The stand-up rabbi

Thursday night, near Segula Junction in Petach Tikva, several hundred meters from thousands of silent graves, the small cafe is already bustling, jam-packed and full of life. Groups of friends, a few young women in jeans, tank tops and bleached-blonde hair, married couples and a few religious people. Still more people are crowded outside the door, hoping to find a place, and the side rooms are filled to capacity, too. There are beer bottles on the tables, and the air is filled with excitement and anticipation. The people know where they are, but they have no idea what is in store for them.

“Believe me, what you’re going to see here is a performance like you’ve never seen before,” says Yossi, a hard-core fan. And then it happens. After the long wait, the star of the evening comes in, the speakers nearly explode from the bass in the dance version of Eyal Golan’s song “Those Who Believe Aren’t Afraid,” and the adrenaline in the air feels like the moment after the starting gun goes off at an Olympic race. He approaches the microphone, takes a sip from a glass of water and asks someone to put it on the nearby table. Two female fans smile and wonder aloud, with equal parts of humor and seriousness, whether they are allowed to touch the glass that he drank from. The performance will be starting in just a moment, but the giggle of a woman in the audience draws a comment from the star of the evening that gets everybody rolling on the floor. And then it begins: “Today we’ll be giving tips about the day of judgment -- the approaching New Year.”

This is not Shlomo Artzi or Buki Peretz. Nor is this one of the well-known stars of stand-up comedy. This is a man in a suit, white shirt and large black skullcap. He has a graying beard. And when his jokes start bursting forth, you realize that his story may just be a bit different.

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Rabbi Yitzhak Fanger fills up cafes, lecture halls and auditoriums everywhere he goes. He has a group of fans that is only growing larger and a life story that even writers of fiction screenplays could not imagine. Once upon a time, he was a world-renowned Reiki master living in Dharamsala as a Buddhist monk. He became religiously observant and into the public consciousness last year when a program on Channel 10 (aired on Friday evening!) broadcast excerpts from his lectures. Those excerpts became the hottest thing on the Internet and went viral among secular people as well.

“It’s hard to explain, in a newspaper, the nature of this phenomenon named Rabbi Fanger. You have to see him in order to understand,” says Yossi Edri, who has been attending his lectures for the past year and a half (and yes, this is precisely the time to put aside the newspaper, watch a few of his videos on YouTube and get a better idea of what we’re talking about). Fanger is a combination of talented lecturer, stand-up artist, couples' counselor and rabbi. The people who are close to him explain that his charm lies mainly in his direct manner of speaking and the messages that touch everyone, but the most prominent things about him are his infinite talent for mimicry, the way he moves his hands, his imitations and his jokes.

For example, several minutes after he began his lecture on Thursday, the auditorium was in stitches as the rabbi described a person who had sent him tips for women from “the average guy.” A small taste: “If you have a problem with the toilet, deal with it. Everything you wear looks good on you, especially if you have to go out. Crying is a form of extortion. Ask for what you want -- hints don’t work. If we ask you what’s wrong and you say, ‘Nothing,’ we’ll take you at your word.” Before somebody accuses him of chauvinism, we should say -- and this is another secret of his charm -- that Fanger elegantly makes a connection between jokes like these and his points about criticism, judgmental behavior, thinking well of others and the need to show gratitude to one’s parents and one’s wife.

Here are a few small but significant examples that illustrate the fact that he is no run-of-the-mill rabbi. Fanger is married and the father of seven children (the oldest is 14). He is the only rabbi in the country with a female assistant, his lectures are attended by both women and men, and during breaks, many young women wearing trousers or tank tops approach him to ask advice -- things that would never be tolerated in the Haredi sector. Alongside this, his students tell of a hidden righteous man who spends entire nights studying the Torah and is precise in his observance of religious law. Unlike other rabbis, Fanger, who lives in Modi’in Illit, does not frighten his audience, but rather uses humor and his talent for speaking to reach them.

“I live for the audience. I love people. I’m not a stand-up artist,” he says in an interview with Israel Hayom. “What the audience likes, that’s what I say. The messages are conveyed through laughter, a hug, a smile. I want to change people so that they feel good.” About his extraordinary gift for speaking, he says, “I never studied acting. It’s a gift that people have, the ability to touch a person’s heart, even though it’s pretty scary. I’m afraid of messing up, I’m spontaneous when I speak, there are no planned lectures. I talk about myself and my wife, and sometimes there are mistakes. Once, I was in a seminar with young female students from the north, sweet young women from a kibbutz, and I said something about how we didn’t leave Egypt ‘to be a free people in our land’ [a line from Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah”]. The tune just came to me. At the end of the Sabbath, one of the counselors came up to me and said that the students were offended that I had treated the national anthem so disrespectfully. I got up on stage, burst into tears -- I cry like a little kid -- and told them that I was so sorry, I came to bring people close and instead I pushed them away, it was the last thing I wanted, it broke me.”

Fanger’s calendar is full. He gives lectures every day, sometimes several times a day, all over the country, from north to south, in schools, post-high-school academies and -- as stated above -- in cafes, too. On his website, www.fanger.co.il, is an events calendar that provides details of where and when he will be lecturing.

But the journey to where he is today began in a totally different place. Fanger was born 40 years ago in Herzliya, “a completely secular person -- nobody was more secular than I was,” as he describes it. “There was no tradition at home. A little bit when we were small, but when we grew up, no more. Spending holidays with our parents? How square. On holidays, I would go out with friends, fly abroad. There was no tradition at all, no Sabbath candles, nothing. We were a warm, loving family -- my father the computer guy, my mother the academic, three siblings and a dog. I was one of the guys, did a lot of sports, triathlons, a good-looking kid who went out on Friday nights.”

In the army, he served in the Armored Corps’ 7th Brigade. “It was there that I met religious people for the first time. They were from the hesder yeshiva and I felt really sorry for them. It seemed to me that they were stuck between worlds, neither here nor there. I had pictures in my tank -- not of landscapes, if you know what I mean -- and they were these poor kids, stuck.”

During his army service, Fanger went through a disaster that, he says, gave him a sense of proportion. “It wasn’t the turning point about religion, but I became more of a thinking person. It was at the beginning of the 1990s. We were in training before going up into Lebanon and one of my crew, Ronen, stayed to sleep in the tank. We came to the tank in the morning and saw that the tank’s cannon had turned upward, crushing him to death. That changed me a lot. I started caring about the way I spent my time. My mother said that I aged 20 years in five minutes, went from a mischievous kid to a serious young man, more level-headed, consistent, a bookworm, especially in psychology. I suddenly became interested in spiritual things. I wanted to help people. At the same time, I wasn’t connected to religion yet. On the contrary, I thought that religious people were fanatics.”

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After the tank incident, Fanger decided to study medicine. “I realized that I wanted to help people, but regular medicine seemed too technical for me, so I studied alternative medicine.” From there, his journey continued. “A world-renowned teacher of the Reiki system -- a laying-on of hands -- came to Israel, and I started to fly. It was just for me. I started to study with her, and at a certain point we became a couple, even though she was at least 10 years older than I was. She suggested that I do a world tour of Reiki lectures with her. It was a dream -- a world tour with an excellent teacher, wealthy, who was my partner. I’d come back to Israel and be number one -- everything was perfect!

“And that’s what happened. It caught on all over the world. We went to the U.S., we had a villa, a jeep, a swimming pool. For me, it was heaven. I was making a mint. One treatment from me cost $180, and I did 10 treatments by noon. I had it made. I got certified as a master and started to become well known. The thing is that I’m an extreme type. If I’m doing Reiki, I’ll be the world champion in it. That’s why I needed to go to India, to join Buddhism, which is the source of Reiki. I left all the luxuries of the U.S. behind and went to Dharamsala. I wanted a way of life that I could use to change people and I thought I’d found it in Buddhism.”

Fanger joined the Dalai Lama’s monastery in India and became a member. “I studied a way of life, a world view, ways to work on yourself such as meditation and yoga, ways to work on your spirit, releasing anger. I took on all the practices of a monk,” he says. But the monastery was not enough for him. “The teachers at the monastery told me that winter was starting, there were no classes and I should spend that time in the hermits’ monastery in Rishikesh for half a year -- but this time in silence. I called my parents and told them that there wouldn’t be anyone to talk to for the next six months, no letters, no postcards, nothing. I got there, in the middle of a forest, heaven for anyone who wants to forget about the world. At first it was very easy -- workshops, yoga, vipassana, sitting for three and a half hours in lotus position, like in the movies. It was an amazing experience, I enjoyed it, but after a while I started to burn inside. I had to speak, so I did more yoga in order to bring my body to wholeness, but I felt like I was going to explode. It got tougher and tougher, and I was starting to think that maybe I’d forgotten how to speak ...

“One morning, I was in the river and felt that this was it, it’s enough, I’m bursting, I can’t do this anymore, I’m like a volcano. I went outside the monastery and it came further and further up and burst out, and it was verses from the reading from the prophets from my bar mitzvah, with the proper melody. I put my hand over my mouth, not understanding what all these verses had to do with me. I was in shock. It would have made more sense if lyrics from songs by Shlomo Artzi -- anything else -- had started coming out of my mouth. I made excuses to myself, saying that I was just homesick for Israel. I suppressed it, but looking back, that was the point where I started thinking that there were other things in the world.”

Those incidents, together with events that occurred several days later, told Fanger clearly that these were no ordinary signs. “I was going to sleep after yoga and exercises, turned out the light and felt that somebody was with me in the room, that there were eyes on me. Believe me, I didn’t smoke a thing there ... but I felt that someone was in the room with me. I decided to go outside to sleep in nature. I took a sleeping bag, and as soon as I opened it, a yellow scorpion fell out of the head section. If I had put my head there, that would have been it -- it would have been over. I still wasn’t thinking about religion or God, but I did start to think that there was a higher power, some entity that was watching over me.”

Two days later, “that was the end of it,” as he puts it. “Once every two weeks, donkeys would arrive with supplies. I took my things and started putting them in order. Suddenly I came across a booklet of blessings that a Chabadnik had pushed on me in India and decided to meditate with it. In meditation, you say certain words over and over, so I took the booklet, sat in the room with candles, in silence, and looked through it for a word to repeat. One sentence stood out: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” I said it out loud and my body started to shake, said it again and got chills. I didn’t understand the verse or what it meant -- when I took the matriculation examination in Bible, I copied everything -- but as I said the verse, I broke up completely, and I’m not such a spiritual type but a very intellectual person. The moment that you experience something like that, you’re done with Buddhism, India, everything. The next morning I took my things and left, telephoned my parents and asked them to pick me up at the airport.

“I landed at the airport like an alien, a classic Buddhist monk, tan all over. I didn’t tell anyone that I was back. I wanted to understand what was happening here. On the notice board across from my house there was a sign advertising a lecture in Jewish mysticism -- ‘Life After Death, entrance free.’ I told myself that I’d gone all over the world, tried all the religions, I’d read the New Testament like a novel, immersed myself in Buddhism, and I wanted to check this out, too. It was the first time I’d ever gone to a lecture on Judaism.

“I got there and sat down in the first row. The rabbi started talking about reincarnation and asked me every second: ‘Do you understand-’ He kept going. ‘Do you understand-’ ‘Yes.’ He finished and asked if anyone had questions. I said I did. I asked him contemptuously, ‘All right, you’ve proved that there’s life after death. That’s all very nice, but what’s that got to do with your beard and fringes-’ I was very anti-religion, not connected with them. They infuriated me. He teased me, saying that if I was serious, I should go to the seminar in Ashkelon for academics.”

Fanger took up the challenge, but arrived with a sack load of preconceived notions. “I thought that Haredim were primitive, holes in the sheet and stuff like that, and suddenly I realized that they were talking logically, intelligently. I still hadn’t decided to become religiously observant, but I realized that something existed on other levels. After all, I’d gotten accustomed to spiritual things, to ‘Come and experience,’ ‘Breathe,’ and here they were talking about the intellect and emotions. I was ready to listen, and I also went to the synagogue for the first time -- in a car, yes, but I felt something. I felt that I’d come home.”

Even as he grew closer to Judaism, Fanger stayed with his great love, Reiki. “My parents saw the process of my becoming more observant, said that I was very cute that way, but were afraid that I’d become extreme. Meanwhile, during that time, I was still considered a well-known Reiki master, starting workshops in Israel, $300 per workshop, still not religious, making loads of money, and at the same time starting to get stronger in my observance, starting to study Torah and only Torah like a crazy man. Slowly, very slowly, I got to wearing a skullcap, a small crocheted one at first.”

At a certain stage, Fanger had to leave Reiki as well. “I gave a lecture to Haredim and at the end, a young woman approached me and asked, ‘Are you sure that Reiki is kosher-’ I didn’t understand what she meant, and at that stage, I didn’t know any rabbis. I was just starting out. I was referred to Rabbi Silberstein, who dealt with medical matters, and I told him what Reiki was. I asked him, ‘Rabbi, is it kosher-’ and he said, ‘No.’ He said that it was like sorcery, the use of impure forces, and suddenly, at that moment, everything blew up in my face. As if I were in a house made of glass and everything shattered around me. My world was destroyed. I had a career, money, status, and suddenly, in a single moment -- boom!

“I went home, sat in the living room and started crying like a little boy. I had a few options, but I’m not an either-or person. I’m not someone who stays in the middle. I decided to leave everything, prayed to God and said, ‘Dear Father, I haven’t known you for very long, but I’ve learned that you don’t give a person tests that they can’t handle. It seems that I can handle this.’ I called my mother and told her, ‘Call everything off. Lectures, workshops, refund the money. Reiki’s not kosher!’ World War III started, but I’m strong and I didn’t break.” What put the final stamp on his adopting a religiously observant lifestyle was a meeting with Rabbi Haim Kanievsky, one of the highest-ranking rabbis in Israel today, who told Fanger to go and study. “I went to Or Sameach and that was it. I understood what the world of Torah was, what I could expect from myself. I’d been riding on a scooter. Now I was in a fighter jet.”

The most difficult thing about adopting a religiously observant lifestyle had to do with his parents. Fanger says that although his family is very close and meets often, his parents had difficulty accepting the idea that their son had become religiously observant. “My parents are dancers, world champions. Their dream was to plan the dance of their lives at their oldest son’s wedding, and here the wedding had separate seating.”

The week-in-review program on Channel 10, where segments of Fanger’s lectures were broadcast, turned out to be good for him even if it seemed ridiculous at first, particularly to people who didn’t know him. At first, it seemed that he was being made a laughing stock in front of the secular population every Friday, but very slowly the penny dropped. Fanger’s unique style had its way, and within several weeks everyone was addicted. The high point was the last program of the season, in which Fanger gave a “lecture” to the program’s staff right there in the studio.

“It started in the worst possible way,” he recalls. “My parents, who do not observe the Sabbath, were watching. Suddenly, after the major news program, they saw how their son was being made fun of. They broadcast a few seconds of the lecture, a joke or imitation. My father was furious. He wanted to call up Channel 10 and yell at them. But my mom said that there was no such thing as bad publicity. They did it again, another week and then another, and we heard that because of it, more and more people started watching the Dialogue Channel, where the lectures were broadcast. People wanted to see the entire segment and said to themselves, ‘This is ridiculous, but let’s listen to the whole lecture. Maybe there’s something to it.’”

He said that despite his distance from the professions that he followed in his non-observant life, the tools that he acquired during his Reiki period help him a great deal in Judaism. “I took the techniques that I learned there -- concentration in prayer -- and poured in Jewish content with relaxation, breathing, concentration and guided visualization. That’s power. Meditation work is tough, powerful spiritual work. Sitting with yourself and thinking about your actions is an unbelievably high level. Prayer is like meditation. You have to disconnect from the whole world.”

At the end of the interview, Fanger feels compelled to say that he is not trying to influence the masses to adopt an observant lifestyle, but rather simply wants to help people.

“There’s anti-religion, Harediphobia. That’s dumb. The whole world hates us because we’re Jews. Judaism is fun. It’s a treasure that I received, and I want to share it,” he says.

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