Various people who know my inner workings have been asking me about the conversion I have recently undergone. Yes, I am a convert. I recently forsook the Reform movement of my childhood and rabbinic training and officially became a Reconstructionist rabbi. It's not really such a big deal, just a change of professional unions, a little like switching from the Teamsters to the IWW. What's been more notable for me has been the long, winding process that got me to make this little switch.
Truth is, I don't know that much about the Reconstructionist movement. It began as the brainchild of one remarkable and long-lived rabbi, Mordechai M. Kaplan. Rabbi Kaplan looked at American Judaism in the forties and fifties and saw the huge dissonance between the words of the prayerbook and what Jews in the scientific, technological modern period actually believed. He proposed more emphasis on Judaism as a civilization (in fact, with some capital letters, this became the title of his magnum opus), on Jewish community, and less on dogma. It was Rabbi Kaplan, as I understand it, who pioneered the Jewish Community Centers, saying that Jews swimming together is no less important than Jews praying together. His daughter became the first American Bat Mitzvah. He started a little rabbinical college in Philadelphia , where you had to get a secular PhD at the same time you studied for ordination. Something like this, anyhow. I remember a little of this history from my seminary days, but it's not what drew me to the Reconstructionists of today. What appeals more to me is the the Reconstructionists are a small movement (though growing), young, a little disorganized, very imaginative and not so monied as some of the older Jewish movements.
Twenty years ago (twenty years???!!!) when I was first thinking about becoming a rabbi, it seemed like there was only one realistic option for women. There were women in the Conservative seminary taking the courses and hoping that the faculty would decide to take the plunge and ordain them. I was aware of one remarkable woman who was, long before this became an almost mainstream option, studying privately with rabbis towards ordination. There was this tiny, faltering little seminary in Philadelphia that I heard might not even stay open for another year. Then there was Hebrew Union College, the seminary of the Reform movement, which had made the historic leap to ordaining women five or six years before I was contemplating rabbi-hood for myself. (Actually it made the leap more than a decade before, when it admitted women to its rabbinic program and agreed from the outset to ordain them -- sparing them the uncertainty faced by their Conservative women colleagues.) I had taken a few classes at HUC, and in fact what little Jewish experience I had had as a child was in a Reform temple. I didn't think very hard about options. I applied to HUC and, to my great shock and elation, was accepted.
I don't in any way want to knock Reform Judaism. There is much I admire there. Were it not for the courage of the Reform movement over almost two centuries, many -- perhaps most -- Jews would have been so marginalized by orthodoxy that they would have dropped off the map altogether. The Conservative movement would never have existed if Reform hadn't paved the way, theologically, socially and institutionally. Nor, for that matter, would the Reconstructionists. Reform has also, like every other important social movement, grown and changed over time, struggling in a conscientious way to be meaningful and, in its own terms, prophetic. And of course, in more personal terms, Reform made it possible for women to become rabbis. So the Reform movement gave me one of the most important gifts of my life. No doubt about that!
But I have never been comfortable being a Reform rabbi. It just doesn't fit me very well. I never took the career path I was trained for, either in my street work in LA or up here with all of you. We're not a Reform congregation. I'm not trying to move from here to anything bigger. In fact, like most of us up here, I really value smallness, simplicity, funkiness, the "Chelm-like" quality of our communal life. My values as a rabbi have never meshed too well with those of the movement that trained me. Now and then, throughout my schooling and since, I let my feelings get hurt by things that were said about me, about how I didn't fit in. One of the hardest moments for me was my ordination, in the enormous Temple Emanuel in New York. I wore a black robe and sat for three and a half hours while awards were given to people I'd never heard of and our class was never even mentioned, other than handing us our ordination certificates. It happened that that year, 1986, was the first year that an entirely female class of cantors was being "invested" (the term for ordaining cantors) in the same ceremony in which we were being ordained. This was never mentioned either. It was such an empty and alienating experience that I've always felt like I was never really ordained.
Somehow this has continued to niggle at me, this feeling of alienation. It shouldn't matter that much. Whatever my ordination was like, I've gone on to be one of the world's truly happy rabbis (usually, anyhow!) Still, I used to fantasize about restaging my ordination, having teachers I love put their hands on my head, offer me a blessing, give me a charge to go forward and carry on the tradition in all its beauty and wisdom... But then it got to be five years and ten and now almost fifteen since my unpleasant ordination. The horse is pretty much out of the barn.
Every Ellul, though, during that time set aside for self-examination and turning before Rosh Hashana, I would spend some time thinking about the Reform movement. What gradually happened was that, in my alienation, I didn't read their mail, didn't answer their surveys, didn't go to their conventions, didn't read their chat on line. I withdrew from the collegial community of Reform rabbis. And somehow it mattered to me, especially up here in Northwest Nowhere. In fact, I was aware that I was deliberately separating myself from their company, which is exactly what we are adjured in Pirkei Avot (2:5) not to do ("Hillel taught: Do not separate yourself from the community.") I was bothered, embarrassed, that I couldn't overcome my own alienation to connect with my rabbinic "hevra." Over time it became more and more a matter for my own personal teshuvah, turning. I would reflect now and then on how to improve my relationship with the Central Conference of American Rabbis, which is the Reform rabbis' union. It was different than working on a difficult personal relationship, because, while I am one person, the other party is an institution. They don't care about their relationship with me in a way that allows for confession, apology and restoration, the old Maimonidean formula that is so important to me. I felt wrong (and a little silly) to have hurt feelings towards an institution. But so it was, and so it seemed to remain from year to year. Meanwhile I remained without rabbinic community (beyond, of course, my ever-supportive circle of personal rabbi-friends), and a little sad about it.
Then just a year ago, last Ellul, when I was as usual doing my more exhaustive "heshbon ha- nefesh," (accounting of my soul) and again revisiting this small but persistent issue, I had a new idea. Maybe after all this time, I thought, I need a divorce. If I can't repair my relationship with this institution from which I am alienated, maybe I just need to leave it. And at that moment I began to think about applying to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association.
I phoned Philadelphia and got the application packet. Turns out it is a pretty exhaustive process. I was asked to write an essay, send college and rabbinical school transcripts, get three letters of reference, supply four other references and have two personal interviews. It was a more intensive process than applying to rabbinical school had been! I actually enjoyed the application process very much. It put me in contact with a number of Reconstructionist rabbis, who were friendly and interesting (as I am sure Reform rabbis would have been in a similar context.) What was more interesting to me was that, as I proceeded, my buildup of antipathy towards the Reform movement began to dissipate. There was something about taking action rather than just stewing which worked its own kind of healing. By the time I was actually accepted by the Reconstructionists, I was actually contemplating staying a part of both unions. Ultimately, many months later, I did resign from the CCAR, but without the anger I had started out with. Little has changed in my rabbinical life except for my daily look at the RRA-net and a different flow of printed things from a new rabbinical union. But it feels full of possibility. Maybe I will go to a convention, sit on a committee, get involved in a debate... Who knows?
I tell this little story not because it has any practical importance for MCJC (it doesn't -- we're not affiliated with any of the Jewish movements, and it's unlikely we ever will be) nor even because it's so earthshaking for me. It's not. It's a small positive change, I hope, opening some doors that were closed by my own rigidity. I'm writing this down because on the evening of August 11 the new moon of Ellul rises, and another season of intensified self-examination begins for us all. I am amazed every year by the endless possibility of change, of turning. It is the best, the most important thing about Judaism, this constant attention to teshuvah. There is something especially hopeful and exciting about taking the time each year to look inward. Maybe you don't solve the juggernaut the first year around. But keep at it!
Copyright 1999 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Last updated 06/27/99 (rge)