It’s the morning of the Fast of Esther. Ellyn Hutt, immaculately attired, quickly apologizes for not offering her guest coffee or even a glass of water. Those are the rules — and the reason her face glows.
Hutt and her husband Steve, who’s out of town, have lived in this tranquil, thoughtful, book-tiered home off Monaco for 35, maybe 36 years. “I can tell you about ideas,” the esteemed Jewish educator prefaces, “but I’m not good with dates.
“I do know we’ve stayed put in our house longer than I’ve been in one place religiously.”
Her parents, the late Sharlene Ancell Kark and the late Prof. Howard Ancell, raised her in a committed Conservative household in Littleton. Her path toward Orthodoxy “was the slowest process ever,” she says, her hands pushing each Sisyphean word up an invisible hill.
“I was the first baby named at Rodef Shalom, which my parents helped found. We were also affiliated with Littleton’s Beth Shalom, where my father was the lay rabbi and conducted services on Friday night.
“We rejoined Rodef when I was a teenager and I became very involved with USY. I went to Hebrew school there, was confirmed, got married, our daughter Audrey had her naming ceremony at Rodef, our son Benjamin had his bris — everything.”
Audrey and Benjamin went to Herzl-RMHA, now Denver Jewish Day School.
Hutt worked in Rodef’s gift shop, located near the administrative offices. One Friday afternoon, Cantor Saul Rosenthal called in sick to the office and said he couldn’t conduct Saturday morning services. The secretary was frantic.
Hutt poked her head in the office and volunteered to do the service in Rosenthal’s stead. The panicked secretary asked whether she’d ever done this before. “No, but I’ve been sitting in the congregation for 20 years and I know the service. So I just did it.”
Then she joined a Torah reading class taught by Andrea Raizen. The class debuted one Saturday morning, each one reading a Torah portion.
“That evolved into my teaching Torah to other adults, Bar and Bat Mitzvah students, and davening,” Hutt says. “It was never a conscious decision, like ‘Now we’re going to be more observant.’ It was just an organic process.”
Hutt’s encounter with TRI’s Rabbi Mordechai Twerski was a soul-opener. The 10 years she studied Derech Hashem (“The Way of G-d”) with him resonated in every fiber of her being.
“There was no pressure, no exertion,” she says of Twerski’s approach. “Yet this initiated a very slow process of incorporating what I was learning into what we were doing religiously.”
Around the same time, Audrey and Ben experienced simultaneous yet separate introductions to Orthodox Judaism
“Audrey was getting a nice, robust, happy Jewish education at DJDS,” Hutt says. “When she was in sixth or seventh grade she decided to go to a Jewish camp but not Ranch Camp. She needed to be with different kids. So she attended Camp Moshava, which is affiliated with Bnei Akiva, an Orthodox movement.
“Our son’s best friend was Eli Calm, son of Marcie and Rabbi Yaakov Calm. Benjamin would spend every Shabbos afternoon at the Calm’s house. When he entered the 10th grade, he chose to attend Skokie Yeshiva.
“It was like a Venn diagram,” Hutt says of the family’s transition to Orthodoxy. “Everybody had their own circle of things. From the outside it looked like, ‘Oh, the Hutt family is becoming religious’ but it wasn’t really like that.
“Each person was moving in his or her own sphere and kind of coming together.”
Asked what her husband thought about the changes, Hutt smiles.
“Steve said that he would follow my lead.”
The Hutts started attending Beth Joseph, where they blossomed under this new connection to community. “There were a number of young families who were . . . they didn’t say they were on a spiritual path, but we were all on a spiritual path.”
Shared Shabbat lunches, dinners and Jewish holidays opened a new experiential dimension for the Hutts.
When BMH merged with Beth Joseph, Ellyn and Steve began attending the mechitza minyan at BMH-BJ, while Audrey and Benjamin went to EDOS to be with their friends — until one day a literal turning of the corner united them under one roof.
“We were walking together, the four of us, then Steve and I turned left to go to BMH-BJ and our kids turned right to go to EDOS,” Hutt says. “We looked at each other and asked, ‘Why aren’t we all going to the same shul?’ So we went to EDOS as a family.”
Today the Hutts attend DAT Minyan.
Audrey, now 38 and modern Orthodox, is married, the mother of two children and lives on the upper east side of New York. Benjamin, 35, married and the father of five, is a teacher at Yeshivat Sha’alvim in Israel.
Sitting at the head of her dining table, her features illumined by window-sourced light, Hutt explains the essence of fast days — and the Orthodox Jewish woman and educator merge into one.
“I always worry about fast days because I like to eat,” she laughs. “I worry that I’m going to get too hungry. The truth is, I’m a very good faster — but it has to be for religious, spiritual reasons.”
The Yom Kippur fast “comes from a place where we are like angels,” she says. “You don’t eat because you’re in an angelic state. But there are seven — no, probably 70 —ways of looking at it.
“From the body-soul context, it’s the body that causes us to commit wrong. Our soul is pure. On Yom Kippur, we want to give a louder voice to our soul and a quieter voice to our body. It’s hard to turn up the soul’s volume, so we turn down the volume of the body, which is pretty easy.”
While sacrifice is integral to the Yom Kippur fast, suffering is not the endgame, she says. It’s about the volitional exercise of will power. Most negative acts derive from a lack of restraint. The ability to voluntarily fast for the lengthy period required on Yom Kippur is a purely human act. Animals aren’t capable of this. You put food in front of a cat or dog and they eat it.
“Only a human being can do this, and it’s a reminder to ourselves of how much will power we have.”
Hutt says the Fast of Esther is entirely different in intention. It commemorates Esther’s call for the Jewish people to fast as a show of unity before she pleads for their lives to King Achashverosh.
“The gathering and fasting united us with one focus, which is doing what G-d wants us to do . . . I have said that there is a web of connection between me and you, and that is the power of the Jewish people.
“Reunifying the Jewish people is our biggest merit. It’s not always easy having the Jewish people do what they’re supposed to do. We’re called Am Echad, one nation, and when this frazzles and frays, we are vulnerable. When it’s put back together again, we’re strong.”
Hutt can probably hear the teacher in her passion, as well as a bit of irony. She earned dual undergrad degrees in Spanish and economics and an MA in economics at DU, where her father was a professor.
“My one joke is that I went from the study of profits to the study of prophets,” she says.
Hutt, who facilitates five packed classes in Jewish education a week, frequently tells people that she started teaching in elementary school, where she was the only Jewishly-identified pupil.
“The teacher would say, ‘Now Ellyn will tell us about Chanukah’ or ‘Ellyn will tell us about Passover.’ I was the kid who brought her Hebrew books to class and put them on my desk. My friends thought I was amazing because I could speak Hebrew.”
After the Six Day War she spoke to church groups about Israel and Judaism, which graced her with the ability to make the unfamiliar accessible to hungry minds.
Students taking Hutt’s current classes represent all Jewish denominations, the unaffiliated and non-Jewish learners. “I explain things in a way that you do not need a background in the subject matter to understand,” she says.
“Some pupils, like non-Jews who start my classes, just found out there is such a thing as the Torah the day before, while many others have been studying Judaism for a long time.”
Virtually everyone praises Hutt’s pedagogic style, even though she teaches within a Torah mi-Sinai (from Sinai), Orthodox framework to women from other Jewish denominations.
The Torah mi-Sinai perspective affirms that the Torah is of divine origin, faithfully handed down and transmitted. “That the premise of the class,” she says. “This my perspective and belief, and I don’t support other beliefs or perspectives.
“Students who come to my class don’t have to sign anything, but they are basically agreeing to hear that perspective and not introduce their own take on the Torah,” she says.
Hutt’s Orthodox orientation does not preclude active discussion or silence questions. “It allows us to do what we do, which is analyzing the words and making connections. People ask a lot of questions in my class. But you don’t have to accept it.”
No new student has entered her parsha class, which has been running for 15 or 20 years (those troublesome dates again) and asked, “Can we talk about something else?”
“It just doesn’t come up,” Hutt says. “Maybe they sense the vibe in the room. And they know me — they’re not wandering in off the street. People know where I’m coming from.
“It’s not a conversation about sharing our various belief systems. It’s about teaching Torah. If that’s what someone wants, they can stay. If not, that’s fine.”
Hutt adds that she’s not trying to convert anyone to her perspective. Many students are deeply involved at Temple Emanuel, Temple Sinai, Rodef Shalom and other non-traditional synagogues.
“Most of my emphasis is on personal growth and spiritual awareness, that kind of thing,” she says. “People find my classes meaningful without adopting halachic religious practices.”
Hutt and longtime friend Teena Slatkin recently published Living in the Present Moment: A Divine Design, an examination of past, present, future, loss, regret and renewal through Jewish eyes.
Constructed like a house, it invites readers to enter a tangible room for each holiday and festival — Miriam’s courtyard, the Shabbat room, Chanukah room, Passover room, Rosh Chodesh room, others.
Jewish holidays thread past burdens, the anticipation of future redemption and the present together, Hutt says. “That’s what all Jewish holidays are about, and every single Jewish day. They teach us how to live in the present moment.”
Asked if Orthodox Judaism exempts her from experiencing momentary doubts of the Divine, Hutt laughs slightly. Yes, she struggles — with laws that elude her understanding, for one — but she believes in the system.
“I trust it because I trust G-d,” she says. “A lot of people get tricked up because they think that if they don’t understand something, it’s impossible to accept any of it.
“I don’t even know how my phone works. I have no idea how my toaster works, or how it knows when my bagel’s ready — so I’m not sure why I should be able to grasp the mind of the Creator of the Universe.”
Hutt, who regards intellect as a precious gift given by G-d, adds that it’s a tool like any other and has its limitations. “But I’m willing to go forward in trust.”
Human beings exercise trust in endless situations that don’t exactly inspire confidence, she says. Take flying, for example.
“When I travel on an airplane, I’m trusting in a lot of things. First, that the pilot knows how to fly, that he hasn’t been up drinking all night and will carry us safely to our destination.
“I trust that the laws of physics are still operational and the plane will be able to complete the functions it was designed to perform; and that somebody is not trying to sabotage my life.
“I’m trusting my physical existence to all these things while I’m sitting 35,000 ft. off the ground.”
For some reason, people place a higher bar on G-d and Torah in terms of absolute trust and belief, Hutt says. “People risk a lot more on a regular basis and seem to be just A-OK with it.
“But when it comes to G-d, they say, ‘Unless G-d appears to me in a burning bush or splits my sea, I’m not willing to give in or go with this plan.”
Then there’s the double-edged issue of free will, which is both a positive and a negative that Hutt has witnessed in her grandchildren.
“We start expressing a need for control at about 18 months,” she says. “I’ve seen this in my grandkids. ‘You tell me to go this way? I’m going that way.’ ‘You tell me to put this on? I’m taking it off.’ ‘You tell me to eat this? I’m going to throw it at you.’
“That’s human nature,” she nods. “We want to be in charge — but G-d didn’t created us to be in charge.”
Doubting G-d wrestles between these two resolute urges.
“That’s why it’s such a huge thing to give over control to G-d and say, ‘I will accept You being in charge of me, and I will do everything to fulfill Your will,’” Hutt says. “There is no greater partnership. Yes, we are the junior partner — but we are partners nonetheless.”
Andrea Jacobs may be reached at andrea@ijn.com.
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