Installing a Rabbi
11 Elul 5774
6 September 2014
I am so incredibly honored and proud to be standing here today, to install and bless Rabbi Minkus—David, my beloved nephew—as your new rabbi.
This is a sacred and momentous occasion not only in the life of the Rodfei Zedek community, and not only in David’s life, but for our entire family. I can only imagine the nachas my parents, David’s Bubbe and Pa—who eloped and were married in this very building, 61 years ago, by Rabbi Simon, alav hashalom—must feel at this moment. I’m feeling it, too. I think all of us are.
So, how exactly does one go about “installing a rabbi”?
I feel like I should’ve worn a pair of overalls and brought my big leather toolbelt. I do have a big, leather toolbelt, by the way. It was my favorite ordination present.
I have to confess that I feel rather unqualified and anxious about being the installing rabbi. I’ve never actually been to an installation before. Plus, I’m not really an officiating kind of rabbi. I sheepishly turn down requests to do baby-namings and weddings (with a few exceptions). I try to stay out of the retail end of the business as much as possible.
A couple of years ago, when my daughter Molly was about six, she set up a little table and chair next to my desk in my study and pretended to work alongside me, playing “Junior Rabbi.” She placed a volume of Talmud on the desk, along with some paper, a pencil, and a toy telephone, and she was Jr. Rabbi Lappe. After a few minutes of staring into her Talmud, I heard her answer the toy telephone and say, “Yes, this is Rabbi Lappe. Oh, you’re getting married? Sorry! I’m not that kind of rabbi!”
So, with the caveat that I’m not really this kind of rabbi, I’m going to do my best in the role of installer today.
It occurs to me that in the phrase “installation of the new rabbi,” it sounds like the cryptic word is installation, right? It sounds like something you do with an appliance or a light fixture. When, in fact, I’d like to suggest that the truly cryptic word of that phrase is actually… “rabbi”!
We assume we know what a rabbi is… But what is a rabbi, really?
As a Talmudist (that’s the kind of rabbi I am), I’d like to share a few, perhaps little-known facts about what a rabbi was originally conceived to be 2,000 years ago. And I offer these remarks, as I do with every Talmudic text I teach, not as the answer to a question, but as material we can use in thinking more deeply about the question itself. God forbid we should actually answer a question and put it to rest. That wouldn’t be very Jewish of us, now would it?
Elie Wiesel tells the story of a young Hasid who devoted his life to studying the religious texts of our people. One night, without any apparent reason, the pious young man closes his Talmud and runs out of his house into the middle of the town square, crying out, “What is the meaning of life? I cannot go any further, I cannot study one more sugya, one more passage or one more verse without knowing the meaning of life!”
Other Hasidim come running to his and try to calm him down, to convince him to return to his Talmud, but to no avail. Finally they recommend that he take a trip to the residence of the rebbe, a few towns away.
The young Hasid leaves immediately for the rebbe’s home. When he finally gets in to see the rebbe, he whispers nervously, “Rebbe, what is the meaning of life? I must know, I cannot go on any longer, I cannot study another page, until I know: What is the meaning of life?!”
The rebbe rises from his seat, walks over to the young man, looks him over very carefully—and slaps him.
“Why, Rebbe? Why did you slap me? What have I done? All I did was ask, ‘What is the meaning of life?’”
“You fool,” answered the rebbe, “You have such a good question—why exchange it for an answer? It is the answers which separate us, the questions which unite us.”
So, without actually putting too sharp a point on an answer, let’s explore together this question: What is a rabbi?
Where does the character of “rabbi” fit into the array of Jewish archetypes? What is the difference between a Jew who carries the title “rabbi,” and one who doesn’t? What are the halachic requirements for being ordained a rabbi, and what are its special privileges? (I’ll avoid the impulse to make a bad joke here!)
Dr. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Professor of Modern Jewish Thought here at the University of Chicago, writes—and I’m going to paraphrase slightly:
The Talmid Chacham, the Tzaddik, and the Navi (the Sage, the Righteous Person, and the Prophet) — these are the models of who we might be that the tradition offers us. They are paradigmatic persons, and it is to them that the pious Jew should turn, when defining for themselves the task of their own life.
The talmid chacham, the tzaddik, and the navi. The sage, the righteous person, and the prophet. Notice that rabbi is not on the list at all. We’ll come back to that.
But let’s take at look at them one at a time, because they will eventually bring us to the rabbi as we know him or her, though our image is actually quite modern and quite American.
The tzaddik, the fully righteous person: From the evidence in the Talmud, I would say that the tzaddik was never really meant to be someone you could—or should—actually be. Unlike the Buddhists, who hold out the possibility of enlightenment and boddisatva status to those who would seek it, it’s hard to find much credence in the tradition for the idea of human perfection in the conventional sense.
Rather, it’s finding meaning in the messiness of life that is the real goal.
As Rabi Abahu says in the Talmud, “Hamakom she’ba’alei teshuva omdin, tzaddikim gemurim einam omdin.” “The place where those who have transgressed and done teshuva stand … the fully righteous can never stand.” What he’s saying is that the one who has erred and done teshuva and learned from their mistakes, achieves a level of humanity that even the most perfect person, who has never transgressed, could ever achieve. That’s cool, right? Put that in your back pocket as we enter the Hi‑Ho’s in a couple of weeks.
So, let’s check off “tzaddik” as a practical paradigm for who we might become.
OK, now the Navi, the prophet: With the destruction of the second Temple in the first century, along with the priest who was now out of a job because he no longer had a place to work, the prophet was also out of a job, fired forever more. Not that we stopped believing that God spoke to people. We just decided we weren’t going to pay any attention to whatever it was that God might have said to them. So check off “navi”/prophet, too.
And that leaves us with the Talmid Chacham, the Scholar-Sage (who, by the way, were the ones who put the kabosh on the whole prophecy thing and whose job prospects improved considerably with the crash of the priest job market).
And so the Talmid Chacham becomes the new “player” in Jewish history. We call them sages, or sometimes “The Rabbis,” but they weren’t all, or even most, rabbis at all! They were essentially learned lay leaders. And anyone could be one, which was revolutionary. You no longer needed to be of a certain tribal lineage or of any particular class, and you didn’t have to wait for a divine voice to call your name, and you didn’t need a priestly intermediary.
Access to God was now democratized and two new institutions arose: the yeshiva and the synagogue—wholesale and retail!—the yeshiva as think tank and training center for the new Temple-less Judaism, and the synagogue as the place where that new Judaism would be translated to the masses (which probably numbered in the dozens at first, after the vast majority of Jews had simply opted out after the Destruction).
And there were two requirements for being a talmid chacham, for being a player—for being given the authority to sit at the yeshiva table and take part in the project of learning, modifying, recreating, and then translating and transmitting Judaism to the People. And those two requirements were to be gamirna and savirna.
Gamirna: to be learned, and to be learning. According to Rashi, that consisted of knowing your mishnahs by heart. You know how much material that is? Someone hold up a siddur for me. OK, great. If you laid every mishnah end to end, without all the later commentaries printed alongside them, it would be about a quarter of the size of this siddur. You could do that! Right?
And the second requirement was to be savirna: to possess svara—deep moral intuition. According to Rabbi Menachem Elon, alav hashalom, the late Deputy Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, svara entails an appreciation of the characteristics of human beings in their social relationships, and a careful study of the real world and its manifestations. It’s reasoning that penetrates into the essence of things and reflects a profound understanding of human nature. In short, it’s what your kishkes tell you is right when you have insight into yourself, your fellow human beings, and empathic sensitivity to their struggles. And you’ve got that, right?!
Final important point about svara: The halachic system elevated svara to the level of Torah—made them equal in authority!—and allowed anyone who was gamirna and savirna to overturn the Torah based upon their svara. That’s very powerful. It speaks to the confidence that the tradition has in each and every one of us to use our lived experience of life to judge the tradition itself. As long as we’re gamirna—as long as we’re in a process of serious learning.
Those two, being gamirna and savirna, were—and remain still—the only two halachic requirements to being a player in the halachic system. Notice what isn’t required: the title “rabbi.”
As I said before, most of the sages didn’t carry the title “rabbi.” Those who wanted to, could, but the title “rabbi” gave you one and only one privilege that those without the title didn’t have; namely, indemnification against financial damages in the event that a halachic decision you made ended up costing someone else money who might then try to sue you to recover.
Example: Let’s say you’re gamirna and savirna and have the title rabbi and are called in by a family to make sure the chickens for their daughter’s wedding are kosher. You examine the chickens, determine that they are, and an hour before the ceremony it’s discovered that the chickens are actually not kosher, and the family has to bring in catered chickens at a cost of $10,000. Can they sue you for the $10,000? No! You’re off the hook. But let’s say you’re gamirna and savirna but don’t have the title rabbi. A family brings you in to examine the chickens for their daughter’s wedding. You say they’re kosher. They turn out not to be. $10,000 for catered chickens. Guess what—when they come after you for the $10,000, you’re gonna be liable and have to pay up.
As I was learning and thinking about this with David the other day—by the way, learning Talmud with the boy you helped carry home from the hospital the day he was born, who’s now gamirna and savirna? Priceless! One of the greatest joys of my life. Anyhow, David said something that opened this up even further for me: Maybe, he suggested, this privilege was not just an economic indemnification, but essentially a freedom-of-the-pulpit kind of thing, a kind of tenure for rabbis—allowing them to say unpopular things without fear of job loss or retribution. Or maybe it was part of what allowed the Rabbis to make halachic calls that went beyond the bounds of the strictly defensible letter of the law.
Which, for me, shed new light on one of my favorite Jewish stories, another chicken story: Two rabbis are walking down the road. It’s late Friday afternoon, right before shabbos, when an elderly, obviously poor, woman approaches them. With a chicken. “Rabbis,” she says, “is this chicken kosher? I’ve just bought it, but I’m worried that it may not be.” The first rabbi examines the chicken very carefully, hands it back to the woman and says, “Yes, absolutely. This chicken is most definitely kosher. Good shabbos!” As the woman leaves, the second rabbi says to the first: “You know as well as I do that that chicken wasn’t kosher! It was clearly treif! How can you be so makil about kashrut?!” (“How can you be so lenient about kashrut?!”) And the first rabbi says, “I’m not makil about kashrut. I’m machmir about ahavas yisroel!” (“I’m not lenient about kashrut. I’m stringent about love for my fellow Jew!”)
The ability to make that objectively tref chicken existentially kosher is the rabbi’s knowledge that he can use his svara, which aches for this woman, to do within the bounds of the halachic system that which, without his title’s insurance policy, would have been an indefensible abuse of that halachic system.
And to this day, the halacha remains: to be a player (to be involved in the upgrading and modification of the Jewish system), all you need is to be gamirna and savirna and you’re good to go. No title or ordination necessary.
What this means, in short, is that every Jew can be a player. You gotta do some serious learning, but not as much as you’d think, and you don’t have to go to rabbinical school. (Remember, the Rabbis of the Talmud never went to rabbinical school!)
In this week’s parsha, Ki Tetzei, we find some of the most classic examples of what drove the Rabbis to bring their gamirna-and-savirna-ness to bear, to the point of overturning Torah itself. By the way, I’m going to go back to the convention of calling the guys who do this “The Rabbis,” just as a shorthand now.
The svara of these guys told them that what Moshe had handed down to them wasn’t to be accepted uncritically, and that some of it was causing suffering, in spite of the fact that it had all been a serious upgrade on the norms of the time. They brought their svara to bear on the biblical traditions they inherited and, determining that svara could trump even a biblical mandate (which remains true to this day), they made radical innovations.
I’ll give you just one example—probably the most famous—from our parsha: the stubborn and rebellious son. The ben sorer u’moreh. The Torah says:
If a man has a wayward and defiant son, who does not heed his father or mother and does not obey them even after they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the public place of his community. They shall say to the elders of his town, "This son of ours is disloyal and defiant; he does not heed us. He is a glutton and a drunkard. Thereupon the men of his town shall stone him to death. Thus you will sweep out evil from your midst: all Israel will hear and be afraid.
How ya feelin’ about that??
Now, as cruel and archaic as that biblical text may seem to us now, let’s remember that it was a major upgrade for its time in the ancient Near East where patria potestas was the law of the land. What is patria potestas? “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out!” It’s the right of the father to kill his own child with impunity whenever he wanted to, for whatever reason. That was the accepted norm. To which the Torah said: Well, not so fast. A father could no longer just out and out kill his child for no reason. He would have to have reasons, and then he’d have to involve the elders of the town, and they would carry out the killing. Now, while I’m sure this doesn’t seem like much of an upgrade to us now, I’m sure this cut down quite a bit on dads just losing it with their teenage kids and offin' 'em right there on the spot.
But to the Rabbis 1500 years later, even this extra step of having someone else step in to murder your stubborn and rebellious kid was intolerable, and no longer our best guess at how God wanted us to deal with our kids.
So, they listened to their svara, and with a little sleight of hand and manipulation of verses, they came up with enough evidentiary requirements for such a killing to take place, that they made it impossible to carry out. First off, they said: The torah says “ben” and not “bat,” so clearly this only applies to boys not girls, so right there they eliminated 51% of the potential children who could be killed. Then they said that the eligibility period was only about three months after a boy’s bar mitzvah. Then they said that in order to qualify for such status, the boy would have to eat a certain amount of meat and drink a certain amount of wine, and have stolen the money for that from his father’s home, and eaten the meat and drunk the wine in someone else’s house, and both the mother and the father would have to be of the same height and have the same appearance and pitch of voice, and you get the idea. In the end, they conclude: A stubborn and rebellious son never was, and never will be. And the text then asks: Well why, then, did God even put it in the Torah? And you know what their answer is? Drosh v’kabel s’char. For us to interpret it out of existence, and if we do we, we receive reward. So you know what that makes this (holding up a chumash)? A treasure hunt! It means that what God meant us to do is decide which parts of this we’re supposed to carry out and which parts it’s our job to interpret out of existence.
And so, returning to our question “What is a rabbi?” we’ve surfaced the prior question: What could it potentially mean to be a non‑rabbi Rabbi? What possible role can every person in this community play in the traditionally radical reimagining of Judaism that’s currently in process right now?
And if you non-rabbis are gonna get gamirna and savirna, what is the new role of your rabbi? I’m not sure of the answer, but it’s certainly neither supreme authority who tells you what to do, nor mere functionary hired and fired by the synagogue board.
It’s probably something closer to the person who helps you get gamirna and savirna—who turns you on to a tradition that’s smarter and more sophisticated than you ever imagined, and who inspires you to learn it along with him, fall in love with it, and use it to transform your life and how you walk through the world.
To quote one of my teachers, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg: “In an age when laypeople are rabbis, rabbis can become rabbis’ rabbis and may actually increase their influence in the process.”
So, I want to suggest that today is not only the installation of David as your rabbi, but that every one of you is being installed today as rabbi-in-training as well, as talmidei chachamim on the path to becoming gamirna and savirna, to using the Jewish tradition to inform your lives even more deeply, to being players in the future of the Rodfei Zedek community, and of the entire Jewish people.
To quote Yitz again: “If we have the courage to walk this path, then a thousand yours from now, our story will be a Bible. And this Bible will not just affect us; it will affect the entire world again. People will tell and study this story of the Jewish Bible of the twenty-first century, and the people of Israel will again be a paradigm, a symbol of salvation for all mankind.”
My friend Sara Bamberger once told me the following story. She said when her little brother was around fourteen, he was bothered by some question, some issue that was very confusing for him. He brought the question to their father, and they talked and talked, but her brother remained confused. The father suggested he go talk to their rabbi, and he did. When he returned, he was so happy, so excited. “Well, did he help you? You’re not confused any more?” “Oh no, I’m still confused,” said her brother, “but now, on a much higher level!”
So, in answering our question today, my hope for you now is not that you no longer be confused, but that you might be confused on a much higher level!
And now for the installing part of my job:
To you, the non‑rabbis of the Rodfei Zedek Community, I think you already sense the kind of person David is. But at the risk of being superfluous, let me say, without hyperbole, that I believe with all my heart that you are the luckiest congregation in America.
You have chosen as your rabbi a person who is not only smart, learned, hard-working, a lover of the Jewish people and someone who has committed his life to its future, but a man of integrity, compassion, extraordinary sensitivity and empathy. He is authentic and honest, sincere and transparent.
He will let you into his life, and wants only that you let him and one another into yours.
And now, David, my final words are to you:
You are so many things to me beside just my nephew. You are my confidant, my chevruta, my student, my teacher, my friend, and now, my colleague.
You are the rabbi I wish I could be, the kind of person I hope to yet become.
And that you have asked me to be your installing rabbi today, I know means that I am more than just an aunt to you. You cannot imagine what that means to me. But may you one day know. May you be blessed to one day stand in my shoes, as your own son or daughter, or niece or nephew, stands in yours…
Some of my life’s most joyous memories are scenes of you and me...
- Helping you build that bridge out of matchsticks
- Buying you your first Talmud when you were just a boy, and learning with you at your dining room table
- The many nights we stayed up till all hours talking about God and prayer, and being Jewish, and becoming rabbis
But, my happiest memories, by far, have been watching you grow into the mentsch that you’ve become.
And now, my charge to you, David, is to:
Know that blessings are, ultimately, not words that you recite, but something you become and which you share by how you walk through the world.
Be bold. Be courageous. Take risks. And if you’re not a little bit afraid, at the end of your life, like Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, that you might have gotten it all wrong, and will have to explain it all to the kodosh boruch’hu … you’re not being bold enough, courageous enough, or taking enough risks.
Now that you’ve turned your collar around, as they say, and carry the title “rabbi,” many people will open their hearts to you and let you into their lives. That is a tremendous honor and privilege that few are granted and I know you treat it with enormous care. But it is also a liability. To quote Yitz again, “the rabbinic aura weakens the effectiveness of rabbis and reduces credibility in this age of the deepest hiddenness of God.” Ironically, the more you can play down that “rabbinic aura,” the more credibility and reach you will have.
Do not measure your success in numbers. Your impact will be in how your balabatim live their lives differently, not in whether they show up to services or this or that program. And like those atolls (remember?), most of your successes you will never even see or be aware of. But you should never forget that they are there, always, beneath the surface.
Soon, God willing, you will be a father and the rabbi of a community. Be the best father you can be, first and foremost. If you don’t, nothing you do in life will make you happy. If your children and your community need you at the same time, choose your children. Your community will understand. Your children will not. And now that your community has heard me say this, they can blame me, not you.
David, your greatness comes from your honesty, your authenticity, and your willingness to be transparent. Every one of us wants to be seen, and when you let others see you, you are telling them it is safe to let you see them.
You do not need to be an expert at everything you are called to do. There will be Jewish professionals in the congregation who know more Talmud than you, psychologists better trained at counseling, social workers more skilled at group work. But to be their rabbi is, simply put, to have the health and well-being of your community as your primary focus.
The day is short and the task is great. But never, ever despair, and always have hope. If you do, you will inspire hope in others.
“And remember, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.”
→ Return to Installation Shabbat webpage.
