Shofar Tevet/Shevat 5772
Jewish Family Congregation www.jewishfamilycongregation.org
January 2012
From the Rabbi’s Desk In December, my long-time friend, Brenda Barrie, visited JFC and spoke about her recently published book, The Rabbi’s Husband. I had received a copy from her beforehand, and had read it, and it has left me thinking about a variety of subjects raised by the book. Brenda mentioned that she had begun work on this book about 10 years earlier, and, at that time, had thought about writing about the first class of the Hebrew Union College (the Reform seminary) to ordain 10 women…a minyan of women rabbis. That did not happen until 9 years after Rabbi Sally Preisand opened the door for women in the rabbinate. Brenda gave up on that project and instead turned out her interesting book about the rabbi’s husband. Before 1972, even the concept of a rabbi’s husband would have provoked astonishment. I remember the husband of a classmate being asked, every time he accompanied his wife to her student pulpit, “What do you call a rabbi’s husband?” His answer: “Lucky”. As far as I know, there is still no term comparable to rebbitzen for said husband. One of our professors, Dr. Michael Meyer, married to Rabbi Margie Meyer, had “rebbitz” on his licence plate, but that was a joke, not a real Yiddish word. There were 15 women in my ordination class in 1990, and we were a support group for each other. Some women ordained long before us visited the campus and told us about the problems of being in a class with only a handful of women in it, problems ranging from the lack of washroom facilities in the library building to not being taken seriously by their student congregations. By the time I entered the college, these were only distant memories. Another subject raised by Brenda’s book has to do with her protagonist’s decision to leave the Reform movement and go back to her roots in the Conservative Judaism. The From the Rabbi’s Desk Service Schedule What’s Happening…? January Oneg Hosts Early Childhood Center The Religious School JiFTY Birthdays/Annivs/Yahrzeits
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rabbi in the book wants to return to a more ritually oriented Jewish practice. This intrigues me, because my adult religious life began in the Conservative movement, and I moved away from it because I saw a great gap between the official standards of the movement and the actual practices of its members. I still see that in my own family. For example, I have cousins who are very active in their synagogue, both as lay leaders and as occasional service leaders. They go to Shabbat morning services every week and then go out for Dim Sum. The Conservative movement officially requires its members to follow the traditional Jewish dietary laws, but many, many Jews affiliated with Conservative synagogues clearly do not do so. The Reform movement encourages each adult member to decide his/her own practice, and thus it is entirely possible and legitimate for congregants to go out for Chinese food before our Shabbat evening services. So unlike the rabbi in the book, I found great comfort in the Reform movement’s emphasis on intellectual integrity and individual autonomy. But, like the rabbi in the book, I also appreciate a ritually oriented Jewish life. For people like me, the good news is that the Reform movement sees itself as an umbrella, under which there is room for a very diverse set of beliefs and practices. Our most recent prayer book, Mishkan T’filah,embodies that umbrella concept. In the footnotes on many pages, it says “for those who choose”, and then it describes a ritual (from bowing at certain times to facing the entry to sing the last stanza of Lekha Dodi) that comes from traditional practice. And the concept of individual autonomy is emphasized in the choice that is offered.
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