The role of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis is to support clergy both personally and professionally, according to its newly installed president, Rabbi Alison Adler of Beverly’s Temple B’nai Abraham.
Previously vice president, Rabbi Adler assumed the presidency at a meeting at Hebrew College in Newton on June 12. Over 50 rabbis attended the event, the group’s largest in-person gathering in recent memory.
The new executive committee’s first task, Adler said, is to figure out what the 80-year-old group’s mission is, given the changes that have occurred since the coronavirus pandemic. “Whether it’s for education or camaraderie or whatever, there are more groups that rabbis could access [virtually] than there were before COVID,” she noted.
To learn what rabbis need today, the executives hope to do a lot of one-on-one outreach. Adler has been meeting with past MBR presidents to get a sense of both the group’s history and what people think it should be going forward. The sense she got from the June 12 meeting was that rabbis are looking for community.
“To be a leader, to be a Jewish person, to be a Jewish leader and to have a way for us to come together – especially for newer rabbis – having support or communication and friendship is really important,” Adler said.
She pointed out such camaraderie already exists among members of the North Shore Rabbis and Cantors Association, of which she is a stalwart. “But I also think it’s important to be connecting, in a larger sense, to what is going on in Jewish communities across Massachusetts in these times, and communicating and trying to have a collective voice when we need to,” Adler said.
MBR sometimes speaks as one, she noted, when it publishes statements on “the mainstream Jewish view” of issues of the day. In the past, Adler has shared these statements with her community to good effect. “I think people appreciated that I wasn’t just speaking as one rabbi – there’s a collective voice on this,” she said.
To support its members educationally, the board runs regular “lunch-and-learns,” where a scholar comes in to discuss potential sermon topics. As an example, Adler suggested one reason the June 12 meeting was so well-attended was because the speaker was the “incredibly inspiring” Rabbi Shai Held of the Hadar Institute in New York City, who discussed ideas for High Holiday sermons.
“They’re the kind of ideas that, no matter what’s going on, can speak to people,” Adler said. “That’s what we need right now – not, ‘What’s the Jewish wisdom for whatever the news happens to be this week?’ Because who knows what the news is going to be in September?”
Sometimes, the group offers opinions on subjects of concern to the community. In April, for example, MBR published a “Rabbinic Statement on Fighting Antisemitism and Protecting Civil Rights” that was signed by 68 clergy and rabbinical students from 36 towns across the state.
In a thoughtful and nuanced argument rooted in Jewish tradition, the rabbis examined how a government of laws is essential for simultaneously protecting free speech and protecting Jews from hate speech. They invoked Polish Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Pshischa’s early 1800s admonition against erring on either side (“Even the pursuit of justice must employ only just means”) and maintained, “We believe that fighting for the freedoms of this society, even for those with whom we strongly disagree, is a way to defend ourselves against anti-Jewish hate.”
They also decried the weaponization of antisemitism for any purpose, writing, “We will not permit our community’s pain to be turned into a weapon against our own interests.”
In starting her two-year term, Adler succeeds Rabbi Ron Fish, an Anti-Defamation League director, who becomes the board’s immediate past president. Temple Sinai of Brookline’s Andy Vogel moves up from group secretary to vice president.
“I don’t think I would have wanted to continue as president if he didn’t want to be vice president,” Adler said. “Because he’s him, you know, but also because having somebody who’s based in Brookline is very helpful – I’m so much farther away.”
Also starting two-year terms are Rabbi Jodi Seewald Smith of Lexington’s Temple Isaiah as secretary, and executive committee members Rabbi Josh Breindel of Sudbury’s Congregation Beth El, Rabbi Ken Carr of Easton’s Temple Chayai Shalom, Rabbi Darby Leigh of Concord’s Keren Shalom, and Rabbi Raysh Weiss of Temple Israel of Natick.
Adler spoke to the need for a group like the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis. “Just for the rabbis to be able to come together and connect with each other and build relationships, that’s really, really important,” she said. “More than ever, I think.”
