The Bridge Builder: The Life and Continuing Legacy of Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein - Couverture rigide

Author’s Note

The first time I met Yechiel Eckstein, in 2004, I was a columnist at the New York Daily News, looking for a story. Someone told me about an Orthodox rabbi out of Chicago who was raising millions for Jewish philanthropy in Israel and the former Soviet Union. This surprised me; in my experience, most rabbis receive charity, not dispense it. Even more surprising—astonishing, in fact—was that these donations were said to come from the evangelical Christians of small-town America, many of whom had never encountered a Jew in person. I was both curious and skeptical.

Eckstein and I met for lunch in New York City, at a kosher pizzeria that he chose. For readers unaccustomed to Jewish dining, suffice it to say that it is almost always a mistake to eat at a place where the kosher certificate in the window is bigger than the menu. This was one of those places.

I should say, right off, that I am not generally an admirer of rabbis. My first brush with one came in Pontiac, Michigan, where I was raised. The Reform rabbi who ministered to our little congregation lived down the street, and my father assigned me the task of mowing his lawn. All I got for the effort was a nod of gratitude. My father explained, ex post facto, that charging a rabbi for labor would be disrespectful. From that day on, I endeavored to be respectful of rabbis from a safe distance.

That became impossible when I moved to Israel at the age of twenty, in 1967. Rabbis were everywhere, and these were the real thing: bearded fundamentalists in black whose worldview and dress code were an unchanging reflection of late medieval Poland. At first, I was charmed by these ancient survivors. That feeling changed to alarm when I realized that they were intent on imposing their absolute rules and retrograde lifestyle on everyone else. Even more alarming, they were organized into political parties that controlled or influenced large swaths of my daily life. Like a great many irreligious Israelis, I became—and have remained—rabbi averse.

As I sat in the kosher pizza parlor, watching Eckstein devour huge slices of double cheese, he didn’t really seem like a rabbi to me. Broad-shouldered and big-boned, he was built more like a retired NFL quarterback. He wore a baseball cap instead of a yarmulke and sported a two-day growth of beard, but there was nothing macho about his affect. He was sincere and friendly, devoid of the irony that enlivens so much Jewish conversation. When I remarked on this, he smiled and said, “I’m from Canada.”

Eckstein proudly confirmed that the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews—which he referred to as his “ministry”—was raising vast amounts of money from evangelical Christians for Jewish charities. But he wanted me to understand that his “mission” went far beyond that. He was building a bridge between Jews and Christians, who had been divided by animosity and mutual incomprehension for two millennia. He saw himself not as a mere fund-raiser or philanthropist, but as a spiritual teacher, able to show Christians how to reestablish their biblical connection to the Land of Israel and the Jewish people. The money, which he raised mostly by direct mail and infomercials in which he starred, was a by-product.

Naturally, I was suspicious. After the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals, televangelists had a bad reputation. And it was extremely unusual to hear an Orthodox rabbi talk about Christianity in any but a disparaging way. But Eckstein checked out. He had a prestigious rabbinical degree. And there really was a Fellowship doing what he said it did. I looked for scandals and found none, and eventually wrote a nice little man-bites-dog story.

A couple of years later, I wrote a full-length profile of Eckstein for the New York Times Magazine. I went out to Chicago and inspected the premises, saw him in action on the pulpit of a Pentecostal church in Indiana, interviewed his staff, friends, and enemies, and wrote a piece called “The Rabbi Who Loved Evangelicals (and Vice Versa)” in which I referred to him as the rabbi with the biggest Gentile following since Jesus. The piece was respectful, but I was not completely sold. If you go to the Yechiel Eckstein Wikipedia page, you’ll see that most of the material in the “criticism” section stems from what I wrote.

By now, the subject of evangelical-Jewish relations fascinated me, and in 2007, I published a book titled A Match Made in Heaven. Eckstein served as my guide to what was (and remains) mostly uncharted territory. He took me with him to a meeting with Jerry Falwell at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia; walked me through a Christian Booksellers Convention in Denver; and allowed me to come along as he led a group of evangelicals on a ten-day pilgrimage to Israel. Over the years we met often in New York and at his Chicago headquarters, where he let me see for myself how the philanthropic sausage was made.

During these years, Eckstein’s Fellowship grew into the largest private charitable foundation in Israel as well as the underwriter of much of the Jewish life of Eastern Europe. As an adopted Israeli, I appreciated what he was doing. He was also fun to hang around with, full of energy and enthusiasm rare in a man his age (or mine). Over time we became friends.

Occasionally we discussed the idea of my writing a book about his life and times. I was tempted. My last two books were biographies of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News. Like them, Eckstein is a brilliant communicator, a self-made entrepreneur, and a man willing to stand up for his ideas in the face of vitriolic opposition from the establishment (in Eckstein’s case, several establishments). They all changed conventional wisdom about what was possible. I had no doubt that a book about Yechiel’s life was an interesting and worthwhile project, but I was reluctant to do it myself.

I hope I don’t shock you with the revelation that there is no such thing as objective biography. Nor is it unheard-of for authors to write about personal friends. But it has some obvious dangers, and some less obvious. Offending a friend in print is a good way to put a dent in the friendship. Yet self-censorship guarantees a dull book at best and—unless readers know exactly what you are doing—a dishonest one.

So let me be clear. This book is authorized. My advance against royalties is partly underwritten by the IFCJ. My royalties will go to the IFCJ. This is Rabbi Eckstein’s story, and much of it is told in his words. But that is not the same as saying that this is an “as-told-to” book. I am confident of the essential facts of the narrative because I have covered Rabbi Eckstein and his ministry for more than a decade. If there were skeletons, I would, I think, know about them. Yechiel is not a man who keeps secrets.

As I worked on the book, a writer friend read it over my shoulder, and peppered me with comments like “This will never stay in” or “No way he’s going to let you write that,” or just “You must be kidding!” When Yechiel went over the finished product, he asked me to remove exactly one thing—an unflattering remark he made about a relative. His comments were mostly attempts to explain the spiritual dimension of his activities, which I often didn’t quite grasp. Not only did he accept unflattering descriptions of his character, behavior, and motivations, he actually added examples. If you think I’m making this up, read the book and decide for yourself.

Still, I can’t say that this book is unbiased. I went into it liking and admiring Yechiel Eckstein. After countless hours with him, I like and admire him more. I have seen for myself the good he does with the money he has raised. I have watched him wrestle with his enemies, his critics, and most of all, his own personal doubts and demons. I have even, on occasion, been vicariously moved by his spirituality.

I still don’t really have a rabbi. I’m not the type, I guess. But if I did, he’s the one I would want.

One

“THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE”

On a bleak Chicago Saturday in the winter of 1989, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein and his wife, Bonnie, rose early and put on their Sabbath finery. That morning their firstborn, Tamar, was to celebrate her bat mitzvah, the coming-of-age party that marks the twelfth birthday of Orthodox Jewish girls.

The Ecksteins had come to Chicago from New York eleven years earlier, after he finished rabbinical school at Yeshiva University and she completed her BA at Barnard College. For the first six years, he worked in the local office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), promoting interfaith activism on First Amendment issues. In 1983, he left to found his own organization, the Holyland Fellowship of Christians and Jews. The Christians with whom he fostered friendship were not the usual mainline liberal Protestants and Catholic dignitaries with whom the heads of American Jewry were friendly. They were evangelicals: born-again, Bible-loving Christians of a kind that most Jews rarely encountered. To the extent they were thought of at all, it was as the Other—a pack of Bible-thumping racists and Jew haters from the hinterlands. But Yechiel had learned to see past the stereotype. The evangelicals he came across in the Midwest were everyday Americans whose religious beliefs made them eager to meet and befriend the Jews, God’s chosen people. He saw the potential for a great Judeo-Christian alliance that would serve as a force for Israel and Jewish causes around the world, and help America stay on a moral course at home. It was a vision shared by virtually no one else in the Jewish community, but he pursued it with single-minded energy. To make ends meet, he held down weekend pulpits in small Orthodox congregations around the city, performed concerts, and sang at weddings with a band he put together.

In the Chicago newspapers, articles described Eckstein’s work for the ADL—teaching a course in Judaism sponsored by the Roman Catholic archdiocesan school board, leading sessions for Christian doctrine teachers on “the Jewish roots of Christianity,” addressing a conference of priests and nuns on “how God speaks to us.” One story noted that he had put together perhaps the world’s first Jewish-evangelical conference. Still, he was far from being famous, and now that he was out on his own, leading his own ministry, he worked hard to garner the attention needed to expand.

Bonnie, his wife, saw this work as evidence of emotional neediness, and she didn’t like it. She had fallen in love with a rabbi’s son, a big, good-natured jock who had played basketball for the Yeshiva University High School team and performed Hebrew folk music for adoring audiences on the kosher college music circuit. Now he seemed different, a driven and exhausted man with a dream she neither understood nor shared. Bonnie had nothing against Christians. She had known some at Barnard. It was the sort of Christians Yechiel was working with, and sometimes dragging home for Sabbath dinner—Republican Christians, Reaganites, full of Jesus talk and pious curiosity about the Shabbat rituals. Yechiel, thank God, was still a Democrat, but he was also a friend of Pat Robertson’s—had actually appeared on his TV show, The 700 Club. No one she knew watched, but still . . .

Family tensions were put aside that Shabbat morning, as they headed for the small Chabad shul in a strip mall near their home in Skokie. Yechiel’s downtown synagogue was too far for their friends and neighbors to reach on foot (Orthodox Jews are not allowed to travel by car on the Sabbath) and, in any case, he didn’t want a repetition of his own bar mitzvah, when the stress of performing in front of his father’s congregation gave him an unstoppable nosebleed that forced him to scratch his sermonic “D’var Torah” speech. Tamar wouldn’t be commenting on the weekly Torah portion during the service—Orthodox girls don’t do that—but she would be the belle of the morning, asked to speak at the party afterward. Yechiel wanted to make sure that she would be relaxed and happy. She and Bonnie had decorated the small social hall with blue and white balloons and replaced the stained white tablecloths with festive blue ones. A large cake inscribed with the words “Mazel Tov Tamar” was placed at the head table.

As Bonnie and Tamar surveyed their handiwork, a severe-looking young rabbi appeared, gave the decorations a disapproving once-over, and informed them that balloons were not allowed in his synagogue, a heretofore unknown prohibition. He also ordered them to remove the new tablecloths and replace them with the old ones. And, after inspecting the cake, he ruled that it was not kosher: it was forbidden to cut letters of the alphabet on the Sabbath. Yechiel was upstairs at the time, taking part in Shabbat prayers. He knew nothing about the rabbi’s hostile attitude, or the pressure it had put on his wife and eldest daughter.

After the Torah reading, Yechiel was planning on leading the prayers. It was the usual thing, especially for a father who was also a rabbi and a cantor. He went to the lectern and began with the opening prayer. Then the young rabbi came up and said, “No, no, no.” Yechiel was confused, but he stepped away from the pulpit. “I knew I was a controversial person, but I had been praying in that Chabad shul for a long time and at first I was shocked to be turned away like that.”

The small shul was filled that day with friends, virtually all of them Orthodox Jews. Silently he walked to the back, covered his head in his prayer shawl, and sat there, half listening, praying that his daughter’s special day hadn’t been ruined. “I was mortified.” Still, he understood. He knew that Halacha (Orthodox rabbinical law) prohibited Jews from entering Christian churches. It was considered avoda zara, idol worship, to teach Torah to Gentiles—a crime he committed every time he preached to an evangelical congregation about the blessings God had promised those who bless the Jews, or quoted the Zionist prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah. Senior rabbis at his alma mater, Yeshiva University, had denounced him. His own father disapproved of what he was doing. Orthodox Judaism is about maintaining borders between the Jewish people and the Gentile world, and Eckstein had transgressed those borders.

And yet, huddled under his prayer shawl, Yechiel Eckstein felt something else: a sense of defiance. He was a seeker and a self-examiner, a chronic critic of his own motives. But at this moment he trusted his vision. A bridge uniting Christians and Jews could be built, and he felt destined to be the engineer. He had no idea how hard the work would be, the price it would exact. He only knew, with a certainty he had never before felt, that he had no choice but to go ahead.

More than thirty years later, Eckstein recalls that certainty. “I felt humiliated and alone. It was the worst day of my life. But I never thought I was wrong. It didn’t even occur to me to quit. I have a personal relationship with God and I felt at the time that it was a divine mission, what is known in Hebrew as shlichut. Sitting in the back of the shul that day, I thought about Abraham and Isaac. In the book of Gen...