Who is Reb Arie?
June 30th, 2009 | Tikkun Daily
This article has been edited. See the original post here.
My dilemma as a modern rabbi is how to answer the very modern question “What kind of rabbi are you?” I haven’t ever had a ready answer for that question.
Last year at a synagogue in New York the rabbi (with whom I spent Shabbat) said to me “I thought you were Jewish Renewal until you told me that you don’t eat before you daven (pray) in the morning. Then I realised you were Orthodox.” He got it wrong both times.
I let Jews and Judaisms merge deeply in me even as I make room for the “Other” also. I’m authentically Chasidic to Conservative Jews, authentically Masorti (traditional Conservative) to Haredi (fervently Orthodox) Jews, and authentically a question mark to Jewish progressives, with whom I deeply identify, irrespective of whether they are spiritual or secular.
It’s a strange tension, one I think that is felt by Canadian Jews generally, the majority of whom were raised in progressive families until the 1960s. My mother was a so-called “Red diaper baby”, the child of communist parents, of whom there are many in the circles I grew up in.
My mother was not a communist but I was raised with a Yiddishist culture instilled by the Peretz Shul in Winnipeg. My father, unusually for Vancouver when he grew up there, was raised in a nominally observant home; my grandfather was one of the founding members of the local Conservative synagogue.
Years later I discovered (to the extent one can discover anything about family in the post-Holocaust generation) that my grandfather was the grandson of a Polish Chasidic rebbe (spiritual leader) in Cracow who was the son of a Turkish chacham
Can one be modern,liberal, and deeply traditional? Yes. I am.
