits and started referring whoever needed a place. In return, they provide the Baums with much appreciated support. The Rebbe has been their stalwart support whenever any question arises. Neighbors and friends pitch in with available rooms, even three hours before candlelighting. A local caterer offers fresh salads for every large Shabbaton. “The team effort is what makes our Shabbos unique. People really give of themselves.”

Leah’s quality of “giving of herself,” is perhaps the strongest magnet for those who pass by her mezuzah. Her smile, quiet presence, and open ear, all remain the same from when she started out in kiruv on rather unconfident ground. Leah is undisputedly the “mother” of this large family.

“I recently told someone I was afraid of strangers. ‘You? But you always have strangers!’ my friend asked, surprised. I told her that these were no strangers. They were all referred to me and thus were my acquaintances and friends.” It took no more than two years and the “Baum Family” already numbered over a thousand souls.

Though the first Baum guest, Steve, who pulled them into kiruv, is today raising non-Jewish children, the snowball of chesed continues to roll. Steve rebuffed all of Leah’s overtures and care packages with a red “return to sender” mail stamp. Yet he can never return them to the pre-kiruv times, before Hashem sent him as the messenger to start them on their journey as guides to lost souls.

*All names have been changed.

(Originally featured in Family First Issue 237)