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The New
Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for its Leader by Stephen Fried Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Fathers There may be as many as three books inside
the pages of Stephen Fried’s The New
Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for its Leader. In the main book, Fried
takes readers behind the scenes at Temple Har Zion on Philadelphia’s Main
Line, as the long-serving senior rabbi, Gerald Wolpe, is retiring, and the
congregation is searching for a replacement. Woven within the pages of that
story is Fried’s own story of his religious journey, from the temple in
Harrisburg, where Har Zion’s retiring rabbi served when Fried was a kid, to
the nurturing Fried receives through an increased prayer life over the three
years he spent researching this book. The third book deals with all the
issues about real fathers and father figures, and how sons and fathers
relate. Two of Wolpe’s sons are rabbis. The death of Fried’s father leads him
back to temple. The assistant rabbi at Har Zion looks to Wolpe as a father
figure, and suffers the loss of a father-in-law while he’s being considered
for the job of senior rabbi. Fried’s touch is light as the story unfolds: he
explains enough for non-Jews to understand what’s going on, and he approaches
the congregation from many perspectives. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 14, “God I
Hope I Get It,” (pp. 152-3), starting with the search committee’s interview
of a balding rabbi, whose kippah is attached to what hair he has, in a jaunty
angle on the side of his head: The
search subcommittee gives Rabbi Rank a chance to impress them, and he does:
he is personable, smart, committed, experienced. But with the jaunty tip of
his kippah, he would have to be the second coming of Rabbi Akiba to convince
them to bring him back to meet the full committee. He starts out with a d'var Torah on the week's
parasha, and then takes questions. He grew up in Minneapolis, trained at the
Seminary; his wife's a Jewish educator and author, they have three kids. Then
he talks a little bit about the Rabbi's Manual, the existence
of which would normally not be well known outside of the clergy, but his
update actually got some lay press. It is the first such manual to contain a
grieving ritual to be held after an abortion. And the ritual has an
interesting Har Zion tie-in. The prayer itself was written by Rabbi Amy
Eilberg, a Philadelphia native who was the first woman to be ordained by the
Conservative movement, in the mid-eighties, and who had her first and only pulpit
as assistant rabbi at Har Zion. (She left after only one year, eventually
becoming a popular teacher and writer.) Rabbi Rank is doing well enough until he is asked
what kinds of source material he uses for his sermons. He begins telling the
group about a recent sermon that incorporated lyrics from a Bob Dylan song. Uh-oh,
wrong answer, Cindy Blum thinks to herself. Dylan lyrics aren't going to fly
with this group; they want to hear about rabbinics, scholarly work, religious
sources. From the moment the words “Bob Dylan song" come out of his
mouth, Rank's interview is over, like a first date that has suddenly revealed
itself to be the last date. There is nothing left to do but maintain politeness until the interview's conclusion. Fortunately,
Lou Fryman knows how to move things along. He begins by subtly cutting off
answers to prevent elaboration. And when Rank thanks them for their
consideration and leaves, everyone in the room knows that he will not be the
new rabbi. Over
the next weeks, more candidates are shuttled in and out. One whom the
committee likes is Rabbi Michael Wasserman, currently at Temple Beth-El in
Birmingham, Alabama. Wasserman is from Boston, went to Harvard and then
entered the Seminary in his mid-twenties. His first rabbinic job was as the
director of outreach at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, where he worked with
interfaith couples and young singles; then he had pulpits on Long Island and
in Rhode Island before taking the job at Beth-El, a seven-hundred-family
synagogue in Birmingham, where he's finishing his second three-year contract. Wasserman is an interesting prospect because his
wife, Elana Kanter, is also an ordained rabbi. Even though they have three
growing kids, she serves as his associate rabbi at Beth-El, and as educational
director of the synagogue. If Wasserman were selected, Har Zion wouldn't have
to worry about a rebbitzin who was too involved in her secular career to play
an active role in the congregation. But the rabbi is still just testing the
waters. He isn't sure he's ready to leave Birmingham, or whether Har Zion is
right for him. Still, he comes right away when the synagogue offers to fly
him in for an interview. He gives a strong d'var Torah greeted by a chorus of
congratulatory yasher koachs, and before heading back home he visits the
nearby Akiba Hebrew Academy, the oldest all-day Jewish high school in the
country, which has strong links to Har Zion. The school was located at Har Zion Wynnefield
before moving to its own building. One of Wasserman's reasons for considering
a new pulpit is that there is no Jewish high school in Birmingham for his
kids, the oldest of whom is ten. In
the meantime, the committee attempts to generate more interest in the Har
Zion position. Even though it is expressly against the Rabbinical Assembly
rules—and Rabbi Herber has given the Two Lews a little lecture on the dangers
of getting excommunicated by the RA—the synagogue is reaching out directly to
a number of rabbis to see if they would be interested in applying. They have
a master wish list that the committee has divvied up. The book jacket shows stained glass windows, and Fried describes them late in the book (pp. 324-5): During
the Musaf service, I lose my concentration on the prayers as well as the Landises, and
find myself turned away from the congregation, staring instead at the massive
stained-glass window to my right. I see these windows every week as I walk
into services, but I have never really looked at them closely from this
perspective: in my aisle seat, I’m only three or four feet from the bottom of
the window, which rises some thirty feet above my head. Light floods through
the richly colored glass, yet from this vantage point I can't really make out
the images that are so apparent from afar. Instead I look closely at the
windows themselves. They are constructed from hunks of glass of various
colors, sizes and textures that are splintered and shattered in fascinating
ways, joined with a black epoxy that is an inch thick in some places and
razor thin in others. While the windows, one for each major holiday, appear
perfect in their glistening modernity from far away, up close you can see
just how massive each piece is and just how distressed. None of the glass
seems to have been cut into shape, but rather smashed, broken with a hammer,
ripped off, bitten off. Yet the pieces are held together by a nearly hidden
force that somehow keeps them from crumbling under their own imperfections. It occurs to me that these windows are a mirror of
this community: big, unwieldy, colorful, opaque, dazzling uncut jewels that
don't exactly match up but are held together anyway by something powerful and
amorphous that fills in both the cracks in the pieces and the cracks between
the pieces. Each piece changes in color and intensity depending on the
quality of light shining through it and the perspective of the viewer. In
this stained-glass community, every piece has great value, no matter how
distressed or distressing, because it holds something else in place. I look
to my left at the congregation, and then turn back right to the window, and
they are both bathed in the same light. Readers
from any religious tradition, or none, will find The New
Rabbi fascinating to read. Steve Hopkins, March 25, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the April 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
New Rabbi.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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