By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Cantor David Lipp and Rabbi Laura Metzger
For more than three decades at Congregation Adath Jeshurun – working with three rabbis, preparing dozens of Bar and Bat mitzvah students, leading services for High Holidays, untold Shabbat mornings, plus many regular holidays and daily minyan services – there has been a stalwart presence on the bimah: Cantor David A. Lipp.
Alongside his wife, Rabbi Laura Metzger, Lipp has forged a legacy that has helped define the very essence of this congregation. It’s no exaggeration to say that he is the Voice of AJ.
On Sunday, Jan. 18 at 5 p.m., Lipp will be honored with an evening of “hors d’oeuvres, desserts and entertainment” at The Gillespie, 421 Market St. The preceding Shabbat morning at AJ, congregants and guests will pay tribute to Metzger during services and a Kiddush lunch.
Sunday’s celebration will feature guest vocalist Joanna Dulkin, hazzan of Minnetonka, Minnesota’s Adath Jeshurun Congregation (yup, they’ve got an AJ, too) and one of Lipp’s favorite cantorial colleagues. Jonathan Wolff will be the evening’s pianist.
“David is one of those people who’s extremely thoughtful and mindful, and whose empathy and wisdom meet that mindfulness,” Dulkin said during a recent Zoom interview.
“He’s not the kind of leader who’s going to be shouting from the front of the room,” she said. But “when he speaks, everybody listens. And he is an example of a cantor who is an exceptional artist in terms of musicality, but who’s also intellectually rich: someone who loves to learn and loves to teach. He’s a cantor who can speak — which sounds so silly, but many of us are conditioned so that our only job is to be the jukebox.”
Next month’s dual tribute has been taking shape gradually.
“People started talking about it several years ago, and when Covid happened, everything got put on the back burner,” recalled Andy Epstein chair of the tribute weekend planning committee.
“Then we went through a period when we didn’t have a rabbi for a couple of years, and things were a little chaotic,” Epstein continued, alluding to Rabbi Joshua Corber’s brief tenure as Rabbi Robert Slosberg’s successor.
“The idea of an anniversary party had been discussed and floated, but no one had taken charge of it,” Epstein explained. “And I just said, ‘Hey, we’re through with our craziness and things are back to normal, so we need to make this party happen.’”
After Corber departed AJ in mid-2023, and with the retired Slosberg being named Rabbi Emeritus, Lipp became the congregation’s sole full-time clergy member. He shouldered that taxing portfolio until spring of this year, when Scott Hoffman came on board as interim rabbi.
It was a markedly different leadership dynamic compared to what was in place in the spring of 1994, when Lipp and Metzger arrived in Louisville. He was fresh out of cantorial school at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City; she had recently been ordained as a Reform Rabbi after completing the rabbinic program at Hebrew Union College – also in Manhattan.
They’d met several years earlier, when both were studying in Jerusalem. “The rabbinical school of HUC and the cantorial school at JTS did their first year in Israel,” Lipp recalled, “and the HUC students invited the JTS students over for kosher turkey – because in Israel, the one thing you miss about America, at least for me, is Thanksgiving. Afterward we went down to one of the preschool classrooms (on) the HUC campus, and we watched ‘Field of Dreams’ – we were the only two who could fit on those tiny preschool chairs.”
Lipp’s mother and stepfather had made aliyah when their son was in elementary school; he lived in Israel from age 10 to 15 until his parents divorced and he returned to America with his mother.
After high school, he attended the University of Minnesota as a voice major, envisioning a career as a musical theater actor. For a time after graduation, he found acting jobs in Minneapolis and Chicago with various semi-professional companies, scratching out a living doing temp work (“I never waited tables, but I’m a pretty good typist,” he quipped).
Lipp has especially strong memories of one role: Arnold Epstein in “Biloxi Blues” – Neil Simon’s quasi-autobiographical play about undergoing Army basic training in Biloxi, Mississippi.
“I still remember what I read for the audition,” Lipp said. “The scene they had me do is the one where Arnold Epstein gets anti-semitized in the barracks. When I read that scene, I remembered my father telling me almost the identical story of what happened to him – which basically means to me that Neil Simon was working from a common Jewish experience in the service.”
Raised in a predominantly secular household, “I wasn’t particularly religious,” Lipp said. But gradually, almost without realizing it, something about his Judaism clicked.
“Little by little I started thinking, ‘I’m going to stop taking phone calls on Shabbat,’ just one little thing. I don’t want to say, ‘I found God’ – it wasn’t that. It’s more that I just felt comfortable. It felt right, somehow. And I had a couple of dear friends who said, “you should really be a cantor.’” Not long afterward, he gained a spot at JTS’s H.L. Miller Cantorial School – launching what would be his defining career.
Metzger’s pathway was even less traditional. Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in religious studies and spent 15 years as a rising executive with Bank of America, Crown-Zellerbach, Grey Advertising and Ogilvy & Mather (the advertising behemoth now known simply as Ogilvy).
Recognizing that she’d fulfilled her major goals on the business side, she — like her future husband — came to realize that genuine happiness lay elsewhere.
With cantorial school behind them, Lipp and Metzger found themselves exchanging Manhattan for Louisville. At AJ, he took over from longtime cantor Marshall Portnoy, continuing Portnoy’s annual Music Festivals while taking on leadership roles nationally with the Cantors Assembly and locally via the Louisville Board of Rabbis and Cantors.
Adath Jeshurun created a hybrid role for Metzger. As a Reform rabbi working for a Conservative congregation, she could not officiate at lifecycle ceremonies. So she became the synagogue’s outreach director, counseling interfaith couples and individuals wanting to learn about becoming Jews by choice. Metzger also served as Rabbi for the (now closed) Four Courts Senior Center and was a principal force in bolstering the Melton School of Adult Jewish Learning when the Jewish Federation of Louisville hired her for the program.
Her formal synagogue staff position ended about a decade ago, and now she’s probably best known for her bimah-based commentaries during High Holiday services. She became an accomplished painter in watercolors, though now – battling advanced ocular melanoma, an exceedingly rare form of cancer that’s left her unable to discern color – she’s returned to her first love, drawing.
Metzger recalls a moment some time ago when their daughter, Natania Lipp (now a Ph.D-holding psychologist) “said something that was so important to me: ‘I’m lucky to have a mother who re-creates her career over and over.’ And I was able, for the first time, to think, ‘This isn’t failure after failure after failure. This is re-creation after re-creation after re-creation.’”
Looking back at his more than three decades as AJ’s cantor, Lipp hasn’t been immune to occasional what-might-have-been musings on a life in the theater.
“Sometimes I have second thoughts even to this day,” he acknowledges, “but it’s not so much an issue of regret. It’s more that there is a certain thing I gave up — wanting to be the next Joel Grey or Dustin Hoffman. But the truth of the matter is, I figured out when I was 28 years old, that I either didn’t have the talent or the grit to make it happen.”
Indeed, as a cantor “I’ve gotten to use some of those skills I would’ve wanted to develop as an actor or as a singer-actor, in teaching, speaking, and singing. One of my friends – who urged me to consider this as a career path – said, ‘listen, they’re going to pay you to sing every week.’”
Call it an affirmation – whether of profession or intrinsic personhood – of Hazzan David L. Lipp.
“If I lose my voice, it’s not just, ‘Oh, I can’t work this week.’ I get emotionally depressed,” he said. “If I can’t physically sing, I don’t feel good as a human being. It’s just part of who I am, and to not be able to do it is just a horrible feeling. So the fact that there’s a Jewish organization that wants me to sing so much that they’ll pay me a reasonably good salary – and they’ve done so for 31 years and counting – is something I don’t take for granted. And as much as I might have liked to be the next Joel Grey or the next Dustin Hoffman, that’s not a bad spot.”
There’s still time to register for the Tribute Weekend events. Go online at https://www.adathjeshurun.com/form/celebration
AJ Rabbi Emeritus Robert Slosberg, who retired in 2023 after 42 years as the congregation’s senior rabbi, had this to say about Cantor David Lipp and Rabbi Laura Metzger:
Cantor Lipp is the Cantor every Rabbi dreams of working with. He is one of my most gifted colleagues. His davening, as expected, is beautiful, and spiritually uplifting. His knowledge of traditional cantillation and his Torah reading are unparalleled. What makes Cantor Lipp so unique is his love of and breadth of learning. He is a lifelong student whose divrei Torah are inspiring and often fun. For me as a Rabbi, Cantor Lipp has given me wise counsel. He is the consummate team player. Cantor Lipp’s teaching in Melton and commitment to bikkur holim, visiting the sick, have touched the lives of many in our community.
Rabbi Metzger is a community treasure. She has been a true community rabbi serving the unaffiliated and for years her congregation at Four Courts. Rabbi Metzger serves as Adath Jeshurun’s Guest Rabbi on the High Holidays. Her sermons are masterful and moving.
Rabbi Metzger is among the most gifted thinkers I know. She is visionary in her insights to Jewish life and living and is a true philosopher. Many in the community know Rabbi Metzger as a Master Teacher from her Melton Classes.
I do not know anyone who is gifted in so many areas — marketing, teaching, speaking, gardening, and painting. My nickname for her says it all: Rabbeinu (Our Rabbi and Teacher par excellence) Laura Metzger