Rabbi Gains National Reputation as Lecturer

West Hartford, CT — Jennifer Hartwell never felt the emotional connection to Judaism that so many of her Jewish friends experienced. Raised in a Reform Jewish family in which the attachment to Jewish life was more cultural than religious, she was, in her words, a “reluctant Jew.”

“I was skeptical of organized religion. I didn’t buy the endless number of “shoulds” – you should marry a Jew…you should feel something special for Israel — without meaningful explanations as to why,” says Hartwell, who moved to West Hartford from Boston three years ago with her husband and two young children.

Then, last spring, Hartwell, a professor of management at the Western New England College School of Business, took a semester off. The time to “connect with Judaism in a meaningful way,” she told herself, was now or never. Looking for something that sounded “low-commitment,” she stopped in at a class called “Bagels and the Bible” that met at the JCC in West Hartford. The effect was immediate.

Within the first half hour of class, recalls Hartwell, “I felt a door within my mind open to a passageway that had always been shut tight.”

The reason for Hartwell’s instant epiphany: Rabbi Shlomo Yaffe, spiritual leader of Congregation Agudas Achim, an Orthodox congregation in West Hartford, who was leading the class.

“[Yaffe] was scholarly, articulate, responsive, outrageously coherent… talking all about a subject – Judaism – that had been approached in my upbringing void of intellect. I realized by listening to Rabbi Yaffe that the key to my heart was clearly through my mind. He has introduced me to the miraculous depth of Torah study. His class has been transformative for me.”

Hartwell is not alone. In fact, she echoes a refrain often voiced by those who have taken Yaffe’s classes or attended his lectures, on everything from Talmudic law and philosophy to the Kabbalah to Maimonides to the Judaic perspective on an array of scientific and social issues. He offers classes and lectures in New York, California, Nevada, Texas, Missouri, Virginia, and sundry points in between…but that it all comes out of Connecticut.

“I’ve been teaching adult education classes in Hartford for more than 15 years and every lecture I give anywhere comes from a class I gave in Connecticut at some point,” says Yaffe, who became spiritual leader of Agudas Achim in 2001 after serving as education director at Chabad House in West Hartford, and has, during the last few years, developed a national reputation as a scholar, author and lecturer.

Today, while Yaffe spends one day a week as a scholar-in-residence at Chabad in Manhattan, where he lectures and gives tutorials from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., and devotes several days a week to his work for Chabad.org (for which he writes an Ask the Rabbi column and recently began a project to revamp their Bible site), he still tends to his congregation and continues to offer a full load of courses at his North Main Street synagogue: four classes on several subjects on Friday; a Kabbalah class on Sunday morning, a class for teens in early evening and an in-depth, line-by-line study of the Bible at night. His students include Jews and non-Jews, singles and couples, young and old…you name it. Some stay for a semester or two. Many have been attending for years.

“We began two years ago with Bereshit (Genesis), and we are just doing Exodus now. That gives you a sense of the depth of our study,” says Edlyn Blitzer who, together with her husband, studied Kabbalah with Yaffe and now attend his Sunday evening Bible class.

“He combines the intellectual and the spiritual,” says Blitzer, who lives in West Hartford, where she serves as assistant principal at the Hebrew High School of New England.

That penchant for combining the intellectual with the spiritual is precisely what led Yaffe to found The Connecticut Symposium on Contemporary Legal Issues and Jewish Law a few years ago, along with Rabbi Joseph Gopin and several members of the community.

“We got very involved in researching American law and comparing it with Judaic law. There are areas where Judaic law can actually solve some of the conundrums and problems that exist in the American legal system today,” he says.

In turn, that interest in the law led Yaffe to offer a monthly legal symposium at The Institute of American and Talmudic Law – a non-profit organization based in mid-town Manhattan that provides continuing legal education to attorneys and other legal professionals. Speaking to increasingly crowded classes, each month Yaffe partners with a lawyer or judge to tackle hot-button topics in law. Drawing upon his expertise in secular law and legal ethics, Yaffe also serves as a legal consultant and lecturer for the New York Legal Assistance Group.

Despite his burgeoning national reputation, however, Yaffe remains rooted in West Hartford.

“This is a beautiful community and I love Agudas Achim and its people. I’m pretty aggressive about chasing people to come in to the shul and I try to make the services user friendly. And I concentrate a lot on classes. There is definitely an interest and a hunger for learning out there.”

For Hartwell, who now also periodically attends Yaffe’s Sunday evening Bible class, few people are able to sate that hunger as well as Yaffe.

“I hold a masters and a PhD degree and have worked with a lot of great scholars at top universities. But, I believe Rabbi Yaffe is by far the best teacher I have ever had.”