Drawing Secular Jews Back to the Faith

Nachum Braverman’s parents thought going through the rituals of Jewish religious life, let alone being very observant, was akin to being a member of a segregated country club. An unpleasant social clique. Altogether exclusionary.

The Braverman home in Manhattan, New York City--and later Berkeley--had no menorah, but it had a Christmas tree. When Braverman was 13, his father discouraged him from having a bar mitzvah.

“He thought it was meaningless,” Braverman, 43, recalled. “They never denied they were Jewish, but they would have listed five or six things that were more important to their identity.”

The course Braverman’s life took after he left Yale University and visited Jerusalem in the late 1970s belied his upbringing. He began to study Judaism in Israel, and later became a rabbi devoted to bringing secular Jews--like he had been--into the religious fold.

Braverman now is the Southern California regional director of Aish HaTorah in Los Angeles, an Orthodox synagogue and educational center on the Westside. Aish HaTorah teaches the Torah to secular Jews and connects its lessons to contemporary everyday issues such as business ethics, marriage and parenting. It places a special emphasis on discouraging intermarriage with non-Jews and slowing assimilation.

The Aish HaTorah (Fire of the Torah) movement was founded in Jerusalem by Rabbi Noah Weinberg in 1974. It now has 28 branches on five continents and in 14 U.S. cities. Students aren’t charged, but many make donations.

In 1983, the year he was ordained, Braverman founded the Los Angeles branch and began teaching secular Jews who were sometimes disenchanted with their lives though often materially successful. They wanted to reclaim their Jewish roots, to plumb their latent faith for meaning in life.

To encourage Jews to marry Jews, the organization sponsors social get-togethers for Jewish women and men. One of its recent Web articles by another rabbi begins: “Oh, no. The folks are hassling her again. What’s the big deal about finding a Jewish partner anyway?”

In an interview, Braverman explained the importance of maintaining Jewish families.

“Ideally, if you have a sense of who you are--and you are shaped by your identity as a Jew--you want to share your life with someone who has the same sense of goals,” he said. A Jew who marries a non-Jew is more likely to raise children not rooted in Judaism, he said.

As Americans flocked to places of worship after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an increased number of secular Jews began showing up at Aish HaTorah, which sometimes serves as a transition to other congregations.

About 1,000 people attend classes every year at the Los Angeles branch, most of them between 25 and 40 years old. In Los Angeles, eight full-time rabbis teach Aish HaTorah classes, both at the 5,500-square-foot education center at Pico Boulevard and Doheny Drive and at the homes and businesses of students.

Many of the students are far from wealthy, but some are movers and shakers, including doctors, actors, entertainment moguls and corporate heads. For example, actor Kirk Douglas and television producer Norman Lear have served as spokesmen for Aish HaTorah.

In classes, the Torah is used to stoke Jewish pride, impart practical life lessons and, Braverman hopes, inspire greater observance. Only a small percentage, he said, become truly observant, but he is pleased if they come away with some insights.

“Do you choose to be at peace in the world you live in and at odds with yourself? Or do you choose to be at peace with yourself and at odds with the world you live in?” Braverman asks one class.

Susan Weintraub, a former fashion executive who has worked for costume designer Bob Mackie and singer Diana Ross, said she would not be observing the Sabbath every week at a Santa Monica synagogue if not for starting Aish HaTorah classes 15 years ago. Raised as a secular Jew, she said her change to a kosher, religiously observant lifestyle caught her family off guard.

“For me, it was something new and I loved it, and they thought I was preaching,” Weintraub said. “They felt threatened.”

A class on love and dating persuaded her to get remarried after a divorce, and to have two more children after having one from her first marriage. Although she never attended religious schools in her childhood, Weintraub enrolled her two younger daughters in a Jewish day school.

Aish HaTorah has generated respect in other parts of the Jewish community, but also questions.

It is among several Jewish organizations that emerged after World War II and the Six Day War in 1967 to promote a return to traditional religious roots.

They were born in part of a “Jewish rebuttal of modernity,” said Rabbi Chaim Beliak of the Conservative congregations Beth Shalom in Whittier and Adat Chaderim in Los Alamitos. “Jews, like all people that became part of modernity, made certain trade-offs, for some largely at the expense of Jewish distinctiveness.”

Some of these kiroov, or Jewish outreach organizations, recruit students almost through an appeal to mysticism, Beliak said. “They rely on astrology or the ‘magic’ of sleeping with a set of mystical books at home,” he said.

To its credit, this is not a trait of Aish HaTorah, Beliak said. “There’s an element in Aish HaTorah groups that’s more rational,” more based on knowledge than mysticism, he said.

Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Westwood, the largest Conservative congregation on the Westside, sees much of what Aish HaTorah does as good for the Jewish community.

“Let me put it this way: I don’t agree with their particular approach to Judaism, but they bring people into the larger tent of Judaism, and that’s a great mitzvah [good deed],” Wolpe said. “Many of my congregants were first inspired to Judaism by Aish HaTorah.”

But he and Beliak, like others, question the acceptance by Aish HaTorah and other groups of “Torah codes,” supposed coded messages in the Hebrew Bible that some say prove God’s existence and predict certain events and people--such as Adolf Hitler. Code supporters say computers were used to find the supposedly encrypted words.

Proponents of Torah codes encourage people to believe in God because of “numerical legerdemain” rather than faith, Wolpe said.

The international Aish HaTorah organization defends the validity of the codes, asserting that “encoded information and a hidden text in the Torah is a well-known and established part of Jewish tradition.”

Braverman said that he’s not wedded to the idea of such codes one way or another, and that they are not central to Aish HaTorah’s mission.

Regardless of these debates, those who take Braverman’s classes often find that his life journey from secularism mirrors their own experience.

During World War II, Richard Polak’s father, an Army lawyer, went into bunkers where Jews were hiding and said to them in Hebrew that it was “safe now. The war is over. The Americans are here.”

“My father was a great man, but he was quite secular,” said Polak, owner of a company that helps businesses such as Netscape and Sun Microsystems expand overseas.

Polak explored Christianity and Buddhism. Eventually, he became more observant in Judaism. Polak credits Aish HaTorah with making him a more successful businessman, husband and person.

“With a self-help guy, you come out really charged; but two months later, you’re back where you started and you have to go to another Anthony Robbins seminar,” Polak said. “The Torah is a lifetime journey.”