Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker forces us to ask: What does it mean to be a rabbi?

The hostage ordeal from last Shabbat along with our communal introduction to the heroic Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker have gotten me thinking about what rabbis are expected to be.

When I watched the first post-crisis media interview with Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, following that awful hostage ordeal from last Shabbat, I was taken aback.

Here was the man who courageously managed to save his congregants from a violent end, a man whom the world was looking at in awe — and yet he was not owning that image. He wasn’t using his pulpit posture of telling us what we all should be learning from all this. He was not pontificating or upselling himself or speaking with pride about his own work and position. He wasn’t in any way trying to paint himself as the voice of God or an authority in anything in particular. Instead, we heard about a guy who was terrified like everyone else, that he was actively using training he had received from outside organizations to neutralize the situation along with rabbinical training to stay calm under all circumstances, and that he was glad to just be alive. He sounded someone normal, and at the same time, amazing for his courage, as well as his kindness.

His demeanor reminded me of some old archetypes of the rabbinic figure — pensive, introverted, humble, and gentle-spirited. Not the looming-large, roaring, soaring, charismatic orator that we have come to associate with rabbis. But the old-fashioned sort who is more comfortable sitting one-on-one with a book and a spiritual seeker than giving grand sermons in a grand hall with built-in operatic acoustics.

I found him mesmerizing.

I don’t know the rabbi personally, but just from watching him post-crisis, I felt the integrity of his piety. He genuinely saw all people — even the stranger-slash-terrorist — as deserving compassion and hospitality. He took the time to explain that the terrifying moment when the gun was first cocked took place while he was engaged in praying, facing Jerusalem. He also tellingly, thanked leaders of other faith communities for their support. It felt like he was saying that his people are the praying people, no matter what faith they are in. And that their job as the people of faith was not necessarily to give a good speech but rather to reach out to all people with humanity. He said all that to me without actually saying it. It was in what was not said, in the intonation, in the body language, in the space between the lines.

That touched me.

It felt like the opposite of what we think of when we think of rabbis.

I remember as a kid when our shul needed a new rabbi and my father was head of the search committee. We had lots of candidates in our house for Shabbat meals following their “trial” sermons at Shabbat morning services. I listened to the adult discussions about their suitability for the job, with two main issues in my mind: how they offered rulings on halakhic questions, and how good their speeches were. Mostly, it was about the speech.

How do I know that it was mostly the speech? First of all, because we spent countless hours at our Shabbat table analyzing the rabbi’s speech — not necessarily the content, but the presentation. Was he a “good” speaker? How did his voice carry? Did he have a lot of “uhhh”s? Did he go on too long? Did he say anything uncomfortable or inappropriate? Did he have to read from notes? In our house, reading from notes was a big sin. Extemporaneous was the only way to go. We were grilled on this, as if there would be a time that we would need to know these skills (even though we were all girls so the idea of us giving a speech in shul was irrelevant). The quality of the rabbi’s oration was paramount. Not even the content per se. It wasn’t about what he said but about how we felt when he spoke.

Also, how do I know that the real issue was the speech? Because the person who was ultimately hired as rabbi gave a kind of strange answer to the Big Halakhic Question. I still remember it. The question was more of a challenge. It went like this: What would you do if you were invited to Shabbat lunch at someone’s house and you noticed that the woman was not using the hotplate properly for heating the food? Would you eat or would you not eat? Or perhaps more subtly, would you shame the woman of the house or not? (So many gender assumptions, I know. I was not questioning them back then.) The man who was eventually hired said, “I would sit and wait for the food to get cool and then it wouldn’t be a problem.” The committee found that answer clever. Very clever. But he never responded to whether a rabbi is allowed to shame a congregant — or a woman — for perceived sins.

Anyway, that answer was far less significant. They loved his speeches. He knew how to fill the hall with his voice. He was hired.

Actually, the only real reservation that the committee had about him was that he didn’t like to drink. I am not kidding. My father found it odd that a rabbi doesn’t enjoy a good schnapps, and was close to not hiring him because of that.

These memories returned to me when I enrolled in rabbinical school. The biggest emphasis in rabbinical school was leading the service, and especially the sermon.

I admit that I hadn’t fully realized all of this before I enrolled. I suppose I was imagining giving sermons (I did, after all, have training in public-speaking from an early age, or at least one particular idea about what makes a good speech). But when I was imagining becoming a rabbi, I wasn’t imagining it being all about the Shabbat service but about something broader. I think that maybe that was my Orthodox bias kicking in. After all, one of the biggest differences between Orthodox and Reform services is that in Reform, the rabbi does absolutely everything. The Rabbi is a full-on emcee. In Orthodoxy, there are many other people to sing and chant and lead the prayers, and the rabbi, perhaps, as other roles. But in the Reform service, rabbi is everything, and a rabbi’s entire reputation comes from the emceeing role. From managing the event, and controlling people’s emotional experiences. For me, coming from life as a formerly-Orthodox woman, I had very little experience actually leading prayer services, though I participated in thousands of them. I had some leadership roles — I chanted Torah in women’s prayer groups and in various partnership minyans, and I had led the specific sections that women are allowed to lead in those places. But I had never functioned as that emcee. (As a life-long piano player, I was thrilled at the opportunity to accompany prayers that way, although, turns out I was a bit rusty at it, never having played an instrument in a sanctuary until then.) Overall, I guess I was a bit surprised at the extent to which the vision of being a rabbi was so ensconced in one’s ability to hold the crowd. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been.

There was an option for rabbinical students to do more of the private, pastoral work. In my second year, that’s what I did. I spent the year in an intense program for certification in spiritual care led by Prof. Ruchama Weiss. That course was a whole other kind of experience, and was physically segregated from the main program of rabbinical school focused so much on prayer-preparation. It was like these were two were constructed as completely separate roles, only one was mandatory and was was marginal.

Interestingly, in a conversation I had this week with a few rabbis in preparation for next week’s session in my course on Jewish feminism, forthcoming panelists Rabbi Jane Rachel Litman and Rabbi Micah Buck-Yael talked about how the entry of women and non-binary people into the rabbinate has changed some of these models. They said that women rabbis have tended to de-emphasize the “charismatic orator” aspect of the rabbi and pushed more for the “pastoral carer” aspect of the role. As a result, they said, the status of the rabbi has been in decline. Whether that’s because of the presence of women or because of the shift in conceptions of what a rabbi should be, it’s hard to tell.

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Professor Daniel Boyarin has written a lot about the image of rabbis and archetypes of Jewish masculinity. In his book, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, he says that the old rabbinic archetype of the gentle, frail, neurotic luftmensch book-worm is based on the realities of a fearful shtetl life. Jews kept to their own, tried to obey the non-Jewish rulers, and looked to their rabbis mostly for women’s questions about how to make the chicken kosher and not to make a scene or be too loud or make life difficult for anyone. Effeminate. Boyarin argues that the rabbinic persona translated into modern culture with the Woody Allen-like wimpy, spineless, hunched-over neurotic Jewish man. Many scholars have pointed out that the creation of the modern state of Israel is partially rooted in the desire to recast these images of Jewish masculinity, to replace impressions of small, passive, powerless Holocaust survivors with the New Jewish Man, the massive, muscular Israeli soldier who can wield a hoe or a or rifle with the same impenetrable strength. Masculine.

Professor Admiel Kosman, also a scholar of Jewish masculinities, takes issue with Boyarin’s dichotomy. He argues that it’s wrong to think that rabbinic leaders have been powerless wimps throughout history. In his book Men’s Tractate: Rav and the Butcher and other Stories – On Manhood, Love and Authentic Life in Aggadic and Hassidic Stories, (originally in Hebrew; translated here), he reads these models of “effeminate rabbi” versus “masculine rabbi” in the relationship between the tannaim Rabbi Yochanan and Reish Lakish. These two powerful rabbis were a chevruta, study partners, and dozens of their discussions and debates are recorded in the Talmud. Reish Lakish was formerly a pirate (or what Prof Rosen-Zvi interprets as “gladiator”) and Rabbi Yochanan — who was the head of an academy in the north — had apparently rescued and converted Reish Lakish, and from there the relationship developed. But Prof Kosman argues that the relationship was not quite balanced, and Rabbi Yochanan was actually the patriarchal power wielder, much higher in status than his “partner”, never an actual equal. Prof Kosman gives an absolutely brilliant and riveting reading of the famous tractate in which the two men are bathing in the river and Rabbi Yochantan mistakes Reish Lakish for a woman and tries to sexually on her/him in the water — a story which, tellingly, ended with the latter leaving Jewish life and returning to his life as a pirate/gladiator. Prof Kosman uses this story to break the myth that rabbis were inherently feeble. He says that the opposite was true: they knew how to wield power quite well.

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I have been thinking about this a lot recently, as I’m working on the final touches for my book, Rabbis who Abuse, (due out May 1 PG) about the phenomenon of high-profile sexual abuse in our community. When I started this research 3-4 years ago, I was not expecting rabbis to be the headliners. I was looking at abuse in general in our community. The title of the book is a result of the incomprehensible number of interviewees in which the abuser was a rabbi. I decided to examine the profile of the rabbi abuser more carefully to understand what this means for our culture and our community, and use those insights to analyze other cases of high-profile abuse using those paradigms of power in our culture.

What I found in my research is extremely disturbing.