THE NEW RABBI
A Congregation Searches For Its Leader
By Stephen Fried
Bantam. 357 pp. $25.95
Synagogue politics are famously byzantine and tend to be of interest primarily to those directly involved. So the story of the process that a large suburban Philadelphia congregation employed to select its new rabbi a few years ago does not seem, on its face, to furnish a promising subject for a full-length nonfiction book. It is thus to the credit of Stephen Fried that he succeeds in weaving a compelling narrative from this rather unusual and not clearly appealing material.
In the late 1990s, Har Zion, an established, prestigious Conservative synagogue on Philadelphia's Main Line, was faced with a serious problem. Gerald Wolpe, who had been its rabbi for 30 years and had gained considerable local renown and some national fame, was stepping down, and the question of succession was wide open. Wolpe was a hard act to follow. Har Zion is the kind of place where the rabbi's ability to deliver a compelling sermon makes a difference. With more than 1,400 member families, the synagogue is not an especially warm or friendly place, and its rabbi is judged on whether he can captivate the imaginations of thousands of Jews gathered on the High Holy Days or similar occasions. And Wolpe was a master speaker. Most members of the congregation had known no other rabbi. Who could succeed him?
In most congregations, the interviews and tryouts for a new rabbi would be conducted pretty much behind closed doors. In this case, Fried, a freelance writer and former editor at Philadelphia magazine, was able to obtain considerable, though not complete, access to the deliberations of the search committee. By doing so, Fried hoped to shed light on the future of the rabbinic profession -- and indirectly, on the future of Judaism and of organized religion in America.
As Har Zion was going through a crisis, Fried was as well. Raised without much connection to Judaism, he was rediscovering his roots in the course of saying the daily kaddish prayer in synagogue for the year after his father died. The New Rabbi thus intertwines a personal search for religious meaning with a communal search for continuity.
Although he is a relative outsider to synagogue life, Fried does a more than creditable job of explaining both the day-to-day rituals and their historical and theological underpinnings. The Conservative movement, of which Har Zion is a flagship synagogue, set its primary goal more than a century ago as that of updating Jewish traditions while staying clear of the more radical alterations introduced by the Reform movement. As such, Conservative Judaism found fertile soil in America, and until the resurgence of Orthodoxy a couple of decades ago, was the Jewish denomination widely deemed the most likely to succeed. And it still may be the one.
But Conservative Judaism has run into some serious difficulties lately, and Fried has pinpointed them perfectly. Although the eventual and much-delayed result of the rabbinic search at Har Zion was not particularly dramatic, the lessons that Fried learned by closely following the selection process are extraordinarily valuable. Over the course of time, the Har Zion rabbi's post did not prove to be nearly as enticing as the congregation expected it to be. The selection committee found that many purported prospects either never applied or dropped out early.
Fried correctly notes the reason: Old, large, formal Conservative congregations like Har Zion are not as popular as they were in the 1950s or 1960s. One good candidate to replace Rabbi Wolpe observed that "the number of Har Zion kids attending Jewish day school, going to Camp Ramah [the Conservative movement's camp for teens], visiting Israel or just showing up at Saturday morning services and having [Sabbath] lunch with a few families from the synagogue is certainly not rising."
The cantor of Har Zion told Fried that after eight years in his position, he was disappointed that his kids were "growing up in a synagogue where few teens show up after they are bar or bat mitzvahed, a synagogue where nobody completely keeps [Sabbath] because there is no community of observant families within walking distance."
Therein lies the problem. As Fried says, Har Zion is "the synagogue of record, where somebody who wants to belong to the right synagogue belongs." But these days, no one has to belong to the right synagogue or for that matter to any synagogue. A Jew can be successful in law, business, politics or any other field without a synagogue affiliation. Synagogues today attract the Jews who wish to stay in touch with their tradition, not those who need to. And those Jews, by and large, want a synagogue that is smaller, more user-friendly, and more spiritual than a Har Zion. That is what was really at the root of this Philadelphia story, and Fried gets it absolutely right. •
Jonathan Groner is a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who frequently writes about Jewish topics.
