I, my father, and three siblings had always expected her to live if not forever, at least until 95, because she was fit as a fiddle and radiated good health, but a glioblastoma not only takes no prisoners, one cannot even talk back. It was a precipitous and swift decline into total madness and physical destruction. So, when the telephone call came after the Sabbath, it was no surprise.

My father asked me to give one of the eulogies—something I dreaded, but also relished. It was a chance to try to explain to the world who my mother was and who we were to each other. My relationship with my mother was pure pixie dust. We loved each other and were enormously attached. There was even a secret, unwritten agreement between us: We would never separate. We would always be attached. This agreement, forged in the magical, totally irrational mists of early childhood, served a neurotic purpose for both of us. Neither of us would ever be abandoned, something we feared was worse than death. This took the form of her knowing wherever I was at all times and the same for me. And we played these silly games well past life’s midway marks. I would check in with her at least every other day and, when traveling, more often.

“So, where are you now?” my mother would ask.

“In Newark,” was my answer—or Chicago, or Detroit, or Jerusalem, depending on where I actually was.

“How did you get there?”

“By bicycle,” I would tell her.

“Was it safe?” she would invariably ask.

“Not really.”

“But you will be careful.”

“Yes.”

“You will call me when you get home?”

“Yes,” I said.

For my mother’s part she would announce to me when she was leaving and returning, when she was about to get onto a plane, train, or automobile. A second dispatch would come when she arrived at her destination. This was one of the rhythms of our connection. Of course this was the cover for much more profound longings, fears, anxieties, and wishes.

Her funeral was beautiful. The rabbis of the generation were present. Decidedly of the old world, they sang us lullabies of sadness and Jewish lament. They had that trademark nod of the head, the Yiddish-inflected tones and soothing cadence, mouths filled with sweetness of the Talmud. Thanks to these beautiful men, my tears flowed easily and naturally.

And then there was the shiva.

By tradition, Jewish mourners will sit in a low chair and around them sit the comforters, loved ones, friends, relatives, and neighbors. The door is wide open, and one must expect all kinds—the graceful, the wise, the well-meaning, and the clumsy. At my mother’s shiva, wave after wave of august personages came, lights of the Jewish world, friends and acquaintances from 70 years ago and from yesterday. Some of the shiva dialogue went like this:

“Was she sick?”

“Yes, very,” I’d answer.

“Did she suffer?”

“Yes.”

“Well, of course, she had a brain cancer. But was she in a lot of pain?”

“Afraid so,” I said.

“Horrible.”

“Afraid so.”

“Was she lucid? Did she know?”

“Afraid so.”

Other conversations were far deeper. One man, the father of an old friend of mine, spoke to me in a hushed sideways manner, cheek-to-cheek. I forget how it came down, but somehow we drifted toward the tender, intimate, and philosophical.

“Death is a perverse miracle in a way,” I said. “The slow shutdown of the organs, in contrast to the gradual development of them in the beginning of life.”

“They are equally miraculous, and equally divine,” he said. “But we cry only about one, never about the other.” He had lost a teenage son in a fire not that many years before. We held hands a brief moment before he left the mourners’ house.

Some pay a shiva call out of respect for the departed or for the family, to worship at a shrine, others out of love, or to relive their own sadness and loss, hoping desperately to locate themselves in the solar system of sorrow.

In my mother’s case, all this was true, but to an even greater extent. People she had been young with came from all across the country, and people who I had been young with came from everywhere—from the Midwest, the West coast, and the South. Some looked wonderful. Others had aged drastically, arriving with walkers and in wheelchairs. I had aged radically too. The bell tolls for all.

Why had they come? “I felt I had to” was often the reply. But in retelling my mother’s history and her core beliefs—a child of war-time London, a daughter of Hassidic parents, a beautiful and modest woman—the puzzle of her life did yield new clues. I particularly enjoyed this one: In 1974 upon Richard Nixon’s resignation there was a now iconic photo taken of the disgraced president standing on the tarmac flashing a V-sign for victory while standing next to his wife Pat. The scene flashed across television screens all over the globe: The president of the world’s greatest superpower quits office—a first. My mother’s reaction? “Look, look at Pat Nixon,” she said to me, as she folded laundry. Mrs. Nixon was wearing a long-sleeved dress, despite the oppressive August heat in Washington. “She is dressed like a rabbi’s wife.”

***

On the last day of the shiva, we locked the front door of the house and turned well-wishers away. We gathered around my father in a complete circle, sons, daughters, and children-in-law. “Tell us what is on your mind, Dad. Say anything and everything.”

At first, he halted. A lifetime of rabbinic restraint and modesty and sensitivity to others is always at work. But we could see the truth: He was alone now and afraid. He who had taken care of us, was now weakened and in need—and petrified of becoming a burden. We assured him that burden is not bad. That this was the way of the world, we told him, something that cannot always be avoided. He protested this idea. It was as if he thought that by some enchanted, ennobled purpose, he was not permitted to become what others become.

Then he began to cry. He had his own secret promise, made to his own mother whose spirit visits him in troubled and wonderful times. That he would always provide; always give and never take. This is how he took care of my mother: like a soldier-saint, vigorously protecting, a muscular yet nurturing presence without complaint. Now he wept and wept and we mourners—now comforters—watched in silence.

And then, in the spirit of our mother, we extracted from our father a promise that he would never die. And we solemnly swore the same to him in return.

The riddle of him and her, mother and father, our joys our sorrows, our family idiosyncrasies, our ways with money, faith, and love, had yielded fresh clues, even some clarity. Shiva was now over. We gathered our belongings and left my mother’s house.

This man might have been my grandfather; his hands were parched like ears of corn, his nails yellowed most probably by psoriasis. I quarrel with myself: How much to give? $1? $5? A man looks like a walking heart attack, comes halfway around the world, and you give him $5? All I had were 20s. I hardened myself. “Do you have change?” I say. Of course he has change. He puts down his papers, a sheaf of papers he carries in a leather folder, like something from Bernard Malamud’s Magic Barrel. You could swear he smells of fish. Seeing his exertion, I told him to keep the $20 bill.

The motif of the beggar, both the holy and unholy ones, is firmly ensconced in Judaic lore, from the Talmud all the way through Hassidic tales. Begging intensified when we were forced to live in ghettos in Europe in the period following the Middle Ages. This continued in the shtetl. We were all one family then, staggered as we were by the waves of brutality visited on us by the gentile nations. This was the golden age of beggardom, which begat a new kind of beggar—the “schnorrer.” “Schnorrers” refer to those beggars who have an air of entitlement, as if they were exiled monarchs, gifts to civilization, who have the unfortunate position of having no money.

Every Tuesday morning at my synagogue, by the coffee urn just inside of the entrance, sit three elderly Russian men. They literally have their hands out. A dollar here and there, a few coins, a Yiddish turn of phrase, a mixture of gold tooth smiles and plaintive requests. One dollar buys you a torrent of blessings from them: A gut yahr, na zdrovie, they say. Spraznikom.

I love these men, with their blue-eyed, lined faces. Perhaps they are veterans of the Great War, remnants of the Red Army’s drive on Berlin. One of them is old enough for sure, but no one is quite sure why they are there.

And those are just the regulars. There are a host more who make cameo appearances, often from Israel. They make impassioned, sometimes anguished speeches beseeching donations for one important cause or another or for themselves. These men, anachronisms in human form—they would have been at home in the shtetl, with their dirty caftans, patched jackets, and stale cigarettes. Their faces, some of them, convey a world of dust and famine, feet in run-down boots that tread in gutters muddy with dirty snow and ice. These men (and they are almost always men) come in the modern equivalent of droshkies (Polish for horse-and-buggy taxis) beat-up car services and livery cabs.

Not too long ago, one young man from Israel asked me if he could take a few minutes to make a plea for funds during one morning minyan. I told him he could do so, after the aleinu. I knew this was after some of his customers would have already left, but the minyan was running late. It hurt me to say no, but I did.

He fumed. Afterward, I asked him how much money I caused him to lose—he told me $25. I gave it to him. He embraced me in gratitude, but I saw he wasn’t happy. Later someone pointed out to me that he may have “needed” to tell his story. I had robbed him of the opportunity to klop on the bimah and tell his tale. It wasn’t only the money. Without his speech he was painfully invisible.

One man I know appears at intervals and faithfully recites his tale with pathos, inveighing with all manner of fire and brimstone all that has befallen him. “I used to have parnassah, pay bills, have a business, but now …” His story is dear to him, so dear that in his mind it trumps davening. A tug-of-war develops between him and the shliach tzibbur, or leader of prayers, as to whose voice will triumph. “I have to make chasunah”—wedding—“now for three children …” is pitted against “Amen Y’hei Shmei Rabboh,” the climax of the Kaddish prayer. Some rush to shush him while others hear him out, pressing dollar bills and fives dramatically into his hands as he sings his song of sorrow. He can break your heart even if you think he is not telling the truth.

In my Passaic, N.J., synagogue, a benevolent attitude has formed toward worthy and non-worthy vagabonds alike. Everyone is given something and sometimes a little more than something. Not too long ago I struck up a deep conversation with Baruch. A man in his fifties, a seventh-generation Yerushalmi, Baruch took his tea with tons of sugar as we schmoozed. He had the visage of a holy man. He carried an album with him with photos of his parents and his children. Ten of them lived in a three-room apartment in the old city of Jerusalem. He was marrying off his third son, and he was begging and borrowing to do it. The man had such charm, had such Jew-holiness about him, I would have emptied my bank account into his, if I had anything.

Together we worked up a cozy steam. On his mother’s side, they came from the Carpathian Mountains of Galicia, where my ancestors are from. In his way, he was a devoted father and grandfather. He would provide by hook or by crook. I respected that. So what if his family was a lot larger than he could handle? Who hasn’t over-reached? Besides, there were already grandchildren. How could a Jewish child be a mistake? It was all very touching. Besides, he quoted from Talmud at a page a minute, and I matched him quote for quote. We had a jolly old time.

I can’t remember if this is actually so, but I believe he made himself as the Yiddish expression goes, ze’er ba’kvemt—very, or too comfortable. Perhaps he took out a cigarette and made smoke rings or maybe he downed a plate of cookies, I can’t remember exactly. He asked if I knew anyone who would be sympathetic to his plight. I actually did know someone, a wealthy hotelier who once told me that he wanted to “twin” his daughter’s wedding with a poor man’s wedding in Jerusalem. “Is he observant?” the Yerushalmi wanted to know. He was not observant, I told him.  With a horrified look, my Yerushalmi friend said that he could not take the money of someone who was not observant.

You had to admire him in a perverse way.  Here was a beggar and a chooser. At any rate, we both paid lip service to the coming of the Messiah, and I gave him $100. But after I did that, I asked him casually, if his children had any plans for making their way in life, like you know, working.

Without even a trace of irony he waved his hand and said, “Ze lo bishvilanu la’avod,” or “It is not for us to work.” At that point, I realized that we were both crazy—I for giving him money, and he for expecting me and the rest of the world to provide for all the children he sired pell-mell—without the slightest plan. We shared a bond as members of the same tribe, but our worldviews were wholly incommensurate with each other.

Nevertheless, somehow in the people’s yiddishkeit, in the precincts of the shul and the beis medrash—a world where virtue and piety rule the high seas of human thought and behavior, we are, all of us, as if in an opium den, rendered into holy fools.

While other precincts of New York City take on a tranquil, almost ghost-green glow on Christmas, Borough Park, the Hasidic enclave, teems with commerce and activity on this holy day. Its main drag, 13th Avenue, has the feel of an Asian city: Shanghai or Hong Kong minus the rickshaws and the pedicabs. Cars and pedestrians compete for room and air in narrow straits, and the street has the ambience of an urban bazaar, with chains and banks nestled next to mom-and-pop stores selling clothing, housewares, and just about everything else. The primary objective on our annual shopping trips was to buy a hat for my father, but the outing came with a number of blandishments and outright gifts for me: usually an article or two of clothing, and a post-shopping meal in a neighborhood restaurant.

My father is gimp-legged after he was hit by a car 30 years ago, but he lives a surprisingly nomadic existence in the greater New York area, often reaching all of the city’s five boroughs and many of its suburbs in a single day of rabbinical work. He drives a sporty, silver, late-model Cadillac, and frequently, at day’s end and too far afield to eat at home, he winds up in a kosher restaurant. One might think him to be a kosher-restaurant connoisseur, but he tends not to pay them any mind. In fact, my father’s dining preferences range from deli to dairy, and not much beyond that. My earliest memories of eating with him were in his haunts on the Lower East Side—Sam’s 999 on Essex Street, where he’d order pastrami and a Heineken, and Steinberg’s upstairs dairy restaurant, where he’d have smoked whitefish, coffee, and cheesecake for dessert.

On Christmas Day four years ago, after we had chosen the hat, we then had to choose a restaurant. Did we want milchig or fleishig, dairy or meat? We chose an upscale dairy restaurant. The restaurant was packed with late lunchers like us. There were mothers with strollers and finger-fed babies. Toddlers ate baked ziti, indolent children ate white rolls with butter, and businessmen nattered on at corner tables over lox and sable. My father and I stood for 20 minutes until a table opened near the swinging-door entrance to the kitchen. Then we sat there for another 20 minutes until service arrived. The waiter, who looked like an apparatchik for Josef Stalin, took our order.

My father took out his reading glasses to study the menu, even though he knew what he wanted. “Smoked whitefish,” he told the waiter.

“What else?” the waiter asked.

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?” the waiter said, incredulously.

“You have decaf?” my father asked.

“No. No decaf,” said the waiter.

“Mushroom barley soup?”

“No. Split pea only.”

“Potato salad?”

“No.”

“Tuna salad?”  I asked.

“We’re out.”

“Egg salad?”

“Blintzes only, with sour cream,” he said. “I have to get to other tables. Make up your mind.”

“OK,” I finally said. “Split pea soup and a vegetable omelet. Can you bring my father a seltzer?”

“No seltzer,” the waiter said.

A restaurant with no seltzer? I began to consider the idea that our waiter had traces of sadism. He was short and stout and had the air of someone who had been humiliated often, probably in a faraway land. I thought of him as one of those nondescript soldiers you see in newsreels from a forgotten conflict, like the Russo-Finnish war, perhaps a private in charge of the horses or the latrine. And to deprive my father of seltzer, if indeed he were doing so, was cruel. My father’s love for seltzer cannot be understood in purely physical or even gastronomic terms. It is simply part of him, long fetishized by his digestive track. Still, what was there to do?

We sat for another 20 minutes waiting for our food. It wasn’t a big deal: The restaurant was busy. My father and I passed the time in small talk. We made calculations on our napkins, refinancing our mortgage payments and family budgets. When our portions arrived, we ate silently and, in my father’s case, industriously—storing up glucose for whatever intellectual, physical, and monetary challenges lay ahead.

Then it was time for dessert. It would be cheesecake. Because we were sitting near the kitchen, I had a glimpse of a platter of store-bought cheesecake slices. There were regular, marbled chocolate, and blueberry cheesecakes. While I was in the restroom, my father ordered plain cheesecake. Upon my return, I urged him to reconsider, telling him the marbled chocolate cheesecake was much better, and he agreed. I called to the waiter. “My father changed his mind,” I said. “Instead of the New York plain cheesecake, he wants the marble chocolate cheesecake.” The waiter looked at us in disgust and said, “Once I put in the order, I cannot change it.”

He then spun away and returned shortly with a plate of the plain cheesecake. My father, who had spent his childhood in the Bronx, knew how to be grateful for food and to those who made it. His grandmother kept a carp in the bathtub to make gefilte fish for the Sabbath, and live turkeys occasionally appeared in their apartment to be slaughtered. But here, my father was surprised and annoyed that he was not permitted to have what he wanted for such a niggling and inadequate reason. Never one to make waves, though, he picked up the fork and ate the cheesecake like a boy fearful of offending his mother. “It was good cheesecake,” he said. “But not as good as the marble cheesecake would have been.”

The waiter brought the check, and my father again put on his reading glasses to study it. He took out his credit card. “Are you going to tip this monster?” I asked him. “Well,” my father said sheepishly, “not that he deserves any, but something I suppose.” I said that I wouldn’t tip him at all. My father considered this for a moment and then shook his head slowly. “Ich kenne nichts,” he said. “I don’t know. I can’t do it. I can’t take away his parnassah,” his livelihood.

Centuries of pious passivity had become the gravity that kept my father connected to his loved ones and to his work. His attachments were carefully sewn and cherished, sometimes overly so. To ask my father to withhold the tip was in effect to ask him to depart from a worldview that had kept him going for years. My father’s father was an immigrant house-painter who was both sustained and oppressed by slum lords, painting closets and hanging wallpaper for $20 a room. The fact that my father had ascended the economic ladder enough to drive a Cadillac would only intensify and amplify an indictment of his soul should he withhold the pay of a working man to teach him a lesson about courtesy and civility.

“But Dad,” I said. “This man mistreated us. He was abusive.”

“What should I tell you?” he said with the air of a man who had been asked to do something soul-damaging, like slaughter a calf or put a horse to sleep. “You’re right, but I can’t do it.”

In the face of mistreatment, my father could do nothing, as his father before him could do nothing when his clients decided cavalierly to pay him less than the agreed-upon fee. And standing there in front of my father, with a 150-year potpourri of Jewish piety and passivity—and of honor and dignity—between us, I too could do nothing but, in effect, turn the other cheek on Christmas Day.

ON SERMONIZING

Rabbi Jack Moline
Agudas Achim, Alexandria, Virginia

I’ve been at this 30 years, and for 20 of them there’s been some crisis around the holidays that demanded our attention. In 1993 when they had the signing of the Oslo agreement on the White House lawn we all had to rewrite our sermons. But there are very few things in this world that you have to consider if you’re going to be a Jew. One is God, one is Israel, and another is your relationship to the Jewish people. So it’s my responsibility when the largest number of people come together to be Jewish to raise all of those issues. People come to synagogue on the holidays for strengthening and introspection. They don’t need my opinion. They want orientation.

Rabbi David Wolpe
Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, California

The Palestinian statehood issue is this year’s crisis, but I’m not sure it’s fundamentally different from anything that’s gone before. My father began the holidays with the state of the Jewish world on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and I’ve repeated that. And it seems to me that a great issue for human beings individually and for Israel as a country is to what extent you act on your own interest, and how much you act based on what other people think of you.

Rabbi Laura Geller
Temple Emanuel, Beverly Hills, California

Every year we have a contemporary-issues discussion on Yom Kippur afternoon. I have found that the advantage to doing it in that format is that you can bring in more than one voice, and it’s not a one-way conversation. Our theme this year is “coming home,” so the Yom Kippur forum will be framed in terms of coming home to Israel’s values in its Declaration of Independence, or in terms of asking whether Israel is our home enough to care what’s going on there. What responsibility do you have as a Jew to pay attention to Israel?

Rabbi Barry Freundel
Kesher Israel, Washington, D.C.

I do my year-in-review sermon on the second day of yontif. What I try to do is take the biggest issue of the year and discuss it with Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur eyes. But it’s a target in motion—because of the vote at the U.N., because we don’t know if there will be a new Intifada, because the old alliances are weakening, because the southern borders are less safe.

Rabbi Sidney Helbraun
Temple Beth-El, Northbrook, Illinois

I’m coming at it from both the standpoint of the Arab Spring and the internal movement in Israel. I heard a report on NPR a few weeks ago with a botanist who found out nitrogen can leach into plants directly through sedimentary rock, and that changes the whole nature of what people assumed about how botany works. And the researcher said, “Well, we have to throw out the textbooks.” The way science views changes of the status quo is that it’s very exciting, even if it uproots everything that your life’s work is about.

We’re always afraid of change. I’m one of the few rabbis from Chicago who did not vote for Obama but would today. He’s changed the dynamic after eight years of George Bush. Bush could not have been more in lockstep with Israel, but Gaza wound up with more missiles, and Israel wound up fighting a war.

ON ISRAEL

Rabbi Efrem Goldberg
Boca Raton Synagogue, Boca Raton, Florida

I feel like this is a pivotal time in Israel’s history. The honeymoon period where the world felt badly about the Holocaust and where people felt guilt and were willing to give Jews a pass has ended, and I think the world is returning to its animosity. We can disagree about policy all day long. If we are critical about Obama and the administration’s messaging on Israel, we need to be critical about our own messaging.

Moline: For too many people Israel has stopped being a value and become an issue instead. And the issues are always crises, which exacerbates the problem. It’s less important that we’re able to argue for or against settlements, or a unified Jerusalem, or a two-state solution than that we can make the case for Israel, period.

Geller: It is the function of the holidays and of a rabbi to remind people that Judaism is not just personal. It is a journey that happens among a people and brings us a connection to a particular place. And part of the challenge right now in North America is that for many liberal Jews, it isn’t.

Moline: It’s less to do with Israel per se than with a general disaffection with the institutions of Jewish life. But I’ve seen a polarization—people who are to the right are harder to the right, and people who are to the left are harder to the left. Maintaining the middle is very difficult.

Wolpe: Israel as a sovereign nation has to make its decisions based on internal considerations knowing that the world often judges it unfairly. But it’s dangerous for Israel to lose the sense that we have to care how the world sees us. Judaism recognizes the idea that a decent respect for mankind is a value—it’s called maras ayin. It is a Jewish value to care what other people think, and that Israel’s reputation in the world should not be a matter of indifference for us.

ON PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD AND THE ARAB SPRING

Freundel: On any issue you want to talk about, there are Jewish values, and most of the time what Judaism has to say doesn’t fall neatly into the Democratic or Republican side. So with the U.N. issue, I can talk about questions of international responsibility, and what allows you to be a player on the world stage, because there are examples in the Torah of nations that cannot. And there is in Jewish law discussions about covenants, and the two-sided nature of things—so while I don’t want to talk about policy, I can talk about attitudes in terms of how you look at people you’re in partnerships with.

Helbraun: We’re living in this world where everything is changing. Other religions are about control, but Judaism says no, we have to educate everyone, we have to give knowledge to the masses. And we’re seeing the ramifications of that—the Arab Spring is an example of people seeing they have power over their own lives. The question is how they’re going to exercise it. But you also see this generation in Israel that says, “We may not have power over the peace process, but we do have power over how we’re living our lives internally.” For decades people have said we’ll deal with religious-inclusion issues after we have peace. Well, waiting for peace is something none of us have control over, but there are other aspects of society that are 100 percent in our hands. So there’s also an awakening in the Israeli consciousness.

ON ISRAEL’S TENT-CITY PROTESTS

Rabbi Andy Bachman
Congregation Beth Elohim, Brooklyn, New York

We have hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets. That’s the largest Jewish protest movement for social justice in our lifetime. What is lost on American Jews is, hey, 6 million Jews live there and speak Hebrew every single day. There is a whole other Jewish reality going on.

Geller: It’s a watershed moment for Israel. It’s the Israeli Arab Spring, but it’s not clear where it’s going to lead—it’s easier to say, “We’re deposing a dictator” than “We’re reshaping society.” I think it’s a shift from the original vision of Israel to a different kind of social contract.

Goldberg: I use Israel as a springboard to get into questions of community. I wouldn’t tell Bibi what to do in the tent protests, but I can talk about what a reminder it is of Israel’s democracy that a quarter of a million people can protest housing prices while people in neighboring countries are gunned down for protesting in the street.

Bachman: I want to link it to the broader question of what ideas we have as a community about the organizing principles of our lives, and to what degree they translate into Jewish identity questions, and beyond that, to building a just society. I think it’s a really powerful opportunity to talk about Israel beyond the tried and true, and possibly alienating ways we engage in Israel.

“I view the world of rabbis and the world of filmmaking as very similar—you have to tell a story,” said Rabbi Jonathan Hanish, a Board of Rabbis executive committee member who came up with the idea for the workshop. “And if you can tell a story, you can reach people.”

-“Hollywood Writers Help Rabbis Punch Up Their Sermons”

The “cartel” in question is the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, which tightly governs the placement of rabbis with member synagogues across the country—a delicate matchmaking process whose result is often a major determinant of whether a congregation will thrive. The professor, Barak Richman, is a lay leader at his synagogue in Durham, N.C., and has spent the last eight months developing his claim that what started as a way to make sure that far-flung synagogues got their fair pick of rabbis graduating from the seminaries—and to prevent internecine poaching of successful clergy between competing synagogues—may today run afoul of the same federal antitrust statutes that brought down Rockefeller’s oil empire.

In Richman’s view, the Rabbinical Assembly and its analogues in the Reform and Reconstructionist movements use their oversight of the hiring process to threaten the autonomy and, at a fundamental level, the independent spirit of individual synagogues. (Richman excludes the rabbinic association of Modern Orthodoxy, known as the Rabbinical Council of America, from his analysis.) “Each placement system imposes severe restrictions on the labor market for pulpit rabbis without creating any identifiable pro-competitive benefit,” Richman wrote in his paper. “These rabbinic organizations are acting to advance their own commercial interests to the detriment of the welfare of consumers, namely the congregations and congregants who hire and ultimately benefit from a rabbi’s services.”

The argument lays bare a facet of Jewish life that remains obscured to the vast majority of American Jews today, who think of their congregations as independent religious communities and who are far less likely than their grandparents to know—or care—about the umbrella movements. But the rabbis’ and cantors’ professional associations do what secular professional associations do: maintain standards, facilitate hiring, and organize pensions. Under the current system, rabbis and cantors seeking jobs declare their candidacy through their movements’ placement offices, rather than operating as free agents. On the other side of the equation, synagogues agree to accept panels of candidates screened by the central placement authorities, rather than posting their jobs on public job boards or recruiting privately. Rabbis and cantors follow the rules in order to protect their access to future jobs at their movements’ synagogues; congregations, most of which go through the hiring process only infrequently, follow the rules because it’s easier and to preserve their good standing within their movements. Bucking the system requires an appeals process that can, in some cases, cost congregations, and rabbis, matches that both sides hope to make.

The idea that American synagogues are, at such a fundamental level, subject to a centralized leadership is a foreign one to most of their members—there is, after all, no Chief Rabbi in this country and no sense that a Jew in Pittsburgh is somehow answerable to an authority in New York, let alone in Jerusalem. The question of what the appropriate relationship between synagogue and movement should be is emerging at a moment when the Conservative movement, in particular, is painfully aware of the need to re-engage its constituents; indeed, its annual conference, last month, was devoted to the issue of rebranding. It underscores the degree to which mainstream synagogues feel the movements have hampered their efforts to attract younger Jews at a time when independent minyans and other groups are succeeding with a less institutional approach to Jewish practice. And it dovetails with a general decline in support for unions—which the rabbinic associations, in some sense, are—among a younger generation accustomed to union-busting. But Richman’s claim, first set out in a Forward op-ed last September, is that the movements’ constraints on rabbinic hiring aren’t just run-of-the-mill Jewish parochial concerns—it’s that they’re actually illegal.

***

Grumbling over the rules imposed by the rabbis’ and cantors’ professional associations is, by itself, nothing new. The issue was explored at length a decade ago by the journalist Stephen Fried in his book The New Rabbi, in which seniority rules restricting hiring by large synagogues became a major plot point, once the Conservative Philadelphia congregation at the heart of the story decided it wanted to promote its young assistant rabbi rather than hire a more experienced stranger from somewhere else to replace its retiring senior rabbi. (The Rabbinical Assembly eventually bent its rules to accommodate the synagogue, Har Zion, one of the largest and most powerful in the country.) And the idea that the movements might use their control over the hiring process to influence theological decisions by its member rabbis surfaced in 2005, when Ayelet Cohen, a Conservative rabbi, complained to the New York Times that she was being punished by the Rabbinical Assembly placement committee because she had officiated same-sex weddings. (The movement responded that Cohen was only being called out for violating the terms of a waiver allowing her to work at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, a largely gay and lesbian Manhattan synagogue that is unaffiliated with any major movement; the Conservative movement voted the following year to allow its members to marry gay couples.)

The current system emerged in the 1960s to impose order on what was largely an ad hoc process, according to Marc Lee Raphael, professor of Judaic Studies at the College of William and Mary and author of a new history, The Synagogue in America. “In the old days, and this was true at the Orthodox seminary and the Conservative seminary and the Reform seminary, the chancellor of the seminary just told new rabbis what pulpits they were going to,” said Raphael, who also serves as rabbi of a Reform pulpit in Maryland. “The next step was the old boys’ network, where the president of the synagogue would call a guy and say, ‘We’re twice as large and pay twice as much and why don’t you come over.’ So, the placement process replaced two terrible ways of hiring rabbis.”

But the core of Richman’s argument, which has not been tested in any court, is that the rabbis’ professional associations organized their system in a way that violates the terms of the Sherman Act, which was passed in 1890 to combat the power of the railroad and oil monopolies, and later helped break up the Bell System. Rather than operating as a neutral clearinghouse, the hiring process run by the rabbinic associations is structured to limit both member rabbis and affiliated synagogues from using other avenues for making hires. And it turns out there is precedent for using the Sherman Act against secular professional associations for just this kind of behavior: In 1995, the Justice Department successfully sued the American Bar Association, the body governing the legal profession, on the grounds that it was using its cartel power to unfairly manipulate law schools into guaranteeing higher salaries for law faculties.

Richman’s crusade against the Rabbinical Assembly emerged from his personal frustration with a system that prevented his Conservative synagogue, Beth El, from interviewing Reconstructionist candidates to replace its retiring senior rabbi, who had been ordained in the Reconstructionist movement and obtained a waiver to preside over the congregation when it was still a Jewish backwater, decades before the universities in the area’s Research Triangle emerged as a hot destination for young academics, many of them Jewish. His initial salvo in the Forward elicited a statement from the Rabbinical Assembly asserting that its system “encourages talented individuals to enter and remain in the profession” and thereby “benefits not only rabbis and their families, but the Jewish community as a whole.” (Representatives of the Rabbinical Assembly did not respond immediately to phone and email messages left seeking comment; Richman declined to speak to Tablet Magazine on the record, citing potential legal action against the Rabbinical Assembly.)

But Richman is far from alone. Congregation Beth Elohim, a popular Reform synagogue in Brooklyn, ran into difficulty earlier this year over its efforts to hire a star cantorial student on the verge of graduation named Joshua Breitzer. Under the ranking system used by the American Conference of Cantors—Reform cantors’ equivalent of the Rabbinical Assembly—Beth Elohim was required to hire a cantor with more than three years of experience. In order to hire Breitzer, the synagogue had to appeal for a special waiver, which it eventually won. But the process took so long that they nearly lost their candidate to another congregation that could offer a job without waiting for secondary approvals. “In the end, we got who we wanted,” Beth Elohim’s rabbi, Andy Bachman, says now, “but it was an unnecessary wringer that we needed to go through.”

Part of the problem is that having a national office act in any substantive capacity is antithetical to the idea of local control. “I’m happy with how everything worked out, but down low, on a personal level, nothing was going to stop me from getting the best cantor, or the best rabbi, I could for our congregation, whether it was someone who was Reform or Conservative or Reconstructionist,” Bachman said. “We don’t need the national movement to tell us what Jews in Brooklyn need—we know what Jews in Brooklyn need.”

It’s an irony Richman notes in his paper: The approach taken by the movement may in fact be strangling the very community it purports to support. “It amounts to an effort to deprive local congregations of the very autonomy and self-determination that has fueled the blossoming of diverse Jewish experiences for two thousand years,” Richman writes. “Were the rabbinical organizations to adopt less restrictive rules that were consistent with the Sherman Act—rules that empower individual communities and defer to the preferences of both congregants and rabbis—it would kindle the passions and empower the dynamism that Jewish communities have shown over time.”

• Reportedly, the United States proposed a three-month freeze extension, and President Abbas said that policy would keep him at the table. Prime Minister Netanyahu has yet to respond. [JPost]

• With its increased shelling, Hamas is attempting to cause enough disruption to harm the peace process but not so much as to provoke an IDF ground operation in Gaza. [JPost]

• On average, rabbis are paid significantly more than non-Jewish clerical equivalents. [Forward]

• U.S. envoy George Mitchell heads to Damascus today to try to restart simultaneous Israeli-Syrian talks. [Haaretz]

• The kaffiyeh has gone out of style in the West Bank, and what ones there are are cheap, China-made knock-offs. [LAT]

CREDIT: Jonathon Rosen

— I don’t know, this just isn’t working.
— You’re being too hard on yourself, Dear.
— It feels obvious.
— What’s obvious about it?
— I feel like I’ve heard it all before. I want to surprise people, I want to make them think, you know? It’s the Yom Kippur sermon, Hon, it’s the biggest sermon of the year. Packed house. I really want to knock it out of the park.
— Remember what Hemingway said, Dear: The first draft of anything is shit.
— I thought Rashi said that. What am I going to do?
— Did you mention the Holocaust?
— Everyone mentions the Holocaust.
— The Inquisition?
— Old news.
— Pogroms?
— You see? You see what I mean? There’s nothing new, nothing fresh.
— What about Iran? It’s very timely. You could do your whole “Iran/ I ran” thing, about running from God, running from punishment. I really liked that one the last time you did it.
— That wasn’t me.
— It wasn’t?
— No.
— Who was that?
— Silverberg.
— Oh.
— You always like Silverberg’s sermons.
— That’s not true.
— It is true.
— Don’t make this about me, Dear.
— “I ran from Hashem, so Hashem is using Iran to punish me.” Jesus Christ. Do you remember his Yom Kippur sermon last year? “If we learn from it, we can turn it from a Hollow-caust to a fuller-caust.”
— I liked that.
— I need a drink.
— Don’t start that again.
— Just get me a goddamn drink.

Later.

— “… and by looking at ourselves and admitting our sins, we can find inner joy, and find true happiness, and then we can turn Yom Kippur into Yom Chipper.” What do you think?
— Chipper?
— Chipper. You know—happy, upbeat.
— Oh.
— It’s crap.
— It’s not.
— Of course it is. “Yom Chipper.”
— You remember what Maimonides said: Writer’s block is just high expectations.
— I thought that was William Stafford.
— I like Yom Stripper.
— Yom Stripper?
— Isn’t that what you said?
— I said Yom Chipper. What the hell is Yom Stripper?
— Yom Chipper, then.
— What the hell is Yom Stripper? Do you even listen to me anymore? Maybe if I was Rabbi Silverberg you would listen.
— Don’t make this about me, Dear.
(awkward silence)
— You really like Yom Stripper?
— It’s cute.
— … “And so this Yom Kippur, if we bare our souls, and remove our …” Oh, for God’s sake.

Later.

— So?
— I think it’s good, Dear.
— Do you really?
— It’s different.
— I wanted it to be different. I wanted to do something totally new and unexpected, you know?
— I think it’s really good.
— Who’s the shul president these days? I’m going to call him. Is it still Dr. Hammer?
— No, it’s Dr. Pleeter.
— Hand me the phone. (dials) Dr. Pleeter? Rabbi Rosen here. Ha ha, yes, it certainly is. Listen, I want to run this past you. It’s my sermon for Yom Kippur. I’m going with “Don’t repent.” Hear me out. Everyone does “you’re sinners, you’re at fault, feel bad,” well, I’m going the other way. I’m saying no more fear, no more living in terror. If anyone’s been punished enough, it’s us Jews, am I right? So, to hell with this—go home! Have a big meal and a glass of wine. No more fasting, no more chest-beating—if anyone should ask for forgiveness, it’s God. This should be God’s Day of Atonement, not ours. Stop feeling so bad, stop beating yourself up. I have this whole thing about fasting—about how the only thing you shouldn’t eat today is your heart out. (pause) Uh huh. (pause) Right. (pause) Well, I think that … (pause). I think you’re making a bit much of the whole … no, no, I was really, I mean what I meant was that, sort of a feel—good kind of a … (pause) of course, yes, I … well, I had this whole “Yom Chipper” thing … no, I mean, if you feel that strongly … yes, of course … yes, I like that … sure, yes, yes, of course … no, I think you have a point … sure, OK … right … yes … see you then. Bye.
— What’d he say?
— He wants something about the Holocaust.
— What about it?
— He liked Silverberg’s whole Hollow-caust thing.
— I liked that, too.
— Thought I could throw in a line or two about Iran.
— It’s very timely.
— How about: If we’re not in a God mood, we’ll get Mach—mood.
— Mach—mood?
— Ahmadinejad.
— I like that.
— Yeah?
— Yeah, that’s good.
— Yeah, it is. I think it can work.
— Of course it can.
— You think?
— I really like it.
— Me, too.
— Phew.
— Right?
— That was a close one.
— I knew you’d get it.

Journalist Keren David wants to see synagogue membership fees replaced by a “communal income tax” to support social services, education, cemeteries, and other needs. She cites Amsterdam as an example, where, she says, Jews who opt in “are charged a proportion of their annual income to join—three per cent for the richest members, less for lower incomes.” Jonathan Boyd, executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, sees a sukkah/homeless shelter/soup kitchen in London’s Trafalgar Square: “Could we take a symbol of our own homelessness, and turn it into a shelter for those who need no symbolic reminders of what it means to have no home?” Keith Kahn-Harris, another research expert, envisions taking the trend toward multi-denominational Judaism a step further and incorporating members of other religions: “Jews, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus and others should collaborate to build a space that can serve for worship and community activities. This would allow different groups to pool resources, and improve the often strained relations between religions.” While this is a cool idea, and not entirely without precedent, his acknowledgment that “There would, of course, be difficulties in making this kind of community” may be understating the case.

But to us, the most striking idea comes from Neil Bradman of The Centre for Genetic Anthropology, and it’s more of a plea than a suggestion. Bradman laments the disparity between rabbinical dictates and the actual lives of Jews. We are all too familiar with the tendency of religiously inclined folks to say one thing and do another behind closed doors, and even growing up in a rabbinical family, we vividly remember “parking around the corner” at synagogue to avoid the appearance of breaking the Sabbath. “Let us strike a blow for honesty. If this is the way we wish to live, let us appoint rabbis who say it is acceptable to do so,” writes Bradman. “It is a game of ‘we pretend to respect you and you pretend to be respected’. It is unhealthy and it breeds hypocrisy.” Here, here.

We Need to Transform the Community. This is How. [JC]

Rabbis in Training Receive Lessons in Real-Life Traumas [NYT]

Samansky is one of 15 students who graduated in May from the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform movement’s seminary. At ordination, fewer than half of her classmates had jobs. On that day, a stirring sense of calling prevailed, she and her classmates say. But then, diploma in hand, it was back to reality. “I really felt like I was going to spend the next year or two filling time, just making enough money to pay student loans, health care, day care,” said Samansky, who has a 15-month-old daughter.

Samansky eventually landed a job as part-time assistant rabbi at a synagogue in Northridge, California, where she handles a mix of adult and youth education, services, programming, and life cycle and senior staff duties—all, somehow, in 15 hours a week. She also teaches two nights a week for the local Florence Melton Mini-School, a pluralistic adult Jewish education network. “I ended up with two amazing jobs,” she said—ideal in content, just not in billable hours. “Five years and a hundred thousand dollars later, I’ll be making slightly less than before I entered rabbinical school.”

As unemployment continues to rise, Samansky and many of her colleagues, both rookie and experienced, have had to invoke their professional training to weather the current dearth of professional placement. “I just decided I’m going to practice what I preach and have a little faith that it’s all going to turn out,” she said.

The recession has not spared the rabbinate. At a bleak and stressful time, when pastoral hand-holding may be more in demand than ever, full-time pulpit jobs in America’s liberal movements—Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist—are in short supply. Seminaries and synagogues have had to pare their budgets down to essentials; individual rabbis, likewise, have had to figure out what it means to be a rabbi without working as one. But as painful a moment as it is, some in the field suggest that this perhaps relatively short-term hardship for rabbis and institutions could ultimately prove to be, as they say, good for the Jews.

“It has been an unprecedentedly difficult year,” said Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College, noting that back in early summer—by which time 90 percent of a graduating Hebrew Union class usually has job commitments—almost one-third of the 47 graduates in the class of 2009 were still looking for work. Rabbi Leonard Thal, interim placement director for the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional association for Reform rabbis, said that now approximately 10 are still looking. (Those who find work with organizations or cobble together part-time patchwork, like Dalia Samansky—and more of her peers than usual this year—are not obligated to report their status to him.) “Five years ago, when this group entered, an awful lot of folks out there in congregation-land were complaining about a shortage of rabbis,” Thal said. “Now the pendulum has swung in the other direction, even farther.”

Representatives from the main Conservative and Reconstructionist seminaries report that the large majority of their classes of 2009, which number 43 and 10, respectively, have found jobs. It should be noted that the latter two institutions in particular—for philosophical rather than economic reasons—typically encourage their students to look for work beyond the pulpit to begin with; generally about half of Reconstructionist graduates find jobs outside synagogues, in organizations and institutions such as Jewish community centers. That held true this year.

But it’s not only newly minted rabbis who’ve been pounding the pavement. Many mid-career rabbis, their positions eliminated, have also found themselves with nowhere to go. Their employed counterparts, like many other American workers, are postponing retirement or staying put when they might otherwise move on. Cash-strapped synagogues, like many churches, are balking at hiring at all, in some cases giving up the now-luxury of an assistant rabbi. And as part of its massive restructuring last spring, the Union for Reform Judaism—the organization that supports Reform congregations in America—eliminated 20 percent of its employees nationwide, erasing scores of potential positions and sending numerous on-staff rabbis back into the pool. Since it’s not exactly a boom time for organizations, foundations, or non-profits Jewish or otherwise, even non-pulpit jobs can be hard to find.

Exact numbers on the rabbinic employment landscape—past and current—are hard to pinpoint, in part because some rely on self-reporting and are not closely tracked. But the bleakness of the current mood is palpable. “There’s a lot of anxiety and sadness,” said Kim Geringer, 56, a Reform rabbi among those who lost a position at the URJ. “We don’t have a model for this; we haven’t been here before. Up until now I think rabbis felt pretty confident that, let’s say something didn’t work out with a congregation, as difficult and sad as that might be, there was a sense—even if it was in the background, unarticulated—that if you were willing to be flexible, you could always find a job. At the moment, that’s not there.”

Some rabbis, maxed out and disillusioned, are leaving the rabbinate altogether. Amita Jarmon, 48, a second-career Reconstructionist rabbi ordained in 2004, lost her job as the first-ever full-time rabbi at a small synagogue in New England earlier this year when the money to pay her simply ran out. She moved to Massachusetts for a relationship that has since ended and found no work; colleagues there were already losing their jobs as area JCCs and Hillels cut budgets.

“I applied for a job teaching first grade at Solomon Schechter. That’s not what I went to rabbinical school for,” she said, noting that the school, of course, hired someone with teaching experience. “What I’d be reduced to if I were to stay here would probably be teaching and tutoring, which is stuff that I did before I became a rabbi.” Unwilling to work “just anywhere” in the United States, and noting that she saw few listings for Reconstructionist rabbis anyway, she is in the midst of a permanent move back to Israel, where she lived for five years after making aliyah in 1983, and contemplating a return to her training as a physical therapist. “I’m willing to do all kinds of things there just to be in Israel,” she said. “But if I were really attached to being a rabbi, I would be in a bad way.”

Others within the field have found a rather rabbinic way to view the recession. They say it’s painful, to be sure, but it also presents an opportunity for self-reflection, even positive change, for both rabbis and the institutions that support them. While seminaries along with synagogues are struggling—Hebrew Union reportedly came close to shuttering one of its four campuses; the Jewish Theological Seminary has implemented significant pay cuts; the modern Orthodox Yeshiva University reduced its non-academic staff by 120 in response to an endowment decline of 30 percent (thanks in part to Bernard Madoff)—many see an upside to Jewish institutions’ being forced to do more with less. “The economic contraction is going to accelerate a process of reexamination and reorganization that’s already going on in the larger Jewish community, in order to figure out how to best serve a 21st-century population,” said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of conservative rabbis. “How can we best use our resources to help rabbis work more effectively? How can our synagogues strengthen the Jewish community in times of greater challenge?”

For individual rabbis as well, recession is the mother of invention. Many are exploring—even inventing—new professional options, whether hospital or military chaplaincy, Hillel positions, or a non-pulpit rabbinate of their own design. “This trend has been happening for a few years, but there’s nothing like an economic downturn to really force some innovative thinking in terms of what it means to have this degree and contribute to the Jewish community in ways that aren’t your standard pulpit options,” said Elie Kaunfer, a JTS-ordained rabbi who is executive director of Mechon Hadar, an institute that oversees an egalitarian yeshiva and helps organize independent minyanim. “We’ve been presented with the opportunity to broaden even further what it means to be a rabbi in America.”

Rabbi Howard Cohen, 51, a canoe builder and former volunteer firefighter, left a Reconstructionist congregation in Vermont in 2006 when he became concerned that the congregation might not be able to continue paying for a full-time rabbi. He was until recently the interim dean of Jewish life at a Jewish boarding school in North Carolina. Now he’s no longer setting his sights on existing Jewish institutions. “There are very few jobs to pursue,” he said. In addition to officiating at life cycle events, he’s “considering a constellation of small enterprises: revamping my Jewish outdoor adventure program called Burning Bush Adventures, spiritual and general counseling, and something connected to the graying segment of our society.”

Synagogues continue to be the key to Jewish community, says Hebrew Union College’s Rabbi Ellenson. “But we live in an age when not all congregations are able to hire the set of rabbinic professionals they would normally desire. So rabbis themselves have become more entrepreneurial in terms of bringing their skills into other settings—coffeehouses and elsewhere—venues that provide novel opportunities for teaching and learning. As a result, they’re able to bring the message of Judaism to a larger audience and to forge Jewish community in new, unconventional places.” In this way, the economy can only help accelerate the kind of change already envisioned by, for example, Rabbis Without Borders, founded this spring to encourage and train rabbis to offer Jewish leadership and insight to a broader cross-section of the public.

“Rabbis Without Borders was founded because it was clear even before the recession that rabbis needed to change and grow in order to respond to the postmodern world,” said Rabbi Rebecca W. Sirbu, its director. “Jews are not found only in synagogues; in fact many Jews never enter a synagogue or Jewish institution. No matter what the economic situation is rabbis need to be more creative in how we teach the meaning of Jewish wisdom.”

Cohen, along with other rabbis interviewed, believes that the rabbinic educational community had laid the groundwork for a bit of a rabbi glut even before the economy began to nosedive. “Rabbinical schools are pumping out rabbis,” Cohen said. “But nobody really addressed the question about where they were all going to work. And where there are jobs—in communities that are dying with no real hope of being revitalized—rabbis are not willing to go.” While the Reform, and Reconstructionist movements each have one affiliated seminary ordaining rabbis, and the Conservative movement has two (in addition to JTS, there is the Ziegler School at American Jewish University in Los Angeles), there are several non-denominational rabbinical schools in operation—including Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts; the “Modern Open Orthodox” Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York; and the Academy for Jewish Religion in Riverdale, New York, founded in 1956— that also add about 30 new rabbis to the market each spring. Some rabbis claim, with frustration, that graduates of unaffiliated seminaries will work for less, thus “taking” jobs from their affiliated counterparts.

The president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, counters that there’s room for everyone. “I am someone who believes there can never be too many rabbis,” he said. “At any given moment the congregations in our movement may not be able to absorb more, but there are other things to do. We need more rabbis on campuses, in JCCs, in federations, in youth work.” Rabbi Ellenson of Hebrew Union echoes that thought. “We need liberal rabbis on college campuses and in Jewish organizations” he says. “There is a strong need for humane, liberal interpretations of Judaism to be put forth in the public arena. By placing our rabbis in these positions we serve the religious needs of a very diverse population, and that is all to the good.”

URJ’s Yoffie even says, perhaps counter-intuitively, that now is a time to redouble recruiting efforts. “There’s this notion that you have more students in, for example, business and law school during economic crisis because while there aren’t jobs now, there will be when they get out. Will that same dynamic work in the rabbinate? It’s not clear. All this talk about there being fewer jobs and all the uncertainties may lead to fewer students,” he says. “My concern is that four or five years from now that as the economy comes roaring back—we hope—we’re going to need more rabbis to serve our congregations and our communities and they aren’t going to be there.” So far, Yoffie can rest easy: seminary admissions officers say applications—from people seeking deeper Jewish meaning and a detour from the job market—are up.

Rabbis in pulpits may be forced to reexamine their roles as well—in ways, some say, that can strengthen the communities they serve. They and those who work with them concur that many synagogues will survive, even thrive, based in large part not just on the size of their endowment, but also on their ability to forge most fully the relatively new model of congregational rabbi as neither autocrat nor employee, but as leader and partner.

While a generation ago, many Jews grew up with “their” rabbi functioning as a top-down (and white, straight, married, male) head of household, healthy congregations—and smart rabbis—today strive for a “brit” (covenant) or “sacred partnership,” said Rabbi Steven E. Kaye, a rabbinic employment coach and consultant based in Denver. It’s even more necessary in the downturn—especially with many rabbis foregoing raises and doing more for less—and it creates an even more vital community for the long term. Eric Yoffie offers the example of congregational bikur cholim, visiting the sick. “If rabbis are saying to their congregants, ‘This is more than I can handle; people are not going to get visited unless our laity comes forward and takes this on as an ongoing project,’ then that’s a wonderful thing,” he said.

For many adult Jews, “their” rabbi was also the same rabbi that saw them through Hebrew school and high school, welcomed them back from college at High Holy Days, perhaps even married them. That model has changed in recent decades as well, with rabbis leaving jobs more frequently, including those they once might have been expected to keep until retirement. Now, though, we may see a return, if small-scale and short-term, to the earlier pattern, with rabbis staying in positions they might otherwise have left. “There is some good in the natural shifting and dynamics of life in terms of positions opening and then being occupied by a new generation,” he said. “In many instances at the current moment, that has certainly been placed on hold.”

Still, individual rabbis are endeavoring to see the upside. One Conservative rabbi in his late 40s is on the last year of his contract at a New England synagogue; while he’s ready for something new, he’s not about to leave: “As much as I don’t want to be looking for a job at age 50 in a bad economy I don’t want to be looking for a job at age 60 in a bad economy, either.” (He requested not to be named because of the sensitivity of his upcoming negotiations.) When it comes time to renew his contract, he said, “I’m going to say this is it: I’m going to stop looking around until I retire.” Much as he’d like to be somewhere “more exciting,” he said, his commitment to not leaving has renewed his dedication to finding ways to build and revitalize the congregation. He also recalled the pleasure of coming back from rabbinical school to visit the rabbi who’d been at his home synagogue since he was 6. “There is a benefit to longevity,” he allowed. “I’m not sure the old pattern wasn’t better.”

Of course there also is a silver lining for synagogues in an economic downturn: those hiring right now are able to choose from more, and more qualified, job applicants. And within a few years, future applicants might have more diverse resumes after they’ve held jobs in universities, social service agencies, Jewish communal organizations—and as some rabbis interviewed reported doing, take college-level classes in the increasingly attractive skill of fundraising.

“It’s a sad and difficult time, no two ways about that,” said Ora Prouser, executive vice president and academic dean of the non-denominational seminary Academy of Jewish Religion. “But the economic situation has also led to some moments of real creativity.” Reform rabbi and former lawyer Tom Alpert, 54, whose interim pulpit job at a Connecticut synagogue recently ended, is considering—among other things—building a circuit-riding rabbi program for underserved communities in the Northeast based on existing models in the South. Margot Stein, a 48-year-old Reconstructionist rabbi, seeing her longtime freelance gigs for Jewish organizations dry up, is launching a tutoring and bar and bat mitzvah prep business for children who, like her son, have special needs.

As more rabbis expand their own horizons, so too do they expand the scope, and definition of Jewish community. Whether in Jewish organizations or fundraising class or even Starbucks, rabbis may come into more contact with unaffiliated Jews, those without a rabbi they call “theirs.” That in itself holds promise. “The Talmud says that when questions of law arise, one way to find the answer is to ‘Go see what the people are doing,’” said Rabbi Alpert. “If we are looking to create, and perpetuate the rabbinate, we have to go see what the people are doing.”

We led our parents to the orchard, our planned ceremony spot, where an old oak tree with a twisted trunk stands. Jon and I envisioned our chuppah under the thick cover of branches. My mom’s eyes filled with tears. “It’s perfect,” she whispered. My father was off on his own, inspecting the lawn for electrical sockets. “Have you thought about whether the chuppah poles will be buried in the dirt or free-standing?” he called out from 20 feet away. “And where will your officiant stand? What about the rabbi’s mic?”

My dad is a rabbi, and he will officiate at our wedding. But, that day at the vineyard, I’d been thinking about him as my father and how I’d be losing him as the central man in my life. This transition wasn’t easy to negotiate. It was Dad who bought me cards on Valentines Day and told me I was beautiful even at my worst moments. It was Dad who read everything I wrote out loud to my mother, brimming with pride. And what I wanted, as I navigated my last few months as a single gal, was for Dad to keep playing that role: father of the bride, not rabbi. He was already edging from one to the other, confirming that his place in my life was changing.

My father wasn’t always our rabbi, though he always had the beard, which he started growing the year I was born, 1977. He decided, at age 50, to give up teaching literature and composition at a college in Brooklyn and begin his rabbinical training. Over the years, amid the hectic schedule of work and childrearing, my parents had become deeply involved in our synagogue. They hosted Sabbath dinners and befriended our rabbi. On Friday nights, we were always the last family to leave services, as my parents lost track of time talking with the rabbi while I fell asleep on the pews.

As a teenager, I’d wondered what they talked about. I couldn’t imagine confiding in a clergyman. All I really understood were my own desires and dreams. I wasn’t fully aware that my parents were individuals, with rich inner lives, desires and dreams of their own, even though I saw evidence that my father’s interests were changing. He wrote a book of spiritual teachings and began introducing himself to new friends as “Avi,” a nickname for his Hebrew name, Avram. He dabbled in Talmud study at a little yeshiva around the corner from our house, on Long Island. On the Sabbath, he wore a knit yarmulke, which he got in a shop in Jerusalem’s Old City.

By the time my father was ordained—it took eight years of part-time study—I still wasn’t used to the idea. I was proud, sure, but conflicted, especially after he found a pulpit to serve in Suffolk County. Suddenly, he belonged to many people, not just those of us in his immediate family.

I was in my 20s, living in Manhattan, and Dad was no longer free to meet me whenever I needed him—weddings, births, funerals, and other demands of his congregants trumped an impromptu lunch. On Long Island on Friday nights, I watched as worshippers approached Dad after services, looking for a word of encouragement. I saw how couples whose weddings he’d performed would keep in touch. Invariably, they’d ask Dad to perform naming ceremonies when they later had babies. I tried to understand how these people felt so connected to my father. What would lead them to call him? What did he say during the countless meetings with couples before marriage? What counsel did he offer?

When Jon proposed to me in April, and we decided that my dad would officiate, that’s what we wondered. “Adina, what exactly happens at those meetings with your dad?” Jon had asked, apprehensively, the night we became engaged at an inn in the Berkshires. We lay under the covers, holding hands and whispering about our plans. “What’s he going to ask us that he doesn’t already know the answers to?”

Adina Kay and her father

I had no idea. I knew Dad gathered lots of information at those meetings to use in the speech he delivered to the bride and groom under the chuppah. But what would he ask us, two people he knew so well?

When we arrived at a vegetarian Indian restaurant on the Upper West Side for dinner Dad was already settled in at a table. He wore his favorite blue knit yarmulke and a tie. He got up and gave us quick hugs, sat down again, took a sip of water, poised his pen on a blank sheet of paper, and began asking questions.

“So, tell me how you met,” he started.

Was he kidding? He knew this story well enough to relay it to countless people, so thrilled that his youngest had finally met her match. But this wasn’t a joke. He was waiting for an answer. I looked at Jon, who put his arm around me and began.

“Well, Rabbi,” he started, “Our first date was on Christmas Day, 2006.”

Jon talked for a while and as he did, Dad took notes, and asked more questions. “Which qualities do you most admire in Adina?” “Tell me how you knew Adina was the one for you.” I liked hearing the answers. Jon spoke of our future with a new passion.

At some point, it was my turn to answer. Dad asked me about spirituality and God. When I hesitated, he asked me about a transcendent moment I’d shared with Jon. I remembered an afternoon atop a mountain in the Catskills. I began to relate the experience. This was a story my father hadn’t heard before.

As I spoke, I stopped being conscious of whether I was confiding in a rabbi or in my father and whether there was a difference between the two. For an hour, Dad gave Jon and me the space to talk about our feelings un-self-consciously, to consider the kind of ceremony we wanted, to evaluate the moral and religious conditions around which we would like to build our home.

I was beginning to understand why my parents valued their rabbi—this relationship was meaningful in a way I hadn’t considered before. Rabbinic counsel didn’t have to mean talks about Torah—that afternoon he also advised us on life and love. I was proud to think that my father offered that to other couples, too.

It wasn’t until a waitress came over with the check that we resumed our roles of dad, daughter, and future son-in-law: Jon reached for the check, Dad argued with him about who would pay, and I excused myself for the bathroom. On the street, we said our goodbyes.

“Sweetheart!” my father said as he pulled me in for a hug, “You’re getting married!”

He kissed my cheek four times. He kissed Jon’s cheek too, and handed us two Lotto scratch-off cards. He was our rabbi now, yes, but he was also still Dad. “If you win, you can pay for the wedding!” he said. Then he turned and headed off toward his car.

Adina Kay is a writer and teacher in Manhattan.

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“It feels like we’re on top of the world,” he said.

Stafman’s destination is the city of Bozeman, where, on August 14, he will be installed as the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Shalom, the Reform synagogue where he has spent 10 days a month for the past year. The ceremony will officially make him one of two active rabbis in the state; the other is an emissary from the ultra-Orthodox movement Chabad, who established a Chabad House in Bozeman in 2004; a third, Beth Shalom’s rabbi emeritus Allan Secher, is retired. It will also make him one of the few intermarried rabbis in the country. Montana is not known as a center of cutting-edge Jewish communal life, and yet by hiring an intermarried rabbi, Beth Shalom has, apparently without dissension, done something that in most synagogues would be as taboo as passing out pork dumplings on Yom Kippur. “I don’t think there’s a single soul in that congregation that resents him being involved in an interfaith marriage,” Secher said. “If there is I absolutely haven’t heard it, and I would have because we’re still very connected.”

That may well be because Montana’s Jewish community is so isolated. Bozeman is a university town of about 35,000 people in a state with about 1,000 self-identifying Jews. Along with Missoula, it’s considered one of Montana’s progressive hubs; Beth Shalom’s president, Jake Werner, compared it to Boulder, Colorado. Almost the entire Jewish community is made up of transplants from around the country. Beth Shalom members say that their congregation is a big tent full of people with often-conflicting views who have nevertheless all sought out the one non-Orthodox shul in town. “You know the joke about three Jews on an island?” asked synagogue board member Franke Wilmer. “There’s only one synagogue on this island.”

“It’s kind of a pioneer congregation,” said Beth Shalom member Bridget Kevane, a Montana State University professor who wrote about Bozeman’s Jews last year for the Forward. “You work with the people who are there to shape a community and it may not be the traditional east coast community.” Kevane’s mother is Jewish, but she was raised Catholic in Puerto Rico; she reconnected with her Jewish roots after marrying a Jewish man. The temple’s past and present presidents are married to non-Jews, as are several other board members. This makeup suggests that what’s really unusual about Bozeman’s Jews is not that they’re heavily intermarried, but that they are intermarried even at the most active, synagogue-going levels.

If Jews in interfaith marriages feel shut out by synagogue life in many places, in Bozeman—where, according to the town’s Chabad rabbi, Chaim Bruk, even 60 percent of Chabad-goers are in intermarried—they’re the only show in town. “I have no doubt that in more established Jewish places it would be more controversial,” Stafman said of his being hired. “There are more expectations, I think. It’s not only a matter of being politically liberal, but a certain kind of open-mindedness and willingness of being able to explore new places, that’s maybe less present in the more established places.”

In many ways, Stafman is a classic second-career rabbi: a socially-minded professional who in middle age felt called to serve on a spiritual plane as well. He grew up in New York and moved to Tallahassee, Florida, for law school. There, he met Beth Lee, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and a Christian spiritual director who, like Stafman, did not consider herself particularly religious. The two married. He became a criminal defense attorney and, for 25 years, specialized in death penalty cases. He and Lee, a freelance artist and calligrapher, decided to raise their children Jewish, and, when their firstborn reached Hebrew-school age, they joined a Reform synagogue. Stafman eventually became active there, eventually serving as president of the board. Lee said she never had any desire to convert—“I have really wonderful Presbyterian roots,” she noted—but she liked being part of a congregation again.

In 2000, Stafman fought what history may remember as his most important case, though it was far outside his usual purview: he was lead attorney for the Democrats’ case in Ronald Taylor v. Martin County Canvassing Board, one of several disputes over vote counting in the 2000 presidential election that were heard in Florida’s Supreme Court. Unlike Gore v. Bush, Stafman’s case never made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, but as in that case, the results marked a loss for the Democrats. That same year (coincidentally, Stafman said), a friend persuaded him to come to a Jewish Renewal retreat, where he began a turn toward the spiritual that would lead him to the rabbinate. Jewish Renewal, a movement that emphasizes an eclectic mix of mystical and spiritual teachings , “spoke to my soul at a deep level,” Stafman said. He began taking classes at the Renewal-affiliated seminary, the Aleph Rabbinic Program—the only one in the United States that, according to a recent article in the Jewish student magazine New Voices, does not reject intermarried applicants outright. But, said Aleph Rabbinic Program chair Steve Silvern, “we say to them that it’s unusual for a community to hire a rabbi who is in an interfaith marriage,” and counsel them about the strain that one partner becoming a rabbi can place on a relationship.

In 2003, after getting Lee’s blessing, Stafman applied. He continued to practice law for another two years, but then quit working as a lawyer entirely. “Even though I never had a client get the death penalty, there came a time when I came to see that the system lacked any capacity for healing and reconciliation and forgiveness, and I realized I didn’t want to be part of that system anymore,” he said.

Last summer, several months before he was ordained, Stafman inquired about rabbinical positions at two congregations, one in Fort Collins, Colorado, and one in Bozeman. “I made a point on the very first contact of finding out whether they would consider someone who was intermarried,” he said of his initial interviews with Beth Shalom. “And the reaction I got was one of, like, ‘So what?’ And one person said that it might be a great asset because we’re so intermarried here that you might have a better understanding of the congregation. It’s not like there was a universal round of applause that I was intermarried, but I’ve never heard that it was a defect or cause for concern.”

Indeed, said Wilmer, a member of the hiring committee—and a high-ranking Democrat in Montana’s state legislature, who grew up Episcopalian and converted to Judaism after she married a Jewish man from whom she is now divorced—an enthusiasm for working with interfaith families was one of the explicit criteria for candidates. “It’s very much in keeping with our congregation,” said Romi Neustadt, a public relations consultant who volunteers as the temple’s communications director, and is one of Montana’s few native-born Jews. “My husband and I are very much in the minority in that we’re both Jewish. I think it will be very beneficial to those interfaith families in the community, and that they will really feel they have a home at Beth Shalom.”

Of course, there were also practical considerations for the search committee: not too many rabbis, especially those coming out of major rabbinical schools, are eager to take a half-time job in Montana. “We can’t really be choosy about what we we’re getting, we’re not going to have a huge pool,” said Josh Burnim, Beth Shalom’s recently installed president. “We were pretty over the moon to get someone with the qualifications of Ed Stafman.”

The fact that he’s taken an unlikely job isn’t lost on Stafman. “Not too many 55-year-old people leave the home they were in for 30 years, pack up everything they own and put it in two moving vans for a new job that’s actually a half-time position, leaving all of their connections, including friends I’ve had for decades,” he said in a phone conversation as he drove through the Badlands. He trailed off: “I’m looking at my wife and she’s getting upset.”

Hussain was one of only a handful of imams making a return visit to the transit point for millions of European emigrés; most of the rabbis said they had been there before, either on previous official visits or as tourists. This trip was sponsored by the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, a New York-based non-profit headed by Rabbi Marc Schneier and chaired by hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons, who did not put in an appearance. It was intended to remind the Muslim delegates of American Jews’ experience as immigrants and outsiders; most of the imams had been recruited for their prior interfaith work by rabbis from their home countries, which included Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, and Switzerland. Organizers hoped the clergy would consider “twinning” programs between the synagogues and mosques upon their return home.

One of the participants translated from English into Arabic as a National Park Service docent led the group through the Ellis Island Chronicles, a series of rooms containing dioramas depicting the island’s development. Walter Ruby, a program organizer, interrupted to tell the group that his own mother, who fled Berlin via France and Portugal at 16, had been detained on the island for two weeks in 1941, while his grandmother searched New York for someone to sponsor their visas. “She celebrated Passover here,” Ruby said. “She figured it wasn’t so bad because at least she wasn’t going to be killed by the Nazis.” There was a wave of sympathetic laughter.

Imam Abdelali Mamoun, from the Clamart Mosque near Paris, seemed struck by the tale, and he asked Ruby, in broken English, about his mother’s journey to America. Mamoun, who was on his first trip to the United States, said he hadn’t heard the stories of European immigrants processed through Ellis Island before; what he did know about was how badly the colonial Europeans had treated the native Americans. “They put away the local people,” said Mamoun, who explained in voluble Arabic that he, as the son and grandson of French Algerians, identified more with the colonial story than the immigrant narrative. Muzammil Siddiqi, the director of the Islamic Society of Orange County, in Southern California, stepped in to translate, and he pointed out that Ellis Island did mean something to older Muslims in Detroit, whose grandparents made their way through the Ellis Island portal a century ago. By the time he arrived from India, to study at Harvard, he continued, that era was long gone. “When I came here 40 years ago, I just went to Logan Airport,” he said, shrugging.

The visiting rabbis also had a hard time feeling connected to a place they associated with the American experience. “Look, everyone in America is a part of this story—everyone in America owns a piece to the tile on this floor,” said Rabbi Reuben Livingstone, of the Hampstead Garden Synagogue in London. “There is no place in Europe that can embody that.”

After a stop in the Great Hall to peer at photocopied ship manifests, the group made their way up to a balcony, where caterers had set up an elaborate buffet of kosher grilled chicken, roast vegetables, and salad. “Jewish food, it’s very nice!” commented one imam, surveying the determinedly non-ethnic spread. Over at the bar, a server poured from a selection of soda, sparkling water, and Snapple; a bottled of chilled Australian Chardonnay was produced. One of the rabbis inspected it, turning it over in his hands to see if it carried a hechsher. “Is it kosher?” asked Imam Mamoun, who was getting a refill of Coca-Cola. “I don’t think so, it doesn’t say,” the rabbi said mournfully, handing it back to the server.

The group moved into a reception room lined with the flags of all the nations represented to eat, a parade of speakers addressed questions of how Jews and Muslims could communicate over immigration issues; several closed with “Shalom, and salaam,” drawing murmurs of approval from the imams, many of whom spoke very little English. After the meal, it was time for prayers, or almost time. The rabbis determined it was too early for davening the afternoon mincha prayers and returned to their coffee and cakes. “It is always the halachic problem of when to daven mincha—can the Muslims daven with us, you know?” joked Rabbi Raphael Evers, of Amsterdam. The imams, meantime, cleared space on the balcony of the Great Hall and turned toward Mecca. The leader began calling the prayers, in a stentorian voice that echoed off the vast tiled arches and silenced the startled visitors below.

Then it was a rush back to the waterfront, in order to make a 2 o’clock meeting with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The delegates boarded the Miss Liberty, toting gift bags filled with Ellis Island baseball caps and other goodies (though Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, Chief Rabbi of Moscow, was loyal to the Yanks, perching a navy-blue ballcap atop his head to keep the rain off). They smiled for photos on the deck, as the Statue of Liberty slipped behind their heads.

To be fair, David does have excellent taste. He’s just a bit of a…minimalist? So I figured hey, if the Fab Five could set him up with three more pairs of shoes—even two!—I’d feel slightly less self-conscious about the vast amount of real estate taken up by my collection of cowboy boots.

David’s first reaction: no way. The world, he said, does not need to see Carson going through a rabbi’s underwear drawer. As it turned out, however, the producers were looking for clergy attached to some sort of social action project that could use some spiffing up: a dismal soup kitchen or run-down playground that needed a makeover.

After exhaustive consultation with every rabbi he knows, David was still wary, but agreed at least to audition. With the focus off his wardrobe, he reasoned, the show might be a great opportunity to spotlight something we don’t see so often on TV: images of a rabbi both maintaining appropriate gravitas and looking friendly, accessible, cool, three-dimensional—”normal.”

Ultimately, the Queer Eye producers went with someone else. But until David gets his own show, there is Shalom in the Home, starring megarabbi Shmuley Boteach.

On his new show (Mondays, 10 pm, The Learning Channel), Boteach cruises the country in his Heal Mobile, a tricked-out Airstream that’s half therapist’s couch, half mobile surveillance base, to bring peace to warring families: the surly kids mad at their dad for cheating, the banshee mom unable to speak below a shriek, the 9-year-old girl with “anger issues” who, I swear, came thisclose to spinning her head around 360 degrees and projectile puking on the camera crew.

Boteach is sort of like Supernanny with a beard, except his primary mission is not discipline. When parents sit in the Heal Mobile to watch video of their rugrats mouthing off or destroying the house, Boteach is quick to point out that their kids’ obnoxitude is all about them. Only when the parents pipe down, forgive each other, or face the pain of their own parents’ divorce will kids set the table without being asked twice. Encouraging families to cooperate might involve a game of hoops or a camping trip with “trust activities,” plus direct coaching from Shmuley through a Secret Service-style earpiece.

Does Boteach actually wind up helping these families? I’m pretty sure he gets them off to a good start, though I would have been more entertained if Mr. and Mrs. Lubner had opted to leave their feral 9-year-old in the woods. Despite the clown-at-a-party cadence of Boteach’s voiceovers, his manner is pleasantly sincere, perceptive, and respectful; he’s firm when necessary, but never a bully like Dr. Phil or Dr. Laura. I was especially impressed—moved, even—by how seriously Boteach took a 16-year-old’s offhand complaint that her squirrelly boyfriend had a habit of yelling at her. (“You’re hurting me, too—that’s what makes me raise my voice,” quoth the manipulative punk.) Happy ending: girl learns she deserves better; furious father scares punk straight.

Selfishly, however, I’m more interested in whether Boteach, with his presence on this show, is helping the Jews. And specifically, the rabbis among them. Given the wide breadth of his book topics (dating, misogyny, fear, “kosher” sex), a vast multimedia resume stretching from Oxford University to Neverland Ranch, and perhaps the caffeine intake of his publicist, Boteach has become the go-to Jew—”America’s rabbi,” if you will—on everything from psychics to pedophiles.
But arguably, this conventional, watchable show on TLC will bring him to a larger mainstream audience than ever. And what impression will that audience—the nonreligious, the religious who have never met a Jew or a rabbi, the unaffiliated Jews who have come to distrust “organized religion”—come away with?

Shalom in the Home will do nothing to disabuse strangers of the assumption that my husband has a beard. But does it reinforce other Jewish or rabbinical stereotypes? Well, there are brief moments of the kind of Jewish corniness that makes me want to stick a fork in my eye, such as shots of the ghoulish bobblehead rabbi on Boteach’s dashboard. And what does he say when he meets the family on the basketball court? “Short Jews can dunk!” What do I say? Me darf zikh sheymen far die goyim. Cringe.

But Boteach is exponentially more appealing—and intelligible—than he has been when interviewed on, say, Fox, where he’s nearly driven Tony Snow to drink with loony tirades like this: “There’s two million men and women who are part of a warrior class that protect us, and a lot of us are hiding behind plastic sheets, for God’s sake, Tony, and we are the inheritors of Washington, MacArthur. We have to learn to be contemptuous of evil again.” By welcome contrast, and I don’t necessarily mean to damn with faint praise, no one will come away from Shalom in the Home thinking, “I wanted to give the Jews a chance, but that rabbi is crazy!”

Shalom, overall, makes Shmuley look like a good guy. This, I believe, is good for him, and good for rabbis, Orthodox and otherwise. I like that he, on the show, upends the stereotype of the stern rabbi who says “Feh!” to the secular world, who is attuned to the minutiae of halacha but not the breadth of human experience, who (like me?) is unable to walk through life without his but-is-it-good-for-the-Jews? glasses.

More upside: I know that rabbis in many movements—and their wives—complain that people tend to think of rabbis as larger-than-life God People, not as actual humans, people with pasts and warts and dishes to do, people who are also rabbis. (I know. I’ve seen their faces when I mention that my husband watches American Idol.) We learn from the show’s goofy, cartoonish opener (narrated, gag me, by his mother), that Boteach himself is a child of divorce. This, he reminds us frequently on the show, is what motivates him to help others find shalom bais, peace in the home. While this conceit irritated me at first, it does help us see him as a guy with feelings, a rabbi who cares not just because he wants to make things Good and Right, but also because he’s been there.

Yet, for all its rabbi-hype, the show is only stealthily religious. Apparently, only one of the families Boteach helps this season is Jewish. And of course, shalom bais is itself a Jewish concept—though we’re obviously not the only faith or culture that values a home sweet home. Otherwise, even with Boteach’s charismatic presence, the show is not even really kosher-style—and I’m of two minds about this.

Of course, it would make no sense for Boteach to march in and try to get a Methodist family to both “use ‘I’ statements” and observe Shabbos. And it pretty much makes my day to see someone real or fictional on television who’s explicitly Jewish, yet basically mellow about it. Someone who’s not The Jewish Guy, not a Jewish joker, not a caricature, not tormented in some way by his faith. Someone who’s Jewish and really pretty fine with it. (For this reason, David and I love Hesh on The Sopranos. Of course, he is also a criminal.)

Still, I have to say that one of the show’s most real moments comes (alas, in one of the “outtakes” shown during the closing credits) when Boteach encourages the once-wayward husband to swear that he’ll cut off contact with the other woman. “Swearing: that’s a sacred oath between you and God,” Boteach says—and you can tell from Luis’ face that Boteach’s language really speaks to him. There is a broad “God” language—talk of a higher power, the “universe,” a connection to something larger than ourselves—that does speak to many people, religious and not, that inspires them to try to act like they’re not the only person in the world. So why isn’t there more of this?

The producers of Shalom in the Home say they conceived of the show rabbi-free, then cast Boteach. But I wonder, just a teeny bit, why it seems to shy away from opportunities to offer even this type of broad spiritual language where it might work—or at least make sense coming from a rabbi? I mean, otherwise, why hire a rabbi? Does this mean that it’s “okay” to have religious people on TV as long as they’re not, you know, too Jewish?

But enough conspiracy theory. Shalom will do no harm. What would help, I think, is if Boteach were not the only big-shot media rabbi, if he were not one of the few “out” Jews (fictional or otherwise) on television. He represents himself quite well, but he does not represent all rabbis. Not all rabbis are Lubavitcher; not all are hirsute; not all suck at basketball. (And so far as I know, none has been on Queer Eye.)

I know, you’re thinking of all the rabbis you have seen: the rabbi on Sex and the City who converted Charlotte, the rabbi on Grey’s Anatomy who dealt with the perennial pig-heart-in-a-Jew issue, to name just a couple. Still, it would be nice to see an even wider variety of rabbis—and of Jews of all stripes—on TV, doing a wider variety of rabbi and Jewish things, even just day-to-day life stuff. Why? So that viewers can see those fellows in black hats, say, as actual humans. So that the unaffiliated can ask whether it’s really necessary for that one bad experience they had in third-grade Hebrew school to make them hesitate to get married under a chuppah. So that people of all faiths can get even the teeniest taste of the massive diversity of Judaism and its clergy.

I’d say the same for other clergy, too. Might be especially nice, for example, to meet a fictional priest without a dark side.