From Law School to the Classroom: Rabbi Dovid Berk on the Flip-Out Journey

Rabbi Dovid Berk was sitting in Osgoode Hall Law School, one of Canada's premier institutions, when he saw Rabbi Aaron Hak and other Aish HaTorah volunteers learning with small groups of students on campus. "I was really envious of him," Berk recalls. "This is really what I wanted to do." That moment of envy, watching someone else do the work his heart was pulling him toward, captures the central tension of Berk's new book, Confessions of a Flipout — a collection of roughly 85 to 90 stories drawn from his own life and the lives of others, published by Mosaica Press.

What "Flipout" Actually Means

The term "flipout" carries baggage. Berk himself was initially apprehensive about using it, because it can sound like someone who "flipped out" in the sense of becoming odd or extreme. But after checking with people in their twenties and thirties, he found the term has been reclaimed: a flipout is simply someone who came from a less observant background and became more serious about Torah and mitzvos. In Berk's own case, Torah was always "one aspect of my life" growing up in a co-ed day school and attending Yeshivat HaKotel in Israel. After encountering Aish HaTorah and Rabbi Noah Weinberg, Torah became "the aspect of my life" — the big umbrella under which everything else became a subcategory.