c. 2000 Religion News Service
(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)
UNDATED This is one is one of the happiest commentaries I’ve ever written.
On May 21, my daughter Eve Rudin Weiner and her husband, Robert Weiner, will be ordained as rabbis in the vast sanctuary of Temple Emanu-El, a New York City landmark. The ceremony will mark the conclusion of five years of study at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
As the parents of the new rabbis, Marcia and I, along with Eileen and Mike Weiner of West Bloomfield, Mich., will surely cry when HUC-JIR’s president, Sheldon Zimmerman, lays his hands upon our children and confers the title of rabbi upon them. That simple ceremony represents both symbolic and physical continuity.
In the biblical Book of Numbers Moses asked God to appoint a successor, and Joshua was chosen with the words: “lay your hand upon him” as a sign of transferred authority. Nowhere else in the Bible is this ceremony repeated, but Jewish tradition adopted the ceremony throughout the generations.
In 135, following the Roman Empire’s military triumph over the Jews in the land of Israel, the laying of hands was regarded as a capital crime and one courageous rabbi was actually stabbed to death by Roman soldiers when they caught him in the act of ordaining five disciples.
Today, the laying of the hands signifies that the person has gained “permission to teach Torah” to the Jewish community.
While that ancient history is of great interest, the May 21 ceremony will open wide the floodgates of vivid personal memories. In June 1960 I, too, received my rabbinic ordination from the same seminary at Temple Emanu-El.
And the changes in the rabbinate since then are extraordinary.
There were, of course, no women rabbinical students back then, and my black and white class picture shows a group of serious young men dressed in drab business suits _ no head coverings, no prayer shawls, no beards. Women make up more than half of this year’s class, and the full color 2000 photograph will capture forever the multi-hued skull caps and prayer shawls that are so much a part of today’s Reform rabbinate.
But the contrast between 1960 and today is more than gender and garb. The past 40 years have seen an enormous transition within the American rabbinate. Many of my rabbinical school teachers were refugees from Central and Eastern Europe. They brought with them the traditions and teaching styles of the great academies of learning that were destroyed during the Holocaust.
Today most seminary teachers are either American or Israeli trained, and the passage of time has claimed most of the teachers who survived Hitler’s genocide.
The average age of today’s new rabbis is higher than in my day. Indeed, Eve and Robbie are both five years older than I was at my ordination. Instead of moving directly from high school to college to seminary, most of today’s students had other careers, raised families or attended graduate school before entering HUC-JIR.
This year’s crop of rabbis will serve a Jewish community that is actively searching for spirituality, meaningful prayer and religiously fulfilling lives. This is in sharp contrast to 1960 when the community was just beginning to grapple with the devastation of the Holocaust that had ended only 15 years earlier and the birth of the State of Israel in 1948. Sheer physical survival was then paramount.
Indeed, 40 years ago, Israel was a deeply cherished but physically remote place for my class. But since the 1960s, every HUC-JIR class must spend its first year studying in Jerusalem, and that personal experience has profoundly enriched and permanently changed the rabbinate for the better.
But all this is merely generalized history. When Rabbi Zimmerman places his hands upon my pregnant daughter and her husband, I will rejoice knowing that a sacred legacy is being passed to my children. I will have the great joy of seeing one’s children enter into the same profession as mine.
Of course, their years as rabbis will be far different from mine, but, after all, adapting to change while preserving the core of Judaism has always been a hallmark of Jewish life.
I will also have the supreme joy of knowing the tradition that began thousands of years ago with Moses will be secure and strengthened with Eve and Robbie as rabbis.
And, finally, on May 21 I will gratefully say the traditional prayer that thanks God for permitting Mike, Eileen, Marcia and me to live long enough to witness this extraordinary moment in the lives of our flesh and blood.
DEA END RUDIN