As I look back on fifty years, I reflect on how my life has gone in two different directions, frequently simultaneously—pulpit and college teaching. As I have made my way through these years, I have kept in mind the advice of two treasured colleagues and teachers, now sadly both in the yeshivah shel maalah. One was to remember the beloved Jacob Rudin’s advice to me and my classmates to always find time and a way to study. The other, which at times could be understood as humor and at others in a far more serious vein, was our cherished Lenny Kravitz’ dictum, “If you don’t like Jews, don’t go into this business.”
There is the title of a book I will never write: B’nai Mitzvah and Other Natural Disasters: My Life Throwing the Knuckleball from the Bimah. We find ourselves in pursuit of teaching and touching lives, with some great successes and yet other occasions where things don’t go as planned or hoped, or events when the saving grace was having a sense of humor and seeing it in the most unanticipated situations, like a Kol Nidrei where a senior colleague failed to check with the organist about the length of Bruch’s “Kol Nidrei”rhapsody, or a Kol Nidrei where a 10-year old burst into the sanctuary to proclaim how the home baseball team had been saved by a dramatic home run.
We all know that there are times when uneasy lies the head that wears the crown—or the kippah and tallit. There are times when I found myself feeling as if I was in an episode of a series that could have been called Tales of the Unexpected—situations our education never taught us about or that we often felt would not happen to us. But those times of challenge were more than compensated for by the times of knowing that I had made a difference in someone’s life, sometimes in very unexpected ways. Three examples in brief: finding a way to reunite a guilt-ridden teenager with her parents; learning that a simple statement of reassurance to a college student had made all the difference to her in her studies; and when a simple sermon about the significance of nerot Shabbat led a woman to start lighting them again after many years of not having done so. The rewards remain so fulfilling—touching lives, and the relationships that now continue long after leaving the pulpit.
Nine years ago I retired from the pulpit and focused on college teaching—ironically, what I thought my goal would be when I entered college. At the time, several people asked me if I was still going to be a rabbi. My response was a reference to the exclamation by a Marine general in Korea when the Chinese came pouring in and the Marines had to move south. A reporter asked the general how it felt to be a Marine and retreating. Replied the general, “Retreat? Hell, we’re attacking in a new direction!” In other words, I was just “rabbi-ing” in a different direction, and on campus I frequently found myself both teacher and counselor.
All told, these years have been quite a ride, and I am eternally grateful for the friendship of colleagues and the love and support of my wife, Barbara, and our children, Amy and Daniel and their families, who have been on the ride with me. Let me close with some excerpts from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (with fond thoughts for classmates sadly gone, along with a heartfelt d’rishat shalom and y’yishar kochachem to those still here):
“I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone…
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move….
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts…strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Rabbi Benjamin Lefkowitz is celebrating 50 years as a Reform rabbi. We look forward to celebrating him and all of the CCAR’s 50-year rabbis when we come together at CCAR Convention 2025.
