The Jewish Rainmaker
LEVINE, SUSANNAH
OLAM The Jewish Rainmaker SUSANNAH LEVINE RABBI NILES GOLDSTEIN stands in front of the Torah ark in an upstairs room Df a Greenwich Village church. Hbout 40 congregants— fcuthors, musicians,...
...They wanted their rabbi to depart from the "performance" model of religious service—where the rabbi speaks and his or her audience listens...
...He tells me about a canoe trip he took last year with a group of Jews in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge...
...Goldstein, a black belt in karate, played Haman—complete with a martial arts demonstration...
...The question is "how to maintain the core values—the kernel—while changing the outside— the husk," says Goldstein...
...His book describes his first spiritual awakening—in a New York City jail, where he was kept for a night after ripping a urinal from the wall of a Manhattan bar in a fit of rage...
...It's easy to get money by saying 'never again' and sticking your fist in rhe air, and seeing a Nazi around every corner...
...A young girl lights Shabbat candles and says the blessing...
...At some point, they realized they were the northernmost Jews in the world...
...My congregants] not only don't mind me going off storm chasing in Oklahoma," he says, "they like it...
...And while other rabbis take sabbaticals in Jerusalem, Goldstein looks for God in encounters with violent funnel clouds...
...And that's why, he says, he is offering them something new...
...Goldstein believes the American Jewish community has its priorities misplaced...
...Though he keeps kosher (and vegetarian) and will not perform an intermarriage (he's not sure it's a good thing for the future of Judaism), Goldstein's spirituality is innovative...
...It was founded in January 1999 by singer/actress Gould, who serves as cantor, and poet/lyricist Holly Gewandter...
...Congregants begin a footttomping, harmonized version t>f "Shalom Aleichem...
...OLAM The Jewish Rainmaker SUSANNAH LEVINE RABBI NILES GOLDSTEIN stands in front of the Torah ark in an upstairs room Df a Greenwich Village church...
...They said kiddush and the motzi...
...And yet Goldstein has been everywhere these days...
...A filmmaker thoots footage for a documentary...
...He's one of the more lively, interesting young rabbis...
...That's when the pink-haired woman speaks up: "I'm not sure we should think of it in terms 3 f God taking a 'role' in the world at all...
...Here's Goldstein on New Age spirituality: "People want to pick and choose from different religions...
...We were looking for a rabbi who was also an artist," Gould says, "someone who was experimental but not mindless...
...Goldstein, 35, believes in God...
...Rabbi Irving Greenberg, president of the Jewish Life Network, is quoted on the God at the Edge book jacket saying: "This is a book for a new generation of seekers...
...I'm throwing it back at them...
...The [Native American] sweat lodge is a powerful ritual, but I'm not going to do it, because it's not a part of my religious tradition...
...He and his shul have been written up in the New York Times, the New York Jewish Week, and the Forward...
...le moves around the semicirc l e , offering the microphone to L-ongregants...
...GOLDSTEIN POSES FOR a photograph, standing on the fire escape of his Park Slope apartment, with the Manhattan skyline in the distance...
...On Yom HaShoah, instead of sermonizing about the Holocaust, he read a poem and offered congregants the mike...
...The rabbi has only one press photo of himself, and he's proud of that...
...They lit candles in a gale-force wind...
...Goldstein, fresh from his disappointing pulpit experience in Westchester, was the perfect candidate...
...Then an elderly woman suggests: "When the Holocaust happened, God was asleep...
...He inspires fierce loyalty in those who admire him...
...The New Shul, which has some 120 families and a 75- child religious school, meets in a lofty upstairs room at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square...
...He wears a green T-shirt, jeans, and moccasins, and leans precariously against the railing...
...he wrote poetry, some of which he published, and a novel, which he did not...
...Goldstein's New Shul is hardly the only Reform synagogue that counts nonbelievers and questioners among its membership...
...When Goldstein speaks, he often makes pronouncements...
...One woman has pink hair...
...This summer, promoting his book, he went to San Francisco, Albuquerque, Seattle, Chicago, and New York City—hardly the schedule of a man avoiding the limelight...
...He understands that for many of his congregants, traditional Judaism— with a rabbi preaching from a raised pulpit—no longer makes sense...
...Suck it up and choose one...
...We have to present to the community a Judaism rooted in joy and a sense of shared responsibility...
...He wants to take Judaism out of the realm of books and sermons, and make it active again— more real...
...But as he of all people knows, finding God isn't easy...
...He's offbeat, he's innovative, he's interested in connection," said Greenberg, with whom Goldstein studied at the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL...
...When I asked Greenberg why he is so fond of Goldstein, he cited the rabbi's creative spirituality...
...I'm not running away from their ambivalence...
...The Chicago native went to Nepal, drove across the United States, and hiked around Alaska's wilderness...
...But it's made a community with rotten foundations...
...There, Goldstein is trying to help people connect to Judaism in a new way—a more "real" and interactive way...
...We're attracting people who are ambivalent about organized religion, who haven't set foot in a synagogue in decades," Goldstein says...
...If we rhink we're going to incite young people to greater Jewish observance with guilt, we're insane," he says...
...Hbout 40 congregants— fcuthors, musicians, painters, Ind sculptors—sit in chairs krranged in a semicircle around the lectern...
...I hate this," he says with a smile...
...When he returned from his travels, he spent two years at a traditional Reform congregation in Westchester, N.Y., after which, Goldstein wrires, "I was losing my faith...
...Funding for Holocaust museums is easier to get than funding for day schools," he says...
...His book God at the Edge, released in paperback earlier this year, is the story of how Goldstein found God in terrifying places: dogsledding above the Arctic circle, locked in a New York City jail, on a bus winding through central Asia...
...He went storm chasing in Oklahoma with Texas-based Tornado Alley Safari...
...But like his congregants, he did not initially find God in the synagogue...
...The feeling of being trapped and the sense of his own mortality sent Goldstein on his search for religious meaning shortly before his college graduation in 1988...
...The first person to volunteer an answer is a young boy...
...At the meeting, participants began discussing how to find "entry points" into Judaism for young and non-practicing Jews...
...Last year, instead of simply reciting the traditional prayer for rain on Sukkot, congreganrs reenacted a "Jewish rain dance" practiced in the original Temple: They poured water from a balcony into a copper bowl...
...Few today dare to tread where Goldstein has...
...Some have brought guitars...
...THE NEW SHUL is part of a movement the Jewish Week dubbed "downtown Judaism...
...He is spiritual advisor for JDate.com, a national chaplain for the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, and a lecturer at Omega Institute for Holistic Studies...
...His FOUR YEARS of rabbinical school—one in Jerusalem and three in New York at Hebrew Union College—were interspersed with travel and writing...
...And that is precisely what Goldstein is trying to do...
...Perhaps because of his creative approach, Goldstein was recently invited to participate in a meeting of Jewish innovators sponsored by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies in New York City...
...Then Goldstein opens up i discussion about God's role in [he world, promising "not to Impart dogma, but to increase four comfort with ambiguity...
...Instead of a vibrant spiritual community, Goldstein writes, he discovered "a cult of woe, a reactionary community that seemed to be obsessed with its own degeneration, with intermarriage, assimilation, anti- Semitism, and the Holocaust...
...He's not trying to get attention or praise," says cantor Ellen Gould, cofounder of the New Shul...
...There are conventional-looking blder couples...
...others carry toddlers...
...He leads Jewish outward-bound trips above the Arctic Circle and takes Jewish high school students rock climbing...
...It was tough," Goldstein says...
...he delivered medical and religious supplies to Jews in former Soviet republics...
...On Purim, instead of performing rhe traditional shpiel for an audience, every congregant took part in the play...
Vol. 26 • October 2001 • No. 5
