A Rabbi’s Decision to Step Down Touches on Questions of Jewish Identity

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Rabbi Andy Bachman developed a model for what might bring some of the nation’s millions of Jews who are unaffiliated with synagogues back to the fold. Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Leafy, affluent Park Slope embodies the challenge facing modern American Jewry: Though many Jews live there, few are observant. So it was no small feat when Rabbi Andy Bachman took the helm of Congregation Beth Elohim in the Brooklyn neighborhood eight years ago and began attracting a vibrant congregation of Jewish atheists and agnostics, as well as the more traditionally religious.

Drawn by big-name book talks, family-oriented religious classes and the rabbi’s teaching that to be Jewish is to do good in the world, membership doubled to more than a thousand families. The Reform synagogue drew young literati like Jonathan Safran Foer and catapulted to national attention as a model for what might bring some of the nation’s millions of Jews who are unaffiliated with synagogues back to the fold.

Recently, however, Rabbi Bachman shocked many in his congregation and in Jewish circles by announcing that he was stepping down from the pulpit and out of Jewish leadership to help New York’s poorest, regardless of their religion.

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Membership at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, has doubled to more than a thousand families in the last eight years, since Rabbi Bachman took over. Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times

“I think that I deliver really good and really inspiring sermons about social justice, but is that really enough?” he said recently in an interview. “It’s crazy to think that’s enough. In order to maintain my sense of integrity and to keep the flame burning strongly about my commitments, I knew it was time to step away.”

His decision was deeply personal, but also touched on vexing questions at the center of Judaism’s future in this country as modern Jews — the secular, the unaffiliated, the questioning — grapple with what it means to be Jewish and what role a synagogue should play in that identity. Nationally, synagogue affiliation is falling as American Jews increasingly decide they do not need to live out their Judaism in a religious context.

Rabbi Bachman, 51, has spent a lifetime pondering such questions. Raised in Milwaukee as a wholly secular Jew, his main links to his Jewish heritage were his paternal grandparents, who cooked sour kugel and sweet blintzes and spoke of the family’s Belarussian roots. Yet when his father died in 1983, Rabbi Bachman did not even know how to say Kaddish, the Jewish blessing over the dead. He felt compelled to take his Jewish heritage more seriously, and that exploration ultimately led him to become a rabbi.

“I was a typical modern Jew who had an identity crisis, and rode it out, and built a whole career out of it,” he said with a smile. “What an embarrassment.”

But in the last two years, he began feeling constrained within the synagogue. He had always wanted to do good in the world, he said. Before pursuing the rabbinate, he considered becoming a journalist or working in government. Becoming a rabbi allowed him to channel his idealism in a Jewish way.

Pre-eminent among Jewish values in his mind, he said, is the call to do justice. And he had come to a point where he felt that he could do more by direct action than by giving sermons about it. “The calculus of how I wanted to spend my hours every day changed,” he said.

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Rabbi Bachman spent months fretting over his decision, worried that it might cause doubt in others. Indeed, congregants peppered him with questions after he posted the news on his personal blog in March. He said one asked him: “You are leaving the pulpit, have you had a crisis of faith? Have you decided there is no God?” Another asked: “Does this mean Judaism has no value?”

“There is no crisis of faith,” he said he had responded. “In a way, it’s just a crisis of wanting to be more effective at doing good in the world.”

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Rabbi Bachman at a protest on Dec. 9, 2013, nearly one year after the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. He has said that serving the broader world was a way of expressing his faith in a different way. Credit Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Yet Rabbi Bachman admitted to grappling with the idea that he should devote his life primarily to the service of other Jews, something he called his “sense of responsibility to the broader Jewish community.” He is not alone.

Reform Judaism, which is the largest denomination in American Judaism, has a long tradition of social justice and activism, but it can be a challenge to persuade many liberal, modern Jews of the need to live out those values in a Jewish context. So Beth Elohim reached beyond the denomination’s traditional boundaries to build its synagogue, hosting cultural events for secular Israelis, celebrations for young Brooklyn Jews seeking a sense of belonging, community service projects and popular book talks featuring authors like Paul Auster and Don DeLillo. Simultaneously, it opened its doors to more religious Jews and began hosting egalitarian Orthodox services.

“Andy is wisely a rabbi who saw the broader landscapes of Jewish life, and built bridges to help people come in,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the head of the Union for Reform Judaism, said. “And that’s the wave of the Jewish future.”

By 2012, Rabbi Bachman was appearing on national lists of top rabbis produced by publications as diverse as The Jewish Daily Forward and Newsweek. And yet, privately, after days of teaching or officiating over funerals, he found himself nagged by a question: “Who is in greater need that I can help?”

When Hurricane Sandy hit in October 2012, he mobilized Beth Elohim to begin a mass feeding program. The synagogue kitchen was transformed into a feeding center that served some 185,000 meals over a year and a half. Then budget cuts hit the temple this year, and it had to retrench, including eliminating several jobs and suspending the feeding program. Some in the synagogue were anxious that its finances were not keeping up with the pace of change.

Although Rabbi Bachman’s announcement that he would leave at the end of his contract in June 2015 came at the same time as the cuts, he said the timing was coincidental. Most congregants have been supportive of his decision, although there has also been sadness and unease.

“Andy has been there for us when we really needed him, so we are sad and disappointed,” said Laurie Geller, a temple member for 20 years.

Rabbi Bachman, who is working on a book about Jewish identity, emphasized that serving the broader world was simply expressing his faith in a different way. “I will always be a rabbi,” he said. And following his example, he said, his congregants should not build a wall around their Judaism in an effort to preserve it.

After all, he added, Moses himself was worried about Jewish continuity, but according to the Jewish tradition his fears were allayed when God miraculously brought him to visit the classroom of Rabbi Akiva, a famous Jewish sage of the first century A.D. At first, Moses could not understand the lesson, because it was in Aramaic, but eventually he heard the rabbi say: “This is the law given to Moses at Sinai,” and was comforted.

“If Moses didn’t understand Akiva, my presumption is that we will probably be O.K.,” Rabbi Bachman said of the survival of Judaism. “I might not recognize it myself if I were to come back and look at it in a couple hundred years, but as long as there is Torah at the center in some form, I guess we will be O.K.”