A Lost Rabbi on The Path to Faith

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4/19/24

Fred Neulander was my rabbi.   He died yesterday in prison serving a life sentence for murder.   He paid to have his wife killed by a disturbed congregant whom he manipulated so that he could continue an affair with another woman.   

But I owe him for a favor.  

He taught my Hebrew School confirmation class for two years between bar mitzvah and confirmation. He was always a bit of an odd fish.  I remember him teaching a class on the prophets in which he said that they were mentally ill catatonics.   They lived over a span of about 450 years, much more if you include Moses, who was also a prophet, so that would have been a statistically bonkers conclusion as well as a hint of his disdain for them.    I remember the class of not particularly religious Jewish kids, most of them in the confirmation program voluntarily, out of interest in their Jewish identity. fairly erupting in dissent.  Isaiah was mentally Ill?   

The V'ahavta prayer (Deuteronomy 6:5-9) had a most unusual acoustic resonance in the wood-ceilinged sanctuary of Temple Emanuel..   the letter "s" hung in the air pronouncedly, (I guess that's a double entendre).   "You ssssssssshhhhall love the Lord your God with all your heart, sssssssssoul, and ssssssstrength..."   The notion that anyone loved God that way, punctuated in ethereal acoustic resonance, however coincidental, I found unlikely and certainly not a hallmark of contemporary Judaism.  So why did we keep repeating it as if it was important to DO?     I asked Rabbi Fred  and he answered that it was a "figure of speech". I found that unlikelier than the prophet-catatonics theory.  Why repeat it...EVERY service?    That very poor answer to a reverberating question was one of the things that drew me to explore the claims of Yeshua who summarized all of Judaism by adding that exact phrase: "love God with all your heart" to Hillel's famous distillation of all Jewish law to this:  "love your neighbor as yourself.   Everything else is commentary." 

https://www.inquirer.com/news/rabbi-fred-neulander-convicted-murderer-dead-nj-prison-20240419.html

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