Rabbi Nachman Seltzer: opportunities, structure, and the universal appeal of passion
Biographies are artificial. They’re never perfectly representative: it would take a lifetime of reading to capture the entirety of a lifetime into a book. That's where storytelling comes in. It's the superpower that elevates a biography from a list of events to a story that connects the dots and creates patterns out of all disparate events. Nachman Seltzer’s biographies are known for their unique and playful structure that lets us holistically experience a person’s life.
This spring, Rabbi Seltzer published his 44th and 45th books. From Sinai to Yerushalayim is a sweeping and ambitious continuation of Roy and Leah Neuberger's search for truth and their impact on the world. 90 Seconds is a thrilling, current, and fast-paced story of an ordinary man who sets out to accomplish an extraordinary goal. (Read reviews here)
Your writing started with the publication of The Edge, and proceeded to publish another 3 novels within the next 5 years: The Shadows, The Link, and The Network. You then did lots of short stories, and in 2016, you published your first “living biography”, Incredible, which led to your current niche. How do you think your start with fiction informs your work today?
My novels show the type of things that interest me. I've read a lot, and I'm up to date with what's happening around the world, so when I’m writing, that allows me to actually fill in the background and make it that much more interesting, informative, and deeper. Those books are richer, bigger, and wider than the average Jewish novel. You can write a book about Nazis with a shallow plot about how a Nazi wants to hurt a Jew, or you could write about the resurgence of the Fourth Reich and how they want to completely redo the world again without shooting a bullet. It's ambitious and much grander. But now I’ve said what I had to say with novels, so I'm taking the same idea and presenting broad books about real people.
The publication of Incredible was so different, both from the work you've done and for Artscroll. What led up to publishing Incredible?
Before that, I had done a book called Inside Their Homes that was like this too, a series on gedolim with stories of different people who knew the gadol. Then Incredible came out and took the style to the next level.
I met Rabbi Wallis through Ashley Lazarus, a film director in Ramat Beit Shemesh. He worked with Rabbi Beryl Wein making his movies, and one of them focused on Rabbi Wallis and his story. Rabbi Wallis dreamed of making a real Hollywood movie and spoke to Ashley Lazurus about it. Ashley said, Before you make a movie, you should really write a book. And he brought me to meet Rabbi Wallis.
For a year and a half, not a day passed without someone telling me that it was their favorite book, either an email or a phone call. It was insane. I had expected it to be a hit, but not on this level.
How does writing about a subject who is alive differ from a project like Rabbi Scheiner or Rebbetzin Jungreis?
The Rebbetzin Jungreis book was almost as if she was alive, it was like she could talk to me through her books. But Rabbi Scheiner was different. I prefer writing books about people who are alive, it's like people who give away their money before they die. They say, why should my kids have to wait before I give them money? Let me give it to them now and see them enjoy it. When a person's alive and telling me the stories, I get the story from the person who experienced it. Who could tell their story better than the person who actually lived it? It's a win-win for Klal Yisrael.
From Sinai to Jerusalem is fascinating, in some ways it’s a book about a book. What do you think is the most essential difference between From Sinai to Yerushalayim and From Central Park to Sinai? Do you think that from Sinai to Yerushalayim takes the place of From Central Park to Sinai?
I have the ability to be impartial. Because I’m not Roy Neuberger, I see what a great couple they are, and I'm able to say things he can't say about himself and talk about how great I see them. I met the Neubergers when I interviewed them for Rebbetzin Jungreis’s book. I read his book and was blown away by them. They were as far as you can be and came as close as you can get. They were at the North Pole and came to the mizbeach. They’re like the Bubby and Zaidy of the world.
I don't see that replacing From Central Park to Sinai, both have their place. I love that book, which is why I wanted to write a sequel. And I felt, look, you guys did this over 20 years ago. So much has happened since then. Let me show everybody what happened. Until he wrote that book, Roy didn't feel fulfilled, he didn't feel like he had achieved his goal, his tafkid. Once he wrote that book, his whole life changed, and he and his wife started traveling the world speaking. So let's tell everyone what happened here. He set his mind to it, and his whole life came together in a different way.
The second half of the book tells how the publication of From Central Park to Sinai changed the trajectory of the Nuebergers’ lives and the influence it allowed them to have around the world. What do you think authors should take as the message from their experiences?
I never know what's going to happen with a book. Eli Beer is my 45th book, but every book has its own journey. Some books sell just a few thousand, and some sell 35,000. That's the beauty of it. Your job is to write, and Hashem will decide where it goes. Roy would tell you himself that From Central Park to Sinai was his most popular book; his other books weren't like that.
After Incredible, I had a meeting with someone at Artscroll. I thought we would talk about how great the numbers are and give ourselves a pat on the back, but he was like, “What's going to be next? How are you going to top Incredible?” I'm like, I don’t understand the problem. He who sent us Incredible will send us whatever we need to do next. I brought this conversation up many times in the years to come because Living Legend came, The Rebbetzin came, and Zera Shimshon came, unbelievable things. I don't take credit, Hashem is sending it to me, but the credit I can take is for taking the opportunities. Roy had doors closing all over the place, but when a door opened, he sat down and wrote a book, which changed his life.
How much are you able to predict the impact? Have there been surprises where something was more or less successful than you expected?
Incredible was more successful than we thought it would be. We expected Rabbi Grossman, and Rebbetzin Jungreis to be like they were. I thought The Insider and Our Man in Jerusalem would do better than they did. They did well and were successful, but I thought it would be better. We did not expect Zera Shimon to be what it was. That was a very big surprise.
We think of certain drama as being part of our history, but when we read about events that could have taken place just a few months back in The Insider, or 90 Seconds, which ends with Covid, Meron, war in Ukraine, and Turkey… we see that history is playing out every day. You’ve written that 90 Seconds was done by September 2022, but you managed to get in events that happened after that. Why are those parts important?
Eli felt it was important to show. He liked those stories, and I like Eli, so we put them in. We were adding things until the last second. There’s so much going on with United Hatzala that it's almost impossible to stop and say, let's stop now, it's enough. The book is big enough, and we'll come back and revisit it. I assume in 10 years, he’ll want to do another book, just like Rabbi Wallis came back to do another book - he even wanted to do a third book. They're doing crazy stuff now, he just opened a helicopter division, and they're going to build another six floors on the building in Yerushalayim. So I feel it's embarking on part two now.
United Hatzalah’s uniqueness is based on three things: grassroots emergency response, the unity of this response between cities, and ambucycle transportation. You present the grassroots idea as Eli Beer’s own. How much influence do you think Herschel Weber’s Hatzalah in the US had on United Hatzalah?
Very little. He didn't know the people in America, it was a very independent operation. Look, there's a lot of politics in Hatzalah. If you read the book, you see that every city had politics, and it wasn't easy for the American Hatzala to think of another huge Hatzalah. When they disagreed on things, Eli said, listen, you don't understand. You have your issues in America, but we have different issues you can't even understand. We're dealing with terrorist attacks, it's a whole different ball game. So I'll respectfully decline to take your advice. And later they understood and became good friends. But Eli was building a whole independent situation that really had nothing to do with American Hatzalah.
The reluctance of other cities to join with Yerushalayim is mentioned briefly. Ultimately Eli Beer gave up on uniting Yerushalayim with Bnei Brak and was only able to bring them together in a separate organization. Why was the only answer to unite them under a new organization?
What happened was, Eli himself was unhappy with how the organization was being run. It was very heimish, and he wanted the organization to be run like a business, with transparency, accountability, and a CEO. He was almost thinking about leaving. But then when the Second Lebanon War broke out, it was an opportunity for everyone to come together and see how there were power in numbers. So he said, Let's start something new, go away from the way it was done before, and do it in a way where everyone has a seat at the table and gets as much money as they need. It became a serious conversation because you couldn't deny the importance of what he was saying anymore. Almost everybody voted to join, and it became more powerful than it ever was before.
Every single subject you’ve written about has had some incredible quality that made them beloved by people, be it youths, baalei teshuva, politicians, or donors. Is there one thing that these people have in common?
These people are moser nefesh for klal yisrael. Eli Beer lives for his dream of saving lives, and everybody he meets picks up on that immediately. People respond to that type of passion and urgency. Rabbi Wallis had it with saving people's lives by being mekarev them, and Rabbi Grossman had it with saving children. It's different levels, the neshama, the guf.... Rebbetzin Jungreis had the same urgency to travel the world to soldiers in Haifa, South Africa, speaking at Madison Square Garden, and speaking to five people in Newburgh.
What these books are really saying is that if you follow your dream, you can achieve anything you want to. You just have to be willing to go for it. These are not people who knew shas by the time they were three. Look at what normal people can achieve. Rabbi Wallis was a little Israeli kid from the Bronx in sweatpants. Eli Beer got kicked out of every school he was ever in, he’s a normal guy. But there's nothing normal about his passion for saving lives.
Your biographies are most famous for their interesting pace and structure, where you reshape a person’s life experiences into a format that seems completely arbitrary at first, and then comes to make sense as the reader gets deeper into the book. I think Rav Yitzchok Scheiner might be the exception to this. What are the limitations and opportunities of a non-chronological structure?
There's a lot of thought that goes into the structure, and the goal is always to do something unexpected. I try to start with something that will capture the readers. The beginning years take time to build up, so once you’re hooked on the character, we'll go back to the beginning and show where they came from. Let's give you a sense of who this person is and then go back.
I just finished writing a book about the Ribnitzer Rebbe, and that’s more linear because I try not to be shticky when it comes to Rebbes and gedolim. But when it comes to other people… ok, Rabbi Grossman is really a gadol, but he's a celebrity at the same time, and I’ll first hook you in.
Today's biographies focus more on significant events and stories than a plodding history through a person's life. How you hold the stories together so it’s not just a book of short stories?
The arc with Rabbi Grossman is the sense of building. He starts off building kids. He builds a school, he builds a community, and along the way, amazing stories happen. But there’s an arc: picture a rainbow, and along the rainbow, he's building houses, schools, shuls, people. I saw the way kids look at him. When he talks to a kid, they light up, they glow. They really idolize him, he's like the Vice President to Hashem.
With Eli, the arc is saving lives. From the time he was little, How do I save lives? I'm very frustrated because I'm trying to save lives and they’re not taking me seriously. Until: Now I want to save 6 billion lives. We're looking at his life through the prism of saving lives. And along the way, things happen.
But I don't have to spell things out for the reader. Mimi Zakon always says, “We have to respect our readers.” There are writers who tell you what the lesson is when they write a story, I never do that. You'll figure out what the lesson is, and maybe your lesson and mine are different. That's okay. One of the things I love about what I do is that I'm able to give good hashkafos to klal yisrael in a way that is under the radar. It's not threatening. You're learning, but half the time, you’re not even thinking about what I want you to think. That’s why I strongly believe the writer's job is to make a kiddush Hashem, not to focus on the negatives or the problems. Some people write that, okay, there’s a place for it. My job is to inspire by showing the beauty of our Jewish experience. These are our role models. We're not idolizing sports figures or wealthy people; we're idolizing people who are changing the world in a positive way.
Who is on your short list of people that you wish you could write about?
We’ve discussed writing about Reb Dovid Hofstedter. In his quiet and unassuming way, what he’s done with Dirshu really changed tens of thousands of lives. He's an amazing example of what a ben torah is. I'm one of the founding members of Rabbi Eli Stefansky’s shiur, and we've discussed the idea of writing a book about what goes on there, in the biggest daf yomi shiur in the world. We did kind of start, we'll see what happens. It's a daunting project because so many people would have to be talked to and so many stories from the thousands of people who watch the shiur every day.
You mentioned the Ribnitzer. What else is coming up next for you?
There’s actually another book coming out Lag Baomer time which I wrote a while ago, and it's coming out with Feldheim. It's about a regular simple Jew from Sydney, Australia, who worked his whole life as a butcher and is best friends with the Rebbe of Kamarna in Bnei Brak. The book is about a very unlikely friendship between the simple Jew and the Rebbe of a Chassidus.
The Ribnitzer will come out Elul, his yahrtzeit is Isru Chag of Sukkos. And I’m starting to write a book about Reb Uri Mandelbaum, the menahel of Philly Yeshiva for 50 years. And after that, Belz asked me to do a book about a particular figure in Belz history. There's just so many great people to write about.