The New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for Its Leader - Hardcover

Fried, Stephen

 
9780553801033: The New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for Its Leader
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0553801031 ISBN 13: 9780553801033
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

The author of Thing of Beauty and Bitter Pills provides a close-up look at the Har Zion Temple, one of America's most influential Jewish congregations, as they search for a successor to retiring Rabbi Gerald Wolpe, capturing the everyday life of the synagogue, the complex search process, and portraits of Wolpe and his family.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen Fried, an award-winning investigative journalist and essayist, is the author of Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia and Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs. His work has appeared frequently in Vanity Fair, The Washington Post Magazine, Glamour, GQ, and Philadelphia magazine. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, author Diane Ayres.

Aus dem Klappentext

From award-winning journalist Stephen Fried comes a vividly intimate portrait of American Judaism today in which faith, family, and community are explored through the dramatic life of a landmark congregation as it seeks to replace its legendary retiring rabbi--and reinvent itself for the next generation.

The New Rabbi

The center of this compelling chronicle is Har Zion Temple on Philadelphia s Main Line, which for the last seventy-five years has been one of the largest and most influential congregations in America. For thirty years Rabbi Gerald Wolpe has been its spiritual leader, a brilliant sermonizer of wide renown--but now he has announced his retirement. It is the start of a remarkable nationwide search process largely unknown to the lay world--and of much more. For at this dramatic moment Wolpe agrees to give extraordinary access to Fried, inviting him--and the reader--into the intense personal and professional life of the clergy and the complex behind-the-scenes life of a major Conservative congregation.

These riveting pages bring us a unique view of Judaism in practice: from Har Zion s strong-willed leaders and influential families to the young bar and bat mitzvahs just beginning their Jewish lives; from the three-days-a-year synagogue goers to the hard core of devout attendees. We are touched by their times of joy and times of grief, intrigued by congregational politics, moved by the search for faith. We witness the conflicts between generations about issues of belief, observance, and the pressures of secular life. We meet Wolpe s vigorous-minded ailing wife and his sons, one of whom has become a celebrity rabbi in Los Angeles. And we follow the author s own moving search for meaning as he reconnects with the religion of his youth.

We also have a front-row seat at the usually clandestine process of choosing a new rabbi, as what was expected to be a simple one-year search for Rabbi Wolpe s successor extends to two years and then three. Dozens of résumés are rejected, a parade of prospects come to interview, the chosen successor changes his mind at the last minute, and a confrontation erupts between the synagogue and the New York based Conservative rabbis union that governs the process. As the time comes for Wolpe to depart, a venerated house of worship is being torn apart. And thrust onto the pulpit is Wolpe s young assistant, Rabbi Jacob Herber, in his first job out of rabbinical school, facing the nearly impossible situation of taking over despite being technically ineligible for the position--and finding himself on trial with the congregation and at odds with his mentor.

Rich in anecdote and scenes of wonderful immediacy, this is a riveting book about the search for personal faith, about the tension between secular concerns and ancient tradition in affluent America, and about what Wolpe himself has called the retail business of religion. Stephen Fried brings all these elements to vivid life with the passion and energy of a superbly gifted storyteller.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

His Voice

What we missed most was his voice. Our rabbi could make the most stilted English translation of prayer sound like Shakespeare. His voice was muscular and musical, with an accent that sounded vaguely British at first, but later revealed itself to be all-American, with leftover "aahs" from Boston.

This was not like the voice of God. Rabbis do not aspire to divinity. They have jobs in an industry that has, like many others, shifted from manufacturing to service. Rabbis are employees, religion workers, with unions and contracts and job-related injuries. They have to negotiate dental with the very congregants they must inspire.

Still, while rabbis do not speak for God, some of them have God-given gifts. Rabbi Gerald Wolpe’s gift was his voice.

My dad had a story he loved to tell about the day when Wolpe took the makeshift stage of a flatbed truck in the parking lot of the Harrisburg Jewish Community Center. It was the summer of 1967, the height of the Six-Day War. And the rabbi brought home this crisis from halfway across the world with such eloquent urgency that my parents were inspired to pledge to Israel, then and there, every last cent they had saved for brand-new wall-to-wall carpeting. Anyone who ever saw the mud-gray shag they wanted to replace would have to agree this qualified as a miracle. And it was documented for posterity. There was a record album made of the speech. My parents bought that, too.

But then Rabbi Wolpe left us. And we never forgave him for taking the voice away.

I was eleven when he departed, so I remember him only vaguely as an image in confirmation class pictures along the wall--all sideburns and pageantry, dressed, as rabbis did back then, like a human Torah. I vaguely recall him telling us to stop running in the hall between Hebrew school classes at Beth El Temple, and to stop banging on the candy machine.

But I have been following Rabbi Wolpe’s lead in my head for de- cades. When I pray, I still pause where he paused, emote where he emoted. When I hear the Ashrei, David’s psalm of praise, recited in English, I laugh to myself when I reach the line about giving the hopeful their food “œin due season,” because I can hear Wolpe giving “due” an extra syllable--”d-yew.” The way he articulated “all the wicked . . . he will bring low” was enough to keep me from going astray.

One of my strongest memories of growing up Jewish is sitting at Friday night dinner listening to my parents, my Nana and Pop-pop, and my aunts and uncles go on about the politics of the day and Wolpe’s sermons. To them, he combined the wisdom of the ages with the morning headlines, name-dropping his way through history, religion and culture.

On the night of Kol Nidre, the prayer that ushers in Yom Kippur, the holiest twenty-four hours of the year, they would eat dinner earlier than usual and leave immediately afterward to attend a special service--for adults only. All they would tell us about this mysterious ceremony was, “Oh, you kids wouldn’t like it anyway, we have to stand for hours.” When the grown-ups returned, they had this strange look on their faces. I assumed they were exhausted from standing. Now I realize it was a kind of awe, the voice still resonating.

I would like to hear him again.

On an overcast Tuesday in mid-November, I drive out to the synagogue that stole Rabbi Wolpe away. I had seen a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, one that a peppier headline writer would have titled “Tuesday, the Rabbi Gave Notice.” Wolpe was calling it quits, announcing a rather elaborate plan of retirement in which he would give the synagogue two years to find a suitable replacement and make a smooth transition.

Why now? Judaism is a religion of mystical numbers, starting with “the Lord is One,” in its most important prayer, the Sh’ma. Wolpe told the newspaper that the numbers just seemed right. Not only would the long good-bye coincide with his seventieth birthday and his thirtieth year on this pulpit, it would be the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of Har Zion. It would also be the twenty-fifth anniversary of the congregation’s controversial relocation from the city neighborhood of Wynnefield to the prosperous suburb of Penn Valley, the heart of what is now called the “Jewish Main Line.”

As I’m driving out there, the numbers seem right to me, too. I’m about to turn forty and I just lost my father. I have reached the point in life when all answers turn back into questions. After making the same professional journey that Wolpe did--Harrisburg to Philly, with occasional day trips to New York--I have been writing investigative articles and books from here for nearly two decades. Yet our paths have rarely crossed. I did call him once, in the mid-eighties, to get some quotes for a story I was doing. But we’ve never really talked.

For a guy whose voice is in my head, I should know him better.

My first glimpse of Har Zion is through a break in a row of evergreens in a typical McMansioned Main Line neighborhood. It’s a modern sprawl of a building, surrounded by rolling lawns, parking lots, even a fenced-in basketball court and playground. I use the side entrance, where the clergy and staff park their late-model cars while the moms idle in their SUVs, watching their preschoolers, and then me, dash up the steps.

I find Rabbi Wolpe in the largest of a suite of offices, sitting behind a utilitarian desk. He is surrounded by the overstuffed shelves of someone who has actually read the books. On a glass side table are the usual family photos and a bronze of his own head. Half-glasses balanced on his nose, phone to his ear, he waves me in.

Wolpe’s face has a certain cartoonish geometry--as if drawn using two perfect circles for cheekbones--and a fleshy ethnicity of uncertain origin. Mostly he looks like a man who works with his hands, dressed in his best suit and tie for a special occasion. Yet when he speaks, his face takes on new character and refinement, the rich charisma of the voice.

He asks--actually, he “aahsks”--how my mother is holding up. Fine, thanks, but that’s not why I’m here.

I ask him how he is. It’s a simple enough question, but I can see it’s not one he hears very often. Usually, when people come to visit him, it is to unburden themselves. He pauses, removes his glasses and leans back in his desk chair.

Instead of answering right away, he makes a joke about what it’s like to be slipping into his “anecdotage,” when new research is mostly dusting memories. He is preparing to give a speech in a few days to the synagogue Men’s Club, reflections on the end of his rabbinate. This could be a good opportunity to try out some of his material.

An only child of working-class Eastern European immigrant parents in the Roxbury section of Boston, Wolpe was raised by the Jewish community based at the synagogue Mishkan Tefila. It was a lively congregation, where one of his Hebrew school teachers was moonlighting political historian Theodore H. White, and one of the older kids in shul was young Leonard Bernstein, who played piano at the dinner after Wolpe’s bar mitzvah.

Benjamin Wolpe, his father, was a vaudeville singer, part of a “song, dance and fancy patter outfit” on the popular Keith Circuit of theaters. His mother, Sally, worked in the family kosher catering business, which was run by her older sister, Bessie, and Bessie’s husband, David. “The family was like a sponge,” he tells me. “It absorbed anybody who came into its orbit.” There was always a lot of food and, on a moment’s notice, forty...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553801031
ISBN 13 
9780553801033
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
357
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780553380750: The New Rabbi

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0553380753 ISBN 13:  9780553380750
Verlag: Bantam, 2003
Softcover