When a Mentor Dies: Remembering Paul PJR Reichenbach

When a Mentor Dies: Remembering Paul “PJR” Reichenbach By Rabbi Paul Kipnes | paulkipnes.com

Somewhere right now, someone you've never met is crying in their car over a person you've never heard of. A camp director. A teacher. A coach. A person who stood beside them at a critical moment forty years ago and then mostly vanished from their life, except in memory. That person just died, and the mourner can't explain to their spouse, their coworkers, even to themselves, why it hurts this so much.

If that's you today, keep reading. This is for you, whether or not you ever knew the man I'm about to name.

For me, that person is Paul J. Reichenbach - “PJR” to generations of us - and he died in the early hours of Rosh Hashana morning, surrounded by his family, after a brief battle with ALS. And since I heard, I have been gut-punched, simultaneously feeling grateful and guilty, half-convinced I'm not allowed to feel this much over a man I hadn't spoken to at length in years.

There is no box to check on a bereavement form for a loss like this. No line in an obituary that reads "beloved camp director to thousands of teenagers." No sympathy card that says "sorry for the loss of the man who, forty five years ago, looked at you across a dining hall and decided you mattered."

Grief researchers actually have a name for this: "disenfranchised grief" - mourning that isn't openly acknowledged, isn't socially sanctioned, doesn't get you a day off work. Nobody around you understands why the death of a summer camp director could knock the wind out of you like this. But you know. You know exactly why.

PJR spent 44 years with the Union for Reform Judaism, co-directing Kutz Camp and then leading NFTY's Israel and teen programs. For 17 years he served as URJ's Director of Camping and Israel Programs. Those are the facts, but they are almost entirely beside the point of why so many of us are aching right now.

Because what PJR actually did, official title notwithstanding, was see people. He had this way of looking at a sixteen-year-old - awkward, unformed, still years from knowing who they'd become - and seeing the leader, the mensch, the fully realized adult already flickering inside them.

PJR handed us microphones before we trusted our own voices. He handed us responsibility before we'd earned the confidence to hold it. He believed in us with a stubbornness that outpaced our belief in ourselves, and somehow, eventually, his belief became ours.

PJR mentored my wife Michelle November and me - first separately, each of us finding our own footing under his watch, and then, somehow, together. He set us both on a path toward leadership in and service to the Jewish community, a path that now spans almost half a century. I don't know how many other couples can trace their shared life's work back to the same person who first believed in each of them alone. I suspect the number is not small. That was PJR's particular genius: he didn't just build individual leaders. He built a web of us, connected to each other, connected to something larger, and somehow still connected to him.

If his voice at the URJ Biennial conventions gave us the Voice of God - transcendent, booming over the loudspeaker, making announcements, narrating programs, filling an entire convention hall with the sense that something important was happening - PJR also gave us something rarer: the felt presence of a God who is near. It was immanent. One-to-one. A hand on the shoulder in a hallway between sessions. A joke at his own expense that let you laugh instead of shrink. A Judaism that was joyous rather than burdensome, that spoke directly to whatever you were actually struggling with that week, not some abstracted theological ideal. Through PJR, we felt the presence of the Holy One, although few people, and especially PJR himself, would ever describe it that way.

He organized multiple busloads of teenagers into New York City - Broadway shows, museums, wandering Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park half-lost and fully alive - and somehow it never fell apart, because PJR did not get flustered. He built the container sturdy enough that we could be reckless inside it, and he made sure every one of us knew the Kutz Camp phone number (repeat after me) 914 (914) 986 (986) 1174 (1174 or 5 or 6), in case we got lost. We rarely did. And when we did, we called, and it was fine, because he'd planned for that too.

Here is the thing about mentors like that: they hold a piece of us that we cannot access on our own. They were witnesses to our becoming, present for the version of us that existed before we knew who we'd turn into, back when we were still raw material, still deciding.

When mentors like that die, we don't just lose them. We lose one of the last people who remember watching us become ourselves. Nobody else was in that room. Nobody else saw what he saw, in that moment, in exactly that way. That witness is gone now, and there's no replacing a witness.

This is true whether your person changed the entire trajectory of your life or shook your hand once at an event and made you feel, for five minutes, like the most important person in the building. Both of those are real relationships. Both are worth grieving. Mentorship was never about the hours logged; it was about whether, in the time you had, he made you feel seen. By that measure, tens of thousands of us are mourning a man who saw us.

There's a song we sang at every Kutz and NFTY song session without fully absorbing what we were promising: Ani v'atah n'shaneh et ha'olam - you and I will change the world. It isn't a solo declaration. It's a partnership. The world doesn't change because of me alone, or because of PJR alone; it changes because of the "you and I" that forms between two people, one of whom decided the other was worth building something with.

That's what mentorship actually is. Not a torch passed down a chain from someone above to someone below, but a partnership struck in a dining hall, a hallway, the back of a bus rolling toward New York, in which someone looked at a kid who didn't yet believe in themselves and said, in effect, you and I are going to change the world. PJR struck that partnership with more people than any of us can count.

The rabbis in Pirkei Avot teach: lo alecha ham'lacha ligmor, v'lo atah ben chorin l'hibateil mimena - you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it. PJR did not finish the work. Nobody does. The work of building young Jewish leaders, of making Judaism feel like joy instead of obligation, of looking at unformed teenagers and seeing who they'd become. That work was never going to be finished in one lifetime, however long or however faithfully lived. But he never once stopped showing up for it. For 44 years, he did not desist.

So if you're reading this and feeling a grief that doesn't have a name, that nobody around you quite understands, that feels disproportionate to a man you may have only met a handful of times… you're not being dramatic. You're grieving a witness. You're grieving a piece of your own becoming that only he could see.

The work he handed us is still unfinished. That was always the plan. May Paul J. Reichenbach’s memory be a blessing, and may we - all of us he ever pulled aside and made feel like a partner in something larger - keep proving him right: you and I, still, changing the world.