Changing Destinies: The Extraordinary Life and Time of Prof. Reuven Feuerstein

By Louis H. Falik and Rabbi Rafi Feuerstein

This is the biography of a remarkable man who changed the lives of those who were lost and who stood at the nexus of world events. A man who brought hope to those for whom no hope was held, transformed our definitions of intelligence and learning, and joined the pantheon of great cognitive psychologists, ranking with Piaget and Vygotsky. This is told largely through his own words and of those who knew him. One does not need to be well versed in psychology or education to appreciate the story of his life but interested in how one’s family, religious beliefs, and optimistic responding to climactic events shape the character of a unique personality. The story evolves over his lifetime and is told as a narrative of extraordinary times and accomplishments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796055658

Louis H. Falik

Professor Louis H. Falik Professor Falik is a professor emeritus of counseling at San Francisco State University (USA) and a senior scholar focusing on training, research, and professional development at the international Feuerstein Institute (formerly, the International Center for the Enhancement of Modifiability—ICELP) in Jerusalem, Israel. He is author and coauthor of numerous books and research papers on the theories and practices developed by Professor Reuven Feuerstein, and he personally assisted him over a period of more than twenty-five years to elaborate and articulate his formulations. He is a clinical and educational psychologist with extensive experience with the training and application of the Instrumental Enrichment programs (FIE) and the Learning Propensity Assessment Device (LPAD) in child, adolescent, and adult populations, focusing on both learning disabilities and academic performance and enhancement objectives. He continues to write about Feuerstein techniques and train and consult with practitioners globally.

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Copyright © 2019 by Louis H. Falik.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019912761

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-7960-5567-2

                Softcover        978-1-7960-5566-5

                 eBook              978-1-7960-5565-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 08/29/2019

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Dedicat

ions

To my wife, Marilynn Lubin Falik (of blessed memory), and my sons, Alan (of blessed memory) and David, who participated with enthusiasm and affection in my journey with Reuven Feuerstein

To the Feuerstein family—Rafi, Noa, Aharon, and Danny—and their spouses and children, who welcomed me as a member of the family for more than thirty years and are an integral part of the life and events depicted herein

A Special Thank-You

To Ya’akov Boussidan, whose depiction of Reuven is on the cover of this book and who helped in the preparation of the photographs, including many that required digital enhancing, and whose story is told in this book

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Prologue

Chapter 1    Setting the Scene

A Day in the Life of …

The Doer and the Dreamer

Defining Destiny

Chapter 2    Antecedents

Geographical Contexts and Changing Identities

Being Jewish in Uncertain Times

The Inheritance of Hasidic Judaism

The Structure of a Hasidic Community

Between the Wars in Romania

Being Jewish in a Non-Jewish World

The Continuity of the Rabbi’s Community

Connecting with the Past and Culture in Everyday Life

Chapter 3    The Foundations of Family and Life

The Meaning of Family

Living Life Like a Candle

The Family of Origin

The Family in His Younger Years

Visiting Botosani Today

The Shabbas Goy and the Shabbat Dance

Limits To Going Out into the Secular World

Paula the Communist!

Precocious At An Early Age

Zionism and Its Role in Reuven’s Life

The Injunction of His Grandfather

The Need To Be a Teacher

Consequences of the Six-Day War

Remembering Aspects of Life Growing Up

Going To the Circus Within the Jewish Culture

The Music of My Grandfather

My Grandparents: Their Lives and Mine

Bringing the Family Together

Chapter 4    Times of Tension and Uncertainty

Life Between the Wars

Activism: From Youth Groups To the Larger Community

The Bucharest Years

Escape From Bucherest

Chapter 5    The War Years and Beyond

Saving the Children

Harassment and Survival

Preparing For Aliyah/Dealing with Anti-Semitism

After the War, Avoiding Entanglements

A Fragile Medical Condition

Returning To Life with All Its Diversity

The Influence of Rabbi Safran

Early Work Organizing Youth

Chapter 6    Coming to Israel The Early Days

The Conditions of Coming

Redemption: the Foundation and Promise of Kfar Etzion

Rooting Himself in the New Life and Land

There But Not There

The Ingathering of Survivors

First Experiences in the Youth Village

Being in the Land

Family Connections To the United States

Life in the New Land

Chapter 7    The Foundations of Work and Family

The Promise of Youth Aliyah

Meeting His Future Wife: Overcoming Obstacles

Jews Divided By Zionism

Building a Family

Individuation and Psychological Differentiation

Taking Leave: into a Void

Extending and Deepening the Family

Israel Needs Great Artists!

Family Legacies

Porgy and Bess: Adding Gershwin To His Repertoire

Furthering Youth Aliyah

Birth of The Hadassah-Wizo-Canada Research Institute

Expanding the Scope

Building a Staff and Structure

Reaching Out To the World

Changing My Destiny

Chapter 8    The Foundations of What Will Come

Geneva and Piaget

Survivors of the Holocaust

Working with the Children of the Holocaust: Impetus and Inspiration

The Theory Takes Shape and Life

Eclectic Interests

Distancing From the Mentor

Cultural Deprivation and Cultural Difference

Judaic Roots in Theory and Practice

The Emergence of Mediation in the Bible

To Be Jewish in the Eyes of Your Colleagues

Chapter 9    Moving Forward: The Next Steps

Writing the Dissertation

Recalling the Youth Villages

Fighting For Others: Pushing Against the Rules

The Priority of Helping Children

To Pay Or Not To Pay: That Is the Question

Family and Work

Another Journey To Celebrate and Commemoriate

The Family’s Artistic Dna

Being in Two Places At the Same Time

Demonstrating Modifiability

Solving a Puzzle and Helping To Overcome

The Group Home Experiment

The Shabbat Table

Recognition in Israel and Elsewhere

A Chance Meeting with a Neighbor in a Bank

The Vicissitdes of Helping

Chapter 10    And the Word Shall Go Forth from Jerusalem

The Beginnings of Dissemination and Acceptance

Further Defining the Concepts

The Proximity To Epic Events

Plowing the Earth and Planting the Seeds

Cultivating Colleagues and Friendships

Taking On Educational Controversies

Meanwhile On the Home Front

Responding To Special Needs

Calibrating the Methods

Observing and Elaborating

Disappointment and Redemption

Expert and Oracle

The Value of the Product

A Financial Contribution with No Strings Attached

Honors Begin To Come

Saving the Life of My Chief Rabbi

Disseminating and Experiencing

Trying To Save a Child’s Life: a Journey To Manchester

Chapter 11    The Work Matures and Spreads

The First Validations

The Arrival of Eitan Vig

International Assessment and Treatment

Mediating Parents/Working with Young Children

A Mentor To Many

Extending the Professional Family

Chapter 12    Securing a Place in the World

From Theory To Practice

Disdain For Diagnoses

Variations and Adaptations: Closer and Farther Away

I’ve Decided Not To Destroy My Brain

The Shoresh Seminars

A Reluctant Model For Sculpture

The Destiny of the Applied Programs

The Inconsistent History of FIE in the United States

Learning To Learn

Priming the Pump

The Institute Grows and Changes

Writing and Publishing, Establishing Credibility

Chapter 13    Now and the Future

A Metaphor For Our Fate

Life Goes On in Spite Of…

Relationships with Benefactors

Experiencing the Pleasures of Life

Nominated for the Nobel Prize

A Prophet Is Without Honor in His Own Camp

An Intuitive Therapist?

His Family Grows and Changes

The Institute Grows and Changes

The Brain Conference

Sources of Optimism

The Shape of the Institute To Come

The Pace and Meaning of His Life

A Sense of Humor

The Reject Manuscript

On the Celebration of His Ninetieth Birthday

The Firsts

For the Family

For His Working Colleagues

For Posterity

What’s in a Name?

Saying a Final Goodbye

References

FOREWORD

A GREAT MANY biographies and films have been produced on the significant, gifted, and profound personage that was Professor Reuven Feuerstein; but the biography written by my friend and colleague, Professor Lou Falik, portends great tidings to millions of people all over the world who were influenced by his inspiring and hope-giving teachings. What is special about this biography is that it was written by a person who was not just Feuerstein’s disciple and partner in the writing of a great many important books and the dissemination of the Method throughout the world but was also actually a member of the institute founded and directed by Professor Reuven Feuerstein as well as being practically one of the family in the modest home of my parents, Reuven and Berta Feuerstein, in Jerusalem. Their many years of writing and research were done during the night hours in the home of Berta and Reuven Feuerstein, more often than not, after a hard day’s work.

During those night hours, the deepest and most meaningful discussions would evolve between the two men. The uniqueness of this book, therefore, is that it was not written from the outside but from within, from the very heart of Professor Feuerstein’s study and out of deep familiarity with the ecosystem that Professor Feuerstein constructed. Professor Reuven Feuerstein’s long life was filled with numerous significant milestones. The author’s profound acquaintance with Professor Feuerstein relates to the last thirty years, and his testimonies have the great value of being given by someone who was there.

My thanks and compliments to the author for his comprehensive research and writing that have generated this book. I am confident that all adherents and followers of Professor Reuven Feuerstein will find great interest in this book.

Rafael S. Feuerstein

President, the Feuerstein Institute

Jerusalem, June 2019

PREFACE

T HIS BOOK IS part memoir, part biography, and part history woven into a narrative. It is neither fully a biography nor autobiography but a bit of both. It is written from a very personal perspective, both Reuven Feuerstein’s and mine, as his interlocutor. It is told in large measure in his words, with bridging and elaborations added to provide continuity to the narrative. The autobiographical portion comes from the personal stories he told me over a period of more than ten years, with his clearly stated intention that I should eventually bring them together into a book. Its biographical nature ensues from the details of his life that connect and enrich the themes of the stories that he told me and wanted to have narrated in his life story. In the historical narrative, I felt it important to frame Reuven’s life from the perspective of his personal and family relationship to his Judaic faith and the influence of his relatively intimate relationship to the founding and flourishing of Hasidic Judaism in Eastern Europe of the late 1800s and 1920s and ’30s. It is not possible to understand the nature of Reuven Feuerstein’s personality and lifework without this context. The times in which he lived and worked were tumultuous and epic, both personally and politically. His life story richly confirms these influences.

What was it like to live in a climate of anti-Semitism and the outbreak of World War II? What did it mean to grow up and move into adult years in the vortex of forces impinging on the Jewish population, both secular and religiously observant? Then what was it like as events found him immersed in the founding of Israel, the response to the Holocaust, and the ingathering of its youthful survivors?

And then, as a component of this story as I convey it, there is my personal involvement. Its relevance stems from the sense of closeness and affection that developed between us through an almost thirty-year relationship. For me, and I believe for him, it tinged all that he told me, all that we did together with a consonance of spirit and deep meaning. Thus this narrative is multilayered. It is a combination of personal recollection, historical context, and a journal of the development of ideas. Its goal is to construct a picture that is reflective of the kind of person Reuven Feuerstein was, embellished by placing insights from the uniqueness of the relationship I was privileged to have with him.

My primary reasons for this structure are several: I want this book to be of interest to those who did not know him, those who are not familiar with his theory or the nature of his life’s work, and those not particularly drawn to the issues of psychology, education, learning, etc. that framed his purpose in life. The uniqueness of his life is worth knowing in its own right. I hope that it is not merely my connection to him that makes this a really good story! But even more, he had much to teach us, and I want some of this to transmit itself to you, the reader. He was a great storyteller, and his life intersected with so many of the important historical events in the last half of the twentieth century. The stories are both compelling and instructive. He also found himself at the nexus of important events in the psychology and science of learning and human development. I often reflected to him that he was at the right place at the right time, which was not always a positive or comfortable experience but a source of his insights, energy, creative thinking, and opportunity to make a difference in the lives of people and the institutions that served them. Thus—and this is essential for the understanding of his life—he always made the most of what he was and what could be done, even returning from potentially fatal encounters. So the essence is in his personal narrative, and the narrative is rich and compelling for reasons that will unfold.

Why do I feel I can take on this task and link his personal narrative to the larger events of his life? Here is an anecdote, the first of many that are in this book. It both explains and justifies my decision to structure this book as I have.

It was late at night in his home. We often worked late into the evening after our working day at the institute was finished and after he had had a chance to rest (forty-five minutes of lying on the couch was usually enough to regenerate him, with the television news on in the background and the telephone taken off the hook—usually by a caring family member in the house, never by him). After he had rested, he would call me on the telephone and say, "Lou, do you want to work for a few hours?" To most such invitations, I almost always responded in the affirmative and came to him. His energy was renewed from his brief sleep, as was mine from being with him!

It was now so late (10:30 or 11:00 p.m.) that the telephone had finally stopped ringing, and it was quiet, conducive to concentration. I was reading him a section of a chapter of something that we had been working on. Our way of working had evolved into a pattern: he may have dictated something or we would have talked about a concept or a process or perhaps a case example. Usually, the tape recorder was on. Sometimes, I would make notes or do a combination of both. I would ask questions, frame an issue from another perspective, perhaps even argue for another point of view. We once debated for thirty minutes whether the use of indigenous or aboriginal was the most appropriate way to describe the native peoples of Australia, Canada, or New Zealand. Sometimes, he would energetically contradict me—but he was always the teacher, with the process of learning and deep consideration of meaning being very important to him. He would argue and listen, a rare combination in a person of his intelligence and power of personality. I can still hear his voice: "Let me explain you! he would often say, and he became the passionate teacher to the attentive student, each of us enjoying and being stimulated by the challenges of the encounter. Other times he would listen or add a word or phrase, and it was clear to me that it should be incorporated into the writing. Increasingly, as we worked together over the years, he would say, Absolutely! which was understood as Put it in, say it, it is what I want to have in this place on this subject. Other times, his voice would trail off; and he would wave his hand and say, You will write this, you will know how to do it," which meant that he gave me permission to go further and write it as I wished. And he was comfortable with our product and then seldom asked to see or discuss it again. This process was transformed by transcribing and crafting, sometimes going back to a past issue, sometimes not, to that which has been generated with a framing, reframing, linguistically fashioning, adding material, and the like. And if time was not an issue, it could go on and on, like the artist who looks at his creation and always wants to make a change or an addition each time he sees it anew.

In the instance I am recalling here, I was reading a section that had been created in one of these ways—I cannot recall exactly how. He was following the text, and we had been at it for close to an hour with no interruptions (a remarkable event in its own right!). He held up his hand, which was my signal to stop reading. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, and I awaited his reaction, which could be any one or a variation of what I described above. It might also mean he was too tired to concentrate, and we would stop working for the evening. After a few moments, he opened his eyes and said to me, Lou, a remarkable thing is happening. When I listen to you read this, I am hearing my voice! That is wonderful. He smiled and closed his eyes again. He was comforted, and I was confirmed, and we worked on in a sense of existential convergence.

And this framed our further work for many years afterward. It did not need to be verbalized, but it clearly energized our work. And much later, it gave me the confidence to undertake the writing of this book in the way that I want to structure it—reviewing his life from the perspective of his words and our shared experience of more than twenty-five years. Even if we might have disagreed on details of content or syntax—and the details did change from one retelling of a story to the next time he recalled it—I feel that I am writing in his voice and capturing the essence of his narrative! And I am actually taking very few liberties.

My only regret is that his passing takes away the potential for his interaction with this material and my interaction with him. I miss his correcting, changing the focus, adding perspective, taking things further and deeper, and even changing the details of a once- or twice-told tale; it is sadly a much less dynamic perspective. But at the same time, as I write, I hear his voice, visualize his face, and think about our almost thirty years of shared experience.

For a period starting more than ten years ago, the gradual formation of this biographical endeavor served as the basis of his telling many stories and wanting me to be with him at a variety of academic, professional, personal and family events. You must come with me, this will be important for the biography! Over this time period, many who knew that this was occurring would ask, How is the biography coming? I would respond that I was still gathering material, and other than outlining the scope of the project and constructing a few paragraphs here and there, I could not focus or sustain myself to do much writing. For me, the material was still coming; and he and I had much more compelling writing to do—a number of manuals for our applied programs (the Learning Propensity Assessment Device (LPAD), the Instrumental Enrichment programs), four published books in four years, and two or three projects already underway. Now I understand! Upon reflection, I now know that the real reason I could not proceed was that his life was not over; and I was reluctant to come to conclusions, generate frameworks, and think about where things were going while they were still happening.

But now, thirty days after his passing, I am ready to write. I am flooded by memories of him and his stories. Over the next two years that this text emerged, I found that I have a sense of what to say, how to say it, and what perspectives are meaningful and relevant for him as his life unfolded and for me as I shared the last thirty years of it—with him, with his beloved wife, Berta, his children, grandchildren, and dear friends. It is all of a piece! Of course, I will bring material and recollections from his children and his colleagues to this endeavor, including those who have been with him in different ways and lengths of time as I have been. But I am now ready, and he would have wanted it this way. I am sure of it!

Of course, each time I sit and reread this material, I add to it as new memories and details emerge from my conscious and unconscious experience with him and engagement in his life.

There are a number of sources that have influenced this work, both explicitly and implicitly. A biography was written and published by our colleague and friend Ruth Burgess in 2008 (Changing Brain Structure Through Cross-Cultural Learning: The Life of Reuven Feuerstein). I include several quotes from her book in the text of this book. Her interviews with him drew out important memories and helped him to make connections from his experience to both his past and future life experiences.

I am also indirectly influenced by a book titled Two Lives by the Indian author Vikram Seth (2005). Seth’s contribution to my thinking is structural as he weaves together the details of the lives of his Indian uncle and the Jewish/German woman he married. It creates an intimate and personal biography, going well beyond the facts of one’s life and doing what another favorite author of mine, Thomas Cahill, author of three small books on Christianity and Judaism (Desire of the Everlasting Hills, The Gifts of the Jews, and How the Irish Saved Civilization) describes as (I paraphrase) delving into the small cracks of history, between the big events. I hope that this book carries some of that flavor as well.

As I began the actual writing of this manuscript, I came across a book by Yossi Klein Halevi, Like Dreamers (2003), that describes Israel’s Six-Day War in 1967 through the lives of five soldiers and then follows them into the postwar aftermath of their lives in Israel. This book helped me understand the more contemporary context in which Reuven lived—for example, clarifying the tensions between religious and secular Zionism in Israel, the geopolitical and governmental decisions and their effect on the population and their geographical implications—all of which are important contributors to the context of Reuven’s life from 1944 to his death in 2014. I have borrowed the phrase proximity to epic events from Halevi and have used it at several places in the narrative because it describes his life so well. It is an absolutely apt depiction of the fabric of Reuven’s life!

Perusing the table of contents, you will see the plan of this book. It is not linear, as his life was not a logically sequenced experience, and so I will move back and forth in historical time but impose a general chronological pathway. It will convey personal and geopolitical history. I have chosen to place primary emphasis on aspects of his life, weaving in his conceptual formulations and work where relevant and necessary, because his life and his work were almost inseparable for him. While thinking about the plan for it and starting to write this preface, I began to think about the importance of one’s personal narrative and the ways in which the events of one’s life (personal/physical characteristics, family, culture, religion) create an ongoing life story that is internalized and acted upon with both productive consciousness and sometimes with less awareness. Often we are aware of our life themes; and at times, they direct us in ways beyond our awareness. For Reuven, it was very much the former. And for some of us—for Reuven very much so—the themes of our personal narrative are extended and elaborated so far beyond their personal meaning that we sometimes look back on and only then understand their themes and purpose. This book is about his personal narrative and its extensions, blending life and work and culture. We can learn much from this!

There are several chapters detailing the development of Hasidic Judaism. There are several reasons for this: his personal family history is directly related to this development—as will be described in this book—and his Judaic background is intimately woven into the structure of his life and work. To understand this is to have a deep sense of who he was—the contributions and conflicts.

Finally, sitting with Reuven in the last years of his life and listening to him and interacting with his thinking (his requirement of me), the existential implications of his life became clear as he reviewed the events and accomplishments, felt frustration for the things left undone, and marshaled his remaining energies to affect the lives of others. As I sat and listened and interacted, I was reminded of the existential philosophers and therapists who summarized the main narrative themes of human life: freedom and will, love and hate, being and nonbeing, awareness, connectedness, and isolation. All of these were richly present in Reuven Feuerstein’s life story, his narrative. All told, mostly he lived long enough to experience the fulfillment of his major goals, personally and scientifically.

These strands of the narrative can be brought together. Daniel Siegel has written about mindfulness in his book Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation (2010), where he integrates knowledge about the way the brain functions (an important issue for Reuven in the final stages of his life—we were in the middle of a manuscript on the relationship of cognitive modifiability and neural plasticity when he passed away) with development, cognitive, and psychotherapeutic processes. Reuven was intuitively on the cutting edge of this thinking, working to deepen the meaning of the integration of behavior with the brain. Here are some of Siegel’s words that describe this developmental and cognitive blend and serves as a framework for understanding the sequences of a life. Its cognitive sequence would have pleased Reuven and is a meaningful rubric for his life:

By the age of three or four, children have begun to think in concrete terms about death (and life). They realize that people and pets don’t live forever. By then our prefrontal regions have also developed enough to weave our life stories. As we move into our elementary school years, our memories move with us and time becomes embedded into our world view. In adolescence we enter another phase in our pre-fontal capacity to sense time—we begin to dream of the future, to wonder about the meaning of life, and to grapple with the reality of death. (p. 232)

It is my fervent hope that as this narrative unfolds, we will be enriched by our access to it. It is a remarkable story, embedded and surrounded by epic events and heroic responses. It is a truly remarkable life. I present it to you here, adding my words here and there to widen and deepen its scope as we begin this journey through Reuven’s life.

His death has come. I am ready to write!

PROLOGUE

I AM GOING to tell Reuven Feuerstein’s story in the first person, his and mine. But worry not, both perspectives will be his. As you could surmise from the preface, our intimate relationship with each other over a period of close to thirty years makes it impossible to do otherwise and compels me to convey it in this manner. Even with the power of his charisma and the extent of his achievements, I know that there was a reciprocality in our relationship, knowing his effect on me and observing many instances of mine on him. I believe that he knew it, wanted it, and nurtured it. But it will be primarily his story and not mine, except insofar as my insights and interactions embellish his narrative. His charisma will be mentioned often for it was a dominant theme of his life, felt by all whom he was in contact with, making possible his remarkable achievements. But although he was charismatic and I do not consider myself to be, there is no danger that it will not be his story. Nonetheless, the narrative will be elaborated by weaving a perspective on the events that comprise the story. It must be this way, for I was with him for more than twenty-five years!

On April 29, 2014, Reuven Tzvi Feuerstein’s corporeal being passed from this earth. But his spirit did not. It remains in the hearts and minds of all whom he touched, not diminished by the passing of time. It remains with us, the many thousands who learned with him, studied the significant and meaningful work he created, and—through them—affected the multitudes of human beings to whom it has been applied. That is what this book is about. He was an extraordinary man living through extraordinary times, each shaping the other. This is the story of this man and the times he lived in.

We all thought he would live forever. At least that was how we lived with him from day to day. We loved him, and he loved us. And the level of engagement and energy that flowed from these relationships—not confined to his family but extending to all he worked with and all he came in contact with—predetermined this expectation. Perhaps that is the way of highly charismatic figures: they exude such strength and confidence that we cannot imagine them not existing.

He was the most charismatic figure that any of us would ever know up close and personal—to use a phrase popular in the media—but also at a distance, from the lecture stage or from reading one of his books or papers. Perhaps it was just me, but I think not as I observed his effect on others: how they would leave an encounter with him feeling optimism and a sense of their own power no matter what miseries or concerns they came with. But he was also enigmatic, demanding, critical, and human at the same time, sometimes arrogant and headstrong, but also humble and self-effacing. I had to keep reminding myself in our day-to-day encounters that he was just a human being after all! When he got angry, he was intense—his eyebrows arched, his voice both lowered and projected, and one could not help but visualize the image of an angry god! He had a confident sense of himself, but he also was humble and deferential in the face of prominent and powerful others or when he encountered something that he wanted to learn about. He learned to surf the internet in his late eighties, including how to differentiate meaningful from spurious information. And he found himself in the proximity of epic events (a theme we will return to several times in this book), from humble beginnings to immersion in traumatic events from the conditions that generated the Holocaust. In the midst of the misery inflicted on children and families, he forged a sense of purpose and direction and directed it positively, optimistically, and outwardly to a range of applications scarcely imagined in the early stages and often contrary to the conventional accepted wisdom of the time—educationally and psychologically—and far ahead of the scientific wisdom of the time! (Not surprisingly, given the personality of this man, he took pleasure in the controversy his theories and practices engendered.) Over my years with him, I learned to curb my skepticism about a new and seemingly radical concept that he formulated as time showed his ultimate wisdom and accuracy, which reflected a great sense of vision. An example of this was his early speculation that not only the chromosomes but even the genes could be changed—that later neurophysiological research confirmed. I will tell that story later at a more timely place in this book.

And more importantly, he exuded a power coming from a belief that he could and should make a difference, as if he could influence the damaging tides of the history he was witnessing and experiencing on the one hand and contribute to the positive outcomes that he saw as potentials in the situations he faced. And he found himself doing this with the great and the humble in the dark recesses of life’s small events and, from time to time, very much in the spotlight—again a story to be told in some detail later. He liked the contrasts, drew strength and confirmation from the experience, and was constantly moving on, perhaps in the spirit of a Don Quixote tilting at windmills, except his windmills were not delusional but related to an important and demanding reality.

Toward the end of his life, some of the power of his charisma began to fade, as did his physical self. He began to lose some of his monumental confidence and felt that he could no longer confront the injustices—both in immediate circumstances and on the grander scale of events. The energy needed to tilt at the windmills was ebbing.

So this is his story and the story of those who were with him like myself. It is his memoire, but inevitably, it will be mine as well. I will tell it through his voice and the voices of the others who were influenced by him, were affected by him, were energized by him—most of whom had their perspectives widened by him—and even some of those who were angered and distanced by him, as well as the many, many others who loved him and whom he loved even when he felt that they had done him injustice.

I have already mentioned his charisma several times. It will be evidenced often as this story unfolds. I mentioned this at his graveside, in much the same words as above, and added that, for him, the power he possessed and that drew people to him gave them the confidence to engage with him and trust him to help them or to expend energy to join him in his quests—the very definition and manifestation of that quality that defines charisma. It was always directed outward, given to others, away from him, not for his self-aggrandizement and not to enhance his status in the world, although he loved to be recognized and affirmed. One typical instance I recall was his excited reaction to receiving a letter of support from the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, a revered figure in the Jewish world. He saved and showed it to many people with great pride. It congratulated and encouraged him to continue his work and project it to others. He added this blessing to the several others he had received from rabbis whom he revered and had influenced his life course. That is why this story must not only be about him but also of others who were touched by his life and whose lives touched his.

And so I return to the beginning—to our expectation that he would live forever. He knew he would not, and so in his last days, he would repeat to me, I hope that God gives us a few more years, so we can finish the work that people in the world need so badly. And in those moments of physical weakness (as his ninety-three-year-old body began to fade, but not his mind), he continued to push himself, saying, "If I don’t work, I will not live." And so each night, as he could not sleep, he would surf the internet (learning to do so late in life), greeting me each morning with a sheaf of papers downloaded from the night before, having found something that we should talk about, learn more about, and add to whatever the current creative project we were working on with enthusiasm and hopefulness.

As I write this, we have just celebrated the shloshim, the thirtieth day after his death, when the gravestone is placed and dedicated; and those who mourn him come to the cemetery to say their prayers and then remember his life in a personal but shared joining together. It is the tradition of observant Orthodox Judaism. We don’t want to leave the graveside; we stay and keep remembering him and our experiences with him. We tell stories and share emotions. We later moved to the institute and sat in an auditorium where he had given many lectures, and there was a wonderful photograph of him projected on a screen and three or four portraits done by his dear friend of many years, Ya’akov Boussidan (whose life story we will share later in this book), in our view as many of us talked of his personal meaning to us and the meaning of his life and work in our lives. And while we talked, two of his great-grandchildren, toddlers, romped and tumbled on the stage, making joyful noises. No one stopped them. No one chided them. No one seemed bothered by their happy playfulness. It seemed fitting.

Thus, I end this prologue with the thought that yes, deep down, we know and knew he would not live forever; but we also know that his life lives forever in our beings, hearts, and minds—and of course in his life’s work. For me, personally, I will miss arising each morning of my time with him, wondering what adventure awaited us from being in his presence. His work was his life, and his life was his work. And for many of us, it became ours as well! I hope for the strength to continue to pursue his vision. That is the positive power of his charisma and his blessing on all whom he had contact with. And as for me and others who were close to him, as we travel the world continuing his work and maintaining the blessing of his legacy, it is confirmed.

CHAPTER 1

Setting the Scene

T HIS IS THE story of a remarkable man who accomplished life- and event-changing things