By: Elliot Resnick, Jewish Press Staff Reporter

Date: Wednesday, September 23 2009

Growing up in a wealthy, but very secular, Jewish home on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, Roy S. Neuberger never imagined he would one day be a sought-after speaker in the Orthodox Jewish world.

His father, who turned 106 over the summer, was a prominent art collector and financier (receiving the National Medal of Arts from President Bush in 2007) and his mother was the chairman of the Board of Governors of the prestigious Ethical Culture Fieldston School. Roy did not have a formal bris or bar mitzvah.

In 1974, however, at age 31, Roy Neuberger met Hineni founder (and Jewish Press columnist) Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis and his life changed dramatically. Within a year, he became completely Orthodox and a decade and a half later he grew even closer to Rebbetzin Jungreis when his daughter married her son, Rabbi Osher Jungreis.

In 2000 Neuberger - whose op-ed articles regularly appear in The Jewish Press - authored From Central Park to Sinai: How I Found My Jewish Soul, and last year he published his first novel, 2020 Vision.

He recently spoke with The Jewish Press.

The Jewish Press: Can you briefly recount your journey to Orthodox Judaism?

Neuberger: I grew up in a very affluent home and went to exclusive private schools. But even as a very young child I felt this tremendous emptiness inside me. Something was wrong. Life wasn't working and I had to find answers.

So as I grew up I started looking everywhere I could think of: literature, wilderness hiking, social action, the civil rights and antiwar movements - you name it. Then I got into, what shall I say, alien lifestyles like Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity. I even wrote a book at one point called Why the Jews Are Wrong and the Catholics and Protestants Are Right. It was totally crazy and extreme.

(In the meantime, I met my wife in high school and got married in college. It then became a mutual quest; we both were looking for a way of life that was real.)

Anyway, after many years, in the early 1970s, I was the publisher of a small newspaper in Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY, and my wife and I went to visit a friend, Walter Grunfeld, who was a newspaper publisher, to learn how to run a paper. At the end of the day, Walter wanted to watch the news. It was during the Yom Kippur War, and as we watched Walter started crying, "I can't believe it. A week ago Israel was finished, and look at what's happening today. General Sharon just crossed the Suez Canal, the Egyptians are surrounded. It's unbelievable."

And I'm standing there, like, "What? O yeh, I heard there's some war in the Middle East." I didn't know a thing. I didn't care. Walter Grunfeld started screaming at me: "What kind of a Jew are you? Don't you have a heart?" Those were maybe the most shocking words I ever heard in my life. They're still reverberating in my head. And I started thinking.

A few months later I was having a meeting with a good friend who was Jewish, and I asked him - I was 31 years old at the time and never yet inside a synagogue - "What do they do in synagogue?" So he called me that night and said, "A woman is coming to speak next Thursday night at the synagogue. Do you want to come?" I said, "Fine." And that's how we met Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis. That's how it all began.

Rebbetzin Jungreis was not supposed to come that night, correct?

Right. She was supposed to come three months earlier, but she got sick and couldn't come. And the night she did come, people tried to dissuade her. "What are you going upstate for?" they asked. "All you're going to find is a few cows out there."

But she came and that was the same moment we showed up - the first time in my life I ever was willing to walk into a Jewish institution. Was that a coincidence? It's too impossible to have been a coincidence.

Roy Neuberger speaks to students on a recent trip to Israel

 

The way you met your wife - whom you credit in your book for almost everything good that's happened in your life - was also an amazing "coincidence."

We met in this elite private school a long time ago. She was extremely popular, and all the guys wanted to go out with her. I wasn't so socially adept, and she was like Miss Universe. I thought I was never going to speak to her. With all these crazy questions in my head, I thought there was something wrong with me.

But then at a track meet I found myself sitting next to her and, like Bilam's donkey, my mouth opened and words - normal words - started coming out. I, who could never speak to girls, especially popular girls, especially beautiful girls, started speaking to none other than the most beautiful, popular girl in the world. And I was not making a fool of myself. It's illogical and impossible but it happened, and if Hashem didn't do it, how did it happen?

You say you had this feeling of "tremendous emptiness" and a sense that "something was wrong" ever since you were a child. Why do you think you had these feelings when so many non-observant Jews do not?

The Gemara in Maseches Nidah says that an angel teaches us the whole Torah when we're in the womb, but when we're born we forget everything. Nonetheless, it's in there - that's the pintele yid or neshamah we have inside of us.

The question is how successful we are in submerging that neshamah, burying it under layers of materialism. Some people make a lot of money and are quite successful in believing that's all there is to life. But other people are not so successful in covering up their neshamah, and they hear that angel speaking to them wherever they go. It bothers them and they want to reconnect with that. And I think that's what happened in my case.

In your most recent book, 2020 Vision, and in your op-ed articles in The Jewish Press, you write a lot about Moshiach. Why?

We're living right now in very incredible times. At the beginning of 2020 Vision, there's a quote from the Malbim on Sefer Yechezkel. He writes that at the end of days before Moshiach comes, the Muslim and Western nations will form a coalition against us to try to drive us out of Israel.

He writes that the situation will look impossible for us, but something unexpected will happen and those two huge nation blocs will start fighting and destroying each other. After that, Moshiach will come and the Beis HaMikdash will be rebuilt.

If you look around the world today and want to understand what's happening, [you should keep the Malbim's prediction in mind]. Why is there a 9/11? Why are there monumental and growing conflicts involving Muslims and the Christian world? It's all explained in Nevi'im and Chazal.

Why is it important for people to know this?

You look at the world and everything is in crisis - personal problems, family issues, the swine flu, tsunamis, hurricanes, economic stress, terrorism, etc. You can become hopeless. But these are all signs that our rabbis told us would be in place in the days before Moshiach comes.

And I think it's super important, it's survival, for people to realize this. The greatest event in the history of the world is about to happen. Just hang in there.

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