The religious instincts of Rabbi Alan Lew
I had a teacher of sorts, a teacher of real world skills, when I was still young. One day he made a point of teaching me how to deal with a certain situation. I couldn’t see the point. I told him, “That isn’t something that I need to worry about right now. It’s something you’ll have when you need it,” was his reply. Life’s lessons don’t come in an orderly curriculum. They can come to us in advance, in the moment, or long after the perfect moment of need has passed.
Ron Wolfson, another teacher of mine, is the expert on the details of creating Jewish community. He has written many books and has had many many readers. I challenged him one time. “It is so easy to read your books. People think that they understand them, but when they put them down they think that they have changed, and they go right back to running their synagogues the same way,” and he said to me, “yeah, it drives me crazy.”
This week I heard about one of my fellow rabbinical school colleagues. He was speaking to a group and said, “This is the point where you are probably thinking that I’m going to bring up Rabbi Alan Lew … and you’re right.” The reference was to Rabbi Lew’s book “This Is Real And You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Transformational Journey.” There was a time when the books that one read to prepare for the High Holidays were either Max Arzt’s, “Justice and Mercy: Commentary on the Liturgy of the New Year and the Day of Atonement,” or the collection of classical texts assembled by S.Y. Agnon, “Days of Awe: Being a Treasury of Traditions, Legends, & Learned Commentaries Concerning Rosh Ha-Shanah, Yom Kippur and the Days Between Culled From Three Hundred Volumes Ancient and New.” While these two books are as vital and useful as ever they speak in voices of different times. “This Is Real,” could be mistaken for just another book of pop spirituality, which may be the key to its success. It is now, by far, the most popular book on the subject.
I have mixed feelings about this, not because I have any quibble with “This Is Real,” but because it is a book and not the words straight from the mouth of the author. I have had many teachers who have left their mark on me. Rabbi Lew was the one who taught me, more than anyone else, how to be a Rabbi. I was not his greatest student overall. That was my friend, Sara Horowitz, z”l. The two of them cultivated their inner beauty. She was a student of the study of the soul. I am a much more primitive creature. I’m not sure where I rate among the many rabbis that learned their rabbinic craft from him. I feel honored to even make the bottom of the list.
In his day there were so many people who wanted to learn from him. I remember the cadre of old Russians who would come to me at kiddush after services and ask (demand) that I explain to them what the rabbi had said in the sermon that day. I was lucky enough to learn from him as the Rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud did: from observing the way their teachers lived their daily lives.
Alan Lew had a messy life before he settled first into a life dominated by Buddhist practice and then by Jewish practice. He was a Baal Teshuvah, a person who returns to Jewish practice and he had a bit of that psychology. As Rabbi Golden would say, “He went hard.” Throughout his time as a rabbi in San Francisco he worked to turn the Jewish practice of his congregation to the more traditional forms and observances. “This is Real,” is a manifesto proclaiming the contemporary relevance of the order of the Jewish holy days, festivals and fasts. Rabbi Lew was committed to the observance of Halakhah (Jewish Law), but when the rigidity that he held to the Halakhah came up against his sense of the dignity of human life, he turned. He was not in the vanguard of bringing the Queer community into the mainstream of Conservative Judaism, but he worked very closely with Kenny Altman, the first openly gay president of a Conservative congregation and would have performed Gay Marriages if his health hadn’t forced him to retire. His traditional practice gave authority to his departures from it.
When we were looking for a rabbi to replace Rabbi Lew we interviewed one rabbi who looked at the combination of traditional practice and aggressive relevance and just said, “You’re crazy.” (He was not hired.) This is where I would like Der Nister to be, but we are building community from scratch, not running an existing synagogue community. This leads to some failures of communication between myself and Rabbi Golden. He struggles sometimes to understand why I care so much about certain things. Why is Tisha B’Av so important to me? Why do I care so much about Selichot? Because for me they are part of a proven system. There is a saying: “You are only as good as your tools,” but still, our tools are only as good as the way we use them. “This is Real,” teaches that the cycle of the High Holy Days begin with Tisha B’av. (In truth, it begins even earlier with the minor fasts leading up to Tisha B’Av.) It is so ingrained for me now that capturing the essence of the day on Tisha B’Av is a necessity.
This brings me back to the Tisha B’Av commemoration that CLUE organized and Der Nister joined in on. For me, the traditional observance with the reading of Eichah (Lamentations) had to be part of the event. There were only a few members of the organizing group who were really familiar with traditional Jewish practice. I ended up being the one who pushed through a more traditional observance and anchored the logistics of the event. At the same time, I didn’t present myself as a speaker. What happened was, despite the success of the event overall, that the connections between the texts of the day – Eichah, the Torah and Haftorah readings – which are finely calibrated for the meaning of the day, were not connected well to the social justice purpose of the event. This was a disappointment to me, because the speakers mostly did not make specific connections to those texts and as a result left most of the attendees to make the connections on their own. In order to get there I was willing to abbreviate the morning prayers, read the Haftorah in English and read Eichah in Hebrew, English and Spanish, and I pushed to add speakers who could present their own Eichah like experiences within the Eichah reading. I was hoping that this would make the ritual aspects of the event sufficiently accessible to be felt in their full drama, and that this effort would, without the usual sort of rhetoric, make the political point that we were hoping to make about the attack on migrants.
The failure to make connections with the tradition sufficiently visible was frustrating to some of the organizers who bristled at my intention to follow through on a full reading of Eichah and I gave in and allowed the omission of one of the chapters. The lesson for me was how difficult it is to maintain the balance required to make the Jewish tradition accessible: particularly for those outside of the community of those who live by it with regularity and hold that tradition as a central aspect of their lives. And yet this is a big part of what I am trying to do with Der Nister. Telling is worth a lot less than showing.
There was a time when I felt like it was my job to serve the tradition. Rabbi Lew certainly felt this way at times. It is easy to look at this way of thinking as a kind of foolishness. For Rabbi Lew though, that was only a part of how he saw his role. He tamed that impulse. He was able to express the will of tradition to be helpful and healing. “This is Real,” is the summary of how he saw that work organized within the Jewish calendar. I learned that lesson from him early on enough, but I didn’t really get it until much later. There is a way that I hold the tradition tightly in hand, certain of its value, while also being ready to set it aside, if that is what needs to be done, to save someone, or more likely, help them save themselves. This may be farther than Rabbi Lew would have gone. I can’t say.
Rabbi Lew is gone now, but his words are still there for you if you seek them out. They read easily, (His wife Sherril Jaffe, a talented writer herself, was his close reader) but they are more challenging to live by. Still, they are not in the heavens or over the ocean. They are close and this is their time.
