Micki Weinberg. "Not Orthodox, but Paradox"

Photo: Ella Barak

Micki Weinberg, an American living in Berlin, happened to be visiting the country on October 7th. The disaster prompted him to stay here and transform his successful international project, Shiur, which combines engagement with the weekly Torah portion, modern thought, unconventional thinking, and a lot of humor, into a lesson for wartime.

Eden Giat gently took the accordion out of its case with the precision of a heart surgeon. He rolled up his sleeves and rested the instrument on his knee. Behind the balcony, two large letters shone: "Chen." The neon of the old cinema next to Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv was lit just like in the days of peace. Giat, in his mid-twenties, confessed that until a few weeks ago, he had no idea what to do with this instrument. Although he was a musician, he primarily played the piano. Now, as the 20th century threatened to make a comeback in all its ugliness and strength, the accordion suddenly seemed fitting. He took a deep breath and slowly began to open the instrument, but instead of the expected sound, a different noise emerged, rising and falling. The brain needed a few milliseconds to realize it was an alarm.

Down the stairs ran about thirty young men and women: all participants in the social-educational meeting titled "Shiur in War," discussing the weekly Torah portion "Lech Lecha." The shelter was crowded, and while explosions echoed above, the place continued to fill with people fleeing from the adjacent wine bar. Among us stood a few dogs, who miraculously managed to suppress their barking instinct. A young woman from Tel Aviv in pajamas said to her partner, "I'm fed up, we're moving. This is unbearable."

In the terrible war, the alarm is less terrifying that the wait.

When we went back upstairs, Eden Giat finally played. It was a melody with a Turkish vibe, infused with touches of the Iranian Urmia culture, where Giat has roots. To less experienced ears, like mine, it sounded like Klezmer music, filled with nostalgia and equally uplifting. As the sounds faded, Miki Weinberg, the host of the gathering, quoted Adorno, who said that music is a prayer that has undergone de-mythologization. I told him that in Israel, Adorno is mainly known for his remark about writing poetry after Auschwitz.

Afterward, between the wine and Bissli, an unconventional conversation took place: at its center were Mark (37), a kippa-wearing lawyer from the United States, and Salim (28), a Christian Arab athlete from the north of the country. The latter expressed his disdain for the definitions that divide Israeli society and shared his dream that one day there would be no need to specify who is Arab and who is Jewish. Eventually, both he and a few others present suggested that the solution might lie in interracial relationships. At this point, Mia Khalifa’s name was brought into the conversation— the Lebanese woman who gained fame three times in the last decade: first as a porn star, second as a feminist activist, and in recent weeks as a vocal supporter of the Palestinian resistance movement. After she published content that could be interpreted as a hymn to Hamas, Playboy magazine severed ties with her.

This conversation was different from the serious, profound, and solemn tone that characterized the main part of the evening: inspired by the story of Abraham, Weinberg spoke about the need to sometimes disconnect from the past and move forward. In other words: "Lech Lecha." It was clear he was referring to the historical moment we found ourselves in, even though he didn’t say it explicitly. Just a week earlier—on that same balcony, in the apartment of a mutual American friend of Weinberg—there had been a discussion about the portion of Noah, highlighting the verse "And the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence." This was just a few days after the terrible Saturday, and the coincidence of the words "hamas" and "Hamas" astonished the participants. But Weinberg, who strives to be measured and careful with his words, refused to attribute mystical meanings to it: "Crazy, isn’t it?" he asked and moved on.

The texts of the Shiur, which Miki Weinberg prints on yellow paper reminiscent of punk zines, include verses from the Torah and passages from the Talmud and the Zohar, alongside quotes from medieval and contemporary commentators and texts and images of artists and creators such as Alejandra Pizarnik, Jane Birkin, Clarice Lispector, Rem Koolhaas, and Jean Genet. Among the Jewish thinkers that Weinberg particularly appreciates are Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Joseph Berdichevsky, Shmuel Alexandrov, Karen Barad, Hannah Arendt, and Ludwig Wittgenstein ("if he is indeed considered Jewish"). He also mentions the later writings of Michel Foucault. For him, all these ideas do not contradict the concepts of Hasidism and Kabbalah, whether it be the writings of Rashi, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, or Rabbi Yitzhak Meir Morgenstern. On the contrary, he says they enrich each other.

Equally diverse is the composition of the Shiur participants, which changes from week to week. You can always recognize a few faces from the last time, but apart from them, the turnover is high. In the first two meetings I attended near Dizengoff Square, there were mainly Jews from Argentina, Chile, and Italy. I belonged to the Israeli minority. I asked some of the Latin Americans if they were familiar with Roberto Bolaño, one of my favorite writers, and a freckled guy proudly replied, "I might wear glasses, but I've read maybe three books in my whole life." He told me he worked in the financial department of a shipping and logistics company, but I struggled to follow the details.

The Dreyfus Affair of the 21st Century.

Most casual conversations at the Shiur begin with one of two questions: "How do you know Micki?" or "How long have you and Micki known each other?" The answers are always surprising: at a café two days ago, at the Hebrew University twenty years ago, through a friend's brother, through a brother's friend, last night at the wine bar—anything is possible. I encountered him in a typical October 2023 scenario: in a public shelter on Rothschild Boulevard, late in the evening. We stood there, a group of complete strangers, when another alarm sounded. We tried to figure out its source, and after a while, a guy in flip-flops, shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a baseball cap said in an American accent, "Oh, I'm sorry, that’s my phone. I’m editing a video to share with my friends in Berlin." It was Micki Weinberg.

As we left the shelter, he told me he lived in Germany and that he had been here visiting when the war started. He was shocked by how antisemitism is rearing its head everywhere, even among those he considered friends: people who just weeks ago were debating the texts of Slavoj Žižek, Frantz Fanon, and Hélène Cixous, and now were debating the necessity of beheadings. "It's a Herzlian moment," he said, "like the Dreyfus Affair." He mentioned that if he returned to Berlin, it would mainly be because he has an enormous library there, built over years, filled with rare and antique books. About a month has passed since then, and now he is determined to stay in the country until the war ends.

Weinberg, 39, is a filmmaker, theater person, and writer, and alongside this, there are people in our world who define him as their rabbi and themselves as his students. He was born in Los Angeles to a Jewish family and, as a child, attended synagogues from various streams: Hasidic, Litvish, and Sephardic. After graduating from Berkeley in 2004, he came to Israel, started studying at Yeshivat Mir, and simultaneously enrolled at the Hebrew University. In the following years, he wandered across Europe and eventually settled in Berlin. But that is in the past, and he rarely talks about his history unless directly asked.

Few people are so immersed in the present, which is reflected in his discussions of the weekly Torah portion: during these, he speaks about the Kabbalists and preachers as if discussing fresh gossip or a news item currently airing on television. Since 2018, he has primarily focused on maintaining the project called Shiur, holding dozens of meetings and events each year around the world, whether in Europe, the United States, or Mexico. The Shiur does not operate in isolation from Jewish communities: Weinberg makes a point of collaborating with a variety of organizations, including the EUJS (European Union of Jewish Students) and the JDC (better known by its former name, the Joint), and maintains relationships with embassies and consulates in Germany and New York, in an effort to reach as many people as possible. During the COVID period, he began to maintain a community via Zoom, and when the war broke out, he founded "Shiur in War."

The format is simple: the meetings last an hour and a half and participation is free. Anyone who wants to can join the discussion, while those who prefer can just listen. Since early November, the meetings have been held every Thursday at eight in the evening at Beit Radikal in the 3426 complex in Tel Aviv. I remarked to Weinberg that the address, Herzl and HaTchiya, could be interpreted as symbolic. His face lit up like a child's.

There are different types of charisma: Weinberg has a charisma of smiles. Not everyone can gather people from the street, bring them to a meeting about the weekly Torah portion, and make them return the following week with a few friends. "Invite your friends, and if they’re not so into it," I heard him say with a wink to some locals, "just tell them it's something that comes from Berlin. Tel Avivians love that."

In his few weeks in the country, he has managed to build a small community and establish connections based on shared interests with several organizations, including the Jewish-Arab partnership guard that was founded in Tel Aviv-Jaffa last month. He is currently raising funds to organize a joint trip for Jewish and Arab children and is looking for ways to hold meetings with Bedouin and Druze soldiers. According to him, these are not political actions but humanitarian ones: "I'm looking to create a deeper action than mere activism," he said in one of the sessions.

A secular guy who attended one of the meetings told me that no one had ever managed to make him interested in "this text" before. He was referring to the Torah. When I shared this with Weinberg, his face showed an ambivalent expression: on one hand, he felt proud, but on the other, he felt the need to clarify that this wasn’t the central goal. The idea is to open one’s mind to new ideas, to bring people together, and to think about the historical moment we are in. Another time, when I asked him if there was an agenda he was trying to convey, something about divinity or faith, he replied, "Not really." I pressed and asked, "So why the Torah?" "It's Torah for its own sake," he answered simply. He added that in other parts of the world, he has "students" who run meetings themselves. For him, it’s not just his but "ours," and abroad, the Shiur already has a life of its own.

In the early moments, my attitude toward this colorful, smiling, sharp-tongued character was tinged with slight suspicion: perhaps because I tend to maintain a certain distance from strangers, or maybe because I recoil somewhat from anything that might smell of proselytizing, of any kind—whether from Chabad booths or communists at scouts. The playwright Ben Segarski, who also attended several of the meetings, understood what I was talking about and said, "Look, if we’re going to regress, it’s better that it be a return to the core."

But that suspicion was dispelled, thanks to the nature of the man leading the project.

First, his meetings are filled with humor. Second, there is no censorship. The discussion about the haftarah concerning King David, for example, opened with the words, "Let's talk for a moment about his sex life." Third, the meetings are devoid of any attempts at indoctrination. Miriam Eliana (31), a graphic designer who immigrated to Israel from New York and began attending the meetings virtually during the pandemic, explained to me that for her, the Shiur is not really a class, like one might find at a university, but more of a practice: "It's like yoga, just mental."

Weinberg himself refuses to define himself as secular or religious, adding, "I recommend that everyone do as I do, and I think this is something that Jews in Israel can adopt from Diaspora Judaism."

I come from a completely secular family. After the Holocaust, my grandmother's mother shattered the Sabbath utensils and declared that her story with God was over. Since then, no one really returned to His embrace. I have a great fondness for Judaism, but it would be convenient and simple to classify me as a "Jew who prominently displays Leonard Cohen's record on the buffet." For a brief period in my life, I often wore a kippah, said "Modeh Ani" every morning, and jumped to buy collections of tales in Mea Shearim, but as mentioned, that didn't last long.

In other periods, I felt very far from religion and tradition, like in July of this year, at the height of the attempted regime change, when I felt Judaism was being imposed on me—not inviting me in. In contrast, by mid-October, I sounded different when I wrote to a friend: "In the week after the massacre, I was reborn, but again as a Jew. Until today, I tended to explain this phenomenon—Jewish identity—through genetics, education, culture, history, and trauma. But suddenly, I began to feel that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet flowed in my blood, and that I could never hide it. Moreover, I would never want to try hard enough to truly attempt to conceal it. Perhaps the day after tomorrow, this will sound silly to me—what do I have to do with this mysticism?—but that’s how I felt in the first week."

And now, several weeks have passed, and while I'm not a great scholar, I'm small. This is undoubtedly related to the rise of anti-Semitism around the world—there's probably nothing that distances a person from their Jewish identity more than an attack by another Jew, and nothing that brings them closer than a similar act by someone who isn’t Jewish; but it’s not just that. In a time like this, of existential threat intertwined with identity crisis, a desire suddenly emerges to seek community, content, human connection, and material for thought. Micki Weinberg manages to provide all this to people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, from all over the world. It begins with a smile in a shelter, on a train, or at a wine bar, and continues with a tragicomic discussion about the binding of Isaac.

Weinberg believes that "we are entering a space that is all in question, and this liberates us precisely because it demands us to doubt. We are still products of history, and we cannot act as if there is such a thing as a blank slate. Every moment is a moment of rebirth. But moments of crisis like the current one amplify this, like a magnifying glass." In a paraphrase of Walter Benjamin—Weinberg jumps from quote to quote—he notes that "in every era, we are tasked with the effort to redeem tradition from the reactionary forces that seek to suffocate it. Analyzing reality is always an active endeavor; we always look back to understand what lies ahead. But this is a problem." And how do we cope with it? "Rabbi Moshe de Leon said that wisdom is essentially: ḥekhma. Therefore, we must continue to act, while clinging to the void."

The Satmar Friend of Philip Roth

The Shiur started long before the war, but it wouldn't have taken its current shape without it. The new, urgent, and catastrophic reality creates a new state of consciousness. Katie Fishbein, a Jewish woman from Buenos Aires in her early twenties, is a regular participant. She recently arrived in Israel as part of the Argentine equivalent of "Birthright" and has some relatives living in Haifa. I asked her if she considered returning to her homeland because of the fighting, and she replied that she hadn't; it hadn't even crossed her mind. "Do you know what FOMO is?" she asked and answered: "It's the fear of missing out. So I feel like I have FOMO about the war."

Had it not been for this project, I would never have met Chaim, a Satmar Hasid from Williamsburg, New York. A tall, robust man in his forties with soft features, magnificent sidelocks, and a black kippa. The community he comes from is associated with anti-Zionist ideology, but about a year ago, Chaim came to Israel with his wife and children—and he has no intention of leaving. "I told them, it's either being here and being afraid, or being there and being afraid. And I know what my choice is," he shared.

He then recounted a surprising and unusual story about an apparently impossible meeting between two extremes of Judaism: it turns out that he and the author Philip Roth were friends, no less. Back then, less than twenty years ago, Roth was still using an old computer and floppy disks, and his literary agency was nearly losing its mind. At that time, Roth was working on the novel "The Plot Against America," and the agency sent him a new computer. The computer came along with Chaim, who was then a young employee, and he was tasked with teaching Mr. Roth how to use it.

The celebrated author and the Hasid met once or twice a week, and gradually a special bond formed between them: "At first, we only talked about computers, but over time we started just chatting about life." Within a few months, Chaim had read all of Roth's books and now shows impressive familiarity with his writing. "When we spoke, there wasn't a single unnecessary word from him. And it's not that he spoke little; he talked a lot," he said. The connection faded over the years, as often happens with relationships, and one day Chaim received news he hadn't expected: Roth had passed away, and Chaim was on the guest list for the funeral. His heart ached when he heard that Roth had requested the funeral to be completely devoid of religious symbols; nevertheless, when someone approached him and asked him to say Kaddish, he refused. "That's not what he would have wanted," he replied.

I also met Gadi Marcus (45), a lecturer in the philosophy of education who was born in England and grew up in Switzerland. At the age of 18, he came to Israel, and when he was 30, he moved to New York, returning here ten years later. I asked him if he thought he would have come to the Shiur if it weren't for the war, and he showed me how that question wasn’t really relevant. This was at the end of a session focused on the Torah portion "Chayei Sarah," during which Weinberg spoke about how a breaking point can bring about an identity change, akin to a rebirth. Gadi's words echoed that sentiment. "Chances are, I wouldn't have even heard about this without the war. My brother wouldn’t have told me about it because he would think I’d be at a party or something," he said. "Everything we do these days, we wouldn’t be doing if there weren’t a war. This is true for all interactions. Something huge happened here, and our whole lives changed. So, I don’t think I would be here, and I don’t think he”—Gadi pointed in Weinberg’s direction—“would be here either."

He told me that he teaches both in Kiryat Ono and in East Jerusalem, and he has Jewish, Muslim, and Christian students. "There’s the Gadi before the war and the Gadi after. You, for instance, only know the Gadi after, and you will never know the Gadi before. It will be the same with my students, and I told them this over Zoom with the college. I don’t know what kind of lecturer I’m going to be, and our students are no longer the same students. The cards have been shuffled, or rather, we’ve been dealt a completely new deck of cards. Everyone will need to take the time to get to know themselves again."

Weinberg loves to quote Antonio Gramsci, who speaks of the pessimism of the intellect versus the optimism of the will. In contrast, Gadi currently sees a bleak picture. "Death has come very close to all of us, each in their own way, and when you realize you could die tomorrow, you behave differently. In the first week, I thought everyone was nice; they no longer had a short fuse. I was traveling on the train, and suddenly everyone was more sensitive. It's terrible to say this—but there’s something nice about it. The problem is that it comes from a place where everyone is hurt. It doesn’t come from a good place." Therefore, he finds it difficult to muster hope. "Will you keep coming to the meetings?" I asked. "I don't know yet. Maybe yes."

As the place started to empty, I decided to try to get an important answer from Weinberg. This was near the refreshments table, during the part of the evening designated as "schmoozing." He was chatting with an Arab man who belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church and is planning to start a singing career soon. They were discussing the different branches of Christianity and their differences. "Micki, how do you define yourself religiously?" I asked. He thought for a few seconds, then burst out laughing and said in Hebrew with an American accent, "Paradox. Not Orthodox, but Paradox."

Support our israel work today

We need your help to make all of this happen!

To give with your Donor Advised Fund click here

Your donation (tax deductible in the US) goes to support our powerful actions in Israel and around the world—in person community, cultural and educational events, digital programming, & volunteer actions—all promoting original discourse, Jewish & Arab, secular & religious coexistence and unity. If this issue is important to you, please consider making a contribution today.

We rely on generous donations from individuals and organizations to run our programming, and we are deeply grateful to everyone who has supported our mission to-date and is considering doing so now.

You may use the donation form on this page to donate using credit cards, PayPal, and other digital payment methods. If you would like to make a larger-dollar contribution or use Zelle, please contact us at contact@shiur.eu to discuss other payment methods available. Please note, we are on corporate matching platforms too, like Benevity. So please check if your company matches.

EIN: 86-3431923

Mailing Address:
SHIUR
269 S Beverly Dr #684
Beverly Hills, CA 90212

this is an URGENT APPEAL TO SUPPORT SHIUR’S ISRAEL RELATED WORK

We believe, now it is crucial to work on “internal defense” by engaging with intellectual and spiritual questions that shape our sense of what Israel stands for and what it means to be Jewish and or Israelis (this includes all Arab and non-Jewish inhabitants and citizens). Given the global nature of discourse about the War, engaging in discourse with our international community is key.

Support our important actions involving Jewish & Arab, secular & religious coexistence and unity programming, including: