Why would a comfortably affluent, well-educated, secular Jew seek out the rigorous discipline of traditional Jewish observance? This is the intriguing question behind, not only David Klinghoffer's personal story, but the growing movement of Jewish ba'alei teshuvah.

In recent decades, tens of thousands of young Jews have returned to Orthodox Judaism, responding in a startling way to the spiritual hunger felt by millions of Americans. They have found that Orthodoxy means not withdrawing from the world, but coming to feel G-d's presence in every facet of life. Klinghoffer, one of these newly traditional Jews, also happens to be a highly articulate, sensitive, and sympathetic writer who states his beliefs so reasonably that readers will be hard-pressed to explain why every Jew isn't Orthodox in practice.

Article Based on Book

Like any true Orthodox Jew, David Klinghoffer, age 33, believes that his disembodied soul stood at Mount Sinai and "that Torah is entirely Truth, that is came from G-d, that it is His presence in our lives." But the story of how Klinghoffer, a senior editor of National Review, came to seek knowledge of G-d and Torah is undoubtedly unlike that of many other Orthodox Jews.

"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 desired 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, 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 his childhood through graduation at Brown University.

Rather, his journey began in a youthful rebellion against what he experienced as the anything-goes, Torah Lite ways of the 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 thoughout 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 motivational 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, the opened up 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 halacha, 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 un- expected 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 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 G-d, with Christianity."

David grew up hearing almost no such G-d talk, but, during Carol Klinghoffer's prayerful struggle with terminal illness, his heart and mind continued to yearn for G-d. He stutter-stepped his way toward the so-called ba'al teshuva movement; that is, the return of tens of thousands of young American Jews to Orthodoxy. In one of the books many sorry-I-laughed scenes, the adolescent David, after being told by a local Lubavicher 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 "non-conformists" by hanging out at the Brown Hillel (a sort of Jewish student union), joining a Conservative minyan, and lusting after a ba'al teshuva co-ed, Ketura Perelsin. 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 embarassing 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 the Torah "and the void," including one female rabbinical student, a gorgeous Californian in tight Levi jeans, who stated she wasn't sure if G-d existed.

After graduating from Brown, Klinghoffer went to work for the "National Review." For several years following a one-time, one-night cocaine binge, he suffered time and time 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 G-d's control by become the Jew he was born to be, to stop backsliding into a lifestyle acutely at variance with his modest yet growing knowledge of Torah.

Fast-forwarding his journey, we find him strengthened in 1993 by the always-on-target spiritual guidance of an Orthodox rabbi, Daniel Lapin, yet craving to discover his "authentic" Jewish roots rather than (as some of my Protestant friends like to say) to "just get right with G-d." He tracked down his birth mother. In due course, they discussed why she chose the Klinghoffers as his adoptive parents. "Well, you know," she told him, "my mother was Jewish" by way of a Jewish great-grandfather surnamed Goldkuhl. With a surge of tribalist adrenaline, he "sat bolt upright. If this was true, I was part Jewish by blood! I realized that, to be precise, my blood was one-sixteenth Jewish. I could walk into a synagogue or a kosher restaraunt and return the curious glances," or the Goldkuhl family was "my blood link with the nation of Israel."

Klinghoffer and his co-religionists will, I hope, not mis-understand me when I say that the book's final chapter constitutes the most satisfyingly Christian moment of Klinghoffer's journey. Christians believe that the only blood that matters is that of Jesus Christ. It took a genealogical investigation that would make Dick Tracy proud, concluding in Stockholm, for David to realize that human blood "evaporates quickly." (But, the surprise ending will not be given away.)

Klinghoffer "reached the conclusion that Judaism is true" even though several Christians, including a Catholic girl he almost married, had courted him for Christ.

But alas, "The Lord Will Gather Me In" insists that for Klinghoffer, Christianity simply was not G-d's plan. The author engages in no interfaith shading. Oral Torah, he writes, "excludes belief in Jesus" as the messiah.

Different as they are, however, Judaism and Christianity in their orthodox manifestations are not only joined at the hip theologically ("If nothing happened at Sinai, both religions are frauds" writes Klinghoffer), but one in so-called mainstream religions that blink or wink at Biblical injunctions against abortion, sex outside of marriage, and more, Klinghoffer suggests that Reform Judaism and other liberal religions are crashing while Orthodox Judaism, born-again Protestantism, and old-school Catholicism are expanding because the latter are speaking authoritatively about G-d, stir souls, and keep them stirred by stressing daily prayer and other religious habits.

In fact, among Orthodox Jews, intermarriage is negligible, birth rates are high, and the ba'al teshuva movement is increasing the ranks each year. He credits Irving Kristol and other "pragmatic" thinkers for seeking antidotes to intermarriage (for example, reemphasizing Jewish education), but chides them for failing to address what you might call the ultimate Jewish Question: whether the religion of the people they want "to save is true or mainly a useful fiction; an instrument for the survival of the tribe."

Klinghoffer's zeal-of-the-convert tone and conclusions are bound to offend many Jews, both religious and secular, both liberal and conservative. His book will also upset many Christians.

Even his worst critics, however, should credit him with offering a simplified, illuminating rationale for life-affirming Jewish laws on keeping kosher, refraining from sexual intercourse with one's with one's wife during her period of menstruation, males' wearing fringes of precisely twisted wool cord on a four-cornered garment, and more. Credit him, too, for shredding the sterotype of Orthodox Judaism as slavish adherence to inane, hairsplitting laws (never mind that he charges the apostle Paul with advancing this stereotype).

As we read in Deuteronomy 4:29: "But if you seek the Lord your G-d, you will find Him is you look for him with all of your heart and with all of your soul." Above all, credit Klinghoffer for looking, and for writing down what he sought -- and found.

How To Order

The Lord Will Gather Me In: My Journey to Jewish Orthodoxy by David Klinghoffer. (c) 1998, 272 pages. Free Press. Ordering Details: http://www.nationalreview.com. ISBN: 0-68482-341-1.

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