The resume of Rabbi Avraham Peretz Friedman (also known as Cary A. Friedman) almost reads like a bucket list. Study Torah with Jonathan Pollard? Check. Consult for the FBI? Check. Graduate from Columbia University with a Masters in electrical engineering? Check. Teach Gemara to the dean of Duke University’s law school? Check. Translate the divrei Torah of a 17th-century rabbi? Check. Write a book on Batman? Check. Get a black belt in Shaolin gung fu? Check.
Rabbi Friedman, who currently serves as associate director of the Center for Tactical Resilience and Ethical Policing, published his seventh book over the summer, “Beautiful Days, Holy Days: The Majesty and Profundity of the Jewish Holidays” (Compass Books). His previous works include “Table for Two: Making a Good Marriage Better,” “Chanukas HaTorah: Mystical Insights of Rav Avraham Yehoshua Heschel on Chumash,” “Spiritual Survival for Law Enforcement,” and “Wisdom from the Batcave: How to Live a Super, Heroic Life.”
He and his wife live in Passaic, New Jersey, and are the parents of six children.
The Jewish Press: How does an Orthodox rabbi come to write a book on Batman?
Rabbi Freidman: Well, I grew up kind of obsessed with Batman. And what happened was: I had been learning and teaching in Eretz Yisrael for a number of years, and I came to back to the United States as part of a Torah Umesorah program to do kiruv at Duke University. One of my rebbeim said to me, “They’re going to melt in the face of your Torah.” But I showed up and the students weren’t particularly interested.
So I decided to incorporate Batman into my classes since it was really the only anchor I had in popular culture. I would bring in a page from a Batman comic book with some ethical dilemma and then ask the students how they would resolve it. The kids would start arguing and after five minutes I would hand out, l’havdil, a photocopy of a page of Gemara and say, “Matt, the point you’re advocating is the view of the Baalei Tosfos. And Jessica, your view is what the Ritva says. And Jeff, your position is what the Ramban says.”
So Jeff, who wouldn’t know the Ramban if he tripped over his turban, would suddenly be battling away to defend the Ramban’s view. It was devastatingly effective. I did that for four years, and the class became very popular.
Would you recommend your Batman book to Orthodox Jews or is it just meant as a kiruv tool?
I think there’s a value in frum people reading it too. To live a Torah life means to be heroic. It calls upon us to transcend our instincts and reach amazingly high levels that we wouldn’t have thought possible, and one of the defining lessons of the Batman persona is the idea of overcoming adversity – of responding to a tough life by rising above it and doing something great.
So if people within a Torah society have good parents and teachers and are excited with this sense of being heroic, I wouldn’t necessarily say, “Go and find out about Batman.” But if someone doesn’t have any other source that would impress upon him the importance of being heroic, I think it’s a great idea.
Turning to your police work, what exactly do you do at the Center for Tactical Resilience and Ethical Policing?
I’m a police trainer. I started the company together with two other nationally known trainers, one of whom is the chief psychologist for the Navy SEALs. We assist police agencies in helping their officers deal with the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual stresses of the job. We work all over the country. This month, for example, we’ll be in Chicago addressing 3,000 police chiefs.
In your book Spiritual Survival for Law Enforcement, you write that people don’t realize how mentally tough being a police officer is – to the point that the police suicide rate is apparently three times higher than that of the general population.
Many police officers considered entering the clergy before law enforcement, so they have the same instinct to do good in the world. They believe in some transcendent value or truth, they care for human beings, and they have self-confidence in themselves. Think of these as spiritual “bank accounts.” The lives of police officers, however, contain all kinds of experiences that drain these accounts. They see suffering, randomness, and evil every day and they begin to think there’s little they can do in the face of so much horror.
So what happens is these three accounts get drained very quickly and police officers go into spiritual overdraft and become embittered. What I do is I sensitize them to the fact that there is this drama playing out, and then I help them create exercises and tools to replenish these accounts. Basically I distill a lot of mussar literature so that police officers can stay healthy.
Is this what you do as a consultant for the FBI?
Yes. For the last fifteen years I’ve been a consultant to the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, and I designed a course for them on spiritual survival for law enforcement. For about seven years I taught at Quantico a few times a year.
What is your sense of the mood of police officers right now with the increase in anti-police sentiment in the country?
They’re bewildered. It’s kind of a sad thing that society dismisses the extraordinary work they do. I mean, they put their lives on the line every day to protect strangers. It’s one thing if a person risks himself to protect his family members, but police officers protect people they’ve never met before.
So the fact that there is this kind of wide-scale negative portrayal of the police in the liberal media is sad to them, but I really believe that most decent people in this country are very strongly supportive of the police – as they should be.
When you lived in North Carolina in the 1990s, you studied Torah with Jonathan Pollard in prison every week for four years. What were your impressions of him?
I thought he was an extraordinary human being. He has a brilliant mind, and I enjoyed learning with him very much. It was very difficult for me to see him in that kind of environment, but amid all the harshness of the place, he retained his dignity throughout, and his middos were, I thought, exemplary.
What did you study with him? Was there a sefer he particularly enjoyed?
We studied Chumash and Gemara, and we spent a lot of time on hashkafic topics as well. Pollard and I also went through every word of the first two volumes of Hegyonei Halacha by Rabbi Yitzchak Mirsky. Finally, Pollard had copy of Gateway to Happiness by Rabbi Zelig Pliskin, which he loved more than anything else around him.
As the author of Table for Two: Making a Good Marriage Better, what would you say is the key to a good marriage?
There’s nothing magical about making a marriage good. Marriage is composed of two people, and each has to refine personal character and work on middos. If a person uses marriage properly, it becomes the vehicle by which he or she can reach very high levels of shleimus and tikkun hamiddos.
In fact, it doesn’t even require two people. Even one person working hard on him or herself can make amazing differences in themselves and use that as a springboard for improving their marriage.
You also write several times in the book that there’s “no mitzvah to be natural.” What do you mean by that?
I think a lot of people within marriage say, “I just want to be myself,” “I’m going to let it all hang out,” “I want to just relax and be the person that I am.” And that’s never a formula for success. Success comes when a person transcends him or herself.
There was a movie when I was a boy called “Love Story” and its tagline was, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s sheker v’chazav, it’s rishus – because love means always saying sorry, always working on oneself, always demanding more of oneself and trying to raise oneself up to a higher level in terms of sensitivity and kindness and consideration for one’s spouse.
Why do you – a rabbi – have a black belt in Shaolin gung fu?
I think it’s important for everybody – for every Jew especially – to defend him or herself. In addition, for me, Shaolin gung fu is an adjunct to my mussar training. It teaches a person to confront his fears and sense of limitations and then to just smash through them.
I’m involved now in teaching Shaolin gung fu to some of my own children.
On the front cover of some of your books you are “Rabbi Avraham Peretz Friedman” and on the cover of others you are “Cary A. Friedman.” Why?
I want to make people comfortable. When I submitted A Table for Two, the people at Targum Press said, “We’re not sure people will be comfortable reading a book written by Rabbi Cary Friedman. They might think it’s a woman. We want people to have a sense that this book is appropriate for them.”
In the outside world, though, “Cary” is a little less scary. So if the cover of my police book said “Rabbi Avraham Peretz Friedman,” I don’t think there’s a police officer in the country who would read it – and I don’t blame them. I mean, would we pick up a book if it was very clearly written by a priest?
So both names are fair expressions of who I am. I am Cary A. Friedman, and I am Avraham Peretz Friedman. I don’t see any setirah, but on the covers of my books I put the name that won’t turn the audience off because the most important thing for me is that they open the book and experience the Torah that’s inside.
In your latest work, Beautiful Days, Holy Days, you write that Megillas Esther is almost an anti-Cinderella story. Can you elaborate?
The outline of the Cinderella story is that a heroine with humble origins is elevated to some high position due to the intervention of an otherworldly being, and her success is a function of her beauty.
In Megillas Esther we see a rejection of all this. Esther doesn’t want to become queen and she gets the job not because of her beauty – in fact, Chazal say she had unappealing features – but because of her middos and the greatness of her neshamah. She even refuses to wear cosmetics when they’re offered to her. And when Esther becomes queen, the only value she sees in it is the potential to save Klal Yisrael.
So Megillas Esther is a rejection of the values of the Cinderella story right down the line.