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The Topeka Question
Rabbi Avi Shafran

The Topeka Question

Rabbi Avi Shafran


Among many sources of inspiration at Agudath Israel of America's recent 79th National Convention was one that particularly remained with me - and with many others, I have good reason to believe. It was a short but powerful address delivered on the convention's Sunday morning by someone who was, until then, entirely unknown to most of his listeners.

Speaking as part of a symposium entitled "Redrawing the Map: Creating Torah Communities Across the USA," Kenneth Broodo, a young lawyer from Dallas, Texas, related how he had come to reconnect to the fullness of his Jewish heritage. His was largely the story of the Dallas Area Torah Association, one of the large handful of "community kollelim" across the country whose members spend their days learning and teaching Torah.

With an endearing lilt of a Texas accent, Mr. Broodo related how one of the kollel's rabbis invited him to ask any questions he might have. They included, he recounted, big ones like how Hashem could have allowed the Holocaust to happen and smaller ones like what in the world had possessed the kollel members to uproot themselves and their families from their insular and nurturing communities in Brooklyn or Lakewood and move to Texas.

"He told me," Mr. Broodo said, "that no questions were foolish questions." And so the lawyer continued to ask, sitting at the rabbi's dining room table week after week for three years.


Journey to a Distant Planet

Along with a group of other Dallas Jews and accompanied by one of the kollel's rabbis, Mr. Broodo took a trip to visit the New York Orthodox community. He wanted, he told his listeners, "to visit the planet these rabbis had come from." He met a number of respected rabbis during his trip - including the late president of Agudath Israel of America, Rabbi Moshe Sherer, z"tl - as well as an assortment of Orthodox laypeople, and became deeply impressed with the Jewish life he saw flourishing there.

He described, too, how Rav Aharon Schechter, the Rosh HaYeshiva of Yeshivas Chaim Berlin, told him that "Torah is the soul of the Jewish people. It's not a step in itself but rather the source of all the steps we take as Jews." And he recounted several edifying and moving episodes of his visit East.

"When we returned to Dallas," Mr. Broodo told his audience, "there was one more Shomer Shabbos Jew in Texas."


Chutzpah Lishmoh

Then he got tough. Citing statistics about intermarriage in the American Jewish community, and apologizing in advance for his "chutzpah," he asked his listeners if, as they await Moshiach's arrival and their own return to Eretz Yisrael, whether they are "planning on taking the rest of us [American Jews]" along. And then he reminded the crowd about the apathy that tragically characterized so much of the Jewish community during the Holocaust.

Referring to the continued drifting away from Yiddishkeit of the vast majority of American Jews, he posed a question: "What will history say about us?"

And then, getting more personal still: "When your children are given an opportunity to join a community kollel in Topeka, Kansas, what will you tell them?"


New York, New York

Listening to the address, I thought back to a fantasy I once harbored; it was born years ago when I lived in an "out of town" community and found myself passing through New York. Confronted with one or another of the societal uglinesses that are inevitably more ugly in a congested city, I wondered at the odd fact that so many frum Jews had chosen to live in the New York area. I understood the obvious reasons and advantages, of course, but as a foreigner was perhaps a bit more sensitive than some to the disadvantages. And then I thought about the lovely, civilized community in which I then lived (Providence, Rhode Island, which hosts a day school, girls' high school and yeshiva gedola) and other similar or smaller towns with Jewish populations. I pondered the concept of golus and the fading opportunity we have to bring estranged Jews closer to our mesorah.


"The Plan"

And then it hit me. "The Plan" would require a well-funded organization, one that could amass sociological data about willing observant Jewish families in the tri-state area: their size, their breadwinners' professions, their communal affiliations, special needs and the like. It would also maintain a comprehensive database of small towns across America with a Jewish presence but without observant Jewish residents, along with information about housing and employment opportunities.

The data would then be crunched and a critical mass of participants - 20 or 30 families of similar backgrounds - would receive invitations to move, en masse, to an "out of town" community. The critical mass of families would ensure a support system and the personnel needed to provide a proper chinuch for the fledgling frum community's children; The Plan itself would arrange employment for the invitees, and help raise funds for the construction of a shul and mikva. The new residents would then have the practical opportunity to live and learn and grow in less crowded, less stressful surroundings - and the holy opportunity to be a magnet for local Jewish neshomos.


Out of Towners, All

All right. It might be overreaching a bit to imagine Satmarer in Sioux City, or Telzers in Tuskagee or Y.U.ers in Wyoming.

But the Brooklynites in Dallas seem to be doing okay. And the confluence of the current economic crunch and the growing number of cities and towns, large and small, across America that are home to yeshivos and kollelim might well give some of us pause. The "out of town" option might just be something more of us should be considering. In any event, as Mr. Broodo noted at one point, as long as we're not in Yerushalayim, "we're all out of towners."

I don't know what most of those present for Mr. Broodo's remarks will answer should their children ever bring up the Topeka question. But I'd like to think, or at very least hope, that their response to his presentation might be a hint.

The applause exploded like a thunderclap and continued loudly for what seemed like minutes, during which time the entire crowd rose to its feet.


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This article is posted with the permission of Coalition, a quarterly publication of Agudath Israel of America, where it first appeared.


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