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Picking a new rabbi? A new novel about a church shows how
(JTA) — About a decade ago, I served on my synagogue’s rabbinic search committee. Normally I am allergic to any activity at which minutes will be taken, but it was a great experience, thanks to the care and intelligence that my fellow committee members brought to the process. Flush with satisfaction for a job well done and probably a little full of ourselves, we even imagined other synagogues might learn from our example. We spoke about putting together a seminar, or perhaps a how-to book.
No one, I recall, suggested turning the experience into a novel.
That’s why I’m not Michelle Huneven, who this year published a novel about a church’s search for a new minister. I’ve been recommending it to anyone who wants to understand shul politics, or wants reassurance that Jews are just like everybody else, no more and no less.
“Search” is narrated by Dana, a 50-something restaurant critic, former seminarian and once-active congregant at a Unitarian Universalist church in Arroyo, California, who is recruited to the search committee when the current pastor announces plans to retire. The book tracks the search process from in-house focus groups to Skype interviews with applicants to the finalists’ “candidating week” — what you and I might call “auditions.”
Despite an unlikely premise for a mainstream novel, ”Search” is a smart, funny and enlightening book about contemporary religion, especially of the liberal, undogmatic variety that is typical of Unitarian Universalism and, well, much of non-Orthodox Judaism. It’s a worthy companion to “The New Rabbi,” Stephen Fried’s 2002 nonfiction book about a Philadelphia-area synagogue and its own search.
Huneven captures the impossible nature of a clergy person’s job, and especially the unrealistic expectation of congregations that want their spiritual leader to be all things to all people. Trying to narrow down what they are looking for, members of the search committee call out qualifications:
“‘Sermons with more spiritual depth and intellectual content,’ said Charlotte.
“‘Someone with an efficient, organized management style,’ said Belinda.”
Wonders Dana: “Who didn’t want a warm presence with a progressive social conscience, the management skills of a corporate CEO, and the work-life boundaries of a New Age life coach?”
As the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly warns in its manual for search committees, searches founder “not because of a dearth of qualified candidates but because the congregation’s expectations of rabbinic candidates is unrealistic.”
Regular synagogue-goers will recognize the tensions in the novel between the older members and the newcomers, between boomers and millennials, between theists and humanists. At one point, the assistant minister remembers when a midweek service led by a student intern began attracting a core of people who weren’t showing up on Sundays.
“You can’t have two congregations, no matter how small one is,” she explains. “It sets up a potential schism.”
Clergy searches are fraught because nearly every congregant regards themself as the rabbi’s boss. On the flip side, members grow attached to longtime rabbis, even when they outlast their changing congregations. In “Search,” the senior minister has been with the church for eight years, but remains under the shadow of his beloved predecessor, who had served for 28 years. (I was married by the “new rabbi” at my wife’s family’s synagogue, who at that point had been on the job for about 20 years.)
“Search” isn’t a satire, exactly, but Huneven has fun with the political and social winds that are blowing through liberal denominations. Some of the congregants are set on hiring a woman after almost four decades of male leadership. “But we can’t say that explicitly,” Dana warns. Another character is angling to be the head of the national church association, “though it’s not such a clear shot for straight white guys these days,” says a church consultant.
Unitarian Universalist, or UU, churches are also staunchly secular, which means the clergy don’t have to express a belief in God, let alone Jesus or a strict theology. That brings with it the paradox of choice: “Our ministers can be gay, trans, Buddhist, atheist, any race, or same-sex adoptive parents with mixed-race families. You name it,” says a member of the committee. “That’s the future. Everybody’s in.”
I would guess that a lot of liberal synagogues would love to be as open and diverse as that, but bump up against the reality that, despite a growing number of Jews by choice and Jews of color, synagogues tend to be white, upper-middle-class and heteronormative. As for theology, rare is the synagogue that doesn’t want its rabbi to “have been inspired to serve God,” as the R.A. handbook puts it; on the other hand, search committees disagree about how much theology and “God talk” they want from the bima.
And yet, even the most secular UU church or most liberal synagogue pursues the sacred in the ways they gather, worship, mourn and serve the community. As the squabbles intensify in “Search,” one older member of the committee laments that they’ve lost sight of their goal: how the search for a new clergyperson is a “a sacred task that will grow us spiritually.”
During my time on the search committee, I saw the sausage-making of synagogue life. Compromise is always hard. Even the most thorough, transparent search process is bound to disappoint someone.
And “Search” the novel can be, at times, as tedious as a real-life rabbinic search, as characters deliberate over candidates at painstaking length. But Huneven understands that holiness is not just a matter of reading from a prayer book or studying from a text, but lives in the way people create communities and choose their leaders. It’s a messy process, but if you do it in good faith and in a spirit of humility, you might end up with a pretty great rabbi.
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The boycott of Israel is increasingly targeting individuals
As Israel’s international pariah status grows, the movement intended to boycott and isolate the country is starting to target individual Israelis — including many with little or no connection to Israel’s actions, and in some cases those who are aligned with its international critics.
Organizers of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which seeks to isolate Israel, have focused on organizations and companies that they contend support the Israeli state, whether or not they are located in Israel, while cautioning that “it does not call for or condone boycotts of individuals because of their Israeli or Jewish origin.”
But that doesn’t stop it from happening.
Nadav Lapid, an Israeli filmmaker and dissident living in France, was the latest victim of this trend. But it has also hit Israeli celebrities who have posted perfunctory statements of solidarity with the country, Israeli musicians with no controversial statements and Israeli chefs operating restaurants in the United States. Israelis have been assaulted for speaking Hebrew abroad, and Israelis studying at American universities have reported being ostracized by classmates.
R.F. Kuang, an American author, even faced backlash from fans for including an Israeli character in her latest novel.
Sometimes the Israelis who face opprobrium are genuine advocates for the country. Others are just Israelis who have expressed warm feelings toward their homeland. Deni Avdija, a star forward on the Portland Trail Blazers, is a prime example of this. He has not shared his political views about Israel or its actions in Gaza, once wrote “Am Yisrael Chai” on his sneakers and wrapped himself in an Israeli flag courtside after Oct. 7.
“I obviously stand for my country, because that’s where I’m from,” he told the Athletic. “I don’t really get into politics, because it’s not my job.”
He scoffed at “all this hate” from fans who act “like I’m deciding things in the world.”
***
The justification for this kind of targeting varies, but it centers on a few key arguments. One is a misunderstanding of the boycott movement and its demands. An Israeli Harvard graduate student recounted a classmate who requested not to work with the Israeli student because “they had pro-Palestinian politics that required them to avoid normal relations, such as collaborating on a school group project, with an Israeli.”
This is not what the BDS movement classifies as “normalization,” which it describes as Israelis and Arabs sharing a public platform together.
Other arguments for shunning Israelis raise thornier issues.
Two major claims center on the premise that Israeli Jews are uniquely complicit in their country’s human rights abuses. If you believe that Israel is a settler colony operating under an apartheid regime, then the country’s Jewish citizens are benefiting from this dynamic in ways that, say, Russian or Chinese citizens do not inherently benefit from their own government’s problematic actions.
And, more tangibly, Israel’s policy of mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces means that most of its Jewish citizens serve in the military — helping the government maintain its policies toward the Palestinians regardless of their personal political views.
This can be distilled into a neat story of collective guilt — Israelis are all settlers on stolen land, and none of them are true civilians because they are either future or former soldiers — that was used by some extremists to justify Hamas attacking Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 and is used more casually to hound Israelis in the diaspora.
Some Israeli celebrities are sympathetic to those who expect answers from them about their stance on Gaza. “For many people to have me say something about that publicly is really important, like, ‘OK you’re from Israel what do you think about that?’” Noga Erez, one of Israel’s most popular musicians who has played multiple international tours, told the Associated Press two years ago.
But Erez has declined to share her own views, instead expressing a vague desire for peace.
This may be partly due to the social cost that Israelis can pay at home for speaking out abroad. Five years ago, Erez told a British magazine that “BDS did an important job in putting the spotlight on the situation” but that she hoped the movement would shift to “discourse and connection.”
After an outcry in Israel — where supporting the boycott movement is illegal — Erez hastened to insist that “I love Israel and do not support any kind of boycott of my people and my country.”
The incident underscored the relatively scant room in Israel for dissent over how the country treats Palestinians.
While Israeli Jews express plenty of disdain for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, only the tiniest fraction (1%) agree with the core contentions of anti-Zionist activists abroad that the country should be replaced with a Palestinian or binational state. And 82% support expelling the population of Gaza, while 76% agree that “there are no innocent people in Gaza.”
This is part of what happens when you have two ethnic or national groups engaged in a century of often vicious violent conflict. Seventy-one percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza recently ranked the humanity of Israeli Jews at a flat zero on a scale of one to 100.
But the point is that if you’re opposed to Israel’s existence on political grounds, the odds are quite high that you’re also diametrically opposed to the political views of most Israelis — something that is not true when it comes to American Jews.
That is a key distinction because even if one believes that Israel is an apartheid state that committed genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, it should still be easy to avoid harassing American Jews with no connection to the conflict.
But almost all Israelis have a bona fide connection, meaning that whether you find it problematic to demand answers from Israelis likely depends on your view of the conflict itself.
If you accept, for example, that the IDF has committed repeated war crimes and is otherwise oppressing Palestinians, then the objections from Palestinian students at Columbia and other universities to being in class with Israeli veterans may sound reasonable.
On the other hand, if you understand the IDF to be the world’s most moral army that sought to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, then any objection to working with Israeli veterans would smack of absurdity and perhaps antisemitism.
At the same time, the kneejerk tendency to assume that any Israeli is an enemy, solely based on their place of birth, can quickly slip into dangerous territory.
Lapid, the filmmaker, is perhaps the most absurd case of this. He has lived in self-imposed exile in France since 2021 and has accused his own government of “genocidal” actions but was nevertheless was by French activists after a film festival in Marseille named him to its panel of judges.
His supposed crime? Accepting funding from the Israel Film Fund for his movie Yes, a biting satire whose protagonist is recruited by a billionaire to write an anthem celebrating the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza after the European Union’s cultural fund turned him down because they thought the film was too anti-Israel. This prompted 10 filmmakers to pull their projects from the festival.
“What exactly do they want? That I stop making films? Should I leave France,” Lapid asked Le Monde.
For many of Israel’s supporters, Lapid’s experience is proof that the demonstrators don’t make any distinctions between Israelis like Lapid — a longtime thorn in the government’s side — and a celebrity like Gal Gadot, the Wonder Woman actress who has said she wants to “help obtain worldwide support” for Israel.
“Nadav Lapid doesn’t understand that Israel’s haters don’t differentiate between us, no matter how much he tries to curry favor with them,” Miki Zohar, Israel’s culture minister, wrote on X. “He will always be, to them, a Jew from Israel.”
But Lapid himself, who bowed out of the festival voluntarily rather than fighting the boycott directly, found himself reassured by two letters of solidarity from hundreds of French film industry leaders.
“Whatever crimes their state may commit,” the first letter argued, “no one can be reduced to a passport.”
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Rank Islamophobia in Congress is a crisis for American Jews
A growing caucus in the House of Representatives is targeting Muslims, and American Jews should be deeply concerned.
The Sharia-Free America Caucus, established in December, now boasts more than 60 members, all of whom are Republican. In announcing its establishment, one of its founders, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, warned that, “from Texas to every state in this constitutional republic, instances of Sharia adherents masquerading as ‘refugees’ — and in many cases, sleeper cells connected to terrorist organizations — are threatening the American way of life.”
His language was reminiscent of past xenophobic claims made about Irish and Jewish immigrants flooding the country with, respectively, Catholicism and communism. And the fact that the caucus has expanded in influence speaks to the continued radicalization of the Republican Party and the growing threat of American Christian nationalism. The attacks on our Muslim neighbors from the party in power call for Jews to stand up in defense of the value of religious pluralism in the United States.
American Muslims are the right’s immediate targets. But Muslims and Jews both stand to lose if the U.S. becomes an even less liberal and more strictly Christian nation than it is today.
A fictional threat
No one should dismiss the Sharia-Free America Caucus as a flash in the pan. Its membership includes a member of the Republican House leadership, Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who has said that “Sharia is completely incompatible with the American way of life and threatens the very fabric of our society.”
The caucus has introduced a number of pieces of legislation to combat the fictional threat of Sharia law, prompting a public letter signed by 119 Democrats demanding the House leadership not allow a vote on these ridiculous bills.
The Democrats are right to be drawing attention to this appalling demonstration of rank bigotry by dozens of Republican members of Congress. It should go without saying that there is no threat of Sharia law supplanting secular American law. Such talk is nothing but the crude fantasy of demagogues.
Instead, the caucus is twisting ordinary religious practices to demonize millions of Americans.
Sharia law, like Jewish halacha, is an unsettled body of religious law that has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and debated for centuries. In the U.S., scholars of Islamic law can weigh in on certain kinds of civil cases such as business disputes. This is exactly how batei din operate for many observant Jews: not as structures that replace American law, but as mechanisms that specific communities turn to voluntarily to help decide internal questions.
Just as the establishment of a Halacha-Free America Caucus would be an illegitimate and plainly hateful assault on the dignity of American Jews, so the existence of this caucus is an insulting act of bigotry toward American Muslims. The message being sent to them is clear: You do not belong here, and if you want to stay out of trouble, you can only practice your faith in ways the majority religious group finds acceptable.
A dark American history
These attacks against Muslims are continuous with a strain of illiberalism and xenophobia in the history of the U.S. with which Jews should be familiar. Yes, this country welcomed ships of Eastern European Jewish refugees at Ellis Island; but it also enacted the 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration quotas — which ultimately helped trap Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, American Muslims faced widespread discrimination in the name of national security — including illegal detainments and unconstitutional invasive police surveillance of communities. Once the terrorism panic subsided, Islamophobia became a standard part of the right-wing playbook.
Perhaps no one has been as brazenly hateful as President Donald Trump, who during his first campaign famously proposed a moratorium on Muslims entering the U.S., which he enacted shortly after assuming office; lied about witnessing thousands of Arab Americans in New Jersey celebrating 9/11; and has in recent years taken to using “Palestinian” as a slur. Right-wing panics over the construction of mosques and even the simple act of Muslims praying in public now occur with shocking regularity.
An alarming outlook for religious minorities
Political conditions have worsened considerably for American Muslims in recent years. Even amidst the hysteria and abuse of power after 9/11, the message of President George W. Bush was rhetorically often one of inclusion.
Such nods to religious freedom are few and far between today. Parts of the right openly portray American Muslims as an enemy fifth column. “Mainstream Muslims have declared war on us,” Rep. Randy Fine of Florida, who is Jewish and has drawn criticism for his Islamophobic rhetoric, declared. “The least we can do is kick them the hell out of America.” Just last week, months after signing a law supposedly banning Sharia from Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said Democrats in his state supported the institution of Sharia. And despite being the target of recent violent attacks, American mosques and Islamic centers are set to be largely excluded from the Department of Homeland Security’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program.
Trump’s administration has claimed to make defending American Jews from antisemitism a top priority. But a governing party that rejects religious pluralism and embraces Islamophobic conspiracy-mongering is not seriously committed to fighting religious hatred. Jews must understand that any “protection” offered on these terms is a poisoned chalice.
Efforts to circumscribe national belonging in the U.S. on religious and racial grounds have never been beneficial to American Jews. In response to the demonization of American Muslims today, Jews should not forget this truth. No minority is safe from the bigotry currently targeting our Muslim neighbors. We must stand up in their defense, and work continuously for a country that belongs to all of us equally.
Abe Silberstein is a doctoral student in the joint program in History and Hebrew & Judaic Studies at New York University
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You’re wrong, Ken Paxton: Obviously God is nonbinary
We are living in a time of reactionary masculinism. Roaring back not only against wokeness and MeToo but against half a century of feminism and a century of women’s suffrage, conservative American men have reasserted a hyper-traditionalist, hyper-violent form of masculine dominance, from the UFC matches on the White House lawn to Pete Hegseth’s pastor calling for the repeal of the 19th amendment.
And now, to the Texas Senate race, in which religious progressive Democrat James Talarico is running against the multiply indicted, investigated, and impeached Republican Ken Paxton, who among other things has taken bribes, committed adultery, and barely avoided conviction for securities fraud. Like all Trump wannabes, Paxton peppers his talks with vulgar schoolyard insults, calling Talarico “Low-T” (i.e. low testosterone, not manly enough), ‘Talafreako,’ and, I guess worst of all, a vegan. (Talarico is not a vegan.) Most recently, Paxton’s campaign has ridiculed comments Talarico made in 2021 that “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.”
But for anyone conversant with Jewish theology, this is obvious. Of course, God is nonbinary.
Genesis 1:27 states clearly: “And God created the human in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Meaning, both male and female are the ‘image’ (whatever that means) of the Divine. Of course, God has masculine pronouns here, but so do the words for socks, houses and money; Hebrew lacks a non-gendered case (until recent innovations). And just a few verses earlier, in Genesis 1:2, the Spirit of God gets a feminine verb form (merachefet, ‘hovers’). As Talarico put it:
The first two lines of the Bible, the first two lines in Genesis, use two different Hebrew words to describe God. One is the masculine Hebrew noun for divinity. The second is the feminine Hebrew noun for spirit. God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.
More broadly, throughout the Bible, God is referred to in both masculine metaphors — Father, King, etc. — and feminine ones, like a loving Mother (Isaiah) or feminine Wisdom (Proverbs).
Jewish theological and theosophical speculation is even more clear. The philosophical God of Maimonides, for example, is beyond all form, and certainly all gender. The Kabbalistic Godhead, meanwhile, contains aspects (sefirot) that are masculine, feminine, both masculine and feminine, and genders that change depending on the moment. This is not merely abstruse speculation; every Friday night, traditional Jews welcome the Sabbath Queen to their places of worship. Who do you think we’re referring to here?
Indeed, one could say that God is the most nonbinary thing (or non-thing) in the universe, since in many Jewish theologies, God is nondual, beyond all binaries and dualities we humans construct to understand our world. In these conceptions, God is everything (yesh) and nothing (ayin), filling the universe and surrounding it, form and emptiness.
Now, obviously, Ken Paxton is not interested in theology; he’s just scoring political points, and desperately trying to change the subject. And with animus against transgender people rising (due to massive campaigns to lie about them for Republican political gain) he wants us to think that James Talarico’s God is nonbinary like a they/them teenager is nonbinary — i.e., conforming neither to masculine nor feminine gender roles. (In fairness, Talarico made his 2021 comments in the context of a political debate about transgender children and sports, and has lately has walked back the comments, calling them “cringey.”)
But just because Paxton is being cynical doesn’t mean his attacks aren’t harmful. They are at once ignorant and insulting, pathetically wrong and offensively backward.
I don’t mean to whitewash or wokify the often patriarchal Jewish tradition. Again, there are plenty of masculine images of God in Jewish liturgy, tradition, and text — maybe too many. The Biblical God has a bad temper, gets jealous easily and lashes out with violence. God is a Man of War, says Exodus 15:3, which scholars believe to be one of the oldest Biblical sources. And for every Lecha Dodi welcoming the Divine Feminine, there are dozens of blessings of God, the King of the World. Yet ultimately, these are aspects, projections and metaphors of the Divine, not the Divine itself. And just as the Greek and Indian pantheons include multiple manifestations of divinity, Jewish monotheism (and monism) contains within it multiple manifestations of a transcendent God ultimately beyond all myth, explanation, and categorization.
Likewise in the New Testament, which has ample male and female metaphors for the Divine, and ample statements that God transcends gender entirely (e.g. John 4:24). And not just God, but human souls as well; one of the most famous, and impactful, statements in the New Testament is the Apostle Paul’s statement in Galatians 3:28 that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Obviously, Paul doesn’t mean that there is no sex or gender at all, but he does mean that in terms of what matters most (which Paul understands to be the spirit), gender and ethnicity are irrelevant.
If only the Ken Paxtons of the world understood that.
Even if Paxton got the Bible right, however, his theological attacks on James Talarico would still be un-American. In fact, the myths and forms of religion are manifold and various, and in the America that truly is great, we don’t take sides among them. Sacred text and tradition portray many different faces of the Divine, and of course there are many different sacred texts and traditions. None of which should be defamed by a corrupt political hack.
But I admit, while I’m pluralistic as to religious worldviews, I do think some are better than others. And James Talarico has a compelling vision for an engaged Christianity that is justice-driven, heartfelt, and, to my mind, the rightful legacy of a certain rabbi who overturned the moneylenders’ tables in the Temple in Jerusalem. Even if you disagree with his political or religious positions, see what you think:
This is what religion should be for: the pursuit of justice, the cultivation of kindness, the commitment to not turn our back on the stranger, the marginalized, or the destitute. This is the God that inspired Jews throughout our history, whether we were activists or prisoners, volunteers at a hevra kadisha or teachers in a school, rabbis or homemakers. It is the source of compassion that can be discovered (or, if you prefer, invented) whenever the heart is broken. And as Talarico says, this God is the opposite of domination.
Amen.
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