From behind his new pulpit at the OU, Rabbi Moshe Hauer connects to the whole crowd

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Photos: Naftoli Goldgrab

Before every Yom Tov, a group of talmidim in my hometown of Montreal join to hear a chaburah from Rav Moshe Mendel Glustein, rosh yeshivah of Yeshiva Gedolah of Montreal.

Covid brought change to our chaburah as it did to everything else, and now it’s become a Zoom chaburah — disjointed faces on a screen, others calling in — as the Rosh Yeshivah tries to summon up the spirit of the beis medrash through the lens of a camera.

But the digital format does have an advantage. It’s brought us some new faces, talmidim who don’t live in Montreal but now have the chance to hear the rebbi speak in real-time and wouldn’t miss it.

Shortly before this past Pesach, the Rosh Yeshivah mused to me about having seen the face of Rabbi Moshe Hauer on the bottom right of the screen during his most recent chaburah. “I don’t know,” Rav Glustein remarked, “how he can find half an hour a few days before Pesach, when he’s paskening and helping families and guiding people, to sit and listen. It makes no sense.”

Then the Rosh Yeshivah paused and said, “But it does make sense, because it’s him. That was always him.”

The Rosh Yeshivah is saying good.

Some rabbanim move from call to call, meeting to meeting, without a chance to catch their breath. You see their devotion and the energy, but also the commotion, that frantic look.

But Rabbi Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, doesn’t give a clue.

His demeanor, his measured way of speaking, and — to share what my kids call TMI — the way he eats his soup during our lunch, the unhurried precise motions, call to mind the baalei mussar of the last generation.

Even as he is dealing with the issues of this generation, in real time.

Dealing as rabbi. Dealing as diplomat. Dealing as policy-maker. Dealing as organizational leader.

Because here he is, filling a job he didn’t think he’d get.

It was one of the more exhaustive search processes in recent Jewish communal life. The Orthodox Union —  one of the largest Orthodox organizations in the United States with more than a century of activism in its rich record — was at a crossroads. Its executive vice president, Allen Fagin, was poised to retire, and its president, Moishe Bane, sought the right leader to direct a superpower organization adapting to a shifting world, growing in government influence, and more importantly, maximizing its efforts to engage and encourage Torah learning.

An alumnus of Ner Israel in Baltimore, the attorney found himself discussing the challenges with his close friend and co-native Montrealer, Rabbi Moshe Hauer, who, like him, had been a close talmid of Ner Israel’s rosh yeshivah Rav Yaakov Weinberg.

It wasn’t just a single conversation or even two. It was sort of a recurring discussion, and Rabbi Hauer, who was knee-deep in the responsibilities of practical rabbanus in a very busy Baltimore shul, admired what the OU executive was trying to do.

Rabbi Bane knew what sort of leader the OU needed — the requisite ideological, intellectual, and emotional skill set — and one day, he decided to take a shot at what he assumed was an impossibility: He offered the position to his informal consultant.

It was a non-starter, because the job called for someone on-site at the OU’s Manhattan headquarters, and Rabbi and Rebbetzin Hauer weren’t prepared to leave Baltimore, where they had deep roots and consuming commitments as rav and rebbetzin of a thriving shul.

“I laughed, thanked him, and explained why it wasn’t for us,” Rabbi Hauer recalls, and adds a candid postscript, “I was sort of sad. It was a job I thought I might have liked to tackle.”

He turned back to regular life, a nagging sense of doubt relegated to the far corners of his mind, when Moishe Bane suddenly appeared at the Hauer home in Baltimore. “Working out of the OU’s New York headquarters was surely the job requirement,” says Reb Moishe, “but the OU’s Executive Committee unanimously agreed that having Rabbi Hauer in New York two or three days a week was more worthwhile than hiring any of the other candidates.”

They wanted him. He didn’t have to move. It was fine, welcome aboard.