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How Being a Rabbi’s Kid is Like Being a B-List Celebrity

As we head into the month of Elul, leading up to the High Holidays, the first in a series of reflections about growing up in a rabbinic home

by
Jordie Gerson
August 22, 2017
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Shutterstock
Shutterstock
Shutterstock

Being a rabbi’s kid, if you spend your entire childhood in the same congregation, is a bit like being a B-list celebrity. Everyone knows who you are (though they can’t always remember your name), has an opinion about what you’re wearing, and cheerfully points out to you (and everyone else) every time you appear to have aged. You spend a lot of time beatifically smiling, saying, “Oh, I think you’re thinking of my sister,” and feeling loved despite having done nothing—really, nothing—to deserve it.

I jest, but only just. Growing up in my father’s congregation in a suburb of Chicago (my father spent 30 years in the same pulpit) was, in many ways, a gift. Through his work, Rabbi Gerson the First (as we began referring to him at my ordination), Rabbi Gerson the Bald (as I sometimes refer to him when I’m feeling petulant), showed me what a life in community, and a life of service, meant. It wasn’t always easy. For example, a few years before my dad’s retirement, on the night of my mom’s sixtieth birthday, as we were on our way to a reservation at a Michelin-starred restaurant in downtown Chicago, a reservation we’d had for months (my dad is also an obsessive foodie), he had to leave to go attend to a sudden, tragic death in the congregation. This kind of thing happened, if not regularly, a lot.

Dad was often exhausted. He worked evenings, and weekends, and, in some senses, 24/7. And because my mom was a pediatric ear-nose-and-throat surgeon, often neither of them was home. (We had a lot of nannies.) His schedule was erratic, and occasionally he’d pull me out of school on a Tuesday, his lone day off, to go to Wrigley Field and watch the Cubs lose, or to go out for sushi (before most Americans knew what sushi was—he’d a Fulbright to Japan in the ’60s).

But Dad was always reading something, always writing, and demonstrating that knowledge was the greatest source of riches there is. When teenage me was struggling theologically, I had a rabbi on hand to entertain my doubts, debate me, challenge me, and even, sometimes, concede to me. Mine was the first bat mitzvah in our congregation in which the gender-neutral Amidah was read, because I insisted to my father that I couldn’t become an adult in a tradition that didn’t see women.

More than anything, though, having a rabbi for a dad meant that even though our grandparents and cousins were a two hour plane ride way—in Philadelphia, where my parents had met—my sister and I rarely felt their absence. At Oak Park Temple we had multiple sets of grandparents, countless sets of parents, and siblings we adored and reviled. When I became a bat mitzvah, the whole congregation attended the ceremony and kvelled, and when my paternal grandmother died, our shiva house was full for days. And when I was invested in my first real pulpit, my parents’ best friends from the shul flew to California for the weekend. These weren’t our congregants; they were, they are, our family.

Rabbi Jordie Gerson is the spiritual leader of Greenwich Reform Synagogue in Connecticut.