16 minute read
LIFESTYLES
This is a story about two American Jews, each raised in traditional Conservative homes, with a fragmented grasp of Torah. Together, they created not just a Torah-observant family, but also a one-of-akind post-high school seminary in Israel for girls from public school backgrounds.
Rabbi Yaakov Lynn had an unusual introduction to Shabbat observance. Growing up in what he called “the classic Conservative family” in East Brunswick, NJ, he had a solid Jewish identity that included Hebrew school, a bar mitzvah, and membership in United Synagogue Youth (USY), a Conservative youth movement.
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But it did not include Shabbat.
At 16, he attended a USY Shabbaton and met Shomer Shabbat people for the first time. “I knew there was such a thing as Shabbat,” he recalled, but he never imagined knowing anyone who kept it.
Meeting public school kids who kept Shabbat was eye-opening. “I was very challenged by that,” he said.
“I had this thought going through my mind that never really went away, which was that I always believed in Judaism. I didn’t know anything very much about Judaism, just what I learned in my Conservative Hebrew school, but I believed in Judaism. I believed in G-d. I believed that Judaism was true.
“And now I saw that there was a thing called ‘keeping Shabbat’ and people did it, people who to go to public schools do it. So, if I believe it’s true, and I say I have a strong Jewish identity, and I see that it’s possible, then why don’t I do it?”
At 16, Yaakov responded to his theological challenge in a surprising way.
“I actually decided that I was going to try. I remember thinking that it sounded like such an awful thing to keep Shabbat. I went to the Conservative synagogue on a Saturday; I’m sure I drove there. And I remember reading things in Mussaf about how great Shabbos is and I was thinking,
apparently it’s supposed to be beautiful.”
There was just one tiny detail to be worked out.
“I didn’t know any rabbis,” he said. “I didn’t know any religious people I would feel comfortable talking to about it. So, I didn’t tell anybody. I smuggled into my room one of those Hebrew-English Chumashim they have at Conservative temples and a pink bat mitzvah yarmulke, and I hid them in the drawer.
“And I would, on Saturday or Friday night – I don’t remember which – I would go into my room. I’d lock the door and open the drawer. I’d take out the yarmulke and the Chumash. I don’t know if I knew what parsha it was. I don’t know what I would read, but I would read from the Chumash.”
‘I don’t understand. This sounds like an awful thing. How could it be so good?’
“I remember the moment – standing in this Conservative temple, I decided then that I’m going to try it, now that I know it’s possible and agogue. Sometimes he would stop and buy something on the way home. He was trying to figure out Shabbat all on his own.
Rabbi Lynn described this early experimentation as inconsistent. Sometimes he would drive to the syn
“I had no idea how to keep Shabbat,” he explained. “I didn’t know about Shabbat meals. I went back and for th. I would watch TV if my parents had the TV on, but I kept saying ‘no’ whenever my family wanted to do something.
“So my parents were getting concerned about me. I was locking myself in my room every Saturday, and I worked on Sundays in a drugstore, and so they didn’t see me on Sunday. They kept pushing me. ‘You want to do this today? You want to do that?’ And I’d just say no, and go back to my room. And then, finally, one day they confronted me.”
Feeling backed into a corner, 16-year-old Yaakov took a deep breath and confessed, “’Mom. Dad. There’s something I have to tell you: I’ve been keeping Shabbat.’
“And I really thought they were going to keel over. They actually weren’t so shocked. And they felt bad that I felt embarrassed about it. But they definitely thought it was a phase.”
That was the beginning of his teshuva journey. Today, Rabbi Yaakov Lynn is the founding dean and director of Meorot, a unique Jerusalem seminary designed especially for public school graduates.
A Path to Teshuva
Although she never locked herself in her bedroom in attempt to keep Shabbat, Penina Lynn’s teshuva story runs along similar lines. Raised in Columbia, MD, between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., she also attended public school.
Penina, who serves as the Director of Students at Meorot, described herself as having a “very typical traditional Jewish background. Hebrew
Meorot students and staff at the closing banquet
school every Sunday. I was bat mitzvahed. My parents insisted that I be in a Jewish youth group if I wanted to be able to date whoever I wanted when I was in high school.” Her childhood was filled with “really positive Jewish experiences.”
She explained, “Through my college years, I became more religious. I knew this was where my life was going, and I just had to get there,” she noted.
For Yaakov, Chabad at Binghamton University and his junior year abroad, spent at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, helped solidify his path. A key player was Jeff Seidel, the legendary kiruv personality, who introduced Yaakov to Shabbat in many different home environments.
In Israel, Yaakov began learning Torah, wearing tzitzit and davening with tefillin. When he returned to America for his senior year of college, he was unable to sustain that level of observance. Ironically, though he turned down a full-time job in his field and returned to Israel to learn in yeshiva after college, “I actually hated it,” he commented laughingly.
He tried five different yeshivot before giving up. “I wasn’t ready to sit and learn Gemara,” he explained. “My mind wasn’t sharp enough. And they didn’t really have beginner tracks back then.” By November, he was back in America.
A few temporary positions, a fellowship with the Jewish Campus Service Corps and then Yaakov became the Hillel director at Goucher College in Baltimore, making him, at age 23, the youngest full-time Hillel director ever.
After finishing college in Boston, Penina pursued a masters in social work at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. After a somewhat traumatic first day at her first field placement, she was reassigned to Hillel of Greater
Baltimore. That’s when their paths converged.
Heading to the Holy Land
Yaakov, recognized early on for being a gifted teacher, knew he wanted to work in Jewish education. After Penina finished graduate school, Yaakov resigned from Hillel and the couple, newly married, came to Israel for a year. The plan was for Yaakov to go to yeshiva, now that he understood more clearly what that involved, and then to return to New York so he could study for semicha.
One year led to another, and, in the end, the couple never left Israel. “We came for a year, and it’s been a very long year,” Penina joked.
The administrators at his yeshiva recognized Yaakov’s gift as an educator and tapped him for various teaching and kiruv-related opportunities, which he took on, in addition to learning full-time.
In the interim, Penina was caring for the first of their six children and found herself with a lot of time on her hands. Initially, she was in a bit of a limbo because the Lynns were still planning on returning to the U.S.
She enrolled in an ulpan to improve her conversational Hebrew and then accepted a position as an online matchmaker with a Jewish dating site. Eventually, she was promoted to the Director of Matchmaker Support, overseeing 250 volunteer matchmakers and five paid matchmakers. This position, which she held for several years, allowed her to work while being with her growing family in the afternoons.
23 Girls on Day 1
As Yaakov’s experience, both in learning and teaching, deepened, it was Penina who urged him to focus on teaching ba’alot teshuva. She felt that her husband had the perfect personality for teaching young women, a task not every rabbi is suited for.
During the coronavirus crisis, Meorot was one of a tiny number of seminaries in Israel that stayed open.
“On March 17, I was sitting in my office as new Ministry of Health restrictions were being announced, rumors were swirling about closing borders, and word was coming in that other seminaries were closing,” Rabbi Lynn explained.
“For the first time, I thought, despite our efforts to stay open, it was ‘game over’; we’d have to close as well. Just then, one of our teachers came into my office.” That teacher reported that the students were afraid that Meorot was also going to close. “They don’t want to leave,” she shared.
“I gathered the students and explained to them that if we stayed open, we would not be able to have any in-person classes, maybe for the rest of the year,” Rabbi Lynn recalled. “I told them I didn’t even know if they’d get to see my wife and me in person again for months, that they might be trapped in their dorms, and that if the borders closed, they might not even be able to go home for many months.
“I told them we would not kick them out, and that we’d take care of them and keep teaching them Torah as long as we could.
“They wanted to stay.
“There were students who wanted to spend a kosher Pesach in Israel and to keep learning Torah. How could I not keep the seminary open? That’s why Meorot exists,” Rabbi Lynn asserted.
Dr. Eliana Aaron, a U.S. board-certified nurse practitioner and Israeli nurse, guided the Lynns on Meorot’s healthcare policy.
“We took a very stringent approach when it came to the guidelines. For over two weeks, we did not let any student or madricha leave the apartment.
“Other than me, all their classes were on Zoom. As I told their parents, they were in the safest place in the world. We provided all their meals (even during Pesach) and even allowed them to add their own requests to our weekly makolet order, which was delivered to their door.”
Looking back, Rabbi Lynn commented, “It was a huge achrayus and I did a lot of davening, but I knew the whole time that this was our opportunity to show Hashem why we do this. If Meorot really exists because we believe that it is our obligation to provide public school girls with the opportunity to live a life of Torah in a way they would not otherwise have had, then of course we needed to provide them this opportunity at the time they needed it most!
“As I said in my speech at the closing banquet, those two months were the most meaningful of my life. While the rest of the world was trapped at home trying to find ways to stay productive, these girls who wanted to stay and learn gave me the opportunity to wake up each morning with a sense of purpose, knowing there were 18 young women who needed someone to take care of their physical and spiritual needs that day – and feeling a sense of gratitude that Hashem chose me for that role.”
Penina asserted that it takes someone who’s been there “to really understand the drive of women raised in secular culture.” Yaakov interjected that 80% of the students he worked with as the Hillel director at Goucher College had been women.
As the years progressed, Yaakov developed a gratifying schedule of learning Torah in the mornings and teaching in six different programs, five of which were for women, in the
afternoons. And Penina had transitioned into the world of teletherapy, working as a behavioral therapist for an online charter school in Ohio. Life for the Lynn family was very good.
Noting that there was no seminary in America for ba’alot teshuva, the couple planned to return to America and establish one. For various reasons, despite early support for the idea, it didn’t come to fruition.
“At the same time I was thinking
about that seminary in America,” Rabbi Lynn said, “there were rabbis who decided that there was a need for a seminary for public school girls, post-high school, in Israel. For whatever reason, the rabbis that were going to start it ended up backing out before it started.”
Since girls had already been recruited for the year, and Yaakov was already teaching there, the nascent school, operating under the name Meorot, started as a sister program to a more established seminary. That quickly proved to be an unworkable model.
“It was not working. It needed to be its own seminary, and I was watching it die. I wasn’t so invested. One day I came home and I said to my wife, ‘Meorot is dying. Somebody needs to take this program over and turn it into its own seminary, with its own place, and its own teachers and its own staff and its own madrichot (student mentors). I should probably offer to do it. But I’m not going to.’”
Man plans, and G-d laughs.
A month later, Yaakov was offered the chance to run Meorot. The couple decided to take it on together.
“For me, it was almost a bigger investment,” Penina stated, “because I had to close my private practice that I was doing during the day and I had to leave my job working as a behavioral therapist for the charter school in Ohio. I really was changing my life over to make this happen.”
This was December of 2017, and the couple hit the ground running. Yaakov booked a flight to NCSY’s Yarchei Kallah, a five-day retreat for public school students who come to learn Torah during their winter break.
“I knew nothing,” he recalled. “I didn’t know where it was going to be. I didn’t know who our teachers were. I didn’t know what our schedule was. I made it all up on the fly.
“I was still learning in the mornings. I was still teaching in six places. I would come home at 10:00 at night, turn on my computer and start my full-time job of building a seminary, yesh m’ayin.”
Somehow, with a huge amount of work and Hashem’s blessing, on August 26, 2018, “there were 23 girls here. I can show you a picture from that day. It was it was incredibly inspiring,” he said.
“There was a stand-alone seminary for 23 public school graduates. It was the first time that ever happened. There had never been a seminary exclusively geared towards public school graduates,” Yaakov noted with pride.
From Aleph to Taf
There are a few things that distinguish Meorot students from every other seminary student in Israel. First, according to Penina, “I always tell these girls that you are the only seminary in the world where every single student here is here because you chose to be here. Nobody’s here because it’s what everybody in their 12th grade class is doing. Nobody’s here because that’s what their older sister did or because that’s what their parents say they should do.
“They’re all here because they want to be here, and therefore they’re incredibly motivated. And it’s very unique. All of our teachers teach in lots of seminaries and they all say this is their favorite place to teach because these girls are wide-eyed and want to learn. We have no attendance prob-
Rabbi Yaakov and Penina Lynn Photo credit Rabbi Peretz Rubel
lem at the 9:15 class.”
On the other hand, because there is no communal or family pressure to study in Israel for a year, in some cases, the parents are not at all supportive and won’t pay even a portion of their daughter’s tuition at Meorot, so there is a need to do extensive fundraising.
Most students are recruited through Jewish youth groups like NCSY and Batya Girls, which has branches in New Jersey, New York, Florida, Illinois and Maryland.
“This is not for beginner girls who know nothing. Some of them don’t know the Alef-Beis, but they know they want to learn about Judaism,” Rabbi Lynn explained. “They’re very intelligent. They’re just missing information,” he elaborated.
Katherine Belilty is a current student at Meorot. She was accepted to Princeton University and deferred for a year to pursue a deeper understanding of her Jewish identity.
Earlier in her teen years, Belilty entertained the thought that “maybe I’m going to be Christian because my diehard Baptist friends all connect to their religion and I don’t connect to mine.”
She had no way to enter the depth of Torah study. “I thought that Torah was just the Chumash. I thought it was just stories.” Then an NCSY advisor introduced her to The Secret Life of God by Rabbi David Aaron.
This year’s class at Meorot
sustainable for me, because they are teaching me everything that I need to know in terms that I can understand it and keep with me.
“Being in Moerot has made me see Judaism as something that’s my own, and that it can be mine forever. And it gave me the tools to continue to develop it, even after I leave. I love it here!” she enthused.
Rabbi Yaakov and Mrs. Penina Lynn took their own teshuva journeys and the skills, education and opportunities that Hashem gave them and created a brand-new path in kiruv.
In the classroom, the girls are taught skills such as how to reference a certain perek and pasuk in Hebrew.
“We can’t assume anything,” he asserted. “Last year, we had a student who completely misunderstood a shiur, because she didn’t know that King David and David HaMelech were the same person. The teacher used them interchangeably and she thought she was talking about two different people.”
He cautions, though, that people shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking Meorot students are stupid.
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Over the remainder of her high school years, Belilty became very involved with NCSY, taking advan tage of many of their programs. With each new program she attended, she grew more connected to Torah and to Israel. By the time she met Rabbi Yaakov Lynn of Meorot, she was ready for something more intensive.
“This is my first experience with really organized Jewish learning,” she shared. “It’s made me see Judaism as something that’s woven into my life. This environment is what made it
“We really would like to be the address for public school girls who want to come and learn Torah in Israel for a year,” Rabbi Lynn concluded.
