Torat JLIC

Picture Yom Kippur in a Tel Aviv square. Thousands of people in white. No microphones, no screens, and most of the crowd has no idea what page they’re on. That last part turns out to be the point.

Dan Cantor sits down with Rav Joe Wolfson, director of JLIC Tel Aviv, to talk about leading a public Kol Nidre for up to 5,000 people. One open question: should it feel like a polished production or a neighborhood shul? Rav Joe borrows an idea from ancient cave paintings, made to be seen by flickering firelight, not floodlights. 

In 2023, Yom Kippur prayer in Tel Aviv became a political battleground. This year, with elections months away (we recorded before the vote), everyone braced for a repeat. It never came. The head of the opposition showed up, stood with the crowd, and said nothing.

The conversation also digs into Tel Aviv’s forgotten Jewish history, including a tiny Hasidic shtiebel founded by a rebbe who lost his sons in Bucharest, and pushes back on “unity” as a slogan. Disagreement isn’t the problem. Poison is. Rav Joe’s challenge: stop fighting on the national feed and start with the people on your street.

A childhood friend told Rav Ari Bar-Shain he had stopped davening and learning, and that he was at peace with it. Rav Ari took the story to his students at Princeton with a hard question: am I responsible for my friend's relationship with Hashem? On this episode of Torat JLIC, host Don Canter sits down with Rav Ari, JLIC co-director at Princeton, to work through it.

Rav Ari lays out three models of collective teshuvah. The Rambam, where Hashem weighs the individual, then the medina, then the world. Rav Kook and Rav Soloveitchik on teshuvah for the norms a community builds, from keeping up with the Joneses to who we put on a pedestal. Finally, the Beit HaLevi on na'aseh v'nishma: we accepted the Torah in the plural, and with it, responsibility for every Jew. He also shares what he told his friend. It's not all or nothing. Take one step at a time.

Rav Ari started his first year as a campus rabbi while serving in Gaza. By the time he reached Princeton, his students had kept the learning going without him, so he found a different role: role model, listening ear, the person who checks in. He recorded this conversation weeks before heading back to miluim for the Chaggim. He also describes a Yom Kippur that a terrorist infiltration upended, and a day spent serving Am Yisrael in a way he never expected.

Kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh. Rav Ari lives it on campus and in uniform. The question he leaves you with: who are you responsible for?

Rabbi Zechariah and Elyanna Rosenthal grew up in what amounts to a JLIC family business. His father runs JLIC's national development. Her brother and sister-in-law run JLIC at another university. Now the two of them are building their own campus, which is why the argument they get into mid-episode about whether Torah study actually changes you isn't academic. It's the question their whole career rests on.

The conversation opens with the imposter syndrome of a first year on campus: introducing yourself to hundreds of strangers, wondering if you belong there. That leads to a sharper idea, one a family member gave them before they took the job: if you believed what you had was that good, you wouldn't sit on it.

From there they dig into what that belief actually costs. Are you a consumer of Torah or a producer of it? Does learning change you automatically, the way a song gets stuck in your head, or only when you choose to let it in? They trace the question back roughly a hundred thirty generations to Sinai, then bring it home to their own kids. They read parenting books, but none of the advice mattered as much as just being the kind of person they want their children to become.

This bonus episode is a crossover from the Shtark Tank podcast. It tracks Rabbi Rafi Dembovsky journey from a Torah-only yeshiva bachur to the author of a sefer on Torah im Derech Eretz. He grew up in a home where everyone worked, but absorbed a Torah-only hashkafa from his rebbeim at Hasmonean and Yeshivas Toras Moshe. Seven years into Kollel, a pull toward his in-laws' seforim, Rav Hirsch's Nineteen Letters, and a hard search for the right cheder for his son sent him back to the sugya in Berachot on Rabbi Yishmael, and into halachic questions about taking money for learning and the value of secular study. The sefer that came out of it, weighing Torah-only against Torah im Derech Eretz on the sources, almost didn't make it to print. Getting haskamot cost him more than he expected.

Rafi lands somewhere both camps can live with: both paths are authentic, and which one is right can shift across a person's life. He's still in Kollel and now studying law at Hebrew University too. Worth hearing how he got there.

Rav Hirsch has a hard read on why Esav became Esav: not because he was born wrong, but because Yitzchak and Rivka got passive about his education, sending him to the same yeshiva as Yaakov and hoping for the best. Rabbi Josh Ross thinks that failure is still happening, quietly, in living rooms everywhere.

Rabbi Ross was one of JLIC's original campus couples, back when Rav Schrader's idea for the organization wasn't yet called JLIC. Now, as executive director, his diagnosis is blunt: "for far too many years we've outsourced Judaism." We hand our children's Judaism to schools and youth groups, then wonder why Shabbat feels like a formality once they hit campus. His fix isn't more spirituality or more singing and dancing, and it isn't a label like modern Orthodoxy either, which he won't define. His term is Torah true Judaism: either you hold by the Torah or you don't. You teach it by living it, in front of students who notice.

The antidote, Rabbi Ross says, is proactivity: acting instead of waiting for someone else to. His proof is Rav Schrader, a talmid chacham with nothing in his background to suggest he'd start an organization, who saw a problem nobody else was solving and built one. Years later, Rabbi Ross still carries that instinct onto campus.

We close on the stakes: students going back to whatever Judaism they saw modeled at home.

Plato says the truth is outside the cave. Chazal disagree. That inversion is the starting point for this episode, and it turns out to explain a lot about what JLIC is actually for.

The story is Shimon bar Yochai. Twelve years in the cave, nothing but Torah. He emerges and starts burning things down because he can't look at ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. God sends him back. When he finally re-enters the world, he sees a man running on Erev Shabbos with two myrtle branches, one for zachor, one for shamor, and something shifts. Real spiritual aspiration lives inside the world, not just apart from it. You have to learn to see it.

This is also the founding logic of JLIC. Orthodox kids are going to secular campuses. The question isn't whether. It's whether we'll meet them there and help them build something worth having. Not just defense. Not damage control. Real growth, real community, real ownership of Jewish life in a place where nobody hands it to you.

This is Don and Alex's final episode together. Alex is leaving Yale after eight years and heading to Teaneck. The conversation is part send-off, part Torah, part honest reckoning with what it means to leave your own version of the cave and figure out who you are on the other side.

Rav Shlomo and Kira Ashkenazi arrived at Washington University in St. Louis on October 9th, 2023. They walked into a house they'd never seen before: no furniture, no light fixtures, nothing. They texted a WhatsApp group of students they barely knew: "We're getting in at 3. Want to do Mincha and a kumzitz at our house at 5?" Forty students showed up. Shlomo cried in front of people he didn't know. A community was born.

In three years, that community has more than doubled, from around 50 day school students to over 100, with 50 gap year students arriving next fall. Growth is exciting. Growth is also a real problem. How do you preserve startup culture at scale? How do you keep a diverse, student-run community from turning cliquey as it grows? Shlomo draws on his venture capital background to ask the same question he'd ask about any company: how do you keep the culture alive when the headcount keeps climbing?

The animating Torah framework comes from Sifsei Chaim on Rosh Chodesh Nisan. If you have the ability to do something, you have the responsibility to do it. Shlomo points out it's written right into the word: responsibility contains ability. That's what brought the Ashkenazis to St. Louis. That's what they're asking their students to sit with.

For campus rabbis, educators, and anyone building something Jewish from scratch.

JLIC is built around serious Torah learning. On a college campus, that's a choice with real consequences. In this episode, we wrestle with an honest question: does being rigorous mean being inaccessible? Are we reaching the students who need us most, or have we quietly built an insiders' club?

The conversation digs into a core tension: depth vs. reach. The Rambam has a framework for this. You use honey to get a kid to love Torah. Then you pull back the honey once the love is real. We talk about how that plays out in JLIC's work: what our programming actually looks like, how it compares to other campus Jewish organizations, and whether "counter-cultural" is an excuse or a feature.

We close on what success means for JLIC. Not headcount. Not packed events. A distinctive community where serious Judaism is the draw, and students who are ready for depth know where to find it. The question we leave you with: how do you stay unapologetically rigorous and make sure every Jewish student knows the door is open?

This episode is for campus rabbis, Jewish educators, and anyone thinking seriously about Orthodox Jewish life on college campuses and how to build communities that last.

Content note: This episode contains graphic descriptions of recovering and identifying human remains in a wartime setting. The conversation is handled with sensitivity and spiritual depth, but may not be suitable for all audiences, particularly younger listeners. Listener discretion is advised.

Rabbi Tzvi Wohlgelernter served in the IDF's Yasar unit, tasked with recovering the bodies of hostages and fallen soldiers to ensure they receive a dignified Jewish burial. In this episode, he walks us through the extraordinary mission to recover Ron Gvili, the final hostage to return home from Gaza, and the profound Torah, emotional, and spiritual dimensions that carried him through it.

From navigating mass graves in an open cemetery on the outskirts of Gaza City, to standing alongside an Israeli pop star in the dead of night, to weeping alongside his fellow soldiers when the last piece of the puzzle finally fell into place, Rabbi Tzvi shares a story of sacrifice, faith, and what it means to feel truly part of the Jewish people.

He also speaks openly about mental health, rabbinic leadership during wartime, and the Rav Kook that suddenly came alive when he experienced Klal Yisrael in his bones.

The Yasar Unit: What They Do and Why It Matters

The Mission to Recover Ron Gvili

The Moment of Discovery

A Tale of Two Dentists: From Auschwitz to Gaza

Leading a Community While Living a Secret

Mental Health in a Time of War

Rav Kook's Kol Dodi and Feeling Klal Yisrael

Guest: Uri Lorkis, JLIC Director at University of Michigan & Startup Coach

What does coaching Israeli startup founders have in common with guiding college students through their spiritual journey? Uri Lorkis discovered the answer isn't just similar, it's transformative.

Uri shares his unconventional path from IDF paratrooper to JLIC director, and reveals why the biggest challenge facing both his students and his startup clients is exactly the same: how to be effective instead of affected. He introduces his powerful "lifeboat to real boat" framework for spiritual growth and explains why closing the sefer is when the real learning begins.

The Lifeboat Metaphor

Being Effective vs. Affected

When the Sefer Closes, Learning Begins