From Sinai to the Boardroom – Torah Comes to the Workplace
By AJS Staff

At 7:45 on a Thursday morning, the southeast conference room in the offices of NAI Horizon slowly fills up. Irv Shuman, a real estate developer and longtime Arizona Chairman of AIPAC, Marc Kelman, a well-known community activist who is also involved in real estate, and Tom Rosenfield, a finance professional, are among the first to arrive. As the others enter and get comfortable, they are very upbeat and excited to be together as they eagerly await the arrival of the meeting’s leader. When he enters, wide smiles spread around the room to a chorus of friendly greetings. The man who takes his seat at the head of the table, however, is not the executive you’d expect – he is Rabbi Ariel Shoshan of the Phoenix Community Kollel and he has come to share an hour’s worth of the excitement of Torah study.

Groups like these – who study Torah in an office setting as part of the workday - have been around for many years, but have recently become quite popular. Growing interest in bringing meaning into the workplace, combined with the spread of Jewish organizations offering exciting options for Torah study, have inspired dozens of these Executive Learning programs, as they’re often called, throughout the country. Most groups are open to everyone, although some are by invitation only. Topics can include anything from business ethics and contemporary issues to the meaning of life or the weekly Torah portion. The attraction seems to be the idea of Jews getting together during the workday for wisdom and direction as a way of bringing meaning not only to the workplace but to life itself.

Studying at the office is also less intimidating, says Mike Schoor of Phoenix, Arizona, an Emmy Award winning sports journalist turned wealth management executive. “It’s more inclusive because no one is judged at the door whether they grew up in orthodox, conservative, reform, non-observant or semi-observant homes. My difficulty in connecting with Jewish learning was always the absolutes that seemed to supersede it.”

Others love the experience of Judaism thriving outside the synagogue. While they appreciate the role played by the synagogue in Jewish life, the time has come, they say, for Judaism to reach into society to be there where people live and work. Sanford Burstyn, a Phoenix shopping-center broker, believes that learning Torah at the office is an idea whose time has come. “I absolutely love it,” he says. “The fact is it should have been there a long time ago. A friend of mine once said to me, ‘you know, Torah is not just for the study hall.’ It hit me hard when he said it but he couldn’t have been more right.

“For me it’s sort of like being territorial, taking control of your environment. If you’re a Jew working to support your family, bringing Torah to your work environment ought to be an absolute requirement.”

The Phoenix group is hosted by John Schottenstein, a prominent real estate developer. At first, he hesitated to start the group, he says. “Initially I was not into it because I’m very busy and I don’t have time to attend such a thing [regularly].” But he decided to host it in his office and to come when he could. “It’s something my family throughout the years has been known to do - to sponsor Jewish education. The epitome of that was my cousin Jerome doing the Talmud,” he says, referring to the recently completed 72-volume ArtScroll translation and elucidation of the entire Talmud, know as the Schottenstein Edition Talmud.

Once they got started, the class surprised him. “It was nothing like I would have envisioned,” he continues. “If you’d have said to me this is what’s going to go on in the study group I would have said, ‘No, come on. No rabbi is going to sit and talk about that kind of thing.’ It’s very refreshing to sit with a scholar of Torah and have everyday conversation about everyday issues that we all deal with - how is it addressed in the Torah or how is it addressed in the Talmud. It’s very refreshing because you don’t get that in Temple on any level that I’ve seen.”

Schottenstein says the class affects his life far beyond the day of the class. “I kind of thought I was a pretty good Jewish guy to start with, but it’s like anything you do in life. If you don’t do it for a long time… Twice a year you go to high holidays and you think about how Judaism affects you. If you do it once or twice a year you’re not going to be any good at it. But if you do it every week or even once a month you’re going to be better at it. That’s the way I look at it. I’m acting as a better Jewish human being as a result of that study group.”

The convenience of a class at work is not lost on Adrian Grant, a CPA in Atlanta who has been hosting Lunch and Learn at his Buckhead Area office of Atlanta’s business district for eighteen years.

“So many people work nearby - you’re basically making it easy for them to come. It’s very convenient – you’re really taking it to the people instead of the people having to go to the synagogue or somewhere else.”

Grant’s program is led by Rabbi Binyomin Friedman of the Atlanta Scholars Kollel, and has been since they began in the late 1980s. The class attracts twenty to thirty people every other week. Grant says the idea to start it came to him during a Jewish Federation Mission to Israel.

“Rabbi Friedman was on that trip,” he says. “We were on the same bus riding back from Haifa to Tel Aviv. We were talking, and I said, ‘you know, it would really be a neat thing to have a lunch and learn program in the business area where I work. I could invite people from around the area to come.’ We tried it and we had a tremendous response from the get-go.” The class was so successful that they eventually outgrew the conference room in his office suite. When that happened, they moved the class to the community conference room [omit downstairs] in his building.

“What’s amazing is that when Rabbi Friedman does a class, everybody can relate to it. It doesn’t matter if they’re Shomer Shabbos [Sabbath observant] or non-affiliated. He does the class in such a way that everybody enjoys it.”
Alan Smirin runs a liquor store in the Atlanta area. He read an article in the Atlanta Jewish Times’ Chai magazine about the lunch and learn programs offered by the Atlanta Scholars Kollel. Rabbi Friedman’s group caught his attention.

“I had just finished Rabbi Telushkin’s book, Jewish Guide to Daily Living,” he says. “I loved it and I wanted to get more. Everyone was saying you need to study Torah. I ran into Adrian Grant and he said, ‘Why don’t you come?’ I got hooked and I’ve been going back ever since. My wife comes sometimes,” he adds, “and she really enjoys it whenever she comes. It’s been life changing, enjoyable, educational – I look forward to it.”

“We now have similar programs in six locations serving about 75 men and women all over the city,” Rabbi Friedman says. “We have one at the JCC, two at area hospitals, and one that’s actually done by phone.”

“We’ve been doing this a lot of years now,” he says, “People have disappeared for a while and then come back older and wiser. People started bringing kids or parents. They get a real sense of uplift by stepping out of the secular workplace into a world of Torah study, and then they’re out the door and back into the world.”

Though both hospital programs started with a focus on medical ethics, the participants were eager to move on to other Jewish subjects as well. They did take the opportunity recently to discuss Torah thoughts on the Terry Schiavo case and the challenges facing physicians in end-of-life care.

After spending seven years building an Aish branch in London, Rabbi Chaim Sampson has been with Aish New York for the last four years. He agrees that Torah study in the workplace is a great idea, but prefers to study with people one on one.

“The relationship that develops from a one-on-one is usually deeper,” he says. “I look at the people I learn with both as students and friends.


“People work very hard at being successful. They spend a lot of time involved in their work and to have a personal Rabbi come to their office once a week can be very meaningful to them. I’m like a personal trainer but a spiritual trainer.”

Mitchell Saltzman, of Goldmann Associates in New York City, has been studying with Rabbi Sampson for three years. He calls it his “personalized growth plan.”

“At the beginning I thought [making time during the day] was hard,” he says. “Life is very busy, but put it this way: without the learning, my life was a whirling dervish and it was an insatiable treadmill of trying to satisfy desire. Not that I wasn’t a good person – it’s just that I didn’t know better. What I thought I needed and thought I wanted - every time I would get it I would just want and need more and I wasn’t getting anywhere. It’s only from the learning that everything else makes any sense, and it has enabled me to feel that I’m living not only a meaningful life but actually a happy life.

“So the question is not can you make time for learning - the question is how could you live without it? I’ve done it that way. It doesn’t work. You could be very successful, make a lot of money, have a beautiful wife and healthy kids and still be miserable because you don’t know what to focus on.”

Saltzman and Rabbi Sampson do not usually talk about workplace-related matters, although there are exceptions.

“When we lose money, for example, and I’m depressed,” Saltzman says, “I will ask him to help me put it in perspective and understand the Torah viewpoint. It basically helps me achieve more equanimity, see things in a broader perspective, make better decisions, that type of thing.”

Everyone’s greatest enthusiasm, though, seems to be reserved for the relationship the environment has made possible between them and the Rabbis who teach them. Irv Shuman of the Phoenix group says he comes “strictly because of Rabbi Shoshan.”

“I love him. I love his teachings and the way he handles the class, the camaraderie he has with me and those of us he teaches. In fact, at the last class I suggested - and it was unanimously approved - that we go every week instead of every other week. That’s how much I enjoy his class and having the benefits of his insights into Torah and Talmud. You just want to reach into his neshama [soul] and grab all that you can.”

Sanford Burstyn agrees. “All the men in the group are nuts about him. He’s so articulate, confident, knowledgeable. He loves all the men, he loves what he does. He’s not the old world image that makes you think, ‘what am I doing here? I gotta go.’”

Adrian Grant of Atlanta echoes that sentiment about Rabbi Friedman. “He’s got these great communication skills, so he can reach out to people and he makes everything so interesting. Its one thing to get people to show up, but if you want them to come back, they really need to be able to relate to the teacher. In this case, Rabbi Friedman is just a great communicator, he has a great personality, he’s humorous. It’s really something people look forward to and they really, really enjoy.”

Smirin seconds that. “I love Rabbi Friedman – he makes me feel comfortable, he’s non-judgmental no matter what level of understanding I’m on. He’s just there to teach, for us to learn and enjoy. I’ve just been loving his talks and loving Rabbi Friedman. I started reading a book on the Talmud recently and now I want to take his class in the summer.”

Irv Shuman summed up the feelings of his group when, asked at the scheduled end of a session if he could stay and study a few more minutes he said, “Well, there’s a fire in my building but I came here to study Torah instead of going to meet the fire marshal. The fire department is there and they’ll do what they have to do and then I’ll have to repair the building. I wasn’t going to miss this.”