The Jewish Question

National Review, Dec 21, 1998 by John J. DiIulio, Jr.

Mr. DiIulio, a professor at Princeton University and a frequent contributor to NR, directs The Jeremiah Project at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

The Lord Will Gather Me In: My Journey to Jewish Orthodoxy, by David Klinghoffer (Free Press, 272 pp., $24)

LIKE any true Orthodox Jew, David Klinghoffer, age 33, believes that his disembodied soul stood at Mt. Sinai and "that Torah is entirely Truth, that it came from God, that it is His presence in our lives." But the story of how Klinghoffer, a senior editor of NR, came to seek knowledge of God and Torah is undoubtedly unlike that of any other Orthodox Jew. The Lord Will Gather Me In is his intimate and classic tale of spiritual self-discovery and religious rebirth, a book so entertaining, intelligent, and compelling that it is must reading for thinking, morally alive persons of every faith and of no faith. Klinghoffer was begat in California by a bookish yet beautiful gentile woman from Sweden and an unsavory gentile gent from Kansas who deserted her. David's unwed mother, Harriet Lund, had grown up "a neglected girl who happened to know Jewish families in which the children were doted on as she was not." She bore her blond-haired, blue-eyed boy, selecting Paul and Carol Klinghoffer, Reform Jews, as his adoptive parents. The Klinghoffers proved to be kind, caring, morally upright parents.

But from the first chapter of The Lord Will Gather Me In, it is clear that Klinghoffer's by turns intellectually fascinating, devilishly funny, and spiritually challenging journey to Jewish orthodoxy was encouraged neither by his adoptive parents nor by most of the Jewish friends, relatives, and rabbis who knew him from childhood through his graduation from Brown University. Rather, his journey began in youthful rebellion against what he experienced as the anything-goes, Torah Lite ways of secular and "easygoing Reform Jews." By the last pages of the book, Klinghoffer makes plain his conviction that his journey to Orthodox Judaism was led throughout by the Lord, who chose to gather him in among the children of Israel and (so I would add) to inspire him to record the motivating ideas and general arguments, the embarrassing and uplifting personal details, of his journey.

How did it happen? At age five, David was told by his adoptive parents that his biological parents were gentiles. In eighth grade, he opened a book given to him by his maternal grandmother, To Be a Jew, by Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin. The book introduced the boy to the Orthodox understanding of halakha, the body of Jewish laws derived from the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and its traditional interpretations (the Oral Torah). He was struck by "one of the most unexpected sentences of my reading life: 'A child born to a non-Jewish mother, regardless of who the father is, has the status of a non-Jew according to Jewish law.' "

The sentence dogged his 11-year-old psyche for maybe a month, but he was hardly socialized to take "Jewish law," whatever it said, seriously. The Reform rabbi at temple where he was educated taught that Jews were required only to accept in Torah whatever is "meaningful and relevant" to them as individuals. Members of David's family's congregation "would have associated any serious talk about commandments, or about one's relationship to God, with Christianity." David grew up hearing almost no such God talk, but, as during Carol Klinghoffer's prayerful struggle with terminal illness, his heart and mind continued to yearn for God. He stutter-stepped his way toward the so-called ba'al teshuvah movement: that is, the return of tens of thousands of young American Jews to Orthodoxy. In one of the book's many sorry-I-laughed scenes, the adolescent David, after being told by a local Lubavitcher that he is not a Jew, performs a decidedly unorthodox self-conversion ritual in his bathroom, soaping a razor blade with a bar of Irish Spring, cutting himself to extract the required bead of blood for a symbolic circumcision, reciting the requisite prayer, and dunking himself in a make-shift mikvah-a lukewarm tub standing in for a ritual pool of water: "I was a Jew now, I thought."

Still, he entered Brown a "secular Jew and a political liberal," complete with Birkenstock sandals to carry him to his orientation-week meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America. Being a secular liberal at an Ivy League university is like being a Catholic believer in Vatican City, but he one-upped other campus "nonconformists" by hanging out at the Brown Hillel (a sort of Jewish student union), joining the Conservative minyan, and lusting after a ba'al teshuvah co-ed, Ketura Perselin. Spiritually, Ketura and her Orthodox Jewish friends picked up where several of his born-again Christian old flames had left off, exciting him with their rock-solid religious sensibilities and embarrassing him with their knowledge of Biblical texts: "I wanted to know something too."

He spent the summer of 1986 at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the bastion of Conservative (read: liberal) Judaism, but he encountered there Conservative rabbis and students who sought a "middle ground" between Torah "and the void," including "one female rabbinical student, a sexy Californian in tight Levi jeans, who said she wasn't sure if God exists." After graduating from Brown, Klinghoffer went to work for NATIONAL REVIEW. For several years following a one-time, one-night cocaine binge, he suffered time and again from the delusion that he was dying. None of the physicians or psychiatrists he consulted told him so, but he was dying-dying to decide who he was, to acknowledge God's control by becoming the Jew he was born to be, to stop backsliding into a lifestyle acutely at variance with his modest yet growing knowledge of Torah.