The Ultimate Show-and-Tell

Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch has a pithy way of summing up his approach to life. “You have to cover a lot of ground ” he maintains “before the ground covers you.”

Lots of us have pet projects from writing a sefer to remodeling the kitchen. But Rabbi Deutsch has many many pet projects and all of them are on a hugely grand scale. While most of us would have been more than pleased with ourselves had we created a Living Torah Museum Rabbi Deutsch simultaneously juggles a family a congregation a business two chesed organizations a radio show fundraising and tours for the museum about a thousand daily e-mails and his own ceaselessly burbling fount of inspired ideas for expanding the museum.

The mere mention of so many different undertakings makes my head spin but Rabbi Deutsch only laughs. “I’ve trained myself to sleep only three hours a night;” he says — then admits “it took twenty years to build up to it. On Shabbos I sleep a lot.” His packed daily schedule begins with the vasikin minyan at 5:00 a.m. and ends with a Torah learning session while the rest of the world sleeps from 11:00 to 2:00 a.m.

Tall and loose-limbed projecting a peculiar blend of relaxed self-assurance and contained intensity it’s easy to see how this forty-four-year-old perpetual motion machine was once a challenge for his rebbeim. “I was the kid who was always getting kicked out of class” says Rabbi Deutsch who was raised in a Lubavitch family in Crown Heights. “I wouldn’t stop asking questions. We’d be learning a mishnah and I’d want to know what the words really meant — which animal was being referred to what the vessels looked like. But my rebbis used to think I was trying to be chutzpahdig and I ended up with more than my share of slaps.”