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Rabbinic Insights: Rabbis New and Old

San Diego Jewish Times, June 30, 2006


By Rabbi Wayne Dosick

In the last issue of this distinguished publication, I was honored to introduce you to new Rabbi Diane Elliot and to tell you of the greatness of her soul, and of the great contributions she will make to Jewish life.

Yet, there is more to Rabbi Elliot's ordination than her own persona, and her own entry into Jewish service. The composition of her ordination class — seven rabbis and three chaplains — gives us reason enough to pause and reflect, for all 10 of these new servants of God and the Jewish people are middle-age, mid-career professionals.

For a very long time, especially here in America, the model has been to go from undergraduate school right into rabbinical school. Until just a decade ago most of our seminaries ordained men — and, for the last 34 years, women — who were in their mid to late 20s. I, for example, was just 26 years old when I was ordained. These young men and women brought great energy and enthusiasm to the rabbinate. We brought quick and agile minds, newly filled with text-learning, and youthful, healthy bodies, so that we could go camping with the youth group kids. But, we had little life-learning, little life-experience; we were brash and unpolished.

 Today, following the new model set by the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York and Los Angeles, and the Aleph S'micha Program of Jewish Renewal, the old venerable seminaries, the Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the newer Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, are admitting and ordaining older men and women who bring their life's wisdom to their new-found knowledge and skills, and enrich the American rabbinate. There will always be a place for young new rabbis; we rejoice that there is finally a place for older new rabbis.

 The Jewish world that the new rabbis are entering is very different from the Jewish world of 33 years ago when I was ordained. Then, there was one woman rabbi, and feminists of both genders were still struggling mightily to give women their rightful place counting in a minyan, leading davennen, and being called to the Torah. We were still working to save Soviet Jewry. We were still caught up in the lingering euphoria of Israel's victory in the Six Day War, and, then, from the pulpit on my very first Yom Kippur as a rabbi, I had to announce that Israel was being brutally attacked in what would come to be known as the Yom Kippur War. The consequences of that war still ripple more than three decades later.

Then, we were certain of the triumph of liberal Judaism over Orthodoxy. We were taught to be community and institution builders. And, most, we were taught the "science of Judaism," the rational, intellectual approach to Jewish study. God was spoken of only in liturgical forms. Chasidut was confined to shtibelach in Jerusalem or Brooklyn. Kabbalah was on the far fringes of Jewish consciousness; Jewish mysticism and the world of the spirit were consigned to the world of superstition at best and blasphemy at worst.

The Jewish world that Rabbi Diane Elliot and her colleagues enter has grown and evolved. The feminine, the goddess, the priestess has come out of millennia of hiding. Women have taken their rightful place in every phase of Jewish life.

There has, at the same time, been a great resurgence of Orthodoxy. Soviet Jewry has been saved, but, in many ways, is finding it difficult to fully integrate into Israeli and American Jewish societies. There have been very difficult times for Israel, and there is a great breach in the American Jewish community's attitude toward Israel — a breach that, here and there, often pits brother and sister against brother and sister. Daily, Israel struggles with issues of her very survival, and we in America struggle with her, all the while struggling with the notion that we are here, not there.

The world of Spirit has come to the fore. The worlds of Chasidut and Kabbalah engage us. Now, not only do we adhere to the communal covenant, but we have begun to explore the personal, individual covenant between each Jew and God. We are concerned with our own inner lives, our own prayer lives, our own relationship with the Divine.

That is why it was incredibly interesting and challenging to be Rabbi Diane's mentor. Over the years, I have moved farther and farther away from the rational, into the world of the spirit — both for myself and for the community I lead. Rabbi Diane already came from the world of the spirit, from her work in theater, and dance and movement therapy. And while she attended a seminary that, amongst all seminaries, is the most spiritual, she nevertheless had to go back into the rational in order to learn and embrace the traditional texts of Jewish learning. So, while I was searching for meaningful prayer alternatives to the traditional amidah, she was learning to envelop in the traditional amidah.

So, she and I walked that delicate line of teacher and student, when sometimes the student learns from the teacher, and just as often, the teacher learns from the student. That is why one person leaving the High Holidays services that Rabbi Diane and I conducted was heard to say, "That is the most far-out liberal service I have ever been to," and the other was heard to say, “That is the most traditional service I have ever been to." And both were right.

And, in private arena of student and teacher, who are really co-equals, Rabbi Diane and I did the delicate dance. I rooted her in traditional rabbinic learning and practice, all the while urging her to creative innovation — for which I am both famous and infamous. She offered me the wings of imagination, the visions of a rabbinate, a Jewish community, and Jewish world, and Jewish service that she and her contemporaries will fashion.

 That is why, in the end, which is really a beginning, Rabbi Diane Elliot's rabbinate will be much more important, much more significant than was mine or the rabbis of my generation.

Our predecessor rabbis, the rabbis of immediate-post-war America, the rabbis of our childhood, brought Judaism out from the shadows of Auschwitz into the Light of Eretz Yisrael and America; out from the urban centers into the suburbs; out from parochial into the American dream.

We were the caretakers, the bridge. My generation of rabbis built the structures, the communities, the institutions of Jewish life in America. And we struggled with the results of the American dream — assimilation, acculturation, intermarriage, declining birthrates, aging. We presided over the schizophrenia of American Judaism — ennui, disinterest, empty synagogues; and, at the very same time, a tremendous and exciting renaissance in Jewish scholarship, art, music, dance, creativity.

We knew how to build community and do mitzvot, especially those of social justice, and save Soviet Jewry, and love and support Israel; we have been sterling caretakers and stewards of the communal covenant. But, we have failed where it is most important; we have failed to help each person form the personal covenant, the deep, intimate relationship with God.

Rabbi Diane Elliot and her generation of rabbis know the personal covenant, feel the covenant; they know God intimately.

They know that the authoritarian hierarchy of relationships — between people, and between people and God — gives way to the all-embracing circle of mutuality and inter-connectedness.

They know that Jewish building and institutions are hollow and empty unless they are filled with Jewish hearts and souls.

They know that Jewish hearts and souls will be built not from the grand pulpits of Jewish suburbia, but from the warmth of intimacy and friendship.

They know how to bring the sacred.

They will lead us where we must go — not simply to save Judaism, but to save our own hearts and souls for lives of meaning and purpose and worth.

The rabbis of my generation are so very fortunate to have this kind of successor generation of rabbis — rabbis who will tend the flock of American Jewry with grace and love; who will create safe and sacred places to seek and find God, who will shape Judaism to flourish and thrive under their kind and holy ministering. "How fortunate are we! How goodly is our portion."

Rabbi Wayne Dosick, Ph.D., the spiritual guide of the Elijah Minyan, an adjunct professor at the University of San Diego and the Director of the 17: Spiritually Healing Children's Emotional Wounds. He is the award-winning author of six critically acclaimed books, including Golden Rules; Living Judaism; and Soul Judaism: Dancing with God into a New Era.