THE NEW RABBI
June 13, 2003













Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana


Three years ago:

"So what do you do?" the man asks as we join our table mates on the first night of the cruise.
"I'm a rabbi."
"Did you hear that, honey? Everyone, did you hear what this fellow is? He's a Jewish rabbi. Honey, what was their name, the Jewish people from Kansas who were on the cruise we took through the Canal, or was it the Alaska trip? Anyway, their name was Abrams or maybe Abramson, and he was in the hardware business somewhere in the Topeka area. Do you know them by any chance? They weren't too fond of their rabbi, I do remember that!

 "By the way, now that we're going to be together here for a week, maybe you could explain those kosher laws to us and, hey, why is you all don't celebrate Mass? Honey, look, it's a Jewish rabbi and his wife. You are allowed to marry, aren't you?"



One Year Ago

"So what do you do?" the man asks as we join our table mates on the first night of the cruise.
"I'm a mortician and embalmer."
"Oh. Say, would you pass the salad dressing?"


 Jews and non-Jews alike are often intrigued by the title "Rabbi" and by the lifestyle of the rabbinate. We're exotic somehow. Non-Jews often hold us in awe. Jews are more often curious and sometimes reverentially sympathetic: "What kind of job is that after all? He could have become a doctor. She should have become a lawyer."

Sometimes we're given a break by our fellow Jews who are simply overwhelmed by the reality of the rabbi's lot in life. "Imagine," they say, "having to please 900 bosses."

 In his book, The New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for Its Leader, investigative reporter Stephen Fried intensely probes and records the exhausting process of finding a successor for Rabbi Gerald Wolpe who, after 30 years, is stepping down as Rabbi of Philadelphia's Main Line Synagogue, Har Zion.

 Fried's book amounts really to three compelling stories in one. First, there's the detailed account of the three-year search for the "new" rabbi for one of America's premier Conservative congregations.

Ironically, their distinguished rabbi, Gerald Wolpe, had been the author's beloved boyhood rabbi in Harrisburg 30 years earlier, and Mr. Fried was able to gain the rabbi's cooperation in documenting the search for his successor.

 Unfortunately, he was unable to win access to meetings of the Har Zion Rabbinic Search Committee. They got together to exclude him, regardless of Rabbi Wolpe's recommendation. Fried was able to follow most, if not all, of the complicated turns of fortune with the help of a few well-placed committee moles and his own exceptional schmoozing abilities.

 In what every Jew knows to be one of the great understatements of all time, the author confides:
It has been my experience that Jews are not really good at keeping secrets.
Well, for three years, Stephen Fried attended services, interviewed all of the synagogue's staff members and anyone else who would talk with him, and kept his ears open by the chopped liver on the kiddush table every Shabbat morning!

You name it, Fried covered it: holy days, sermons, funerals, Sisterhood meetings, and the every day dramas of schul life, and the many developments and disappointments along the way of the Rabbinic search process. He even went incognito to visit the applicants in their home settings and, , evaluated their prospects. So that is the first story that Mr. Fried focuses upon.

 The second is a novel-like account of the loss and love between a father and a son. Raised without much connection to his Judaism, Stephen Fried was rediscovering his roots in the course of saying the daily Kaddish prayer for this year after his father's death. So what one reads in his book is as much a personal search for religious meaning as it is a communal search for rabbinic leadership.

 Here, by the way, Mr. Fried renders a valuable service to any of his readers who know little if anything of basic Judaism: Jewish ceremonies, holidays, prayers, and history. He carefully addresses all of these. In addition, we learn ad nauseam of Fried's attachment to Conservative Judaism, its Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Rabbinical Assembly. What little he does write in reference to our Reform movement is either snidely negative or outrageously inaccurate. Shame on him!

 This leads us to his third story-the state of American Judaism and that of American religion as a whole.

According to Stephen Fried, when a congregation self-scrutinizes itself (in all of its demographic camps) so deeply as to ascertain what it wants and needs in a new rabbi, that questioning will inevitably lead one into examining all of the transformations in the culture affecting both religion and religious institutions.

What does it mean, for instance, that half of the Har Zion members wanted to be able to call their new rabbi by his first name, unthinkable with Rabbi Wolpe? The other half insists they call to their synagogue a rabbi who is nothing less than a great orator-national figure and scholar. And here again Fried asks his readers:
The question is whether baby boomers and generations after them want their clergy to be as dress-casual as the rest of thier lives, or whether the significant return to religion in the 1990s is made up of people who will ultimately desire more formality. . . .

 [Har Zion] is the synagogue of record, where somebody who wants to belong to the right synagogue belongs.

And yet, as Fried makes clear, these days, no has to belong to the "right" synagogue or for that matter any synagogue. A Jew can be successful in law, business, politics, or any other field without a synagogue affiliation. Synagogues today attract the Jews who wish to stay in touch with their tradition, not necessarily those who need to.

Well, since this book, The New Rabbi, reads like a good novel, I won't give away its ending. But instead, as this is the beginning of my 30th year in the Rabbinate, let me conclude with some personal thoughts on rabbis-old or new!

 The rabbi's role has never been more complex or demanding than it is today. It seems to me that this is the congregational rabbi's challenge:

to summon that humanizing skill and responsiveness to others which will overarch the institution, and create an unbreachable relationship between the individual Jew and his/her Judaism, and thus preserve the function of the synagogue as the primary vehicle for Jewish spiritual survival.

 Now that's a mouthful, I know. But no mortal man or woman can meet such expectations 24/7. The rabbinate offers a rich life of service, but it's a job is never done and one is rarely truly "off." And sometimes expectations are too rigorous and unfair.
It's things like these that put you in a mood to rave and shout,
They're all of them the things a rabbi could do well without!

You get the idea. The modern rabbi cannot become the vicarious Jewish community either. One man or women cannot, time and again, pinch-hit for the entire Jewish community. We cannot be for long the solitary pray-er, study-er, planner, visitor, dreamer for an entire congregation-not a living one anyway.

 And yet, we rabbis are great and unquenchable lovers and apologists for our people. We learn that where synagogue life is concerned, some things are simply not measured by the pound. Give us a couple of people to sit beside us at a table-the Saving Remnant, if you like-with whom to study and delight in the majestic gems of our peoples' wisdom, and we are once again enthusiastic and happy.

 In the end, it was the saintly Rabbi Leo Baeck, the faithful shepherd of Berlin Jewry in its last tortured hours, who best expressed the rabbi's essential duty when he said in language appropriate to those times long before women were ordained:
The message is not the sermon of the preacher but the man himself. The man [the woman] must be the message. The rabbi must not deliver a message; he must deliver himself.
The rabbinate-the new Rabbi, or the older one. What kind of a job is it for a Jewish boy or girl? Why, it's a sacred calling! It's a precious honor! It's more than making a living. It's making a life!
Amen.