I’ve learned to my chagrin over the past 30 years that the more charismatic the rabbi, the bigger the chance that he’s a charlatan. This bloke, however, seems to be different. I just hope he doesn’t release a book on modesty filled with praise of himself.
With fear and trembling, I’m surfing over to his website, and, heart be still, G-d, don’t let me down here, I’ve been disappointed before, I’m vulnerable, my father was a charismatic preacher man, I’ve had some charisma myself at times and not always used it wisely, big intake of breath, let me click on the About page, and, please L-rd, let not the praise be too fulsome:
“Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn is one of America’s brightest and best young rabbis and this new book tells us why.… Engaging, inspiring and challenging, these are essays to cherish and apply day by day. A fine work by a fine man.”
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations: 1991–2013
“The top young Orthodox rabbi in America…as well as one of the most dynamic educators that the Jewish people have. Judaism Alive…challenges your assumptions and inspires you to grow, think, and experience life in a more profound way.”
Rabbi Steven Weil, Senior Managing Director of the Orthodox Union
“Here is an accessible, wise guide to getting more life from your years. Rabbi Einhorn moves easily from Sanhedrin to Springsteen, illuminating corners of our souls all along the way.”
Rabbi David Wolpe, Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, California; acclaimed author; Newsweek’s “most influential rabbi in America”
Have you ever felt that you are just not living up to your potential? That you could be getting more out of life? In this introspective guide, Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn taps into the wisdom of the wisest of men – Abraham, Joseph, and Moses – to reveal ancient secrets of productivity and success. With a wit and charm honed from his varied experiences as a rabbi, lecturer, and teacher, Rabbi Einhorn melds the ancient Jewish sources with the best of modernity to guide readers to a better, more fulfilled life. Discover a vibrant and spiritual way of life – a Judaism Alive!
Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn
Rabbi, lecturer, educator, author, songwriter, dean, and most recently, record-holder for the longest continuous Torah class at 19 Hours, which he delivered as a wildly successful fundraiser on May 3rd, 2018 – and Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn is just getting started.
After receiving Semicha and a Masters in Education from Yeshiva University, Einhorn began his rabbinic career as an intern rabbi in Manhattan’s legendary Lincoln Square Synagogue. In 2005 he became the head Rabbi of New York’s West Side Institutional Synagogue. Seven years later this once empty Shul was drawing over 400 people every week. Einhorn’s out of the box approach was so successful that in 2010 the Orthodox Union gave him his own think tank to craft programming for other synagogues across America.
In 2012, Einhorn moved back to his hometown of Los Angeles to serve as Rav and Dean of Yavneh Hebrew Academy, an elite Orthodox prep school, and as the rabbi of its congregation. A soft spot in his heart for teenagers, Rabbi Einhorn has been working with at-risk teens in the Jewish Community for over 15 years.
In 2015, released an introspective guide that weaves together the best of pop culture with ancient Jewish wisdom, and its complementary music album, both titled Judaism Alive, hit the Amazon Best Seller and #1 on ITunes World Music chart, respectively. This was followed up by a 2017 musical release called “The Return”, featuring collbaroations with some of Jewish music’s biggest names.
Look, if someone had said these wonderful things about me and my work, I’d be featuring them too on my About page. Rabbis aren’t pastors. There’s no mitzvah in Judaism to be humble.
Not too many typos. Fewer than the average Orthodox rabbi. At least the praise is primarily about his work. I give the rabbi props for not offering a high resolution download picture of himself.
I’ve got my own About page and it is not the product of a modest man:
“…he breaks legitimate stories that have a huge impact.”
Emmanuelle Richard, Online Journalism Review (July 9, 1998)
“…aggressive, eloquent, he’s a kind of shaggy-haired, acid-washed Brad Pitt…”
The Weekly Standard (Sept. 21, 1998)
“Smart, insightful and with a charming Australian accent, Ford is one of the most fascinating characters…”
Michelle Goldberg, Speak magazine (Jan. 1999 issue)
It must be the Seventh-Day Adventist in me, but I believe we should leave praise of ourselves to others, and yet, once again, I do not live up to my own standard.
A fair analysis of my own offerings and the rabbi’s lectures would show that I am 100 times more narcissistic than the rabbi, so who the hell am I to critique anyone?
Stop. I don’t like where I’m going with this blog post. I’m using cheap and easy definitions of “humility” to get a cheap and easy blog post. Perhaps this one time I should not take the easy way out and instead I should say what I believe. So let’s roll:
Here I stand. I can do no other. So help me God.
Here’s the definition of “humility” that most speaks to me, and by this definition, the rabbi is a humble man, and I am more humble today than I was five years ago: “a clear recognition of what and who we really are, followed by a sincere attempt to become what we could be.” (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)
So yes, if it is true, we can take pride in our humility.
I used to be modern (meaning a believer in the power of reason and narrative and the transcendent objectivity of my religion’s God-based, Torah-based hero system), but in my old age, I’m increasingly post-modern (suspicious of reason, narrative and progress). I’m not a fan of the Apostle Paul, but I have a little bit of sympathy for this expression from Romans 7: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
Back to my regularly scheduled programming:
Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn from Hancock Park combines new approaches to Torah with the wisdom of the Jewish tradition. He has hundreds of lectures on YUTorah.org and they’re consistently thought-provoking. I am particularly enjoying his latest series on the Talmudic tractate Chagiga.
In 2015, Einhorn released an introspective guide, weaving together pop culture and ancient Jewish wisdom, and its complementary music album, both titled Judaism Alive. Einhorn uses New Age thought, self-help ethos, and pop culture ideas to help explain the Torah. The New Age band Enigma, for example, inspired his “Social Sermon” concept and he once brought Roger Daltrey of the Who to his synagogue to talk about the importance of giving charity.
Einhorn added a second album to Judaism Alive called “Teshuva”. This album tells the story of repentance and return through music and Jewish ideas. Celebrity musicians and vocalists are featured throughout the album. The album is produced by Kaela Sinclair, lead vocalist of M83. In 2020, Einhorn produced a Hebrew Bible designed for teens.
I’m listening to Rabbi Einhorn’s series on the Talmudic tractate of Hagiga. According to Wikipedia: “Hagigah or Chagigah (Hebrew: חגיגה, lit. “Festival Offering”) is one of the tractates comprising Moed, one of the six orders of the Mishnah, a collection of Jewish traditions included in the Talmud. It deals with the Three Pilgrimage Festivals (Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot) and the pilgrimage offering that men were supposed to bring in Jerusalem. At the middle of the second chapter, the text discusses topics of ritual purity.”
The rabbi blends the virtues of Daf Yomi (a quick page of Talmud typically covered in about 45 minutes) with other Jewish methods of study combined with modern modes of learning text. I’ve not encountered this approach before. The rabbi may have his faults, but he’s never boring. And this is a big deal because in an increasingly secular world, religion keeps losing. For example, when clergy emphasize there’s no contradiction between religion and science, this means they don’t want to compete with science for authority because they know they will lose.
In 1966, sociologist Steve Bruce produced his classic work, Religion in Secular Society. He noted:
The availability of other opportunities for the exercise of leadership was obviously associated with the replacement of religion and church by secular activities in fulfilment of some of religion’s erstwhile
functions. Diversity of leisure opportunities meant that for recreational pursuits other possibilities were open, particularly in the sphere of educational and intellectual recreation, which had previously been almost exclusively the province of the Churches. The growth of new techniques for the presentation of information necessarily led to the emergence of new occupations expert in production and in presentation—the development of the film industry illustrates the process most vividly.The technical achievement in itself was sufficient to confer interest and stimulate enthusiasm. Its detachment from the agencies of social control, its competitiveness, and its profit-seeking meant that from the outset it appealed to immediate appetites and emotions. There was never any inbuilt or implicit restraint about what it might offer, and it was not in the service of any particular class, national, political or governmental agency. It was ideologically uncommitted, prepared to test the market to discover what people would pay to see as entertainment, and prepared to defy social conventions and accepted morality, whenever it appeared to be in the interests of profits to do so, and until governmental interference might occur. Thus the entertainment industry—and it became an industry in the full sense only with the development of advanced technical means of presentation—was from the outset a challenge to religion, offering diversion, other reinterpretations of daily life, and competing for the time, attention and money of the public. In its actual content it may be seen as more than an alternative way of spending time, but also as an alternative set of norms and values. It replaced religion’s attempt to awaken public sentiments by offering titillation of private emotions.
In this whole development, and it is necessarily a complex one, relating to the expansion of literacy and the development of a secular Press, as well as to the cinema and subsequently to the radio and television, the Church was steadily losing its near-monopoly, and at least its dominance, of the media of communication. From the times when public communication was largely from the pulpit or by notices appended to the church door, when intellectual stimulation was almost necessarily religious exhortation, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the Church’s influence as a source of information rapidly eroded as the relative significance and effectiveness of its channels of communication were reduced. From being a very powerful voice in the local community, the clergyman became one of several voices with divergent religious messages, and subsequently competed further with the increasingly effective voices using the new technical means of mass communication offering non-religious distractions.
Today, even though the Church is able to use the means of mass communication, it does so only marginally—marginally to its own total communication, which still relies on the nexus of pulpit and pew and on religious literature, and marginally to the total content of the mass media as a whole. Compared to the amount of entertainment, music, news, drama, secular education and all the other types of item carried by television, radio, Press and cinema, religious information has become a very tiny part indeed. Nor are religionists as good at using the media as those who are instructing or entertaining. They have developed few, if any, new techniques for its use, and they use it by courtesy and on sufferance. They tend to be older and middle-aged men using media increasingly dominated by the young. It might not be untrue to say that they are the deference note of the mass communicators, ‘employed’ to whiten the image of an industry which is frequently charged with subversive, immoral and deleterious presentations.
As long as the Church connives in using the media, the media controllers can use this fact in their own defence, as evidence of their social responsibility. But, given the religionist’s necessary assumption that religious truth is pre-eminent and that it ought to take a dominant place in our minds, the relegation of religious
material to a marginal place in the programmes of the mass communications is itself a derogation of the religious message. In using the mass media the Churches permit their own material to be reduced to the level of the medium, to be put forth without much differentiation of presentation from a wide variety of highly heterogeneous and at times incongruous material. This in itself must detract from the high claims to pre-eminence which—of necessity—religion makes for itself.There is indeed some evidence that the use of mass media themselves alters the image of the Church. In the secularized society, religion must accept a marginal position in the communications agencies in defiance of its own self-assessment of the relative importance of different types of information!
The rabbi has an excellent speaking voice. He employs a moderate amount of melody and rising intonation so that you feel happy and excited when you listen to him, but there’s not so much melody that you think he’s gay.
In his 2016 book Set Your Voice Free, celebrity voice coach Roger Love notes:
Brendon [Burchard] makes sure that his volume is strong to showcase how happy he really is, and that his melody takes a very specific “upturn” when he gets to commas or periods. This helps viewers stay connected and positive. At each pause, Brendon consciously makes his voice rise in pitch. I often talk about my distaste for the way kids learn the English language in school, specifically how they learn cadence and phrasing. We are taught that when we get to a comma or a period, we should make the last syllable go lower and softer.
The problem with this use of sound is that it sends a subconscious signal to the viewer or listener that the speaker is done after each pause. The voice goes down, it gets softer, and, essentially, it waves goodbye. If you were listening to an orchestra and the sound trailed off every five seconds or so, then jumped back to life and blasted out more music for another five to eight seconds, you would get up and leave. It would be hard to endure even the most exquisite sonata if the flow were broken and the energy drained away at annoyingly frequent intervals. Yet we’re taught that it’s fine to do something quite comparable when we give a talk or read aloud. Let me just say this: Don’t do it. You’re pushing your audience away.
Instead, use the commas and periods to put more melody into your voice and make people feel happy. It sounds like this (audio 43) when you use Brendon’s technique and raise the pitch of your voice, or stay on the same note, when you get to a comma, a period, or the last part of a word.
This technique will keep your viewers excited, looking forward to your next words. You have to master this tip if you want people to think you are happy. And believe me, you DO want that. It’s the best way to start communicating with someone you don’t know yet. Brendon always leads with Happy.
After Happy, Brendon moves into Grateful, sounds that are very similar to Bethany’s. He, too, gets slower and softer and stretches out his words. The sounds of Grateful are less defined by age-appropriateness or attention than Happy is. I think that’s because the whole concept of being grateful comes from a more adult perspective. A child is first happy to have a new toy, lost in the joy of playing with it. The idea of gratitude tends to come in only when a parent or gift-giver says, “Do you know how lucky you are to be the first one on your block with that toy?” or, “You’d better thank Nana right now for giving you such an awesome present.”
In my mind, gratitude is a more mature concept, filled with self-awareness and perhaps a greater awareness of the outside world. So when Bethany sounds grateful, she sounds a little older, and when Brendon sounds grateful, he sounds his age.
