Reform Jew Becomes a Follower

By Ronald L. Rosenfield, Cleveland Jewish News

As a Reform Jew, I thought taking a six-session course with the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute (JLI) – the “educational arm of the worldwide Chabad Lubavitch movement” – would require my fending off proselytization while focusing on course content. What I found instead was a remarkably open atmosphere that welcomed secular as well as halachic points of view.

Although my love of Judaism has not been grounded in formal Jewish learning, I have always been curious about the traditional and contemporary answers to questions of “what do we, as Jews, believe and why?”

So when I received one of JLI’s eye-catching mailers about 18 months ago, I decided to risk putting myself into what I thought would be an uncomfortable environment because one of the course offerings particularly intrigued me. Set in the time that the rise of Rome spelled the fall of Jerusalem, “Portraits in Leadership” would examine six sages of the era. This combined my general Jewish interests with a particular interest in ancient history. I had read a lot of fact and fiction pertaining to the Middle Ages and feudalism, and I could now travel back centuries earlier through a Jewish perspective.

I walked into a room at The Mandel JCC, having armed myself with defenses I never needed to use. Immediately I was put at ease by the accepting nature and candor of our instructor Rabbi Yossi Marozov and by the openness of my fellow students. I also was taken with the dialectic approach to our topics – an ideal milieu for a trial lawyer who is hardly a wallflower.

Rabbi Yossi, who often responded to challenges with “Those are valid views and criticisms,” made an ancient period, the insights of our sages, and tenets of our faith all come alive. We learned about Rabbi Akiva, who sacrificed his life for the Torah; the teachings of Hillel; and Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakai. Totally new to me was the story of Rabbi Yochanan, who had the wisdom to put the preservation of the Torah before the preservation of the First Temple – understanding that our people could survive without the Temple but not without Torah.

After that course, I paid more attention to subsequent JLI mailings. Meanwhile, I had started to pursue a master’s degree in bioethics at Case Western Reserve University after decades of specializing in medical legal issues as a trial attorney. So by the time “Medicine and Morals” was offered this past fall, I was looking for ancient and modern Jewish perspectives on issues I was studying in my master’s program: in vitro fertilization, abortion, organ donation, end-of-life decisions, euthanasia, putting one’s life at risk for another.

And I had another compelling reason to delve deeply into “Medicine and Morals.” I had recently been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

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