At Monday morning’s YMCA Senior Fitness class, Beth Daniel, a fitness instructor at the Y for over 30 years, asked her elderly students a fun question. Beth, an extraordinary leader, combines rigor, consistency and genuine care for people. She takes the time to remember names, tell stories, share her experiences and ask others to share theirs. Yet somehow, after one hour of cardio, strength and flexibility training, she still manages to both promote health and keep you coming back for more.
Oh yeah… back to her fun question.
Midway through our regimen, she says she went up over the weekend to Whidbey Island and took in the local theatrical performance of “Fiddler on the Roof.” She was deeply moved by the play and told of a friend sobbing at the end when the song Anatevka was sung. Then Beth asked whether anyone in the group (there were about 25 of us) had been in a play. A couple of people told of their roles… and then we moved on.
After the class was done, I went up to Beth and thanked her for bringing up “Fiddler” and told her that I had played the Rabbi in our high school “Fiddler” production. I have always thought that I got the role not because I could sing, dance or act, but because as one of the only Jews in my school, they kinda had to give it to me.
Beth had earlier asked people if they remembered any of their lines, and that set me back to my character’s only line, which was a response to a question from the rabbi’s son: “Is there a proper blessing for the Czar?”
“A blessing for the Czar? Of course… may God bless and keep the Czar… far away from us!”
Great art is always relevant to the moment, and is that ever relevant now!
In “Fiddler,” the Rabbi was both a peripheral and a comic figure. Yet, I felt a certain obligation to do the role correctly. So, in preparation for the marriage scene, I contacted the rabbi who led me through my bar mitzvah ritual, Dr. Arthur Lagaweir.
Dr. Lagaweir was a fascinating and impressive man. Born a Dutch Jew in Amsterdam, he studied and became “ordained” before World War II under the tutelage of another rabbi, escaped Europe before the war, and made it to America. The war, and the Jewish Holocaust, took away his belief in God, but not his knowledge and devotion to study. He was an autodidact, reading and writing in at least seven languages, including ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, as well as modern Dutch, English, German and French. He filled his time at home with biblical study. His work life in America involved the diamond trade. I don’t remember how he ended up in Seattle, but after age 50 he took advantage of his location and became an avid downhill snow skier.
My bar mitzvah tutelage with him has a fascinating backstory. When my dad became the director of the Kline Galland Home for the Aged in Seattle – the first professional social worker to head that Jewish senior housing facility – he sought a rabbi to lead shabbat services. There were no orthodox rabbis who were willing to travel by car on shabbat to meet that need. But Dr. Lagaweir was an exception. He no longer believed in God, but he did believe in service to others. When it was time to find a tutor for his son, my dad prevailed upon Arthur Lagaweir to take on that task and based on their mutually respectful relationship, he agreed.
Visiting Dr. Lagaweir in his study during those six months of preparation was a visual and odiferous sensation. The room was piled floor to ceiling with books, and he always was smoking a cigar. I felt a kind of awe and privilege to be with someone who was both learned and exuded a kind of holiness.
The bar mitzvah itself is a topic worthy of another blog entry all its own. It was the last gathering of a set of friends and relatives from both of America’s West and East coasts before so many passed away; an event that my irreligious grandpa found himself crying deeply at, surprised by his own connection to his Jewish soul; and a time where I first put my foot down on a major issue: I’d only agree to do the whole megillah if there could be both potato AND macaroni salad available.
But I digress. Back to the tale of rabbis and “Fiddler.”
There is a wedding scene in the play where the rabbi marries Motel and Tzeitel to the tune of Sunrise, Sunset. The script has no words for the rabbi, but the visual is that he is speaking.
Four years after my bar mitzvah, I returned to Dr. Lagaweir’s office – by then he had given up smoking – to ask for the blessing prayer for marriage. I wanted to mumble it during my performance as a paean to authenticity. His reply to my request was unexpected and wonderful: he turned me down flat.
“If you say that prayer during the play to those two students, they will in fact be married. I cannot teach it to you under those circumstances.”
Over my nearly 70 years on the planet, I have encountered many rabbis. Each, of course, with their personal and professional distinctiveness, and each with differing relationships to me. All leaving a deeper mark on my life than the average Joe or Jill, for the rabbinic calling comes with a certain intensity and magnetism.
As a poor college student, I lived a half-mile from the University of Washington Chabad House. In search of a filling meal, I visited for a free erev shabbat dinner accompanied by a mandatory service. At my first such visit, a young rabbi came up to me before dinner, and asked me to lead a prayer. “But rabbi, I don’t know Hebrew,” I protested.
“It’s ok,” he replied with a grin, “God understands English.”
Several years later, a friend from my teenage Jewish basketball team, who had become a devout Lubavitcher Jew, invited me to join him for a shabbat dinner at that same rabbi’s home. I went and had a great time, taking in the richly engaging and comforting sights, sounds and smells of a life very different from my own. The next day, I went on a first date with Karen, who would become my first wife, and told her the story of the previous day’s Jewish adventure. As for that very same rabbi? Well, he became ensnarled in an international criminal operation. The courts found him both innocent and naïve to the smuggling operation. He went on to a fine rabbinic career.
Never being an adult member of any congregation, when Karen and I decided to get married, about a year after my Lubavitcher dinner, we found a rabbi ordained in the Reform Judaism movement, Vicky Hollander, as a compatible guide to a Jewish marriage ceremony. After more than 3000 years of textual Jewish continuity, Rabbi Vicky was one of the religion’s first female rabbis. She was kind, warm, knowledgable, accessible and non-intimidating and led us through our preparations and the ceremony itself. And in retrospect, she must have been an incredibly courageous and self-actualizing person to have taken the rabbinic plunge as one of the “firsts.”
Several years later, when we moved to Olympia, I heard from a friend that of all things, Rabbi Vicky was the visiting rabbi at Temple Beth Hatfiloh. At that time, TBH was an unaffiliated, historic synagogue located in downtown Olympia. There were perhaps a total of only 60 households. We went to a shabbat service led by Rabbi Vicky and instantly found a welcoming community of friendly people with whom we connected. One of the men had actually dated Karen’s sister in Brooklyn! We stuck around and became members of TBH, even though Rabbi Vicky’s tenure was short.
TBH’s membership started growing dramatically, and lay leadership decided to recruit a rabbi to work slightly more than half time. As part of that search, different members, including us, hosted candidates. We hosted Rabbi Marna Sapsowitz, trained in Mordechai Kaplan’s Reconstructionist movement, who would go on become TBH’s first fulltime rabbi. With Rabbi Marna at the helm, and local Jewish demographics ascendent, our temple’s membership more than doubled in size in the next five years. It was bursting with energy, and, of course, not a small amount of contention and controversy.
Rabbi Marna found herself at the center of some of that contention. A portion of our membership were raised and desired to continue to practice in a more conservative/traditional Judaism. Those folks clashed with the more liberal/progressive orientation of not only our rabbi, but the majority of our congregation. TBH membership made a collective decision to align with the Jewish Reconstructionist movement, where Rabbi Marna had been ordained. This resulted in both a schism, with the more ritualistically traditional members creating another shul aligned with the Conservative branch of Judaism, and soon thereafter a decision by Rabbi Marna to leave her pulpit role at TBH.
I was a supporter of Rabbi Marna’s leadership during that difficult time. After she left TBH and continued to live in Olympia, we became not just Rabbi and congregant, but friends. And that relationship has continued for over 20 years.
Soon after Rabbi Marna and TBH separated, I became part of the Rabbi Search Committee. I was the lead contact with the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in securing potential candidates. We identified three or four final year students who would come out, conduct a shabbat service as part of an “interview” process, and from that, we would make a selection.
I remember my principal college contact at the time recommending that we seriously consider Seth Goldstein. He wasn’t initially our first choice on paper, but I was advised “to really give this guy a shot. I think he’d be a good fit for you out there.”
Rabbi Seth was invited to lead us during the High Holy Day services that coming fall, and he was an instant “hit.” We indeed did hire him after that, and he is now in his 22nd (I think that’s right) year at TBH.
Over the many years of Rabbi Seth’s tenure, the temple has doubled again in size. Eloquent, energetic, and humorous, he has also proven himself an exceptional temple leader, adept both as an inspiring orator, and compassionate pastor. I have gotten to observe him take on many of the roles that rabbis play in the life of a local Jewish community and also have been aware of his interactions in the broader national/international Reconstructionism movement and his functioning as a community leader within the wider non-Jewish world around us.
But it has been in the last year, as President of TBH, that my interactions with Rabbi Seth have taken on a new and distinctly different tone and purpose. As a rabbi who for 20 plus years is required to adjust to a new president every 1 – 3 years, it must be an enormous challenge to maintain a professional relationship with very different kinds of people with very different goals and styles of communication and leadership. And that is what the rabbinic/lay leadership relationship is, a professional relationship.
It would, of course, be inappropriate in this public blog, to detail the specifics of our communications and the tasks we work on for TBH. But for me, there is constantly much learning, not only about the issues we face together, but the distinctive approach to the role of rabbi that Rabbi Seth has defined for himself, and indeed the nature of the role that the Reconstructionist Movement has defined which he uses as a guide.
In the history of the Jewish people, there have been many roles that rabbis have played. After the destruction of the temple more than 2000 years ago, and the banishment to Babylon, ritual animal sacrifice was mostly abandoned in favor of adherence to a range of ritual procedures from the Torah. Correct interpretation of the Torah became essential, and with that, the Talmudic approach to learning and decision-making became ascendant.
That approach required rabbis to be authoritative about ritual procedure, with a magnificent catch. Rabbinic disagreements were exposed, explained, and honored through the act of documentation. Thus, the two main extant Talmudic documents – the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds – contain a series of arguments between different rabbis about the correct interpretation of various Torah passages. These disagreements are passionately stated. But always in the form of logic, not ad homonym attacks. And it is in the reading of these Talmudic disagreements, that Jews have studied their laws for hundreds upon hundreds of years.
For some modern Jewish communities, the decisions of their rabbi are viewed as supreme, as absolute. Followers of the aforementioned Lubavitcher movement, led for decades by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, revered his stature as more than just a sage, but in many ways a direct connection to God. Whereas the role of the rabbi in more liberal Jewish groups, including Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist synagogues, has been seen more as a knowledgeable guide to Jewish tradition and practice, than the final arbiter of faith.
At our synagogue, Rabbi Seth is given “freedom of the pulpit.” He has the right to say what he believes, and express himself as he chooses in all his official temple communications, both orally and in writing. He is there as an advisor and a consultant to all his congregants. But he also must take care not to press himself upon those aspects of community decision making that are the domain of lay leadership. His is a spiritual position, yes. It is a guide to ritual practice, yes. And it is very much a political position, which requires staying in touch with the diversity of opinions and orientations of his constituents and finding ways to meet their varying needs.
Throughout my life, rabbis have played important parts of my growth and learning. I feel truly blessed to have been able to interact with them in all their diversity and all the different relationship roles we have had with each other. And yes… there have been no czars among them.
Daniel's Derekh 