My experience in the rabbinate reflects the fact that I was one of those people who never decided what they wanted to be when they grew up. I majored in biochemistry in college, but decided that Jews seemed more interesting than molecules, so I enrolled in HUC-JIR. I became frustrated with my studies there, so I took a year off to work in an environmental physiology lab in Beersheba, but came back to finish ordination. I had a wonderful three years as intern and assistant (and mentee) to Martin Rozenberg, but decided I wasn’t suited to the pulpit rabbinate, so moved on to spend ten years as a day school educator (teacher and principal). I had the opportunity to obtain a PhD at the Hebrew University as a Jerusalem Fellow—another wonderful experience with two important mentors, Professors Seymour Fox and Immanuel Etkes—but decided that academia was not for me. And after we made aliyah, my fourth life-shaping mentor, Rabbi Bob Samuels, tried to draw me into the team at Leo Baeck School, but I felt that the Israeli educational bureaucracy was too much for me.
Meanwhile, thirty-five years ago, we settled in Moshav Shorashim in the Galilee, where I continued my zigzag career, including creating a Jewish-Palestinian youth circus; facilitating hundreds of encounters between diaspora Jews and Palestinian Israelis; developing educational tourism programs in the Galilee; but also, consulting for the Melton and Mandel Institutes, and six satisfying years as director of the Israel Rabbinic Program at HUC-JIR. And since retiring, I’ve had the chance to pursue the other interests I never had time for: carpentry (a highlight was a Sephardic Torah case for our synagogue, made of maple and walnut); and writing (Turning Points in Jewish History and Contested Utopia have been published by JPS); and last year I went back to blogging on the Times of Israel site. And most recently, I’ve learned welding, which is great fun.
A kind of strange, unsettled rabbinate; varied, interesting, and most days, satisfying. But I suppose it suffered somewhat from the syndrome of “jack of all trades, master of none.” Whatever. Still, I like to think that through the various students I taught, encounters I facilitated, words I wrote, and institutions I led, I did manage to teach some Torah, and to model that Torah as I performed those tasks.
In one year’s b’rachah for the ordinees at HUC-JIR in Jerusalem, I remember advising them to never mind the destination, what is important is to enjoy the journey, and never stop looking out the window.
So, what have I learned? That it’s time to give up on trying to figure out what I should be when I grow up.
Rabbi Marc Rosenstein 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.
