At the Rabbis’ Convention
Friday, March 8, 2013
Congregation Bnai Brith, Santa Barbara CA
I was in the elevator of the Westin Hotel in Long Beach on Monday morning and the elevator was full of rabbis, all of us wearing our name tags showing that we were attending the annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. The elevator stopped at one floor and a woman stepped into the elevator, not wearing a nametag. She was just an innocent, regular hotel customer, not a rabbi. As she entered someone murmured “so many rabbis!” She looked up and said “is this the opening line of a joke?”
I have been in this field so long that I am not even slightly awestruck by rabbis, but even for me, it is kind of overwhelming to be in a hotel with 300 rabbis. On a typical day in Santa Barbara, there are a total of eight or nine rabbis in the entire county. So by comparison with my typical daily dose of rabbis, three hundred rabbis all in one building is a huge concentration of Torah, of ego, of compassion, of Jewishness, of power, of self-promotion and of humor. I was there in rabbi-land for just about two days and this is my report back to you.
There were approximately equal numbers of men and women. And since women have been ordained as rabbis for the past forty years, the women are not just among the young rabbis. The three hundred included baby-faced young men, who looked like they had just graduated high school. And distinguished older women, in their sixties, some of them friends of mine whom I knew thirty years ago. We sat in class together, or worked together at Camp Swig, three decades ago when we were starting out on this path. Full of chutzpah, idealism and passion. Now when we meet, we look each other over, with some disbelief, and smile at how the years have taken their toll. And there were quite a few of my former Hillel students, who I knew when they were eighteen or twenty…and now some of them are forty years old or forty-five, their hair beginning to turn grey. And my teachers, the men who taught me when I was young, have now all retired. Some of them were there at the conference…the venerable elder statesmen of American Reform Judaism. But many of my teachers are gone now; leaving my friends and me to lead this American Jewish community through the uncharted wilderness as best we can.
The topic of technology was in the air at every session. Facebook’s Corporate Vice President for Global Strategy and Policy was one of the speakers…a young woman, not more than 35 years old. The room was packed, and for a change everyone was paying attention. Rabbis around the country are all wondering how much of our precious time, our limited energy, and our finite money to put into social media. We were reminded at every session that young people inhabit the brave new world of Facebook, Twitter, Google, the Internet, flash mobs and YouTube…and if we want them in our congregations we need to learn to speak those languages. The work of a rabbi is all about relationships and maybethe new tools of technology can help us to stay connected with our younger congregants.
But the old man in me…the voice of experience, of wisdom, and caution….kept whispering my ear: yes, but people are still people. Relationships are born and grow the way they always have--in person, face to face. In my experience, love does not really travel well over the internet.
I did not raise my hand to make that speech, but I left Long Beach not yet a believer. Intrigued by the implications and the possibilities of the new technology…but unconvinced.
At a certain moment on Monday morning I was standing in the lobby chatting with an old friend and received a text message from Rabbi Stone, who wrote to me “R u in the main session?” I typed back “no, should I be?” To which she typed back “Well it’s about a national reform campaign re: social justice. I would love to know yr [y r] thoughts.” So I stepped into the session and walked into perhaps the most powerfully emotional presentation of the whole conference. It was a young Latina woman, highly articulate, with a commanding voice and presence, describing her own heartbreaking life story as an undocumented alien. Everyone in that room was mesmerized, as she told of her relentless struggle to get an education, and to become a contributing member of American society, and how she was rebuffed at every turn…and then finally the tragic moment in which she and her mother learned that their brother had been killed in Mexico but they could not go to bury him, because to leave this country would mean never returning to the life they had here. She explained that from that moment she has dedicated her life to fighting for immigration reform for the 11 million undocumented workers like herself, constantly risking deportation. And she ended her own speech with an electric call to action “Si se puede!! Yes we can!!” and the three hundred rabbis rose to their feet and applauded and applauded and applauded. Had Rabbi Stone not sent me that simple text message, I would have missed that moment.
I mentioned before that the rabbis’ convention featured a high concentration of ego, which probably does not come as a surprise. But to be honest the most problematic ego of all during those two days…at least for me… was my own. The prayerbook committee was rolling out the first draft of the Reform Movement’s new High Holy Day prayerbook, which is being edited by two rabbis that I like and admire. But as we gathered together to pray from the new pilot version, I had trouble turning off the voice in my head screaming “what about me? Why wasn’t I asked to participate? I even sent some sample translations….and never heard back anything! As for this new prayerbook….they have got it all wrong!!”
I did not raise my hand to make that speech either, but that’s what was going through my mind. It’s not easy to be a rabbi at a rabbis’ convention.
And an old classmate of mine was teaching some Talmud texts in a workshop Tuesday morning and I sat there for ten minutes thinking “I would do this so much better!” so I got up and left and went down the hall to the workshop on marketing, about which I know nothing. Many of my most impressive colleagues were in the marketing session. It turns out that being a rabbi requires knowing something about marketing, and it was never part of our rabbinic training. All of us in there knew that we were beginners. There I was able to sit happily, with my ego quiet and under control.
The last workshop I attended was with Ron Wolfson, a professor of Jewish Education at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, who has just written and published a book entitled “Relational Judaism.” Wolfson wants our synagogues to become less about programs and more about people, and believes that we have much to learn both from the mega-Churches and from Chabad. His session also was packed…..many of us know that he is right. He is right about what we need to learn, even though it is easy for him to make pronouncements about how we should change our synagogues, since he is not a rabbi himself and so doesn’t live daily with the challenges of assimilation, the pressures of fundraising, the illnesses, the deaths and the infinite complexity of real, life flesh and blood congregants.
Like everyone in that room, I was scribbling notes like crazy, as he offered idea after idea about how we can and should put relationships back at the center of our synagogue life. And then the session was about to end and he instructed us “ok, now stand up and put your arms around each other. I know this is a very Californian thing to do….but we are here in California, so just go along with it.” A shudder went through the room. “No way. That is not going to happen.” But then the fifty or sixty of us in that room, men and women rabbis, some in their thirties and others in their sixties or seventies, from Florida, from New York, from Texas, from Chicago, from Massachusetts and from Santa Barbara went along with him and put our arms around each other. And he then continued “Now I want to give you a blessing. You spend your days and weeks giving other people blessings, and rarely receive one yourself. Now I ask for the privilege of giving you a blessing, you our rabbis, who devote your lives to building sacred communities, and to caring for our people, often at great cost to your families and to your self. Y’varechecha Adonai v’yishmerecha….May God bless you and keep you.”
In that hotel meeting room, at the Westin Hotel in Long Beach California, just for those few quiet moments with our arms around each other, receiving the ancient priestly blessing from another Jew, not a rabbi, my colleagues and I stood in the presence of God, and I felt grateful for the gift of this sacred work.
Shabbat Shalom.