The Book Shelf,Michael Skakun

The baal teshuva movement has reconfigured the face of modern American Judaism. In the space of little more than a generation, it has reinvigorated the practice of Orthodoxy and fortified its sense of purpose. In a storm-tossed world of secularism, chance, and equivocation, it has served as both inspiration and anchorage.

Roy S. Neuberger, an exemplary baal-teshuva, who after years of breathlessly circumnavigating the globe for answers, found it, at long last, by cultivating his own garden ? in the heart of his ancestral faith. "Spirituality is very practical, it brings the reality of G-d into life," he says. Judaism's strength inheres, he argues, not in full-blown metaphysical systems or even in the profound interiority of personal faith, but rather in the incremental articulation of the holy life through Torah, the step-by-step ascent of the steep ladder rungs of the sacred.

His story is all the more extraordinary for the rich simultaneity of a family's religious discovery. Both he and his wife, Leah, (the former Linda Villency, daughter of Maurice Villency, the up-market furniture store owner, and herself a scion of Vilna rabbis) found their way back to a discarded Judaism at nearly the very same time. After an education at the University of Michigan (both made Phi Beta Kappa) and a year at Balliol College, Oxford, they found their academic baggage a good deal lighter than they had supposed. They had made obeisance to all the secular gods but could not escape the hollowness at the core of their being. Their return journey, a heartrending homeward bound story, has deservedly become a classic of teshuva.

The new updated paperback edition of Roy Neuberger's From Central Park to Sinai: How I Found My Jewish Soul not only recapitulates his extraordinary voyage but also offers guidance and counsel in the wake of the Twin Towers disaster. He writes, "àsince September 11, 2001, it came to me with renewed intensity that religion is a continuous process. As long as we exist in this world, the process never ends. We're never high enough, we're never close enough to G-d, we're never good enough. We never run out of rungs on the spiritual ladder. We must forever find new ways to reach up to Him." During this period of national adversity, he has found Jews, a notoriously divisive people, coming together. Fond of popular adages, he quotes a former coach who said, "when the going gets tough, the tough get going."<

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The scion of a great wealth and privilege, Roy S. Neuberger knows that the road back is an arduous trail demanding heart, stamina and conviction. His father, the near centenarian investor and art collector, introduced in 1950 one of the first value style mutual funds offered to the public with no front-end sales load. His son reminds us that his father made his mark on Wall St. not merely to amass a great fortune but to help underwrite great art, the sort he himself hoped but ultimately failed to master in the Paris of the 1920s, when he dined at the Café Deux Magots, the meeting ground of the Lost Generation and the Ecole de Paris and in later years the gathering place of the existentialists. Here in the heart of bohemia, in the shimmering City of Lights, he befriended many of its stellar figures.

Realizing that he lacked artistic genius, he did not descend into despondency and bitterness but rather supported wholeheartedly in the immediate post-war years such icons in the making as Jackson Pollack, the abstract expressionist, and collected the works of such latter-day American classics as Milton Avery. His formidable art collection now reposes at the Neuberger Museum at SUNY-Purchase, specially built to house his treasures. Indeed, the elder Neuberger is the author of the appropriately titled forthcoming book The Passionate Collector.

For the son, however, it was to be an experience of an entirely different dimension. Saturated in a world of secularism, his heroes were folksong legends Pete Seeger, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. A graduate of the Ethical Culture schools, founded by Felix Adler, the consummate assimilationist, Roy Neuberger concedes that initially he developed a strong animus towards Judaism. "I broke out in spiritual hives at the mere whiff of Torah," he says. The first time he ever stepped into a Jewish house of worship was parenthetically when his cub scout group happened to be meet at Temple Emanuel-El, a convenient neighborhood venue.

Ethical Culture, a moral distillate of Judaism bereft of ritual and reverence, encapsulates for Roy Neuberger everything that went wrong with the Jewish experience in America. Steeped in liberal politics, it elevated social justice to the summit of spiritual attainment, viewed ethics as the shimmer of the fashionable and demonstrated a not-so veiled condescension to traditional religious mores, a world view he knew all to well as his father had assumed the presidency of the Ethical Culture Society and his mother the chairmanship of its board of governors.

But beneath the frozen propriety of the Neuberger household lay a great subterranean stream ? the unacknowledged world of mussar. His maternal grandfather, Aaron B. Salant, hailed from the birthplace of the father of the mussar movement, the rigorous, if not ascetic, spiritual revolution that rocked rabbinic Judaism and redrew the constellation of Jewish learning and practice in the most revered of Polish and Lithuanian talmudical academies. He told Roy that "we are descendants of the great Rabbi Yisroel Salanter," a lineal point that still remains to be substantiated genealogically, if not spiritually.

Roy Neuberger says "Salanter was a moral lighthouse, a beacon still shining, whose influence is a mighty force in the world." Indeed, Judaism's most rigorous movement of self-examination, character refinement and motivational analysis, left its mark even in a family so beholden to secularism. He insists that his mother's goodness of heart and fineness of perception mirrored the quintessence of mussar.

At the epicenter of the Neubergers's spiritual earthquake stood Rebbetzin Jungreis, the "Jewish Billy Graham" as the glossies once termed her, a Hungarian Jewish survivor of Bergen-Belsen, a woman of indomitable faith and indefatigable energy. Indeed, of the eighty seven rabbis named Jungreis in Hungary before World War II, only her father, the rabbi of Szeged, and his immediate family survived. A religious trailblazer, Rebbetzin Jungreis, whose Hineni movement got its very first start as a column in the pages of The Jewish Press, led the Neubergers in 1974 to Israel, and by the sheer force of her eloquence, dynamism and example convinced them to move to her community on Long Island and finally to ascend the path to spiritual regeneration. In time the Neubergers became part of the very warp and woof of the Hineni movement when their daughter, Yaffa, married Rebbetzin Jungreis's son, Rabbi Osher Anschel.

Today, nearly thirty years after their tectonic identity shift ? their unabashed rediscovery of their Jewish heritage ? the Neubergers themselves bring the message of Orthodox Judaism and religious commitment to others. Both husband and wife are inveterate travelers with a well crafted and profoundly moving message. Roy Neuberger is currently hard at work on his new book, tentatively titled, The Spiritual History of Israel: From Bereshis to the Present and Beyond, which, among its many other insights, will look at the intractable conflict in the Middle East through a focused Biblical lens.

A man with a instinctive foreknowledge of all that is good in life, a connoisseur of kosher wines and life's many other spiritual elixirs, he says appropriately of his remarkable odyssey, "We drank from the fountain of life, and this delicious wine tastes better each time, especially when you share it with others."

Michael Skakun is the author of "On Burning Ground: A Son's Memoir" (St. Martin's Press), a Holocaust memoir.

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