David Epstein’s motto is “We’re here to learn, not to have fun.” It’s not only what he tells his grandchildren when they’re traveling together, but a philosophy he’s embodied throughout his 90 years.
Born and raised in Texas, Epstein settled in Washington, D.C., in 1961 after attending law school and serving as an officer in the United States Coast Guard.
Epstein has been a longtime pillar of the Jewish community. He served on the board of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, delivered lectures at Kesher Israel and the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies and co-wrote a book titled, “Torah With Love: A Guide to Strengthening Jewish Life Within the Family.” In 1975, Epstein attended one of the Federation’s first missions to Auschwitz.
He and his wife traveled with Jewish National Fund to support agricultural rebuilding efforts and restore affected kibbutzim in the Gaza Envelope in January 2024. The two have hosted weekly Shabbat dinners for half a century.
The D.C. resident is a 65-year member of Kesher Israel Congregation, where he’s served as president and as a trustee.
Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I was born in June 1935 in San Antonio, Texas. My parents were both immigrants — my father came from Lithuania in 1922 and my mother came from Poland to Mexico City in 1930. I was the middle of three children; I have an older brother and younger sister.
My father believed that you transmit Jewish culture through learning Yiddish, so we spoke Yiddish. That was my first language. We all spoke Yiddish. My mother was the one who brought Jewish observance to us. We observed the holidays, we observed kashrut and that was an important part of my formation. We didn’t have much formal Jewish education in San Antonio. There was a Hebrew school I went to, but I didn’t really learn very much. Most of my Jewish learning happened in college, in Hillel and various other institutions that I was fortunate to get to be a part of. I had a strong Jewish identity, a strong Zionist identity.
What do you like about the Kesher Israel community?
When I first moved to Washington and came to the congregation in the early ’60s, I liked it because the facilities were intimate, there was intergenerational contact, and it’s a place of some transients and some people who are there long-term.
What prompted you to write your book, “Torah With Love”?
When our children were young — we have five, but I think we had two or three at the time — we had Friday night dinner, Erev Shabbat, and I didn’t want them to start singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” or be restless, so I started presenting something from the Torah portion, or I would ask them multiple choice questions that were easy to answer — you know, the third one was always the right answer. I would do this every week. We had a five-year-old, a three-year-old and a baby.
One week, I forgot to do it and afterward, my older son said, “What’s in this week’s Torah? We didn’t have the discussion.” So, I wrote an article that was published in the B’nai B’rith monthly magazine called “What’s in This Week’s Torah?” and I got an invitation from one of the big publishing companies to write a book about how to have discussions with your family on topics that matter. My wife found me a co-author, a friend of ours who was a psychologist. The two of us wrote the book and we got great reviews. Elie Wiesel gave us a foreword to it. I wanted to call the book “A Table With Content,” but the publisher thought of “Torah With Love.”
The idea was that you can take something from the Torah portion without being an expert — that 9-year-olds and everybody above that age can talk about. For example, when you talk about Rebecca and Jacob deceiving Isaac to get the birthright blessing, you can talk about deception. “Is it ever justified?” “Is it justified in some larger benefit that you’re trying to achieve?” Whatever the Torah portion is for that week, there’s always something in there that has a large topic that you don’t have to be a Torah scholar to understand or talk about. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to create the idea that over time, if you do that, people become familiar with the stories and the idea of having a discussion about something of substance comes across.
Why is it important to you to remain involved with Jewish life and learning at the age of 90?
I think that keeping alert and keeping learning is always important no matter what age you are. So, if I get invited to lecture, that gives me an opportunity to delve into a topic with greater depth. When you prepare something, you gotta know what you’re talking about. The topics I choose and present give me an opportunity to learn more about Jewish history [and] Jewish thought.
This past year, I gave a presentation on Jewish memory and Jewish history, which was a series of lectures by a Jewish historian from Columbia [University] called “Zakhor,” which means “to remember.” Earlier this year, I gave a discussion about historic documents, going back to George Washington’s letter to the Touro Synagogue to Napoleon’s questions to the Sanhedrin to various other documents over the past 250 years. It gives me a chance to focus and learn. That’s one of the characteristics I try to transmit to my children and grandchildren.
