Written by Bob Chodos, presented at Temple Shalom on April 5, 2025
As I mentioned, Vayikra was the portion I read for my bar mitzvah way back in 1960. Instead of discussing the portion itself, I’d like to talk about some of the developments that have taken place in the Jewish community in North America in the intervening 65 years. A few caveats to start with. First of all, while I think the developments I will mention have been widely felt, they also reflect my own experience, and other people’s experience will be different. Also, I’m not going to talk about Israel or Israel-diaspora relations. Not that these topics aren’t important — they are. But they represent a whole subject area in themselves, and there is much else to chew on. And finally, this morning we read the same Torah portion, from a more or less identical Torah scroll and using a very similar chant, as I did on this Shabbat in 1960, and as Jews would have done in 1860 or 1760. The continuity of our tradition is truly awesome, in the original sense of that word, and nothing I say about change is meant to negate that continuity. But continuity doesn’t have to mean being static.
Soon after my bar mitzvah, there was a lot of buzz in the Montreal Jewish community, including in my high school class at Adath Israel Academy, around a dynamic — and, it must be said, hot — young rabbi named David Hartman. Some of my classmates and I went to hear Rabbi Hartman speak at his modern Orthodox congregation in the then-new suburb of Côte Saint-Luc, and we hung on every word. Around the same time we went to a show at Her Majesty’s Theatre, then the leading venue for English-language live performance in Montreal. The headliner was the comedian Jackie Mason, but we were more interested in the opening act, a liturgical singer-composer named Shlomo Carlebach, some of whose songs we had learned in school.
A few years later, when I was an undergraduate at McGill, my friend Harry Fox told me that a rabbi from Winnipeg who combined the best of Hasidism with the spirit of the sixties would be speaking on campus, and urged me to go hear him. I did, and Zalman Schachter, whom Harry called the Vinnipegger Rebbe, lived up to his advance billing.
Well, David Hartman became one of the leading Jewish thinkers of the late twentieth century and founded the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, whose research and educational work has continued after his death in 2013. Shlomo Carlebach’s melodies continue to be sung in synagogues around the world. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi — or, as he became known to his myriad of friends and followers, simply Reb Zalman — started the Jewish Renewal movement, embodying the union of Hasidic spirituality with the pursuit of social justice. So in the 1960s, I was privileged to have advance notice of some of the significant directions in which Jewish life was heading.
But the most consequential date in this whole 65-year period was June 3, 1972. That was the day on which Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati ordained Sally Priesand as a rabbi, the first woman formally ordained by an institution. She was the first of many women rabbis in North America, Europe and Israel, in the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative movements and even, down the road, in pockets of Orthodoxy.
Women in the rabbinate and other positions of leadership and influence have transformed Jewish life and vastly enriched our understanding of Jewish texts and traditions. Many women have contributed to these developments; I will mention just four who have especially influenced me. Rabbi Elyse Goldstein brought feminist Jewish studies to a wide audience as head of Kolel in Toronto in the 1990s and 2000s and has written and edited some pioneering books on the subject. Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg created a whole new genre of biblical commentary, putting the traditional commentators and Hasidic masters in dialogue with modern psychologists, anthropologists and literary scholars, with stunning results. Rabbi Jill Hammer, through her books and courses and the Kohenet — Hebrew priestess — movement, has drawn attention to the mystical and earth-based dimensions of the Jewish tradition and their connection to women’s experience. And I’ve recently been introduced to the work of Rabbi Dalia Marx and her brilliant insights into the Jewish calendar.
The year after Rabbi Priesand’s ordination, a book was published that crystallized another important development. Family celebrations aside, Jewish observance in the 1950s and early 1960s was very institutional. The large synagogue with a professional staff was the dominant model. In reaction to this, people, and especially young people, formed small groups — chavurot — where they got together to observe Shabbat and holidays. The Jewish Catalog, which came out in 1973, was intended as a kind of manual for the chavurah movement, but it soon spread to a broader audience the notion that Judaism was something you could do on your own. The second and third Jewish Catalogs followed over the next few years, and resourceful, self-reliant communities became an important part of the Jewish world.
Another book that represented a changing perspective on Jewish tradition came out in 1982. Seasons of Our Joy is a guide to the Jewish holidays written by Arthur Waskow, a 1960s activist who became a rabbi and a leader in the Jewish Renewal movement founded by Reb Zalman. What made Seasons of Our Joy special was its emphasis on the origins of the Jewish holidays in nature. In an afterword to a new edition of the book published in 2012, Reb Arthur noted that “the first review of Seasons condemned the book as pagan because it was so Earth-oriented … One important measure of change in the generation since is that today it would be very unlikely for any Jewish commentator to condemn the book that way. All, or almost all, of the Jewish community has come to celebrate, not fear or deny, the earthy aspect of Judaism and the festivals.”
Seasons of Our Joy also highlighted some of the mystical traditions surrounding the festivals. Growing up, I had never experienced or even heard of a Tu BiShvat seder, which is a ritual created by the kabbalists of Tzfat in the sixteenth century. Seasons of Our Joy contains a brief description of the ritual, and in the years since it has become an important part of how people observe Tu BiShvat.
There have been many other changes, but I would like to mention just one additional one: the increasing diversity of the Jewish community. The face of North American Jewry in the 1950s was Ashkenazi, White and straight. There are still many Jews who fit that description, but there are also an increasing number who don’t. Since the 1990s, many Jewish spaces have welcomed LGBTQ+ Jews and recognized same-sex couples as families. People coming into Judaism by choice from a variety of backgrounds — and not only to marry Jews — have made the whole idea of “looking Jewish” or “having a Jewish name” obsolete. Jews with disabilities are another group that have made their presence felt — and I certainly did appreciate our ramp when I came to Shabbat services in a wheelchair for a few months last year.
There was much that was beautiful and warm about the Jewish life that I grew up with. But I sometimes wonder whether that Jewish life, if it had remained static, would have engaged me as an adult. Etz chayim hi lamachazikim ba, we just sang — she is a tree of life for those who grasp onto her. In becoming more feminist, more participatory, more diverse, more inclusive of elements of Judaism that had been undervalued, the Jewish tradition has offered new ways of grasping on for people who might not have otherwise found one. And I’ve been especially fortunate in having, for the last 40 of those 65 years, a spiritual home that has been open to, and sometimes even in the vanguard of, all of these developments: Temple Shalom.
