"We affectionately called my father Harry, the Bear," writes Robert Leventhal. "Big, garrulous, and gruff, he cast a big shadow. I would struggle to determine how to be my own kind of bear."
Swept Away
From Family Broom Business
to Synagogue Consulting
by Robert F. Leventhal
Swept Away is the story about the father and son relationship that shaped Leventhal’s life. The journey of becoming his own kind of bear is one that lead him from being a manager in his family broom and mop business in Springfield, Ohio to becoming a well-known synagogue leadership consultant in New York City.
Leventhal spent 23 years in his family’s broom business, which would evolve into O-Cedar-Vining cleaning products. After the business was sold he stayed for 5 years with new owners. He then resigned from full-time work with O-Cedar and began exploring Jewish communal interests. He was interested I what was giving him energy in life and what was draining him. Along the way, he became a 7th grade religious school teacher, a Jewish day school president, and a Federation leader. From these experiences sprouted Leventhal’s idea of combining his business background with his emerging Jewish learnings—into a career as a synagogue consultant.
Leventhal tells this story through a series of chronological vignettes that are organized around the narratives of key eras of his life: childhood, high school, college, early career and courtship, entering family business, choosing a new career, Jewish spiritual awakening, thoughts on love, legacy and loss. This is not an exhaustive biography full of dates. It’s more like a charm bracelet: stories on a glinting chain of narrative themes.
Leventhal’s relationship with his father and his father’s legacy are certainly themes along this chain. Leventhal writes, “Dad was the hero of our family story. He went out from our home in Springfield, Ohio each week to sell his brooms. On these lonely highways, pre cell phone or Sirus XM radio, curiosity was his companion. On his return, he entertained us with his curious adventures.”
Leventhal chose to mirror his father’s style: its adventurousness, ambition, and curiosity. Swept Away tells the story of Leventhal’s longing to learn new things, to be a story gatherer and story teller, to hold court, to entertain the table as his father always had. Unknowingly, just a kid, he also accepted the burden of his father’s restlessness, driven nature, and loneliness. He would be swept away from home and hearth—by ambition and by fate—to launch his own adventures.
The first Jewish senior consultant at the Alban Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, Leventhal was taught how to patiently and carefully consult to congregations. He would use his entrepreneurial marketing skills to develop leadership, learning programs. After 10 years at Alban, he moved to New York City, to become the director of leadership at United Synagogues of Conservative Judaism.
During this time, he was a Jewish work-in-progress. Through trial and error, he created a synagogue consulting practice and worked to create a life of Jewish learning, living, and leadership. Leventhal writes that, “As I did this work, I came to feel that God was smiling on my construction site—cheering me on.”
