What Matters Most To Me Is Community

December 27, 2009

    I enrolled in the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College as one of 17 founding students when the school opened in 2003. I was then 60 years old.

    In my last year, in the fall of 2008, we studied the book of Deuteronomy, the last of the five books of Moses. Deuteronomy is a retelling by Moses of the story of the Israelites’ journey from slavery in Egypt to the edge of the promised land of Canaan. Our final project in the course was to retell the story of our own journeys on the way to becoming rabbis. This is a portion of my response to that assignment.

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I was born in New London, Connecticut, in September, 1942, where my father taught mathematics at the Coast Guard Academy. In the summer of 1945, just before my third birthday, my mother and older sister and I traveled by ocean liner to Greece where my father had taken a job with Socony Vacuum Oil Company [later known as Mobil Oil Company and still later as Exxon-Mobil]. My mother understood we were to live there, but my father informed her that he had accepted a transfer to Sofia, Bulgaria. He went there while the three of us moved temporarily to Beirut, Lebanon, where my mother’s parents lived and worked as Presbyterian missionaries.

    For the next nine years, from 1945 to 1954, my father was frequently absent on assignment for Mobil and our family moved many times: to Sofia, back to Beirut, to Athens, to Istanbul, to Salonika, back to Athens, and so on, with occasional interruptions for “furloughs” back to America. By the time I went to college I had lived for a period of three months or more at 27 different addresses. I have only recently come to understand that all that moving around made me hungry to belong somewhere, to be part of a community.

    My mother was an important religious influence in my life. She grew up in a religious Presbyterian family in which her parents were missionaries in Syria and then Lebanon for more than forty years. As a child I believed that God watched over each person individually, that God was concerned for us, and that God could and did perform literal, supernatural miracles, of which the most prominent concerned the virgin birth of Jesus and his death and literal resurrection.

    As I grew a little older I struggled with the problem of undeserved suffering. I learned in high school about the murder of millions in the Holocaust. That knowledge caused me to question my religious beliefs profoundly. Did God know? Did God care? Did God know and care but lack the power to prevent? Did God know and care and have the power to prevent but choose not to do so?

    I found only unsatisfactory answers within Christianity. The permitted approach to these questions at that time in my immediate family excluded challenging God’s role. I failed to investigate the ways in which Christians themselves were reshaping modern, liberal Christianity in light of the terrible events of World War II, in particular. The answers my mother gave me to my anguished questions included, “We must have faith” and “God has a plan beyond our power to comprehend, but all is for the good.” To me, those answers were unsatisfactory on many levels.

    By 1967 I had had many positive encounters with Jews. Joe Lieberman, now Senator Lieberman, was a college classmate and post-college housemate and good friend. I learned from him about kashrut as I ate in the college dining room while Joe ate his specially delivered kosher dinners. I learned about tzedakah as he made sure to have change in his pockets for beggars when we walked in New Haven.

    My law school roommates were both Jewish, as was the young woman, Alice, with whom I fell in love and later married (and to whom I am still happily married 42 years later). I started studying Judaism. It provided no easy answers to my questions but, unlike the religion of my youth, Judaism valued questions.

    My first formal teacher about Judaism, Rabbi Beryl Cohon, taught that challenging God’s decisions was not only permissible but could be a mitzvah. I learned about Abraham’s argument with God to prevent destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and Moses’ plea that God spare the Jews after the golden calf. Elie Wiesel’s stories inspired me. In his world, rabbis conduct a trial of God in a Nazi death camp, find God guilty under God’s own law, and then proceed to daven mincha. They question and challenge God, yet maintain traditionally Jewish forms of worship and, by clinging to tradition, keep their balance.

    This approach provided a place for me to stand in relation to the questions that had bothered me for so long. Christian theology long taught that Jews eternally deserved punishment for killing Jesus Christ. These teachings embodied and nurtured the anti-Semitism that permitted Hitler’s seeds of hate to fall on fertile ground. I began to feel that I wanted no part of that religion.

    The more I learned the more I knew that my place in life was as a Jew, not a Christian. In 1967, I converted to Judaism.

    My life since then has been one of ever-increasing involvement in Jewish institutions and study and community while expanding the role of Judaism at home.

    Alice and I joined Temple Israel in Boston in 1967. I became a Trustee and Chair of its Social Action Committee. In 1974 I was the first adult Bar Mitzvah there. Later we joined Temple Emanuel of Newton. I served sequentially as a Trustee, a Vice President, the Executive Vice President, the President, and the Chair of the Board. I am now a life Trustee and a member of the President’s cabinet.

    From the beginning of our marriage in 1967, Alice and I observed Shabbat and the holidays. We increased our observance over time, and found that each additional ritual or mitzvah added to our lives as Jews: keeping kosher; building and eating in our own Sukkah; sending shalach manot for Purim; extending kashrut to observe Pesach fully; searching for and ritually burning hametz; the list goes on.

    In addition to a desire to continue learning and to teach about Judaism, I chose to become a rabbi in order to be part of a Jewish community of faith and meaning and to inspire other Jews to take active roles in such a community.

    I love my studies (Torah, Mishnah, history, Hebrew and more) and I love to teach and I do both of these well, but my strongest passion is the connection of people to each other in community.

    I particularly wanted to join the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College as a founding student because of the opportunity to help create and build a new community.

    I have frequently started and sustained groups and assisted in the formation and development in the early years of new institutions.

    When I was a sophomore at Yale, two new residential colleges were opened. Students who wished to move into them could apply to do so. I joined Morse College, founded the newspaper of the college, and was elected to the student council from that college. I was the college speaker at commencement.

    In 1965 Harvard Law School accepted a federal grant to open a legal services clinic in Cambridge to represent poor people and to provide clinical instruction to students. I served as one of the volunteer students in the clinic, known as the Community Legal Assistance Office [“CLAO”], during my senior year. In the spring of that year I told the director that I thought CLAO should hire another lawyer and I thought I should be that lawyer and he instantly agreed, saying he had been thinking both those thoughts himself. I remained at CLAO for the next four years, helping it to become established and guiding it in its formative years.

    In 1971 the Massachusetts legislature approved a plan for reorganization of state government, creating a cabinet system for the first time in the state’s history. The cabinet secretaries reported to Governor Frank Sargent. I went to work in the Executive Office of Human Services as Deputy General Counsel in order to help create this new governmental entity and serve the people its agencies served. I helped to develop a system for publication of state regulations that remains in use today. I wanted the public being regulated to have easy access to the rules that governed them, rules that had theretofore been available routinely only to the agencies and only with great difficulty discovered by persistent lawyers working for the affected populations. I served that office for four years, then became the General Counsel of the Massachusetts Department of Public Welfare under Governor Michael Dukakis, where I served until the end of his term.

    When I left state government I worked first in a large law firm and then in a smaller one for a total of 23 years. Early in that time I formed and served as the first chair of the Boston Bar Association Health Law Committee, a group of lawyers who met for luncheon meetings approximately monthly under my direction.

    In 1988 a group of about a dozen people started meeting in a monthly discussion group. Alice and I were invited to join in 1990. We have continued to meet with that group every month since then, and I have led the group with regular reminders of our meeting times and places and our discussion topics.

    Alice and our sons, Ben and Sam, and I visited Israel in 1989. This inspiring experience caused me to join and actively support the American Jewish Congress for many years. I chaired its Commission on Law and Social Action in New England, a group that met in Boston over lunch every Friday and engaged in legislative efforts and litigation on behalf of causes important to the AJCongress. I was subsequently elected to serve as the AJCongress Regional President, which I did from 1996 until 2000.

    Starting in 1993 I organized an annual reunion of seven of my closest Harvard Law School classmates and our wives. That group has met each year since then, celebrating the fifteenth year of our meetings in June, 2008.

    In 1997 I created a monthly lunch meeting of my law school classmates in the Boston area. That group met every month for the next six years under my direction and continued thereafter under the direction of a classmate whom I recruited to the role of organizer and convener.

    In 2002 I learned that Hebrew College was going to open a rabbinical Sshool the following fall. I applied immediately, eager for the opportunity to study full time and to play a constructive role in the creation and operation of the school in ways that I had done so many times.

    In the summer of 2003 I met with eight of the accepted students to begin forming our new community. I had the idea to support our community interactions through a listserve, which I then created and continue to operate, under an acronym, suggested by another student, that stands for “Jews for Exegesis.” I have been a very active member of this community, often volunteering for various supportive roles. For just one example, when the school decided it needed to have a formal policy adopted governing sexual ethics, I chaired the committee that produced that policy.

    Soon after beginning my studies I learned that students from Hebrew College and Andover Newton Theological School were meeting in an interfaith dialogue group called “Journeys on the Hill.” I joined that group promptly and became an active member of it, supporting its communications through another listserve I created and guiding its work on a steering committee. In my last year of rabbinical school I was chosen to be a Fellow under a grant from the Luce Foundation awarded to Hebrew College and Andover Newton to continue the interfaith work of the two schools through their newly-created Center for Inter-Religious and Communal Leadership Education [“CIRCLE”].

    In 2007 I recognized that the rabbinical school would need an alumni association after its first class graduated in 2008. This is necessary because we would now have alumni who needed the support generally of an alumni association but also because we needed a Code of Ethics applicable to our alumni since many of them would not become members of any other rabbinical association. I therefore led the effort to create the Hebrew College Rabbinical School Alumni Association and brought it into existence in the spring of 2008, together with the Code of Ethics drafted by the committee I chaired. I now serve as the unpaid Executive Vice President of the association.

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    In January, 2009, five months before ordination, the Dean of the Rabbinical School offered me the opportunity to come to work at Hebrew College to help in development. I was delighted to do that. I began on a part-time basis that spring and became the full-time Associate Director for Development in July, 2009. I am thus continuing to build and strengthen this community that is so important to me.

    I have also continued in my role as the Executive Vice President of the Alumni Association. In this role I help our alumni in a variety of ways:

· Assisting the Treasurer with collection of dues;

· Advising alumni in their contract negotiations;

· Organizing a support group for alumni serving as solo rabbis;

· Facilitating regular conference calls of alumni;

· Advocating for our alumni to be accepted to rabbinical boards of the cities and states where they work on the same basis as graduates of other seminaries;

· Advising the Chair of the Nominating Committee as that committee identifies candidates to fill officer and director positions in the Association; and

· Scheduling and planning the annual meeting of the Association and reunion of the alumni.