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INTERVIEW WITH JAN URBACH
March 9, l999
Two years ago at the age of 33, Jan Urbach gave up a prestigious law career in New York City to enter Jewish Theological Seminary and become a rabbi. Jan is short of stature with dark brown hair and eyes and an expressive intelligent face. One afternoon this spring we sat together in a cafe and Jan talked about herself in a most engaging and thoughtful way.
COLETTE SHERMAN: Why did you make this big change in your life? Was it some negative experience as a lawyer? Or did it have to do with your spiritual searchings?
JAN URBACH: I had a wonderful experience as a lawyer. I was successful, I became partner in my law firm -- it was great and I loved the work. But there were two parallel things going. One is that I was starting to think what do I want my life’s work to be. Is the career that is intellectually satisfying and materially rewarding enough for me? Or do I want something more? I was looking at what was the purpose of my life, what am I doing here on earth, why was I given the particular set of talents and weaknesses that I have, what am I supposed to do with them? And the answer was increasingly and uncomfortably, no, there is something more important than what I am now doing.
Also, I always had a strong sense of spirituality. I was always connected in some way to a sense of there being a God and a meaning beyond the surface level of our existence. I never had a Jewish expression of that. My Jan Urbachdaism was primarily a cultural thing to the extent that it existed at all. I didn’t grow up keeping kosher, I didn’t read Hebrew. At Passover, my family would have a seder which was primarily a family dinner with a 20 minute little religious service before it that no one really fully understood. When my grandfather was alive, we did more of the service, and after he died we did some, but it was mostly “let’s get through this quickly and get to the dinner,” and then the conversation was completely secular. I had no bat mitzvah [the religious coming of age for Jewish girls]. I could have had one but I refused to go to Hebrew school -- it seemed a stupid thing to do and I had no interest in it.
So I had this sense of spirituality and of wanting more meaning in my life and wanting to make more of a contribution. I have a strong need for truth, because of my own personal psychological makeup, and I was increasingly feeling uncomfortable with the legal system, which is not really about truth although it purports to be. I was a trial lawyer and did mostly media-related litigation. It was fun, it was sexy, and sometimes very high profile -- I had some celebrity cases. But litigation is a little like the game of Monopoly; you are playing and strategizing, but it is not really about getting at truth. That discrepancy was hard and became increasingly more difficult.
Parallel to that, I discovered Jan Urbachdaism. I wandered into the synagogue. I am still not altogether clear on why I did that. For several years I had intended to join a synagogue primarily to have a place to go on high holidays. I had no other reason except this vague sense of Jewish guilt, that I should belong to a synagogue, that it’s not good that I don’t. I was also feeling that I wanted to start doing some volunteer work, and not primarily for altruistic reasons. I felt I needed it for me, to get out of myself at least a little. I wanted to do this volunteer work not in a vacuum but as part of a community, and I thought, well, the best way is to join a synagogue.
Through someone working with my mother, I got the name of one and decided to go there one evening, Jan Urbachst to see. I had never in my life voluntarily attended a Friday night service, and I went with a friend, and I was completely captivated. Something clicked the moment I walked in there, and I realized there is something I need to learn here, I need to be here, there’s something very significant going on. But I didn’t know what and I was cautious and reluctant. So I started going regularly on Friday night, and I would listen to the music and the teachings and absorb what I could, and I did that for almost a year. -------------
Then I started having a very profound sense of being called in that direction. At that point I knew I was not going to be a lawyer forever. I have always had a strong belief in being somehow guided, so I felt, okay, all I have to do is stay open, the right path will open itself, and I will Jan Urbachst see what happens. I began getting involved in the synagogue on Friday nights. I would sit in the balcony way in the back. It was a conservative congregation, completely egalitarian and very relevant and authentic. The prayer is very authentic, which I had never seen before, and the message was profoundly personally relevant.
COLETTE SHERMAN: Tell me more about that.
JAN URBACH: The way the prayers and Torah [the first five books of the Bible] were being discussed was not abstract sermons, it was psychologically informed, and looking back, I think what I was experiencing was more of an integration of the intellectual, the spiritual, the emotional and the physical than I had ever seen before. And that coincided with my own personal approach to life, that’s what I was looking for.
COLETTE SHERMAN: Give me a feeling for how the rabbi talks at these services.
JAN URBACH: The teaching on Shabbat morning [the Saturday morning service] is definitely not a sermon, it is a teaching of Torah. I personally think when a service is being led or Torah is being taught in a truly authentic way, it is very difficult to distinguish the teaching from the teacher, because the teacher becomes a conduit. So yes, there is a tremendous amount that rabbis bring to what they do, but to some extent the greatest gift they bring is to get out of the way and the teaching comes through them. In this particular service the rabbi was not Jan Urbachst mouthing words and going through motions, but really himself praying.
And there were a lot of other things happening in those services that touched a very deep chord in me, that released and gave me freedom to acknowledge and experience things that were latent within me for a long time. Part of it is being given permission to take God seriously and acknowledge this openly. I had associated people who speak openly about being motivated by belief in God with Bible-Belt Christianity, which I had a lot of problems with, or with ultra-Orthodox Jewry, which I also have a lot of problems with -- the kind of fundamentalism in religion that I shied away from. And I associated it with a narrowness of mind, with checking one’s intellect at the door. Here in this particular synagogue was a group of people who were very highly functioning normal people, wearing business suits, and who were really trained with a seriousness, and they were expressing emotion. It is not a decorous service -- people cry and it doesn’t sound weird, so it gave me permission to acknowledge that this is really who I am. I had never before found a public outlet for that.
That was one piece of the story. Another piece was a sense of responsibility. I had been in Italy and had gone to a couple of synagogues, one in Rome and another in Florence. It is very sobering for a Jew to be in Europe and see still the aftereffects of the Holocaust. The anti-semitism that is still there, to see synagogues under armed guard, with various checkpoints in order to gain entry.
Then I was in this New York congregation which is very vibrant, with some l800 people on a Friday night, where the singing and the clapping were literally shaking the rafters. I realized there were more people here in this synagogue that evening than are left in the Jewish community in Florence. This was a sobering thought and I started to feel a tremendous sense of privilege which brought with it a sense of shame, that here I had this privilege and this great gift, and what exactly am I doing about it. What am I doing to uphold my part in this tradition? I remember having very disturbing thoughts -- God forbid that we should be in a situation again where I was not permitted to be in a synagogue like this and worship publicly. Yes, I can pray with my own words, but I don’t have the skills, the words that come with skills. If there were another persecution, I couldn’t be a transmitter of this tradition, and I felt ashamed of myself, and guilty. I felt the need to learn.
COLETTE SHERMAN: It sounds like everything you have related so far was very much your own inner exploration.
JAN URBACH: I don’t think I was sharing this journey with anybody. The next thing I did was to start studying and reading Torah on my own. I also started going to the service on Shabbat morning and I was drawn in by the community. People began introducing themselves and welcoming me and inviting me to lunch or to Shabbat dinner. I fell in love with the community -- they were simply wonderful people. And I fell in love with studying, I bought books and read and I began to feel that the text was speaking to me, that I was being drawn to insights I shouldn’t be having at that level of my knowledge and skill. I taught myself the Hebrew alphabet, got a Hebrew tutor and started to learn basic Hebrew, and also started attending one of the rabbi’s classes where he was teaching the prayer book. But essentially I was studying on my own, reading the weekly portion of Torah with as much commentary as I could find in English. I would be reading something in English and thinking to myself, I wonder what the Hebrew word for that is, there is something peculiar here, and I would look at the Hebrew word and see if I could figure out what was interesting about it. Almost always these explorations were very fruitful and I was instinctively drawn to them.
COLETTE SHERMAN: Perhaps partly because of your lawyer’s training.
JAN URBACH: Yes, that could be. Then I started writing down my thoughts on Torah, my own interpretations. And then things began to snowball, and I felt that this is something I need to do in my life.
COLETTE SHERMAN: I am curious, were women active in the classes and the studying that was going on in the synagogue?
JAN URBACH: I am now the chairperson of adult education at this synagogue, so I am aware of what is going on. The vast majority of people who actively study and who volunteer to do things in the synagogue are women. It could be that they have more time and fewer ego barriers to learning new things, perhaps they are less intellectually satisfied in other areas of their lives. Perhaps they are Jan Urbachst more interested.
COLETTE SHERMAN: Does it lead to their participating more in the service?
JAN URBACH: There is a movement now for adult “bat mitzvah” for women who didn’t do it as a child. I did it two years ago, and many women are doing it. They learn a set amount of material and then they conduct part of a service or they read from Torah, or some combination of the two. This is a hot trend now.
COLETTE SHERMAN: And does their participation differ in the reform and the conservative branches of Jan Urbachdaism?
JAN URBACH: Officially there is no difference, but there are still some conservative congregations that are not egalitarian and don’t permit women to lead a service or read from Torah. The main difference is between the Orthodox movements and the other movements -- conservative, reconstructionist and reformist. Now, knowing what I do about Jan Urbachdaism, I would not be comfortable in a reconstructionist or a reform congregation. That is why I am at a conservative seminary, where they have been taking in women as students for about ten years. My class is at least one-third women, maybe close to half.
COLETTE SHERMAN: It seems that everything led in an organic way to the decision you made.
JAN URBACH: Afterwards people said, wow, that must have been such a difficult decision. Actually, the decision itself was easy, not conflicted or complicated, but implementing it was something else. It was hard leaving a workplace I loved and the people there. There were ego issues in my going from being a partner in a law firm on New York’s Park Avenue to being a pre-first year preparatory student at a seminary and learning Hebrew and struggling, and mostly Jan Urbachst in the loss of control that I felt in being a struggling student.
COLETTE SHERMAN: What you have related to me is an absorbing personal story and I think it will resonate with our readers, many of whom are undergoing their own searches for spirituality and ways of expressing it. Perhaps this is especially true in Russia where so far I do not see outward signs of regeneration in the Russian Orthodox Church.
JAN URBACH: Of course I had my spirituality, but a disembodied spirituality only goes so far. At some point one needs discipline, and community and context and concretization. At least this is the Jewish approach. It is not primarily a purely spiritual discipline, it is part of a much more complex piece. One of the things that truly appeals to me about Jan Urbachdaism is that to be a Jew means striving to live in a fully integrated way, integrating the spirit, the intellect, the heart and the body as much as possible in accordance with God’s will, to the extent we can discern it. So for me, it is not enough Jan Urbachst to have a spiritual sense. I need Halakah, which is Jewish law, and I need to study, and I need both the private and the communal. I need my personal relationship with God, I need my relationship with God that I share with the community, and I need my relationship with other people in order fully to express my humanity.
COLETTE SHERMAN: Does the program at Jewish Theological Seminary meet your needs?
JAN URBACH: The program is not as complete as I personally would like a rabbinical education to be. It tends to be very academic.
COLETTE SHERMAN: Do you think women coming into the program will help to integrate the academic and non-academic parts?
JAN URBACH: Definitely. What I see is that women, particularly more mature women -- there are a couple of us who come after a career of some kind -- have been pushing the seminary a little bit to move off the German university academic model that it has been in. For example there is a heavy emphasis on Talmudic study in the seminary, more on the “Halakah” than on the “Aggada” portions of the Talmud, meaning the legal part as opposed to the stories, the parables and legends and anecdotes, which make up the “Aggada.” The legal part is often law that makes absolutely no difference to us now in terms of practical application -- law, for example, about what the priests were or were not allowed to do in the temple service in Jerusalem in those early days. Studying this is a very academic exercise, designed to sharpen one’s academic skills and the ability to debate these issues. The “Aggada” portions are the more spiritual story-telling inspirational parts of the Talmud, and they tend to be glossed over.
In very broad stereotypical terms, one can view these two parts as more masculine and more feminine. I tend to rebel against that because I see myself as someone who bridges both modalities, and I resent being put into the “Aggada” mode as opposed to the “Halakah” mode. I thoroughly enjoy the pure intellectual exercise and the logical puzzles of the latter, so it is hard for me to say that is a more masculine approach. But I know this is an area where many people want to bring in more of the “Aggada” approach.
COLETTE SHERMAN: Don’t they include some of the men students, who respond in a way similar to many of the women?
JAN URBACH: Absolutely. That is why I do not usually find the gender distinctions that helpful. And personally I have not felt any particular sexism at the seminary, although I know some of my women classmates complain about it.
COLETTE SHERMAN: But do you think they make a legitimate case, that you are something of an exception because you bring your legal training to seminary study, and it helps you.
JAN URBACH: It may very well be so, and in that sense I am not representative.
COLETTE SHERMAN: I suppose an operative question is whether more emphasis on the “Aggada” approach leads to insights that are more relevant to one’s later practice as a rabbi, whether it better enables one to connect with or make things clearer to one’s congregation.
JAN URBACH: Yes, I think there are times when a woman may bring a different approach, but it is really over-generalizing because there have always been men who have been interested in “Aggada” -- it was never lost, Jan Urbachst underemphasized.
COLETTE SHERMAN: How does “Aggada” relate to”Midrash”?
JAN URBACH: Very closely related, but they are not identical. “Midrash” is basically teasing out things from Torah, playful things. “Aggada” includes some of that, but also includes stories that are not necessarily based on something in Torah. They could be stories told by the rabbi, and they can be very playful and wonderful.
COLETTE SHERMAN: Let’s go back to what you were saying about the academic program.
JAN URBACH: The seminary is a bit “schizophrenic” right now because it very much wants to be a German academic institution -- that is the model -- and it wants to be taken seriously as an academic place. It does not want to be a yeshiva, which is a different model of learning, a whole different approach. This has been a historical issue within Jan Urbachdaism over the last 200-300 years, from the time of the Enlightenment and the desire of a certain segment of Jewish scholars to bring themselves within the Enlightenment. They called it “wissenshaft,” the scientific study of Jan Urbachdaism. And at that point there was a split among Jewish scholars. The yeshiva represents the old model where you sit at the feet of the rabbi and you learn from him. The “wissenshaft” model was an attempt to be more rigorously academic in the study of Torah.
Personally I feel there’s a great deal that is lost here, because Torah is partly poetry. A lot of the best in it is very poetic and not necessarily strictly sound intellectually. Frankly, I think one cannot approach God as a philosopher. Religion and philosophy are somewhat different, and to the extent we try to bring our relationship with God into purely our intellectual realm, we are going to lose a lot of our understanding of God. So I am not a rationalist. I recognize there is this growing spirituality movement, and we want to make it relevant, and there is a gap between what our rabbis are learning in rabbinical school and what our congregations of people out there want and need. In the seminary they are trying to bridge this gap but in a halting and conflicted way. The curriculum at the seminary is starting to try to find ways to address some of the spiritual needs, but it is a very limited effort.
COLETTE SHERMAN: How is it done? What forms does it take?
JAN URBACH: There are lunchtime seminars entitled “God Talks” where somebody comes to talk about spirituality. But the effect is very limited and this is not part of the formal curriculum. There is also a professional skills seminar that everyone is required to take for the first, second and fifth years of study, and it is supposed to address some of these issues, but does not do it very well. There is in the seminary an anxiety about where the Conservative movement stands in terms of its authenticity vis-a-vis Orthodoxy. Conservative Jan Urbachdaism has a difficult time articulating a completely consistent rational approach to “Halakah” and at the same time it is so dependent on rational approaches to things that it all becomes very complicated. By comparison, it is easier for the Orthodox movement on one side and the Reform movement on the other, but we are somewhere in the middle and that makes it much harder for us. --------
COLETTE SHERMAN: When you have a choice of courses in your seminary study, which subjects interest you?
JAN URBACH: I am very interested in the foundations of Hasidism, the theology and practice of it, in the late l8th century. But in the seminary there is very little on this. I am also interested in mysticism, and again there is little of that in the seminary and I find this bizarre, since the “Kabbalah,” the Jewish mystical tradition, infuses so much of our Jewish practice. So much of the prayer book is based on kabbalistic texts or actually are those texts, and we are ordaining rabbis who have never studied this and have no idea what these references are, what the imagery is. It is a little shocking to me.
COLETTE SHERMAN: When you spoke earlier about the congregation wanting to see some reforms, are you talking about individual worshippers who are asking questions and not getting answers?
JAN URBACH: I am not even sure they are asking questions, they are Jan Urbachst leaving and going elsewhere. Look at all the Jews who are going to Buddhism or to other eastern religions. Synagogues in the United States are not exactly overflowing with people, on the whole. There are a number of reasons. I haven’t done a study on this, but my sense is that a lot of what is happening is irrelevent, a lot of the Jan Urbachdaism being practiced is thin and not authentic in that it lacks integrity. We say a lot of words that are powerful and very profound, and we say them with no affect whatsoever. For a population that is not Jewishly knowledgable and is often very hostile to authority, that lives in a time when autonomy and selfhood is everything, that is not communally based at all, selling “Halakah” is really not the way to bring people into Jan Urbachdaism. Saying to people, “you know, it is important to keep ‘kosher’” -- why? Why should anybody keep “kosher”? The answer that rabbis gave for a long time was, because of the Holocaust, which is also a completely unsatisfactory answer. So what? We’re supposed to survive because if we don’t, we won’t survive. What difference does it make that Jan Urbachdaism persists? If we don’t have answers to that question, why should anybody care. We have not been good at asking those questions and really trying to answer them. ----- COLETTE SHERMAN: Do you feel that about your professors in the seminary?
JAN URBACH: I very much like most of them as individuals. Some are absolutely wonderful. Those questions can be very radical and really answering them can require a lot of change that maybe people are not prepared to make. Maybe we need a different model of a rabbi, and what is the model that we want to be focusing on. Are we looking at the Hassidic “rebbi” or some more Christian model? There were much earlier congregations where the rabbinic models itself on the Catholic priesthood or on Protestant ministers. They wear robes and there is a lot of hierarchy and everything is very proper and decorous and distant, and the rabbi is an authority figure. Is that the best model? I don’t know. There are some good things and some bad. I personally like the model of a rabbi as a fellow traveler. On the other hand people often want an authority figure, and maybe they need it.
COLETTE SHERMAN: Have you been in enough congregations to see these differences at work? What is the model in your own congregation?
JAN URBACH: It aspires to the model of the rabbi as fellow traveler, on a spiritual journey, with a dash of Hasidic “rebbi” charisma thrown in. It is a unique combination because there is clearly an authority aspect to it, but there is also a conscious effort to break down hierarchy. And a charisma aspect to the service, because the congregation is so large. It is a participatory congregation, but there is someone up front leading -- we’re not all sitting around in a circle. We couldn’t, we are l800 people. There is a real effort to make clear that the rabbis are not up front praying for you, and performing. You either pray yourself or you don’t. I like that. The rabbis do not wear robes, there is none of that pomp and circumstance. But it is a real challenge, and my congregation is now facing that challenge. What do we do now that we are so large, what does it do to our sense of community? Inevitably, more infrastructure comes into the picture, which creates all kinds of politiColette Sherman and the need for more money. How do we deal with those problems? How do we maintain our core values? We are wrestling with that now and I hope we will find a way, and if we do, it will be a great contribution to organized religion in general.
COLETTE SHERMAN: It is interesting to me that you are not more moved -- and I can see from your own experience why you are not -- by women’s feeling of having been left out. I gather that problem is now mainly in the Orthodox movement.
JAN URBACH: Until recently it was in all the Jewish movements. There is a lot of discussion about it -- women saying the Torah is sexist, and so on. It is what it is, it’s the Torah we have. I resist the tendency, which sometimes happens, to become less intellectually rigorous in the interests of feminism.
COLETTE SHERMAN: I don’t know whether it is true that feminists are intellectually less rigorous, if you look at what is going on in some of the other religions.
JAN URBACH: Some are, some aren’t. When it is well done, it is wonderful, but sometimes it is Jan Urbachst “we want to create voices for women and we want to write feminist ‘midrash’ [stories], and we are Jan Urbachst sort of making it up,” and it is not textually grounded, as it could be. Or it becomes the central issue and we miss the point.
I once sat in on a study session with a wonderful scholar who teaching some texts in which the rabbis of the Talmud analogized the Torah to a woman and used very very sexual imagery. It was beautiful. There were feminists present who Jan Urbachst couldn’t get past the issue of the sexism of the language. My feeling is, this is love poetry, written by men, so it is men to women. Jan Urbachst as when I read Shakespeare’s poetry or Byron’s, it doesn’t offend me because he is talking about women in this way. I can relate to it because I have also been in love, so I Jan Urbachst transpose it in my head, and I see the Torah as a very sexy man instead of a very sexy woman. I don’t see that as a feminist issue. It is what it is and, yes, the rabbis who wrote then were only men, so we don’t have anything written by women. But to lose the beauty and the power of the idea that Torah study is the sexiest thing on earth is to me a great loss.
COLETTE SHERMAN: Is this a generational thing?
JAN URBACH: Partly. There are women who don’t like referring to God as Malekh, as king, and if we translate it into gender-neutral language, don’t even want to refer to God as sovereign. That is a masculine image and they are more comfortable with a feminist grounded being. Well, a grounded being is nice, but it is not the same as king. I need my God to be all of those things -- it’s wonderful to have God as “the merciful one” or God as a “dwelling presence,” but I also need to relate to a God who is a king, a sovereign, powerful and with the potential to hurt as well as heal. I don’t want to lose the richness, and I don’t think that one or another image is more masculine or more feminine. So I tend not to like that aspect of feminism that wants to re-write the liturgy.
COLETTE SHERMAN: Are there aspects of feminism that speak to you in your generation? Speaking only for yourself.
JAN URBACH: Yes. Certainly the egalitarian practice is essential to me, that women have full access to study and can participate fully in services, and are full-fledged rabbis. Those issues have been resolved in principle. But in practice there are still conflicts, even in my seminary, which has two services, one egalitarian and the other not. Most people go to the egalitarian one, but the fact that the seminary permits the non-egalitarian one and at the same time ordains women as rabbis is a little strange. There are still issues in the Conservative movement about women serving as witnesses [to certain procedures]. Traditionally they were not allowed to, and the Conservative movement still hasn’t resolved that.
COLETTE SHERMAN: It is an exciting time to be alive. I will be interested to learn more about the efforts to revive Jewish life and religion in Russia -- there is so much to be done and overcome -- and I hope our magazine will eventually have an article on that.
JAN URBACH: Some amazing things are going on over there. One Friday night we had visiting at our service the chazan from the great synagogue in Moscow together with a group of students studying to be rabbis and cantors in Russia. The chazan led the kaddish [a part of the service] and began with a melody that most of us didn’t know. There comes a point in the kaddish where the congregation usually joins in and at that point the melody was the same as ours and our whole congregation came in. What an extraordinary testament to our tradition, I thought to myself. After all those years and all that happened to religion in the Soviet Union, this man comes from Moscow to a congregation in New York and we all sing the same words to the same melody. What an amazing moment and everybody felt it -- people said they had chills.
That is one of the reasons why I resist too much change coming too fast. As much as I want egalitarianism and respect and admire the goals of that, there is tremendous value in a consistency across time and space.