Led by Jewish Destiny

Morristown, NJ — The road 20-year-old Yehoshua Florczak traveled to study at the Rabbinical College of America in Morris Township is odd and, he believes, destined.

Every day he visited the shopping plaza across the street from his high school in Sunrise, Fla., to buy a drink. One day he ventured into a small Jewish section in the back of an odds and ends store owned by an Israeli man.

“He had a pair of tzitzis,”recalled Florczak. “I asked what it was and he said it was a special Jewish shirt. I thought, ‘I’m Jewish. I should get one. Why not?’”

But Florczak, whose upbringing kept him distant from his faith, had no idea the eight tassels and five knots that hung from the bottom of the shirt represented 613 commandments intended to remind a Jew to be a good person. He just wore it, until an Israeli student at school told him that if he was going to wear the tzitzis he may as well cover his head.

So Florczak wore a yarmulke, too, having no idea the skullcap is a reminder to a Jew that God is always above his head.

At lunch one day a third student told him the school food was not kosher.

“Eventually, I wound up getting a book called the ‘Kitzur Shulchan Aruch’ (‘The Small Set Table’), a basic guide to Jewish law,” Florczak said. “I read it, and here I am today.”

Five months ago he arrived in Morris Township to study at the New Direction Program at the Rabbinical College of America for four years to earn a bachelor’s degree in religious studies. He is one of some 450 students there, only 40 of whom are now doing post-graduate studies in the smicha program to be ordained as rabbis.

The rest, like Florczak, want to thoroughly understand their heritage, to the point of learning Old Hebrew and Yiddish and studying the great books of the Hasidic Lubavitcher traditions — the Bible, the Tanya, the Talmud and the Code of Jewish Law — with some of the greatest teachers in the world.

Demand is growing for the scholarship of the Lubavitch Movement offered at the Rabbinical College, according to its dean, Rabbi Moshe Herson, also the chief shliach (emissary) of the movement for the state of New Jersey. A 2-year-old dormitory built to accommodate students for the next five years already is filled to capacity, he said.

Rabbi Herson was a disciple of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh rebbe (leader) of the 250-year-old movement credited with reawakening Jewish consciousness in the post-Holocaust world.

The key to the growth of the programs is the nature of chabad — the philosophy of spiritual inner growth combined with service in the world, Rabbi Herson said. That is why students from 24 states and 18 countries come to the 82-acre campus in Morris Township, where the college is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.

“We are living in a very complex, difficult society. It’s not easy,” Rabbi Herson said. “We hear locally, globally about a war here, a war there, what one does to another. Young people are looking for more integrity in the world and they’re not getting it so much. As one student expressed it, ‘The university was teaching me how to make a living. What I learned here is how to live.’”

In essence, that is what drew Florczak and others like him, such as 31-year-old Mordechai Hoenders of Eindhoven, Holland. Though he lives across the world from where Florczak grew up, they had something in common: Their families and communities offered nothing in how to experience life in a Jewish way. There was no mysticism to calm their minds, no philosophy to drive them to make a difference in the world. Only a void, a yearning for more meaning.

Hoenders was drawn to the Rabbinical College after earning a chemical engineering degree back home. He entered the college’s New Direction Program, for which 29-year-old Rabbi Boruch Hecht is director of admissions. Half the students at the college enroll in this program, geared to beginners who do not have the benefit of traditional training. Some New Direction students pursue full degrees and others come for as short a time as six weeks.

The rabbis who run the college say the New Direction men are integral to the vision of the college to spread the Lubavitcher brand of loving kindness and enlightenment across the globe. They also report that it is working. To date 4,000 graduates have opened chabad centers worldwide.

“Each center is a center of learning, a center of prayer, a center of activity,” said Rabbi Benyamin Bresinger, college director of community development. “Each one easily has 100 to 200 families they’re affecting on a regular basis and thousands and thousands on a day-to-day basis.”

This is the way consciousness rises and a tradition lives on. The success is partly due to the combined effectiveness of yeshiva students continuing a generations-long tradition of Judaism and their New Direction counterparts, who are able to reach laypeople in a different way.

Rabbi Hecht told a story from his days as a rabbinical student at the college to illustrate the point.

As is the custom of the students on Fridays, he and a friend from the New Direction program went into the community to do public service in nursing homes, hospitals, offices and homes. One day they met with a professional man in a real estate office.

The New Direction friend introduced himself as a psychoanalyst from Colombia who took a year off to study in Morris Township about his heritage.

Rabbi Hecht recalled:

“Then the man turned to me and asked, ‘And you, Baruch? What does your father do?’

”I said, ‘My father’s a rabbi.’

“’And his father?’

”’He’s also a rabbi.’

“The man said, ‘Ah, I don’t want to hear from you. Let me hear from a normal person.’”

So he spoke the rest of the time to the student from Colombia.

Each program — for those with a traditional background and those without — has its own study halls with its own teachers. One day last week, the New Direction Program study hall buzzed with conversation as students sat at tables, two by two, each with a Jewish text open before him.

“It’s not like a secular library where there is silence,” Rabbi Herson said. “Here we want exactly the opposite. When you study, study with a loud voice and argue back and forth because then you will get to the bottom of the intellectual pursuit.”

The tradition was orally transmitted long before it was written, Rabbi Bresinger explained.

“The way it is written was founded on the oral discussions, the discourses back and forth,” he said.

Surrounding the young men as they speak and debate with each other are tomes of Jewish wisdom dating back 1,800 years and stained glass windows, a remnant of the 75-year-old building’s prior incarnation as a Catholic home for wayward girls. The symbols on the windows have been changed to reflect Jewish wisdom.

It is in this hall that students such as Florczak find what they seek — the inner understanding of God and themselves.

All new students study Talmud and Code of Laws and the Bible, Rabbi Herson said, but almost universally they drink in the Jewish philosophy.

“The philosophy talks about having an integration between mind and heart. The longest road traveled is from the mind to the heart,”Rabbi Bresinger said.

“The philosophy is about being able, through learning and the intellect, to effect one’s own emotions and ultimately to change one’s own behaviors.

”The philosophy is about going into the darkest, lowest, hardest, most vulnerable place in yourself and bringing out illumination. If I can bring that out, then I’m really making a difference within and, ultimately, without.“

In the pages of the Tanya, a book of Lubavitcher Hasidic philosophy written in 1798 by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Florczak learned that finding the shirt in the odds and end store was destiny.

”It says specifically that if a person insults you, you shouldn’t respond to this person’s insult,“ Florczak said. ”You should try and correct this person but not because you’re hurt. You should correct him because he is hurting himself.

“If God didn’t want this person to insult you, this person wouldn’t have done it. It would not have been feasible or possible for this person to do it. If this person did it, God has something inside that occurrence specifically for you.”

So God had a message, a path, for him when he discovered the shirt with the tzitzis.

Like most students, Florczak does not want to be a rabbi. He wants, as Rebbe Rabbi Schneerson said, to be the rabbi of his own house. After graduation he wants to go to culinary school in Florida and ultimately open a kosher restaurant, probably in rural Tennessee.

These will be the ways he brings chabad into his corner of the world.

In the meantime, the college carries on its mission, knowing it is in the minds and hearts of its students that Judaism will live into the future.