Son of a pioneer of Colorado’s media world, Hillel Goldberg was expected to continue his family’s newspaper. But a mussar scholar, writer, and seforim author, too?
Photos: Avital Rotbart
W hile planning a recent West Coast trip I had contacted Rabbi Hillel Goldberg to ask about interesting people to interview in Los Angeles. I knew Reb Hillel to be well-traveled and a resident of Denver Colorado which to a New Yorker seems like just around the corner from L.A. I wasn’t quite prepared for his response: “I don’t know what topics you’re looking to cover but there’s a guy named Josh who’s the car-service driver I used the last time I was in L.A. and I got a very fine dose of yiras Shamayim listening to him. The number I have for him is…”
It was vintage Goldberg. An intimate of great rabbinic personalities he’s an acclaimed author and award-winning journalist respected in yeshivah and academic circles alike. Yet he takes inspiration where he finds it even in the back seat of a cab — and the vignettes of Jews famous and unknown that fill the pages of his most recent book The Unexpected Road: Storied Jewish Lives Around the World attest to that as well.
Now I’ve come to the Mile High City for an elevating conversation of my own with Reb Hillel and entering his office at the Intermountain Jewish News where he’s the executive editor and writes the longest-running column in Jewish journalism the first thing I glimpse on his desk is a volume entitled Mind Over Man. It’s a newly published collection of vaadim given by Rav Yechiel Perr a rosh yeshivah and leading contemporary exponent of mussar thought.
The warm inscription inside the book reflects Rabbi Perr’s appreciation for Reb Hillel as a longtime student of mussar and the Eastern European–born movement that championed it. His groundbreaking books The Fire Within and Illuminating the Generations helped make the personalities and concepts of the mussar movement accessible to the Jewish reading public. A writer friend recently shared with me that when The Fire Within first appeared he read it and then reread it numerous times in what was a life-changing experience for him.
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