Yehuda Weg serves as a Hasidic rabbi in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a state that has only 5,000 Jews in total. In this conversation, Weg discusses with his friend and fellow congregant Howard Berkson the transition he underwent when he moved from Brooklyn to Tulsa and the lessons he learned from his experience with culture shock.
This story was produced by StoryCorps.
This story is a part of the American Pilgrimage Project, a conversation series that invites Americans of diverse backgrounds to sit together and talk to each other one-to-one about the role their religious beliefs play at crucial moments in their lives. The interview was recorded and produced by StoryCorps, a national nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.
Yehuda Weg: My family moved to Brooklyn because it's the largest Hasidic community in the United States, and I am of Hasidic heritage. Hasidim tend to live in enclaves together with other people of a similar background and similar interests. And have schools, synagogues, availability of kosher food, all the cultural trappings that Hasidim are really interested in. So, I was born in the cradle.
Howard Berkson: For people who don't know, a Hasidic rabbi wears a big dark overcoat, maybe a big black brimmed hat, and wears a long beard. It kind of sticks out here. So, when you first came to Tulsa and you got off the plane, what was that like?
Yehuda Weg: Moving out to a place that needed a more intense Jewish experience was part of our sense of mission, and that's what I had always strived for and hoped for. So, I was living the dream. My family and my friends, and certainly Ethel and I, we were excited about this idea. This was a tremendous opportunity. Well, when we landed in Tulsa, that lasted only seconds. It suddenly hit me that Dorothy, you're very far from home.
Howard Berkson: And you really might've been in Kansas.
Yehuda Weg: That's right. Might as well have been. I think the question in people's minds were not, what is a Hasidic Jew doing in Tulsa, Oklahoma? That's the question that they might have today. But at that time, the question was, what is this guy? That was jarring when it finally dawned upon us, because we hadn't thought a whole lot about it. It was exciting. We were young and naive, and that was a good thing. But when we came here, suddenly we had to face reality. It was culture shock, but we survived.
And we learned to appreciate the people that are here, and the tremendous value that we could pick up from learning from people in Oklahoma, in ways that we probably could not in a place like New York. Not only are we teaching, we're also learning. And I've learned tremendously important values in terms of kindness and seriousness and so on, from the salt of the earth people here in Oklahoma. Part of my responsibility is that I visit many food production facilities.
Howard Berkson: For kosher inspection?
Yehuda Weg: For kosher inspection. Which brings me in contact with all kinds of people throughout Oklahoma, some in Arkansas, Southern Missouri, and so on. AndI have great, great respect for these people. On one hand, I come from a very intense academic and intellectual background. That's the world I grew up in. And yet there's so much that I learned from the people that I've come in contact with over here. Living in Oklahoma has given me tremendous opportunities to value people and their individualism, their uniqueness. So when I meet somebody, they're my entire world. And it's changed my perspective because these are people that I would have not otherwise have met. It's not the type of people I would have otherwise met. But now when I meet somebody, this is my moment with them, and how can the two of us contribute to the larger, really nice picture?
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