In This Moment: Flipping the Script
My two professions are rabbi and journalist, and I’ve somehow managed to combine them. One profession preaches love and the other cherishes truth. Where will I go from here?
With just 65 days to go before I become rabbi emeritus of Temple Beth El in Stamford, CT, I am folding my weekly digest of Jewish information and ideas, which I’ve been sending to my congregation for nearly 30 years, into my Substack page. “In This Moment” will continue to feature my own observations along with recommended reading from a wide spectrum of perspectives.
For the first 40 years of my career, I leveraged my training as a journalist and rabbi, for mutual benefit, but primarily using my writing skills to serve rabbinic purposes, as an advocate for Torah, Israel and all things Jewish. Despite that, I worked hard not to compromise journalistic integrity and by and large succeeded (as a number of journalistic awards will attest). But still, it was rabbi first and journalist second, for four decades.
Now I get to flip that script.
I wrote in the 1985 NY Times Magazine essay that first put me on the journalistic/Jewish map, “As I see it, I am a spiritual leader simply because I want to refine my own spirit, to stretch myself using the texts of my tradition for guidance, and in doing so, possibly to inspire others to do the same.”
Through all these years, did I hold true to that lofty ambition?
I tried to.
Twelve years after that initial article, as I turned 40, I wrote an update for The Jewish Week and concluded that I was a better rabbi at 40 than I was at 28, but not because I had aged but because my relationship with my congregants had deepened. It was not so much about my age or degree of accumulated wisdom, but about the love that grew over many years of bonding (not bondage) together. That love had made me a more understanding rabbi - and a more sensitive writer. I concluded, “Twenty years from now, I fully intend to seek God as fervently, pursue and impart knowledge as passionately, be as open to change and amazed by each new experience as I was 12 years ago. With luck, I'll be as wise.”
Now that I’ve passed that anticipated milestone and then some, I see the need for a midcourse correction. I’m as passionate as ever and can stretch my spirit with the best of them, but I’ve found the grind of pulpit life to be downright debilitating, never more than these past few years. The one-two punch of Covid and October 7 has forced me to write differently, seeking words to convey greater comfort rather than sharper truth. At all costs, comfort.
While the country was fighting sedition, clergy were called upon to provide sedation.
And even before Covid, pulpit life was becoming unbearably painful, as clergy relentlessly endeavored to dull the pain. There was the unmitigated nightmare that was the Trump presidency, which led directly to Charlottesville and then my mother’s passing – the day before the Tree of Life massacre – a series of gut punches that left me wondering what purpose I was serving, as one lost rabbi just echoing the bromides of other lost rabbis, some of whom spoke with greater authority and with soaring poetry, but all of them lost. I saw it in their writing, in their eyes, their sermons, their formulaic tributes to Israel even as Netanyahu’s government increasingly spat in the faces of progressive Jews and competed with Trump to see who could destroy their country’s democracy first.
As rabbis we kept on “teaching to the test,” preaching what everyone expected us to preach, all the while besmirched by the right and betrayed by the left. And it was getting worse, not better, even after the January 6 Revolution was quelled – or so I hoped.
A million Americans died of Covid. Say that again. A million Americans died of Covid. I get paid for words. What words can address that reality?
Seven Million Human Beings Have Died of This Plague – But let’s move on.
Eighty years after the Holocaust we thought the last remnant of the survivors was about to leave us, that a new phase of remembrance was about to begin. But suddenly, we all became instant witnesses, all of us, to a pogrom so horrific in execution and intent that it can only be compared to the Holocaust. And so immediate, so televised, so in-our-face as to leave an indelible mark, a tattoo on our souls. So we restart the clock and Auschwitz is forever present. We have become a new generation of survivors. We are Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, Primo Levi. Anne Frank is Naama Levy, a nineteen year old dragged by her hair on October 7, who is still in captivity, whose story has yet to be told.
My whole career has been an orderly transition from darkness to light, from Shoah to a better future for the Jewish people, to a flourishing democratic Jewish state and the most successful diaspora community ever. I narrated that heroic journey. I helped mythologize it. I rabbi-wrote it in the annals of my generation, to leave this unfinished project to the next. That’s what I did, in essay after essay, sermon after sermon, column after column, class after class. There were setbacks over these past four decades, but I got to scribe all the achievements of an unparalleled age in Jewish history, from June 6 to October 7.
But that all came crashing down.
And so I still rabbi-wrote, ceaselessly, day after day as best I could. I wrote daily to my congregants after October 7, to try to forge order out of the chaos. People appreciated it, but I knew I was crying “Peace, peace” where there was no peace. I was conjuring hope where there was none. I was living in a world that no longer existed, where we could blithely hop into kayaks in northern kibbutzim that are now abandoned or walk down Broadway and 116th near Columbia with a yarmulke.
Sometimes I could bring comfort, sometimes not. Sometimes I could inspire activism. Sometimes not. Sometimes I could help people empathize with Israelis, or Black Lives or immigrants or trans folks. Sometimes, I could even help them sense the divine as we waded through each thousand-year storm relentlessly pounding us, one after another, week after week, with increasing ferocity.
Sometimes, when I was most inspired, I could help people to love one another more. To love the stranger, to love their neighbor, to love themselves. But sometimes, the price we pray for love is truth. I always tried to balance the two in my messages. But as a rabbi, I needed, like the God of the Kabbalists, to have a bias toward love, toward Hesed.
My reservoir of love has not run dry. Far from it. But it’s become too daunting for me to continue to be an apologist, to split hairs between what is genocide and what is not, or ethnic cleansing, or antisemitism, or Judaism or God. I don’t know how many years I have left, but I can’t spend them all making everyone else feel better - even when they shouldn’t.
And that’s why it is time for me to transition to journalist-first. The rabbi will still be there, but receding to the background a bit. You may not even notice. I won’t take it off my stationery letterhead or my Substack masthead. It’s a big part of who I am. But so is the truth teller.
From here on, I speak for no one and nothing but the truth, as I see it. Not for God, not for Torah, not for Bibi (God-knows) and not for any party, anywhere.
At a time when college campuses are roiling over an Israeli people that deserves much, much better, while many Jews on campus are being subjected to an unforgivable degree of hatred – I can’t be saddled with the role of priest-comforter in chief when I need to be a prophet echoing the cry of Jeremiah 8:11:
“They offer healing offhand
For the wounds of My poor people,
Saying, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.”
It’s time to transition.
Shabbat and Pesach Shalom
