Making choices
Rabbi Avram Mlotek’s new book, and his conversion work, is all about decisions
It’s an old chasidic story, about the butterfly in the questioner’s hand. Is it alive or dead? It’s a question meant to stump the sage to whom it’s asked, but that sage — rebbe, rabbi, parent, mysterious stranger — knows the answer.
It’s a paradox, a less nasty version of the famous if mythical physics experiment known as Schrödinger’s cat. It’s about choice, about life and death, and, in the Jewish version, ultimately about the choice of life.
In Rabbi Avram Mlotek’s new version, “Butterfly,” as illustrated by Annita Soble and published by Archway, a Simon and Schuster imprint, the story is about a soon-to-be-bar-mitzvah boy, a smart, sweet, but challenging kid, asking the question of his rabbi, who knows everything.
“This story, or a version of the story, has been with me ever since I was a camper at Ramah in the Poconos,” Rabbi Mlotek said.
Background’s important here. Rabbi Mlotek, who grew up in Teaneck, where his parents still live, is the third generation of a family prominent in Yiddish culture and music. His grandparents, Chana and Joseph Mlotek, were musicians and musicologists who were central to preserving and performing the sounds of prewar European Jewish life, and keeping those sounds vibrant. His father, Zalmen Mlotek, is the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. He has major yichus — and the desire to move it forward.
His having been a camper at Ramah — the camp network that is halachically observant but Conservative — might be surprising, given that he, like is family, is Orthodox, but Rabbi Mlotek says that it’s not. “We’re flexidox,” he said.
He graduated from Brandeis, studied music at Yeshiva University, pastoral counseling at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Talmud at Hadar, and was ordained at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a modern Orthodox school that values pluralism within the boundaries of Orthodoxy. His background — eclectic but bounded, or bounded and eclectic — is a logical entry to his career.
So, back at Ramah Poconos, a rabbinical student who was working there that summer — Eric Yanoff, now a rabbi who leads Adath Israel in suburban Philadelphia — “introduced me to the story, and I fell in love with it,” Rabbi Mlotek said. “I always felt that I wanted to see it in the form of an actual picture book.”
He’d also wanted to work with Ms. Soble, a Crown Heights-based artist who had created the cover art for his brother Elisha’s band, Zusha, and for his ketubah. Because Ms. Soble is Lubavitch, she would know the feeling he wanted for his book.
“I was very specific in the types of representation and imagery I wanted,” Rabbi Mlotek said. He wanted a shtetl brought to vibrant, vivid life; he wanted “a traditional-looking rabbi, and the people in the street to be all sorts of people.” He wanted a blend of inclusivity and tradition.
“Ultimately, the story is a simple one,” he said. “Being mindful of what is in our control and is not is helpful, and certainly it’s helpful in times of distress, but I do think that we have more choice in our lives than we give ourselves credit for having.
“I think about it as the parent of young children.” Rabbi Mlotek has three children; the oldest is 12.
“I’m mindful that our children are not machines, but precious neshamot.” Precious souls. “And because they are my responsibility for a relatively short time, I think about how I am going to usher them through this time. I think about teaching them how to be aware of our own choices.
“It’s something I also have to come back to — what is in my control, and what is outside it.”
This book, for 5- to 8-year-olds, features a man and a boy as its protagonists; his next book, a graphic novel aimed at the 8 to 10 crowd, is about a young girl and her grandmother. “Sheyna Sheyndl Sneezes” looks at an ethical dilemma. What do you do if you sneeze in the cholent — not actually in it, but certainly in its general direction — but nobody sees?
He’s also working on a heavily illustrated book about the Yiddish alphabet.
Writing isn’t Rabbi Mlotek’s main job, though.
He’s a founder of Base, an organization that works with young, unaffiliated Jews, drawing them closer to Jewish life by offering them an informal, home-based look at its warmth and spiritual depth.
He’s a cantor; he leads davening that’s filled with the music that draws a community together.
Now, he’s also part of Project Ruth, “which aims to make traditional Orthodox conversions accessible to a larger audience,” Rabbi Mlotek said. “We work with people who grew up as patrilineal Jews, who converted with other denominations, or who just come in almost off the street because they feel a kinship with the Jewish people, especially in this profound moment.
Project Ruth “is relatively new,” he continued. “It’s headed by Rabbi Adam Mintz.” Rabbi Dr. Mintz is the founding rabbi of Kehilat Rayim Ahuvim, an Orthodox shul on the Upper West Side.
“Since October 7, the number of people in my class has doubled,” Rabbi Mlotek said. “Every week, I get to go to the mikvah and welcome new Jews into the fold. Last year, we had about 200 conversions.
“There is a real thirst for yiddishkeit, for community, for connection. People are so ready to learn. That is a real gift.”
The massacre on October 7 turned some people against Jews, but it also drew others toward the community. “Someone said to me, ‘Rabbi, could you imagine if Coachella’” — the new age-y music festival that’s held in the California desert every year, and bears more than a passing resemblance to the Nova festival, the site first of joy and then of death — “‘was infiltrated by ISIS and left college students dead, and young women raped and dead, could you imagine there not being a quick and devastating response from the U.S.? No one would bat an eye at that.
“‘But you people’” — Israelis, and more generally Jews — “‘remain in the news for doing what any country would have done.’”
That student wants to be part of “you people.”
“For a lot of them, it is the horror of the false equivalence idiocy, and many of them already were interested,” Rabbi Mlotek said.
“The Talmud says that if a person comes before a beit din” — a religious court — “and is asked, ‘Don’t you know how tormented and harassed the Jewish people have been for thousands of years?’ and answers ‘Yes, I know, but I still want to join you,’ then you accept that person immediately.”
Conversion, as Project Ruth does it, is according to Orthodox halacha; it is also “different in every case,” Rabbi Mlotek said. “We are unique in that way. We strive to uphold their humanity. Generally, we say that we want people to live for at least a year, according to the Hebrew calendar, in community and in learning. We try to be a bit more holistic in terms of the general approach. We are looking at a person’s neshama” — the soul — “trying to be faithful to it and mindful of it.
“People come in at different stages of ritual observance and beliefs. We welcome that. We are not a cookie-cutter project.”
His career has taken unexpected turns, Rabbi Mlotek said. “When I was in yeshiva, I never thought that I would be rabbi-ing to so many non-Jews.” When he started that work, “modern Orthodox Jews were coming in with their partners, who weren’t Jewish, and they needed a way to show them Shabbes.
“I tell parents in that situation not to give up on their kids.”
That’s how his interest in outreach started.
“Butterfly” is an outgrowth of all of this work. “Besides being an extension of my own neshama, I think that it reflects a colorful, pluralistic shtetl,” he said. “I feel like I live in that shtetl. And it exemplifies the power of choice. I experience that with my students, who chose a Jewish path.”
He plans to give all his students a copy of “Butterfly,” although it is a children’s book and they are not children, because “they, each one of them, embodies choice.”
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