Meet Rav Jeremy
What am I doing here? I mean, me, the rabbi. (You may be wondering the same thing about yourself, in the “big question” way, and part of my job is to make sure you have the resources to answer the question. But this page is to let you know who I am and how I see my role as rabbi here.)
Decades ago, when I was coming to the end of a graduate program in economics, and wondering how I was going to get a job, I noticed two things I was really excited about in my graduate student life. One was bringing people together in community to care for each other and make things better for each other. The other was that, as I was preparing for my wedding with my amazing life-partner Merle, I would actually miss lunch because I was so engrossed in researching Yemenite Jewish wedding liturgy in the university’s rare books library. (I never did that for economics papers.) So off I went to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.
I still believe that the breadth of Jewish civilization – the literature, music, practices, philosophy, and more that we’ve produced over the centuries, both “sacred” and “secular,” produced by “authorities” and “rebels,” – is a wonderful resource to enrich our lives, a structure within which, together with others in our Jewish and wider communities, we can respond to that question, “why are we here?” And I’m blessed to teach and share that civilization with congregants and community members of all ages in so many contexts.
And I still believe that a key aspect of “why we’re here” is tikkun olam – ‘repairing the world’ by seeing the holiness in all that is around us and responding with awe and love, caring and repairing. And I’m blessed to play a role in our congregation and in our community doing and facilitating the implementation of love both interpersonally and societally.
That’s a brief introduction to me and my role as I see it today, August 2, 2022 / the 5th of Av, 5782, but I try to keep growing. I hope I remember to change the web page if it seems to no longer represent me.
And I hope you and I can get to know each other better and share a bit of our lives’ journeys.
Rav Jeremy (“Rav” is Hebrew for “Rabbi.)