From the Rabbi’s Bookshelf
A Rabbi by Many Other Names...
November 2003 – Heshvan/Kislev 5764

Three recent books with the word “rabbi” in the title, present radically different views on that word, its roles and potential meanings.

By definition, this is the intent of Rabbis: The Many Faces of Judaism. Subtitled 100 Unexpected Photographs of Rabbis with Essays in Their Own Words (Universe 2002), this captivating volume is much more than a coffee table book of glossy portraits.

Photographed by George Kalinsky, the portraits feature “rabbis that span the globe and the ideological spectrum, from youthful Orthodox communal leaders to pillars of Reform Judaism,” and beyond.

The style of each portrait varies considerably. Some portraits are classically posed and framed, including Jacob Staub, academic vice president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, posed in the Kaplan archive room holding an open book. Others show unexpected images, like that of Niles Goldstein dressed in martial arts garments, including a black belt, with the Manhattan skyline in the background.

The essays, edited by Michael Kress, editor-in-chief of My Jewish Learning.com, complement the photographs beautifully. They tell of childhood epiphanies, career changes in adulthood, and a tremendous range of backgrounds and approaches to Jewish life and values.

There a several parent-offspring pairs, chaplains, soferim (scribes), Jews by choice, lesbians, administrators and a professional comedian; rabbis wearing cowboy hats, crocheted kippot, helmets and black yarmulkes; guitar-playing rabbis, rabbis sporting tefillin, and one holding a clay drum. The array itself is heartening and speaks well of the strength that multiple pathways bring to our religious inheritance, and its future.

Far less heartening, and deeply disappointing, is Stephen Fried’s The New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for its Leader (Bantam 2002). One of the cover blurbs mentions his “breezy, readable prose [about] real life on and off the pulpit.” What I read was a gossipy, blowsy, heavily subjective account of a complex process that left no one’s shem tov (good name) intact, save, presumably, that of the author.

An inside look at the Philadelphia’s Har Zion Temple was a personally compelling subject for me. For three years, I served as the cantor at a nearby congregation, referred to in the book as “younger, hipper Beth Am Israel, a smaller Conservative congregation down the road.” Multiple references to Beth Am repeat this theme of down-the-road or down-the-street, accompanied by slightly tarnished accolades for its “bright” “young” “appealing” rabbi, despite the synagogue sanctuary’s “Mickey Mouse” appearance.

Fried is described as an award-winning journalist and essayist, who writes for a number of periodicals, including GQ and Glamour. The entire book has the faint air of an expose written for a glossy publication. Fried himself, and his relationship to Rabbi Gerald Wolpe - the rabbi whose retirement is the book’s ostensible subject - often takes the spotlight. He offhandedly shares his distanced stance towards Jewish traditions and practices, but never really exposes himself to the scrutiny and judgment he brings to bear on the members of Har Zion who are either engaged in the search process, or had the bad fortune to converse with the author during his years of “research.”

There are academics in various disciplines, as well as other journalists, who have written cogently about the challenges and oddities of synagogue politics and the rabbi-congregational relations. I have yet to read an article or book that treated its subject with such a sensationalistic tone. One of its many disturbing features is the quoting of many shul members, showing them in a poor light. Many, if not all, of these quotes, could have been disguised; the average reader does not need to know the name of every single passing commentator on the rabbi search process to fully appreciate it.

On the other hand, poorly titled as it is, Arthur Magida’s The Rabbi and the Hit Man: A True Tale of Murder, Passion and the Shattered Faith of a Congregation (HarperCollins 2003) treats the members of M’kor Shalom in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, with respectful distance. Magida’s main subject is the rabbi convicted of arranging for the murder of his wife, Carol Neulander, while serving the large Reform Temple he had founded in a Philadelphia suburb. He writes with quiet accuracy, and yet the book is as compelling as a murder mystery, even though we are well aware of the outcome, prominent as the headlines were during the years since Rabbi Fred Neulander was first suspected of the horrific crime.

Magida, who serves as writer in residence at the University of Baltimore, and has been senior editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times, covered the two trials in the case, the second of which returned guilty verdicts to counts of capital murder, felony murder, and conspiracy.

His careful research takes us back to Neulander’s college days, his decision to study for the rabbinate, the courtship of his future wife, Carol Lidz and, later, the rapid success of his solo pulpit in Cherry Hill. “Within a year or two of its inception it was suddenly the hip temple in town, attracting new members so quickly that it would soon outgrow the farmhouse where services were being held.”

Magida wrests clarity, if not complete comprehension, out of the spiraling combination of circumstance and personality that turned a rabbi into a murderer. And yet, though he reveals some of his personal outlook on the story in his acknowledgments, which appear as a postscript to the volume, he maintains a respectful scribal distance from the saga as he is relating it, enabling to reader to more fully engage with the compelling details without prurient interest. “I took no joy in writing about a rabbi who went bad … Neulander is an aberration. He represents what can go wrong with the rabbinate, and, indeed, with clergy from any faith.”

From a rainbow array of images and model, through a process painfully experienced, as well as awkwardly related, to a gripping narrative about an unimaginable crime, these three books effectively bring the contemporary rabbinate down “off the pulpit.” As such, they help all us engaged in the enterprise of creating and maintaining religious community – whether from the professional or lay perspective – with their insights and images.

Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton