When Rabbi Eli Stern, the director of outreach for Rabbi Asher Brander’s LINK Kollel, says “I tend to be on the shy side,” it ranks as the unchallenged, undefeated understatement of the year.
A quarter-century later, it’s nearly impossible to picture someone with the softspoken personality of Stern standing on the UCLA campus, randomly inquiring of students if they were Jewish.
If the answer was affirmative, he would ask, “Would you like to learn more about being Jewish?”
Canvassing for the organization Jewish Awareness Movement (JAM), Stern can acknowledge now that he was relieved when non-Jewish students walked past him.
But the rabbi, who sardonically describes himself as “SFB,” or shy from birth, admits “it was always hard for me to go up to someone and ask if they were Jewish,” he says.
By the 1990s, when Stern turned 40, his shyness was swallowed up by his confidence. But only in a familiar class setting. Outside was different. When he walked around campus, he couldn’t mask who he really was. “I looked like a rabbi,” he said. “I didn’t try to look hip and cool – I looked like what I was.”
How did he overcome what seems like a tall handicap for a rabbi?
“Y’know, we are here to work for God in this world,” Stern said. “We have to put higher objectives ahead of our own personal need.”
The more Jewish students he encountered, his confidence naturally multiplied.
“The more I felt empowered about bringing people closer to God,” he reasoned, “the more I was able to overcome that shyness.”
He confesses that the journey has not been easy.
Turning to the Torah for a logical resolution, he recalled: “Ultimately, as God says to Moshe when he complained that he was tongue-tied, ‘Who gave man the ability to speak if not Hashem?’”
Proper motivation also is crucial. “If you tap into doing this not for personal aggrandizement but to bring people closer to Torah, you get the ability to do it.”
Stern almost shudders at the prospect of quizzing passersby in today’s multilayer environment. “What with intermarriages, adoptions and conversions, soon there is no such thing as people looking Jewish,” the rabbi says. “People of all colors are halachically Jewish.”
No one who knows him, however, will doubt the veracity of his school-day memory that “I never was the Big Guy on Campus-type. I never was the first to raise my hand in class. I always deferred to others.”
The younger of two brothers by six years, his childhood was word-scarce because “my parents were refined people, on the quiet side.”
The Sterns were traditional Jews, not fully observant, ConservaDox, as their surviving son recalls. He didn’t want to study in yeshiva because the setting wasn’t comfortable (or familiar). “I like to joke I grew up in an apartment building that was almost all Jewish,” he says. “But there was strict apartheid: The fifth floor and below were religious. The sixth floor and above were not religious. We lived on the 11th floor of the 12-story building. So we were on the wrong side of the tracks.”
But it wasn’t until he enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor that he was drawn to his Judaism. During his two Michigan semesters, “I discovered something called a ba’al t’shuvah (returnee to Judaism).”
Stern never had heard the term. “I met other students on campus who had become observant – and some who were studying to convert to Judaism.”
“The whole idea of someone being born not a religious Jew – or even Jewish – wanting to take on observance at a level higher than me – that was a game-changer.”
All of this was as new as his next breath to him. He still looks surprised when he glances back. “The whole idea of someone being born not a religious Jew – or even Jewish – wanting to take on observance at a level higher than me – that was a game-changer,” Stern says.
“As a result of my connection to those people, and getting a chance to learn, spending time at a Chabad House (though I wasn’t Chabad), I went back to New York and got reconnected to more traditional observance.”
After graduating from Hunter College, Stern committed to three months in yeshiva. “I wanted to learn more about what it meant to be Jewish,” he said.
The three months turned into nine years.
“After three months, I realized I knew nothing even though I had gone to a serious Hebrew school five days a week, an hour and a half a day, and learned Chumash (Torah) with Rashi.
“But at the end of the day, I never had learned Gemara (Talmud) until then, and that made a big difference.”
Stern moved to Israel for two years, plunging deeper into Torah learning. When he returned, he studied at Yeshiva of Staten Island.Shortly he would meet the religious school teacher Robin Gordon, formerly of Richmond, VA, who would become Rebbetzin Stern.
They are the parents of six religious children. Although the rabbi, at 65, is not preparing to step back, eventually it will be the turn of the next Stern generation.
Fast Takes with Eli Stern
Jewish Journal: What is your favorite Jewish food?
Eli Stern: Whatever my wife cooks.
JJ: Where would you like to travel?
ES: Israel.
JJ: What figure in Jewish history would you like to meet?
ES: Moses.
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