Stephen Fried - The New Rabbi

A LSO BY S TEPHEN F RIED

THING OF BEAUTY
The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia

BITTER PILLS
Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs

THE NEW RABBI

A Bantam Book / September 2002

All rights reserved.
Copyright 2002 by Stephen Fried

If I Can Stop One Heart From Breaking reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fried, Stephen, 1958

The new rabbi : a congregation searches for its leader / by Stephen Fried.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-89712-8
1. Har Zion Temple (Philadelphia, Pa.)Personnel management. 2. JewsPennsylvaniaPhiladelphiaPolitics and government. 3. RabbisPennsylvaniaPhiladelphiaEmployment. 4. RabbisPennsylvaniaPhiladelphiaOffice. 5. Conservative JudaismPennsylvaniaPhiladelphiaHistory20th century. 6. Wolpe, Gerald I. I. Title.
BM225.P5 H374 2002
296.61dc21 2002016422

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

v3.1_r1

To my father, Jerry Fried, of blessed memory,
and the family he so loved and inspired

When I was a kid, my parents had a Jewish bookshelf. On it were three kinds of books. There were, of course, prayer books and Bibles: some ours, some accidentally brought home from the synagogue and someday to be returned. There were handsomely bound scholarly or historic books, most accepted as gifts and never read, except to look up something for Hebrew school. And then there were novels, like The Chosen and the Tuesday the Rabbi books and even Exodusthe pulpit fiction of the day, where the struggle between religious life and real life was explored in language that anyone could understand: the human drama of the intersection of the divine and the secular, the battles between God and man and American culture, the searches for spiritual awakening and the perfect bar mitzvah caterer.

To broach these same subjects in non-fiction, especially the emotional and financial intricacies of American synagogue life, was considered dangerous, bad for the Jews. And, to this day, thats still basically true. While Jewish bookshelves now teem with a new genre, spiritual self-help and how-to books, there is still very little journalism on the lives of American Jews as Jews. The scarcity is such that a recent book on American rabbis actually resorted to using many examples drawn from fictionincluding quotes from fictitious rabbisto illustrate points that everyone knows to be true, but almost no one dares to write down in narrative non-fiction.

When I first started writing books in my late twenties, I thought about following a congregation while it hired a new spiritual leader as a way of telling a true story about American religion. I was inspired by the fact that a change of clergy in my own hometown synagogue, when I was eleven, had made an indelible impact on my family and my community. You never forget your first rabbi.

But it was just a one-line book idea, and I was at that time only tangentially involved in religious life. I was a six-day-a-year Jewdoing the High Holidays, Hanukkah and two Seders on Passoverwhich I suppose made me twice as good as the traditional three-day-a-year Jew, but still far from observant or spiritually engaged. So I wrote other books instead.

Then, when I was about to turn forty, my father died. He was only sixty-two. And after years as a wandering Jew, I found myself attending synagogue regularly for the first time since I had set out from my bar mitzvah reception in Sisterhood Hall with my breast pocket stuffed with gift envelopes. I returned for completely selfish reasons: I needed comfort, and the synagogue happened to be a place where I found it.

I took comfort, and I also began taking notes, because I was finding the day-to-day life of the congregation to be endlessly dramatic. Its survival seemed somehow crucial to my own survival. And I started thinking again about a book that would resonate within my generation as the first wave of religious novels had in the 1960s for both Jews and non-Jews. I decided to combine my newfound search for spiritual meaning with my experience as an investigative reporter, and to capture the interior life, the sacred and the profane, of a great American synagogue at the delicate moment of generational handoff.

At any given time, many of the four thousand synagogues and more than 230,000 churches around the country are immersed in the heart-wrenching process of trying to hire new clergy. In doing so, their leaders must anticipate what future generations will expect from their religious institutions. No longer just houses of prayer, they are now big businesses responsible for delivering all kinds of services. Failure to deliver will put spiritual as well as financial solvency at risk.

It just so happened that an extraordinary synagogue, Har Zion Temple in Philadelphia, had recently hung the equivalent of a help-wanted signby registering its pulpit opening with the national rabbis union, the Rabbinical Assembly of America. Not only was Har Zion an internationally famous congregation, but the rabbi they were replacing was the very one who had been hired away from my synagogue when I was a kid, Gerald I. Wolpe (WOHL-pee).

Har Zion is one of the most powerful and influential congregations in the world. Few American synagogues have produced as many world-class rabbis and scholars, or can match the congregations ability to put its money where its mouth is. Har Zion is, in every way, rich, with an annual budget of over $4 million, an ambitious Hebrew school that is regularly named the best in the country and a reputation for supporting intellectual pursuits and social causes. The synagogues national status has derived from its dominance of the Philadelphia Jewish community, one of the countrys largest, as well as the resolve and wealth of its lay leaders. Har Zion is the home of the big machers. In Yiddish, a macher is someone who is a big deal or has a lot of big-deal connections, a person with power or proxy who understands how to get things done. All synagogues have their big machers, but Har Zion has a smorgasbord of them. With fourteen hundred member families, the various subgroups within the congregation are larger than many congregations.

Har Zion is also well known for the success and career longevity of its clergy: since its creation in 1924, the synagogue has had only three rabbis, each a giant in his own right. Founding rabbi Simon Greenberg left after twenty-five years to become one of the most important voices in the American clergy as vice-chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York, which is considered the Harvard of Judaism. He was later the first leader of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, which is every bit Judaisms Stanford.