Master of Soul-Speak

Rabbi YY Jacobson has a message that can ignite the genuine seeker inside us all.

 

Interview enough talented people and you notice how they all seem to answer questions from a preassembled box of answers: the counterman at a fast-food joint serving up a burger spicy fries and large Coke from the fountain.

Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Jacobson is more like a chef creating a fresh dish sampling ingredients and spices rethinking measurements adjusting and fine-tuning: the answers are different every time uniquely his. He owns them. It’s evident in the way he grows excited at the more challenging questions his expression that of a cleanup hitter eyeing a slow-moving curveball.

His conversation like his formal lectures fuses intellectualism — he offers copious and detailed sources for each idea  — with kumzitz-style banter jokes chassidic tales. Even notes of song creep in.

He can do a lot of things maybe because he is a lot of things  — an Ashkenazi who’s really a Sephardi a master of the mussar works who’s really a chassid; he can explain a shtickel Reb Chaim with the same eloquence as a piece of Tanya. His calendar is dotted with appearances in LakewoodKiryatJoel and Yeshiva University. It’s a paradox hinted to by his surname.