MY NEW FRIEND

A brief journaling about my magical encounter with Dr. Naftali Loewenthal

Author’s Note: I wrote this about a year ago a few weeks after meeting Dr. Loewenthal, and for whatever reason I am publishing it only now. But this does give me the opportunity to wish Dr. Loewenthal a happy eightieth birthday. Wishing this very special man many more years of health and learning and good cheer.

I.

The hour was late and outside London was damp.

I got out of my Uber on a street in Stamford Hill under a haze of jet lag. Across the actual fog I could just make out the address between the narrow rowhouses. Some men with peyos and long coats walked past me, noticing my baseball cap and maybe my Lubavitch beard. Reminding myself to look right before left before crossing the street - the cars in the old Empire drive on the wrong side of the road - I felt I was in a sort of upside down Brooklyn.

A friend had made me promise that I make this visit. “If you’re going to London, you have to go see Tali.” I’d heard his name before, but also that he was a professor who lived in the land of academia and hyphenated words that scream for dictionaries. Not my kind. But my friend speaks a straight and unhyphenated English. “I’ve gotten to know him. You’d be nuts not to see him.” I reached out.

Touching the straps of my backpack for reassurance, I walked up and knocked on the door. Past the knock but before the opening I waited, in that point of no return. In my work as a filmmaker I’ve gotten used to walking through people’s doors into their worlds, but this moment of hesitation or even apology is always there. I’m aware that on the other side of the door lies some kind of disruption, both to their lives as well as to mine.

A soft but straining voice from the other side. “Is that Mr. Avtzon?” Man, do I have a soft spot for a classic British accent. “Yes,” I hear myself turn proper, “that would be me.”

The door opens, and I see a short man in a blue cardigan with a white beard and peyos and - I noticed this immediately - a wicked grin. “Prof. Loewenthal?” “No, no, that would be wife. I’m Dr. Loewenthal.” Like I said, very British.

II.

I had arrived early, a few minutes before our appointment half past nine. Earlier that morning, I had asked my hosts in Cambridge, Rabbi and Mrs. Leigh, about the late hour call. They assured me that Dr. Loewenthal, or as he’s known, Dr. Tali or Reb Tali, is only getting started then. “When does he sleep?” Mrs. Leigh grew up next door to the Loewenthal’s. She shrugged. “Nobody really knows.”

The math of the doctor’s shuteye is daunting. Dr. Tali is a teaching fellow at a prestigious college in London, has published a number of books and many essays, and also teaches at the Lubavitch Girls High School in London. And that’s just his day job. As I had started asking about this man, I discovered more and more people who look up to him as a mentor, and spend all kinds of time trying to get any time with him on the phone. No wonder he gets no sleep.

I personally was very ready to sleep, having arrived in London only the day before. But with this myth of a man in front of me and persistent drizzle behind me it was as if I had walked onto a stage of a surrealist play, and the fact I hadn’t rehearsed any lines jarred me wide awake.

Dr. Tali ushered me into his study, where I was greeted by a small desk off to the right under the blue light of a computer screen, next to it a wild panorama of books and off to the left a small table with a thick patterned tablecloth peaking out from yet more piles of books. It was immediately obvious we were going to record the podcast here, in some space between the books, we just had to, a podcast being filmed here was preordained long before me. But where I was going to find room to set up the camera? And what to do about the rickety sound of this small wooden table?

These technical questions were standing in for larger questions: What had gotten into me to start this podcast? What was I doing here in London, thousands of miles from home, walking into strangers’ homes? Homesick for Lubavitch? Pah! Right now I was homesick for home!  This whole idea was a mistake. Why did I think I had something interesting or useful to this man? Why did I think my idea to have a podcast was somehow his problem?

I tried to remind myself this was the whole point of the podcast, to break my reinforcing loops of shared opinion and to hear what was cooking on the minds of other Lubavitchers, even if or precisely because they are strangers. Didn’t we all have something in common anyways, which needed to be explored? Precisely here, in this tight and book submerged study of someone old enough to be my grandfather, precisely here was an answer I wouldn’t find elsewhere, or maybe even a new question.

My considerations were broken by a British lullaby. “Coffee or mint tea?” I turned around. The near eighty year old doctor was looking up at me with a pressing question, and he expected an answer. In Britain, a hot beverage is the business before pleasure. “Mint tea sounds good, thank you.” “With milk?” My gosh, no wonder the Americans rebelled. “Black, thank you.” I smiled, taken completely by the absurd script I was now vocalizing, watching as he carefully shuffled around yet another pile of books. Tonight’s disturbance was assured to be thick.

III.

By the time he came back with the very pareve tea, I had set up the camera and microphones. We sat down on opposite sides of the small creaky table, and I asked him if he’d be comfortable putting on the headphones. Some of my older guests had declined this millennial contrivance. “Sure,” he said, framing the headphones on either side of that wicked grin that quickly grew into a mischievous chuckle.

We hadn’t discussed the topic of conversation ahead of time, but the doctor didn’t seem anxious at all. His son is an old friend of mine and had liked the first episodes of the podcast enough to recommend to his father that he come on. “Zalmy’s suggestion is good enough for me,” came through the wire of my headset.

Some days later, I would tell my friends that I sensed the depth of the man sitting in front of me within minutes. But that I could trust him I sensed within seconds. Our conversation immediately moved into territory deep within my heart, what in podcast jargon I call jumping into the deep end, talking about my attempt to navigate the modern world while staying true to ancient Chassidus, or as the Breslov scholar in front of me put it, the “gesher tzar me’od.”

This question, what I frame as the question Lubavitch identity is in 2023, has been the focal point of already over a dozen episodes on the podcast, but for the first time I felt that I was sitting with someone who was not only not offended by the question but had thought almost exclusively about this very question for over half a century. As he began to tell me, he was already a PhD candidate when he came to Lubavitch, and to his surprise the Rebbe had advised him to continue his studies in Jewish studies. “But what about the Apikorsus?” To this question he received the amazing answer, “Read what you need for the footnotes, and afterwards do teshuva.”

The story I’d heard before, and I knew that the footnotes to any of his essays are extensive and varied enough to easily justify his earlier qualms. But on this night I learned he had taken the second part of the Rebbe’s answer with the same seriousness, for it was clear his thoughts on teshuva were no less exhaustive.

Each of my questions were met with a penetrating answer, and each answer unfurled into a new question, like a GIF of an opening door on infinite repeat. I will not recount here the details of our conversation, the entire conversation is recorded and uploaded online, but I will recount what I felt. Most of the time that he spoke, he was looking downward at the tablecloth, thinking through each word that he spoke, but at the end of making each point he’d look up at me, like someone resurfacing after a deep dive who while looking for an answer had found something so unexpected that it made him, and by extension me, chuckle.

IV.

A couple times I asked if certain tendencies toward secular reading had any validity or if they could all be chalked up to the yetzer horo. Out of character to our conversation, he cut me off. “Leave the yetzer horo out of it,” he commanded, with that chuckle I can only describe as that of a young child having the time of his life. “The yetzer horo is a catch all, it has no use to our conversation.”

Deeper than a theological observation, this comment conveyed to me that Reb Tali was not interested in a paranoid Freudian conversation about underlying motives, but in a more practical and good faith dialogue of ideas. Less suspicion, more trust. Perhaps because he’d been on this journey for so long himself, or maybe it was just his good nature, I distinctly felt he wasn’t interested in judging me but in conversing. In trusting.

In the never-ending divide between generations, the choices seem to always be either call to the past’s authority or surrender to the future. We believe the young can simply be made to obey, otherwise the elders must give in. The question is simply which side wields power, and which must follow suit. If you ask me, much of the societal shift we see around us today is really a shift in the underlying power from the old to the young. Try telling young people how to dress when they know they can bide their time. Try telling them to stare in a Sefer all day when they know they can make their own way and pay their own rent. And so on.

But whether or not my diagnosis is correct, these two choices are two sides of the same first coin you pull out of your pocket. They come from a place of defensiveness, where either side feels they are in a zero sum struggle, that if they give an inch, be it of kapota or earring length, there will be no coming back.

Trust cuts through these two options. If one can force the behavior of the other party, he has no need for trust. But if one trusts, he has no need for force. This sounds fantastic, but the catch is we live in a cynical world where trust is for suckers, and trust is the ultimate gamble. Trust itself needs to be trusted.

So why does one trust? Mainly because he knows that’s all he could ask of himself. One trusts in others because he knows how much trust he himself is in need of. So while I can’t tell you if and why the doctor trusted me, I can tell you I felt trusted, and that is at least half if not far more than half of the equation.

V.

I related to Dr. Loewenthal how I and so many of my friends feel they are alone, that life after yeshiva is essentially life after the fork in the road, friends having always taken the other path, and that I believe this isolation is the root from which the branches of exploration grow outward. If one can’t find warmth at the fireplace he looks for it in the cold. To the frostbitten mind, every tree outside looks like firewood. The doctor heard what I said, and his answer made it clear he knew exactly what I was talking about. “You see, the opposite of isolation is a yedid nefesh, and that’s why having a yedid nefesh is so important.”

To play on the doctor’s formulation, I would say the opposite of cliche is how he said this. Reb Tali believed, still believed, in the power of a farbrengen, not so much the fireworks of crowds and speeches, or even of rousing niggunim, but the quiet farbrengen of the yedid nefesh, two friends simply acknowledging one another. He thought that even if this era of fragmentation meant the possibility of fully coming together is out of reach, just the “being there” for one another could do wonders. “You don’t need to share every single thing with your friend, don’t expect too much from him. But even to share one thing will do wonders. It will mean you are there for each other.”

Truth is, that’s not exactly how he said it, but how I worded back to him what I understood. He listened carefully to my pale American english, paused for a moment, and said, “I think you put it very beautifully.” I was stunned. I had simply recapped what he had told me, hadn’t done anything to earn this kind of praise, but here he was gifting it to me. I knew it wasn’t false diplomacy. So why? I can’t speak for him, but if I had to guess it came from a belief that we are all on this journey together, and it’s better to go at it together than alone. Even if it’s with someone who has just stumbled into your study with a camera and two microphones and thinks tea is better without milk.

As we wrapped up the conversation, he encouraged me to continue with my podcast, and then said something I won’t soon forget. “I’m going to think of you now as a new friend.” Trite or polite as it may seem to you reading this, I felt something well up inside of me. His offer of companionship, his invitation to walk less alone, was without conditions. It was a statement of trust, I knew he trusted me, and so without asking questions I now trusted him.

The hour was late, and I packed up my stuff. Within a few minutes, there was no evidence in his study of the great disturbance that had occurred in my soul, and I suspect in his as well, though he may be more used to it.

As I walked to the front door, I turned around and gave the doctor a hug. I stepped outside and my foot floated on a puddle.

Bentzi Avtzon is a filmmaker who live in Bala Cynwyd, PA. His podcast, "Homesick for Lubavitch: Exploring Lubavitch Identity in 2024,” releases a new episode each week and can be found on all podcasting platforms.