Farb was born in
Konawa in Seminole County, Oklahoma, on January 18, 1941; his father, also named Nathan Farb, owned a jewelry and clothing store, and died by suicide before he was born. His mother was Bertha Eisen Farb, a music teacher who was a violinist and conducted the high school orchestra in Konowa. She and Nathan moved to
Lake Placid, New York, when she married Alfred Kahn, a rabbi and a
Talmudic scholar who was 25 years older than she. There were few Jews in Lake Placid, and the family lived in the working-class section of town where anti-Semitic attitudes lingered. When Farb was 11 years old, he was stripped naked and beaten by a gang of neighborhood boys. Kahn conducted services at the small synagogue in Lake Placid whenever there was a
minyan (the required quorum of ten Jewish adults), which happened mostly in the summer. During the winter there were usually not enough Jewish men in town to read the
Torah. Consequently, Kahn served as an itinerant Jewish chaplain to several sanitariums in the villages of
Saranac Lake and
Tupper Lake, both within the boundaries of
Adirondack Park. Because he didn't drive, Bertha drove Kahn to the various communities he served, and young Nathan had to come along. While his parents were at services, Nathan would retreat by himself into the nearby woods, where he developed a deep connection with nature and spirituality. Hiking and camping in the Adirondacks was a formative part of his life. When his stepfather died in 1955, his mother moved with him to New York City, then across the river to
Hackensack, New Jersey. He attended
Rutgers University, where he earned a degree in psychology. ==Career==