By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
A Chabad-Lubavitch Mitzvah Tank (Wikipedia — https://www.flickr.com/photos/51035774131@N01/15634931)
One of the first things I noticed after returning to Louisville three years ago was how many emails were either to or from someone whose name began with “Rabbi.”
It’s the nature of my job as Community editor to communicate with rabbinical clergy, whether on a spiritual or secular basis, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox (Modern and Traditional) Reconstructionist, Chabad-Lubavitch, Adonai or Hashem, God or G-d. You could say that when it comes to rabbis, I’m an equal opportunity journalistic facilitator.
Not that my childhood was bereft of rabbis. Rabbi Norman Lamm, who was then chancellor of Yeshiva University, lived in my Upper West Side. I grew accustomed to seeing him emerge from the back stairways on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings – why, I wondered, was this guy taking the stairs when we had a perfectly good elevator? Such was my comparative ignorance of observant Shabbat methodology.
Growing up in Manhattan, I often spotted the Chabad-Lubavitch’s “Mitzvah Tank” parked along a busy sidewalk, with a cadre of young men approaching someone, asking if they were Jewish and – if answered in the affirmative, typically inviting them to don tefillin (if men) or given candles (if girls or women) to light on a Friday for Shabbat.
That was a very New York-kind of thing – where else could you be strolling up Sixth Avenue (nobody I know calls it by its official moniker, “Avenue of the Americas”), and though I was among the least formally-observant Jews anywhere, it was somehow comforting to acknowledge my Judaism merely by being approached on a bustling Manhattan sidewalk. In my formative years as a young teen, I had never wrapped tefillin or learned the appropriate, accompanying blessings. I’m not even sure I understood what those leather compartments contained, or why one lay on my left arm opposite my heart, with the other resting on my forehead.
Indeed it wasn’t until I was engaged to be married and contemplated the new, startling likelihood of having children that the tenets of formal observance snapped onto focus. I recall the first time I was coached in the donning of tefillin (if memory serves, by Shelly Gilman during one of his regular Monday morning minyans at Adath Jeshurun), an act of literal faith that was genuinely, unforgettably powerful.
There was plenty of rabbinic energy in those days thanks to Rabbi Bob Slosberg, and even more hazzan-driven energy courtesy of Cantor David Lipp. Not long after my tefillin-donning debut, I found myself back in Manhattan, strolling into West Side Judaica at 2412 Broadway to purchase my very own set of tefillin. It was the spring of 1997, not quite three decades ago.
Funny how time creeps up on you. Children come along – a son in 1999, daughter in 2001 – a bar and bat mitzvah – and almost imperceptibly, those fledgling instances of formative observance recede further and further back into the archives of personal memory. But every so often they come roaring back, a reminder of what it means to be Jewish amid an ever-changing secular and sacred landscape.
I recall one Friday night sitting in AJ for Kabbalat Shabbat services. It was January 2023, just a days after I’d arrived back in Louisville to take my present job. A great circle had been closed, one that had begun almost 40 years earlier when I first set foot in the city. Barely into my mid-20s, my personal Judaism was still in flux, and very much in the background.
Now, four decades later, working for a self-defined Jewish organization, I was intrinsically, unabashedly, joyfully, reclaiming a measure of my Jewish identity. I was right where I was supposed to be, sitting amid congregants whom I recalled from ages past, singing Yedid Nefesh and Lekha Dodi, welcoming the Shabbat Bride. In the weeks to follow I’d hear from all manner of rabbinical voices, but at this moment it was enough to listen to my own, inner, quiet Jewish voice – a blessing of incalculable worth.
Andrew Adler is Managing Editor of Community.