The New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for Its Leader

His Voice What we missed most was his voice. Our rabbi could make the most stilted English translation of prayer sound like Shakespeare. His voice was muscular and musical, with an accent that sounded vaguely British at first, but later revealed itself to be all-American, with leftover "aahs" from Boston. This was not like the voice of God. Rabbis do not aspire to divinity. They have jobs in an industry that has, like many others, shifted from manufacturing to service. Rabbis are employees, religion workers, with unions and contracts and job-related injuries. They have to negotiate dental with the very congregants they must inspire. Still, while rabbis do not speak for God, some of them have God-given gifts. Rabbi Gerald Wolpe's gift was his voice. My dad had a story he loved to tell about the day when Wolpe took the makeshift stage of a flatbed truck in the parking lot of the Harrisburg Jewish Community Center. It was the summer of 1967, the height of the Six-Day War. And the rabbi brought home this crisis from halfway across the world with such eloquent urgency that my parents were inspired to pledge to Israel, then and there, every last cent they had saved for brand-new wall-to-wall carpeting. Anyone who ever saw the mud-gray shag they wanted to replace would have to agree this qualified as a miracle. And it was documented for posterity. There was a record album made of the speech. My parents bought that, too. But then Rabbi Wolpe left us. And we never forgave him for taking the voice away. I was eleven when he departed, so I remember him only vaguely as an image in confirmation class pictures along the wall--all sideburns and pageantry, dressed, as rabbis did back then, like a human Torah. I vaguely recall him telling us to stop running in the hall between Hebrew school classes at Beth El Temple, and to stop banging on the candy machine. But I have been following Rabbi Wolpe's lead in my head for de- cades. When I pray, I still pause where he paused, emote where he emoted. When I hear the Ashrei, David's psalm of praise, recited in English, I laugh to myself when I reach the line about giving the hopeful their food "oein due season," because I can hear Wolpe giving "due" an extra syllable--"d-yew." The way he articulated "all the wicked . . . he will bring low" was enough to keep me from going astray. One of my strongest memories of growing up Jewish is sitting at Friday night dinner listening to my parents, my Nana and Pop-pop, and my aunts and uncles go on about the politics of the day and Wolpe's sermons. To them, he combined the wisdom of the ages with the morning headlines, name-dropping his way through history, religion and culture. On the night of Kol Nidre, the prayer that ushers in Yom Kippur, the holiest twenty-four hours of the year, they would eat dinner earlier than usual and leave immediately afterward to attend a special service--for adults only. All they would tell us about this mysterious ceremony was, "Oh, you kids wouldn't like it anyway, we have to stand for hours." When the grown-ups returned, they had this strange look on their faces. I assumed they were exhausted from standing. Now I realize it was a kind of awe, the voice still resonating. I would like to hear him again. On an overcast Tuesday in mid-November, I drive out to the synagogue that stole Rabbi Wolpe away. I had seen a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, one that a peppier headline writer would have titled "Tuesday, the Rabbi Gave Notice." Wolpe was calling it quits, announcing a rather elaborate plan of retirement in which he would give the synagogue two years to find a suitable replacement and make a smooth transition. Why now? Judaism is a religion of mystical nFried, Stephen is the author of 'The New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for Its Leader' with ISBN 9780553801033 and ISBN 0553801031.