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Partners in Torah, Partners in Eternity
The Personal Stories, the Life-Changing EncountersCompiled by Rabbi Eli Gewirtz
Partners in Torah, Partners in Eternity
Partners in Torah--they're partners for life.
It starts off as a conversation. It develops into a simple partnership - two Jews spending one hour a week learning together, in person or by phone. But for many, that weekly learning session through Partners in Torah becomes a journey of self-discovery, a powerful dynamic of two Jewish souls learning and growing together.
In Partners in Torah, Partners in Eternity, an oustanding collection of fascinating, life-changing stories, you'll meet Jews from around the world and across the sprectrum whose lives were, and continue to be transformed by this revolutionary organization.
Discover...the power of a partner.
Book Excerpt from Partners in Torah, Partners in Eternity
 |
Partners in Torah, Partners in
Eternity:
From
the renowned Partners in Torah Jewish organization comes this
outstanding collection of fascinating, true stories of Torah partners
worldwide - & how their weekly Torah learning sessions totally
transformed their lives. |
Powering Up the Torah Study
At home in Toronto, a teenaged Benny Powers wanted more.
He had been given a sparse Jewish education, and nothing at all since becoming bar mitzvah. He found himself interested in Judaism and thought it was a shame that he knew so little. He started looking around on the Internet, and soon found his way to Simpletoremember.com, a website that offers many interesting articles on Judaism presented from the authentic Torah perspective. It was an eye-opener.
Benny corresponded with the webmaster, David Greenberg, and confided that he was searching for a greater connection to Judaism and more resources to bone up on everything that was out there. David recommended that Benny get himself a Partner in Torah.
Benny, who had never been to visit Israel, was a prime candidate for a mentor who was young, savvy, and could help get him there. Avraham Weiss fit the bill to a tee.
Avraham, who had traversed quite a journey himself, would be able to relate to Benny’s search. And Avraham lived in Israel, where he was studying at the Lakewood East Yeshiva.
The two started talking. At first, Benny says, it was pretty informal. The basic Judaism kind of books which so many partners start off with together didn’t suit Benny, who by this time knew a bit of the fundamentals. So he and Avraham would go back and forth with questions and answers. Avraham would tell him a relevant vort on the parashah. They discussed all things Jewish, and Avraham was eventually able to help Benny fill in the blanks.
“We started learning even before I began university, and it was great. But it was once I started university that his regular phone calls really made the difference. Surrounded by non-Jews who were less than congenial toward my sprouting Jewish practice, Avraham supported, encouraged, and inspired me the whole year.”
Benny came to Israel for the first time on a Birthright trip, then stayed on for the acclaimed Essentials Program at Aish HaTorah. And the rest, as they say, is history...
“When I decided to come to yeshivah in Israel, Avraham’s care and concern for me didn’t stop. Shabbos meals, simchahs shared, and a loving, attentive ear were his offer, and I readily accepted. Now he and I are close friends, and I consider him like a family member in my new home, so far from the old one.”
At Aish HaTorah in Yerushalayim, Benny no longer has to wait for international calls to connect with a heritage that has been waiting for him forever.
The Power of an Hour
Two partners, one hour of Torah study a week. As Yossi Taub has discovered, this adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Before joining Partners in Torah, Yossi had volunteered for another community organization that took lots of his time. He got deeply involved in the project and went all out. His efforts met with success, baruch Hashem, and he looks back on the hard work he put in with the satisfaction that comes of knowing it paid off.
With Partners in Torah, Yossi thought he entered into a simple learning relationship and didn’t really think the time spent would, or even could, be as profitable or as transformative. After all, just an hour a week was all that was asked of him, and that was indeed what he had been doing for the last two years. Unlike his previous project, there were no exhausting phone calls at odd hours, no tough emotional issues to deal with on the other end of the line, no desperate crisis control needed. Nonetheless, Yossi and his Partner formed a very special relationship through steady learning each week at their scheduled time. This relationship, nurtured not through sleepless nights and incessant hard work but through simple learning, is something Yossi marvels at and says he’s learned a lot from.
David London, Yossi’s Partner, had already become frum when Partners in Torah introduced them. He had recently moved to Toronto where he had a better chance of finding a spouse who was Jewishly on the same page, and was getting started in his newly kashered kitchen. The two began with hilchos Shabbos and have kept at it steadily. Sure, they’d schmooze a bit occasionally, but never really veered too far off of the page. When David told Yossi about a girl from New Jersey he’d met and that he wanted to meet him on one of his shidduch trips to the tri-state area, Yossi was thrilled. David soon brought the young lady with him to Yossi’s house, where the partners met for the first time.
Fast forward: David invites Yossi to the wedding in New Jersey. Yossi was obviously touched, but when David called him three days before the wedding, asking if he could honor him with a berachah under the chuppah, Yossi realized that the relationship was more important to David than he ever imagined.
Yossi, who had never previously met anyone at this wedding other than the chassan and kallah — and even them, only once — somehow felt like family. He left the wedding with an astounding sense of the potency of Torah learning.
“All I have ever done for David was put in my hour’s time each week. I had no idea how important I had become to the person on the other end of the phone. I didn’t help him solve any personal problems, or save him from catastrophe, or do anything more for him than just learn with him. But this pure Torah study formed a bond between us which has become so important to us both.
“People have said that the relationships a yeshivah bachur makes with his chavrusa while learning are deeper than those he may later make with coworkers or friends,” Yossi muses. “Torah brings people together. It’s the same thing here. Although I hadn’t realized it... There is no way I could have become so close to David in the amount of time we share each week had we been pursuing something secular or just schmoozing.”
The unity of Yisrael v’Oraisa v’Kudsha Brich Hu chad hu has taken on new meaning for Yossi Taub and David London.
Frum...and Fun
Samantha Tucker went on a Birthright trip and was approached by Partners in Torah while in Israel. Although she promptly forgot all about it, within a week Samantha got the initial call from Partners in Torah. What would she be interested in studying about Judaism? When would she be available? “We’ll find you a partner,” they said.
A week after that, she got her first call from Raizee Soffer. Samantha remembers thinking, Raizee? What kind of name is that? Raizee sounded really nice and always called Samantha on time. Samantha asked lots of questions. Some of them didn’t pose too much of a problem for Raizee. Others required outsourcing, and Raizee would run up the steps of her house and get the answers from her father while Samantha waited on the phone. Sometimes Raizee would write down the really tough ones and get back to Samantha once she’d done more research. They started out in February and talked their way through many things, including Pesach, which was soon approaching, and then Shavuos.
Then one day Raizee told Samantha she’d be spending the summer working at a camp, and her schedule would be changing. “Where’s camp?” Samantha asked. It turned out to be Camp Sternberg, only thirty-five minutes away from Samantha’s home in Rock Hill, New York. The two made plans to meet.
“Raizee called me one day and said that she and her friend Rachel were out of camp and happened to be at Wal-Mart. Could we get together?” “I told them where to meet me. I figured that, as a native, I knew the store really well and could plan this strategically. I wanted to be sure and look them over before they saw me. I mean, if they looked really weird, I’d just never appear... All I knew was that Raizee is tall.
And I found them, crouching down in an aisle, trying to get a good look at me before we met!
“We had a great time schmoozing — I think we spent two hours at Wal-Mart! Meeting Raizee and her friend Rachel in person, I could tell these were two of the nicest people I’d ever come across. The way they spoke to me... They were laughing and telling me about camp.
There were all these private in-jokes that they actually explained to me; they included me. None of my friends would ever have done that. It was really something.” “Since we’d hit it off, they invited me to visit camp. So I did.
The first time, I didn’t know what to expect. But I wanted to do the ‘let’s-be-religious-for-a-day thing,’ so I got dressed for the occasion. I wore a long black skirt with a large slit down the side, a short-sleeved polo shirt, and flip-flops. This was my idea of what observant people wore.” “I wanted to bring them something, but they wouldn’t let me. I said, ‘Come on, guys, you’re in camp, and I’m in civilization. What do you need?’ But they wouldn’t give in. Finally, when they saw I really wanted to bring something, they suggested I bring pizza — they told me everyone would love me and I’d make lots of friends.” “I brought the pizza. And the girls were just so normal — not weird, not dressed up in some strange outfit. They were just girls having fun, just like my own friends. The pizza made a big hit, as promised, and I had a great time.”
Raizee says the point of having Samantha meet her at camp was to show her what it’s like to be in a Torah environment. Hearing about frum life is one thing — seeing it in action is something else entirely.
To that end, Raizee and her pals invited Samantha for a Shabbos. Samantha was overwhelmed. She had never experienced anything like this. Samantha’s mother is Sephardic and had carefully cultivated traditional observance in their home. Her dad, a native of the Catskills, had worked in the kosher hotels there as a teenager and knew a lot about what people did on Shabbos. In their home, Shabbos was a weekly taste of tradition. But in camp, Samantha saw a completely different Shabbos. “The singing...and everyone was all dressed up. The singing especially had a strong effect on me. The idea that all these girls would stop eating, in camp, to sing, because it was Shabbos...”
Samantha didn’t understand a word of any of the songs she heard.
But she understood that there was a deep undercurrent of the spiritual, and that these girls felt very connected to Hashem. It was magical to her. She had so many questions. Some Raizee knew how to answer, some she didn’t. “More than once, Raizee would tell me, ‘I don’t know, let’s go ask someone’ — and they’d have just the answer for me, on the tip of their tongues, before the question had even been put to them at all. It was clear to me that Hashem was showing me there’s something special here.”
She’d ask questions like, “Hypothetically speaking — what would I tell my parents if I wanted to start keeping Shabbos?” and she and Raizee and Raizee’s friends would work it out together. “They kept inviting me back. I had a job working at a pool, but I was having much more fun at camp. Someone made some kind of half-joking comment like, ‘Maybe you can work here second half!’ And at some point I said, ‘Hypothetically speaking, what if I wanted to come stay in camp?’ ”
A job materialized for Samantha and she started working in the office. The girls in camp gave her a crash course in davening and hilchos Shabbos. “My parents were not thrilled about all of this. I think my mom felt threatened by it. I mean, she was the one who had taken such pains to establish Judaism in our home — and here I was, making her feel that she hadn’t quite done enough. My father was convinced I’d joined a cult. “My parents came down and spoke to the camp director, Rabbi Greenwald. He reassured them, and they didn’t stop me from going to camp.”
It helped that there was lots of other outreach going on at Sternberg. Through its ALOT division, Sternberg gives public school girls a taste of religious camping. Raizee and Rachel were involved in that, in addition to being lifeguards. Those campers were much younger than Samantha, but their presence helped her understand that reaching out is something frum people do, and that being the beneficiary of it doesn’t make you a “case.”
When camp was over, Samantha was committed to keeping Shabbos and kosher. But how to do this back at Bucknell University? She tried to transfer to NYU, thinking that the greater New York area would be so much more conducive to shemiras hamitzvos, but this couldn’t be arranged quickly or practically enough to make sense. So
Samantha ate prepared, canned kosher food in her dorm room and alternated spending Shabbos with Raizee, Rachel, and some of the other friends she had made at camp when she did not travel home to spend time with her family.
Keeping halachah by herself, with so little real information, was no easy task. “At that point in my life,” Samantha recalls, “Raizee’s initial hour a week on the phone became about an hour a day, as she helped me work through everything.”
Raizee, who has since gotten married and added a husband to the team of people who would answer Samantha’s questions, has taken on yet another key role in Samantha’s life. When Sam was ready for shidduchim — a different kind of partnership — it was only natural that Raizee would be helping her do research on young men who were suggested for her. But how heavily the word “partner” would factor into the rest of Sam’s life had yet to be seen.
The references for one prospect included Josh Garbarsky, a student at Yeshivas Sh’or Yoshuv in Far Rockaway. Josh, too, had been a Partner in Torah. And like Sam, he’d signed up while on Birthright.
Returning home to Phoenix, Arizona, he was soon learning with Rabbi Elazar Meisels, then of Detroit. He learned with the rabbi for eight months and then accepted Rabbi Meisels’s offer of a plane ticket to come and experience Sinai Retreats, a summer immersion program then held in Moodus, Connecticut. He saw his first Shabbos there.
When he returned to Phoenix, he found the lameness of working grueling hours on deals that didn’t always work in his job as a car salesman too much of a contrast to the richness of a Torah life. He realized that he needed to get himself back to Israel — and within forty-eight hours, Partners in Torah wired him the money for his airfare there. He learned at Yeshivas Ohr Somayach for four years before returning to the United States and settling in at Sh’or Yoshuv. When Raizee initally called Josh to ask about his friend on Samantha’s behalf, she was impressed by his manner. The shidduch between Sam and the friend didn’t pan out. But Raizee remembered speaking with Josh and thought plan B might just work. And it did. The two were married this past November and now live in Far Rockaway, New York.
Even before the shidduch Raizee made for her, Samantha’s story is striking. When Sam talks about the transition period of her life, the satisfaction of getting answers to all of her questions seems to take second place to the warmth and acceptance she got from Raizee and her friends. Interestingly, what amazed her most wasn’t the vast amount of new knowledge she was acquiring. Rather, what made the strongest impression on her was how pleasant it is to live a life of Torah.
Meeting girls who made sure to include a stranger in their jokes, who went to whatever lengths necessary to welcome a newcomer and provide for all of her needs because they felt a deep attachment to the spiritual — this is what won her over.
The kiddush Hashem that Raizee and her friends achieved that summer in Camp Sternberg spoke volumes, and Samantha Tucker was listening.
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