Saving Souls In Times Square

Originally published in The Jewish Week, vol 210, No. 14, written by Susan Josephs

Rabbi Yehudah Fine’s life in the streets began with a simple phone call. A concerned family had called him because their child had run away. Would the rabbi walk the streets in “the way beyond” and help them locate their loved one?

Rabbi Fine, now 50, has spent half his life reaching out to the young people in the way beyond: drugged-out club kids, hookers, transvestites, hustlers and others who have initially wondered why a rabbi would spend his nights on the docks of the west side Highway or outside the porn shops in Times Square.

Even on a freezing winter night, Rabbi Fine would be there to offer them hot chocolate, an opportunity to shmooze about anything and a message of hope from Maimonides. Or as Rabbi Abraham Twerski, the founder and medical director of gateway Rehabilitation center puts it: Rabbi Fine “has dedicated his life to helping young people emerge from hell and to preventing their re-entry into it.”

About three years ago, Rabbi Fine-an Orthodox rabbi who directed the Jewish Family Institute from his Brooklyn home and currently works as a guidance counselor at Yeshiva University moved his family to the Catskills and spent many hours writing down his experiences and insights from a cabin in the woods. The result, the newly published “Times Square Rabbi: Finding the Hope in Lost Kids’ Lives,” (Hazelden) which reads like both a memoir and an inspirational guidebook. In recounting his encounters with Danny, Jessica, Allison, Rick and other troubled kids through eight different stories, Rabbi Fine spells out his “eight-step program”.

Based on Maimonides’ 12th century work “Hilchos Teshuva,” or “The Path to Meaning and Hope,” Rabbi Fine’s eight principles revolve around vidui, hurling out the pain; spiritual awakening and the ability to change, assume personal responsibility and sustain a love for life.

For years, Rabbi Fine’s counseling techniques inevitably included a “spiritual component. To me, these principles from a legacy that goes back centuries was obvious,” he says. “I wanted to show people that Jewish spiritual values can be relevant and applicable. Jews may see this as a Jewish book, but I hope that non-Jews see this as a universal book.”

Rabbi Fine shows up for an interview looking exactly like the photograph on his book cover: baseball cap; neatly trimmed beard; dark rimmed glasses; casual clothes; atypically rabbinic, if he’s to be compared to any sort of rabbinic stereotype. After all, how many rabbis can show up at technoclubs and receive preferential treatment from tank-sized bouncers? “I’m comfortable in clubs,” the rabbi says. “But I’m usually there because I’m looking for someone in trouble and that is not easy, fun or enjoyable.” Rabbi Fine, who grew up in Seattle, attributes his calling to his late father, an Ob/Gyn who was “on call 24 hours a day. My father’s intense caring for his patients had a profound impact on me,” he says. “My father would say that we wound up in the same line of work, only I don’t dispense traditional medicine.”

After graduating from the University of Washington, Rabbi Fine ran a secondary-school program for migrant farm workers in California’s Sacramento Valley. “I had planned on making aliyah and instead became a crusader for boycotting grapes,” he says. “But I felt I was missing the Jewish component in my life.” Rabbi Fine moved to New York and studied to become a rabbi at Yeshiva Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn and a therapist at the Ackerman Institute of Family Therapy. Although he had dedicated his life to helping people with their problems, “nothing” prepared him for his work on the streets. “You’re never prepared to see how hurt and abandoned people are, people who have never been hugged before,” he says. “But people are people and they have souls, and like everyone else, it takes times to build trust with them.”

In his book, Rabbi Fine writes about his first impressions of street life. “What I saw was a war zone. People were dying and disappearing. I saw kids’ bodies become ravaged by sickness in just six months. I sat and talked with kids under tunnels of garbage. Rats jumped in front of my flashlight.”

He got dubbed the “Times Square Rabbi” from working with Covenant House’s Times Square based “Off The Streets” program. Every Thursday, Rabbi Fine would ride the “outreach” van and hand out peanut butter sandwiches. He met people like Danny, a young hustler addicted to coke, who “hadn’t seen a rabbi up close” since he was in the third grade. Although Danny’s father used to get drunk and beat him up, he told Rabbi Fine about his fond memories of lighting the menorah with his family.

Rabbi Fine stresses that he never pushes religion when he talks to kids. “I know that a lot of Jewish kids are moved that I’m out there, but the Torah speaks for itself,” he says. “If someone wants to know more about Judaism, they can ask and I will be always be available. You just can’t have any kind of agenda when you’re out there … spiritual healing is not a business.”

Rabbi Fine, in fact, brought many “Dannys” to his home in Brooklyn. “My kids grew up in a sea of wonderful people and grew up to be savvy and non-judgemental,” he says, of the constant human flow into his home that “at times, grew overwhelming. I was also very zealous of making sure my family came first. I learned that if you have a strong family life, it can vaccinate you against much of the chaos that you find out there.”

Entranced with “rural” life in upstate New York, Rabbi Fine says that his work on the streets of New York has come to an end. “But I’ve seen what works and I knew had to turn to the next page,” he says of his desire to write his book and future works.

Still, the rabbi misses the kids who hang by a thread and still hope for something better. “Times Square has changed but the kids haven’t,” he says. “Things aren’t better for them. Those kids haunt me in my dreams.”