I am an unreliable blogger. This is probably clear to all those following this. Anyhow, I have something to report: I have been accepted to the Prospective Students’ Institute of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. I am so excited!
To honour this, I am going to post my application essay, because it tracks a lot of my thinking about religion and my developing desire to go into a profession of religious leadership. I’m cutting out the irrelevant bits, but I’m posting more or less all of it. So, without further ado, here it is:
Before I introduce myself, I would like to thank you for taking the time to review my application for the Prospective Students’ Institute. I first heard about this program from Rabbi Amy Klein, with whom I had the opportunity to talk about Reconstructionism and the rabbinate before I left Israel, where I was living last year. This conversation was engaging and inspiring, and encouraged me to consider the rabbinate seriously and apply for this program to explore whether this career path truly is the right fit for me.
It is only recently that I began to think of the rabbinate as a potential path for myself. Until about a year ago, I was hoping to obtain my PhD in philosophy or a related discipline, intent on securing an academic teaching position at a university. However, soon after I began a year abroad at the Rothberg International School in Jerusalem, Israel, I realized that I had developed a sort of tunnel vision from being immersed in academic study for so long. I was reminded of the various careers I had considered pursuing before I decided to become an academic, and I remembered the days where I felt inclined to ‘do something’ with what I had learned. I remembered considering law school with dreams of becoming an international human rights lawyer, and thought about other similar things I had considered pursuing. I surveyed my university career and discovered that somewhere, around the time that I discovered academic philosophy, I forgot about my drive to be socially engaged – in short, I had moved away from wanting to effect change and begun to feel comfortable remaining strictly in the academic realm.
When I began classes at the RIS, I was struck by my peers, many of whom were, like me, visiting graduate students, but, unlike me, were not there to advance a career path in academia. Rather, many of my classmates were rabbis and lay leaders in training. The particular way that they approached the texts that we were studying gave me a whole new perspective. The texts were no longer only to be understood and interpreted – they were to be applied. The questions they asked were not only about what a text had to say, but rather were questions concerned with how these texts were formative of Jewish identities, and how they could be used to shape communities in the future. Concurrently, I was becoming interested and involved in programs addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I explored groups such as Peace Now, B’Tselem and Shovrim Sh’tika/Breaking the Silence, but ultimately felt myself most able to engage and learn about this difficult issue through the Encounter program. The unique way in which the program combined Jewish learning and social awareness really appealed to me. Ilana Sumka, the current Middle East Director of the program, repeatedly reminded me and the other participants in the program that Encounter was started by two rabbinical students – Miriam Margles, an RRC alum, and Melissa Weintraub, a JTS alum – who, on their Israel year, felt that they needed to do something about the conflict, and founded Encounter. This engagement with social justice issues in a Jewish context really spoke to me, and I found myself wanting to take what I had learned home and share it with my community. Furthermore, I was inspired by the tremendous achievement of Rabbis Margles and Weintraub, who were able to take their commitment to and knowledge of their Judaism and formulate it in such a way that encouraged others to come to learn about the conflict through the lens of their Judaism and their own particular attachment to their religion, tradition and culture. Parenthetically, I have recently become acquainted through my work as the Programming Co-coordinator for the Limmud Toronto festival with Rabbi Margles’s mother, Ruth Margles, a member of the Limmud Toronto Steering Committee, who has been very informative about her daughter’s experiences as a rabbinical student and moving into congregational work, and has been very encouraging about my desire to go into the rabbinate.
My decision to apply to rabbinical school is not one that has been particularly straightforward. Growing up a child of racially and religiously mixed parentage – my mother is of Eastern-European Jewish, and my father, of Afro-Caribbean Catholic descent – I have often been engaged, both actively and passively, in a quest to define and affirm my own identity. I grew up in close proximity to my mother’s family, who, due to various family and socioeconomic reasons, were marginal in the Jewish community. However, their Jewish identity was always front and center in my life, and it was this religious and cultural identity to which I have always been drawn. Despite this, my mixed race identity and my father’s upbringing in a devoutly Catholic family were always in the background. I was encouraged to cultivate a racial identity that drew from both my Jewish and my Afro-Caribbean parents. Religiously, while my parents agreed that my brother and I would be raised Jewish, I still learned about my father’s upbringing in the Catholic Church – his time as an altar boy, and his high school years spent in seminary prep school. This unique blend of my Jewish upbringing and my acute awareness of other religious realities gave me a particular perspective with I approach my Judaism to this day.
Judaism for me has become not only my religion – it extends far beyond Friday night dinners, Saturday morning synagogue services, and holidays in synagogue and with my family. It is my culture and my community. It is also what I study. I am currently pursuing my Master of Arts degree in Religious Studies, working with the Canada Research Chair in Modern Jewish Thought, Dr. Dana Hollander. My thesis toward this degree will be on the French-Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida’s ideas of messianism and hospitality, and how these themes can be applied to an understanding of the Pesach Haggadah and related liturgy. Through thinking about this project, I have come to realize that my concern with this area has a lot to do with my desire to make a place for my own form of interpretation within the Jewish tradition. It also relates strongly to my current thinking about entering rabbinical school, which stems from my commitment to interpreting Jewish sources and educating people about them. In particular, I am drawn to the possibility of being a source of knowledge of Jewish sources, and being called upon to interpret these texts and traditions as they pertain to ethics, community-building, social responsibility, social justice, and so on. This goal comes through in my thesis project, which aims to make explicit the ethical nature of such a key Jewish tradition – the celebration of the Pesach feast.
While my studies to date have not been informed by Reconstructionism, I am drawn to this tradition in my own Jewish practice and identity. My knowledge of and experience with Reconstructionism to date is a result of a progression in my own Jewish identity that began in 2004 when I participated in a Taglit-Birthright Israel trip. At the time, a large-scale event was held for all participants at Binyanei Ha’uma in Jerusalem featuring a performance, some speeches, and a large bazaar with both merchandise for sale and information booths about Jewish programs in North America and in Israel. At this event, I visited the RRC booth, where I met Rabbi Klein, who warmly welcomed me and explained Reconstructionism to me. She shared RRC course calendars, publication catalogues, and pamphlets about what Reconstructionism is, all of which I have on my bookshelf to this day. I never forgot about this conversation, but I was not living in a city with a Reconstructionist congregation, so my thinking about this particular approach to Judaism was put on hold.
When I returned to Israel in 2007, I met Isabel de Koninck, a RRC student, with whom I had class on the Rambam. I quickly became interested in the way she approached the texts and the seemingly encyclopedic knowledge she possessed. Although our conversations were mostly during class breaks, I got information from her about Reconstructionism and learned that RRC is a school that encourages critical thinking about the tradition and developing a relationship with Judaism that emphasizes community and social responsibility. Around this time, I started reading all of the available information on the websites for RRC and other Reconstructionist websites. I also borrowed some Mordecai Kaplan books from the library and began reading about the philosophical foundations for Reconstructionism. I was struck by what seemed to be a very dynamic and engaged way in which Reconstructionists pursue their Jewishness. Later on, Isabel put me in touch with Rabbi Klein, with whom, as I have already mentioned, I had a very informative and encouraging conversation about Reconstructionism and the rabbinate.
Since returning to Toronto, I have begun to attend services at Darchei Noam, Toronto’s Reconstructionist congregation. My first Saturday morning there is still with me – two congregants gave Divrei Torah, and after, they opened the floor for questions, comments, and personal reflections. This attitude of openness and engagement within the community resonated with my own values. It was then that I knew that there was a reason I kept being drawn to Reconstructionism – the high level of congregational participation was exactly what I had found missing in other services I had attended. It was the Judaism that I had wanted to find.
Finding a home within the Reconstructionist community has driven me to explore RRC as my first and only choice for rabbinical school. Because of this, I am interested in attending the Prospective Students’ Institute to experience a taste of rabbinical school, and explore how it differs from the academic study of religion. Although I have said that I am eager to move away from academia, I am also curious to learn what options RRC offers to combine rabbinical training with academic pursuits. In particular, I understand from both the RRC website and from my conversation with Rabbi Klein that RRC has agreements in place for coursework at Temple University and Graetz College, and I am interested to fully understand how this works. I am very interested in continuing to engage in scholarly discussions about Jewish issues, and thus am curious to know whether RRC is the kind of place that can bolster this sort of endeavour.
