A Rural Rabbi’s Challenge
Celebrating Judaism in a White Christmas world
By Kevin O’Connor
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Joshua Boettiger is the rabbi at Bennington’s Congregation Beth El, which begins Passover — the most observed Jewish holiday — Wednesday at sunset.
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Joshua Boettiger can trace his Protestant roots back to his great-grandfather Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the 35-year-old would rather talk about why he became a rabbi in Vermont.
Boettiger’s father was the son of the president’s first child and only daughter, Anna Eleanor, and, in a twist, the White House correspondent for the ferociously anti-New Deal Chicago Tribune. His mother, for her part, grew up in the only Jewish family in Frankfurt, Ind.
“According to Jewish law,” he says, “if your mother is Jewish, you’re Jewish.”
Born in Maine and raised in Massachusetts, Boettiger traveled to Israel as a religion major at New York’s Bard College. But he didn’t feel the full strength of his Jewish ancestry until he had to hide it while studying Arabic and Islam his junior year in Syria.
“In the experience of keeping my identity secret, I didn’t realize how central a part of me it was. I thought, ‘If I keep this part of me bottled up, then I’m not here as a full person.’ It was an eye-opening moment.”
Boettiger now leads Bennington’s Congregation Beth El, which this year is celebrating its centennial. The synagogue is just steps from downtown. But the blue-shingled building topped by a Star of David can seem a faraway place for the 99 percent of Vermonters who aren’t Jewish and may only know this week’s Passover holiday as something overacted by Charlton Heston in the 1956 film epic “The Ten Commandments.”
Boettiger is working to connect more people to his tradition. The congregation’s Web site offers a rabbi’s blog, podcasts and an online calendar of events like the monthly, multigenerational “Green Mountain Shabbat” (Hebrew for Sabbath) that supplements formal services with children’s and community activities like “The Oy of Knitting.”
“Our goal for coming together here is to not be about standing on ceremony, but to build a community that is supportive and nourishing in a real-time way.”
On the eve of both Passover and Easter, Boettiger has a message for everyone.
'My own questions’
When most children were learning “cat” and “dog,” Boettiger (pronounced Bott-igger) was tackling “ecumenical,” bouncing between Episcopal services with his father and synagogue with his mother.
“My parents raised me with a lot of respect for the other’s tradition.”
By the time he graduated from high school, he felt his own calling.
“It became clearer and clearer to me that if there are many paths up the mountain, the one I felt most resonance with was the Jewish path. It wasn’t a matter of ‘I believe this’ or ‘I don’t believe that.” It was much more of a gut choice. It was a feeling of belonging.”
Attending Jerusalem’s Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies after college, Boettiger kept his interfaith ties by volunteering with Rabbis for Human Rights — an Israeli organization seeking justice for all people, including Palestinians — and working as a timber-framer specializing in “sacred spaces” like meditation huts.
“The first thought I had about becoming a rabbi was, ‘This would be a great bully pulpit to do interfaith work between Jews and Christians and Jews and Muslims.’”
But upon enrolling in 2000 at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College just outside Philadelphia, “my relationship with Judaism in its own right had deepened, and the decision to become a rabbi was from a sense of, ‘This is a place where I can bring my own questions and, I hope, make a contribution.’”
Boettiger served as a student rabbi and hospital chaplain in such places as Punta Gorda, Fla., Yonkers, N.Y., and, in a moment of foreshadowing, Bennington, population 15,000. Graduating in 2006, he was hired to head the southwestern Vermont community’s now 110-family synagogue.
Of the state’s 624,000 people, only about 5,000 are Jewish, with more than half in Burlington and the rest near congregations in Bennington, Brattleboro, Manchester, Middlebury, Montpelier, Rutland, Saint Johnsbury and Woodstock. Boettiger’s installation was so rare (he tapped the Havdalah liturgy words “I will trust and I will not be afraid” as its theme) it drew guests from throughout the Green Mountains, including former Vermont governor and U.S. ambassador Madeleine Kunin, whose Jewish family fled the Holocaust and her homeland of Switzerland in 1940.
Chance to plug in
Boettiger’s synagogue has an equally engaging story. Local Jews formed the Hebrew Congregation of Bennington in 1909 and, after several starts and stops, finished their building at the corner of North and Adams streets in 1923.
The group held traditional Orthodox services until the late 1960s, when its rabbi died, membership dwindled and the building fell into disuse and disrepair.
On the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah in 1988, member Lilo Glick, who had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, tried to enter the synagogue for private prayer, only to find the door locked. Vowing to reopen it, Glick joined with other longtime faithful to lead a restoration effort.
The building’s new oak-panel front doors feature a hand-carved menorah and Hebrew lettering. Inside, blue and purple stained-glass windows shine on what’s now a Reconstructionist congregation — one that respects ancient Jewish teachings while reinterpreting them for modern society.
“We always are in relationship to the sacred texts that came before us,” Boettiger says. “Judaism is commentary built upon commentary built upon commentary — the original World Wide Web. We strive to be true to those values embedded in the texts even as the ways that they manifest are different.”
Take the observance of Shabbat, the weekly day of rest that begins each Friday at sunset and continues Saturday until three stars, according to tradition, are visible in the night sky.
“There are definitely a couple of dozen people who really like coming to services regularly, but there’s also people who identify culturally as being Jewish but don’t necessarily connect through a traditional Shabbat.”
That’s why the synagogue not only offers services in Hebrew and English but also public programs with titles like “Make Marvelous Matzoh Balls” and “Is rooting for the Yankees or the Red Sox a more Jewish endeavor?”
“There are many ways to see oneself on a spiritual path — through arts, culture, music, language, food — and we want to give people different ways to connect,” the rabbi says. “We’re trying to give people who might not think of themselves as ones who come to synagogue a chance to plug in.”
Full-contact sport
Passover, which begins Wednesday evening and ends April 16, commemorates the Israelites’ survival of 10 plagues, exodus from Egypt and liberation from slavery more than 3,000 years ago. The most observed Jewish holiday is marked by Seder meals. Boettiger hopes celebrants also feed on the concept of redemption.
“Judaism is a full-contact sport,” he writes on the congregation’s Web site. “If we see our holidays not simply as ways to remember and honor what has already happened, but as guides that can illuminate our lives today, season by season, then the tradition comes to life as well.”
He’s also influenced by his family history. His Roosevelt ties have sparked profiles in the New York Times (“The jaw is pure Roosevelt,” the paper wrote of him) and The Jewish Week (“an heir completely without airs”) and mention in the 2000 book “The Presidents of the United States & the Jews.” Although he answers questions, he’s reluctant to dwell on “the Roosevelt Rabbi’ thing.”
“He was my great-grandfather and I honor that, but that ancestry has not played a central role in a conscious way in my life.”
That said, Boettiger has inherited a passion for public service. He’s chairman of the Greater Bennington Area Interfaith Council, which helps the needy with food, fuel and a new free medical clinic. He teaches Hebrew and Jewish meditation and modern thought regionwide, is a board member of North American Rabbis for Human Rights and Vermont coordinator of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs’ new Jewish Justice Initiative.
Last month, as the state Legislature debated same-sex marriage, Boettiger — whose wife, Vanessa Grajwer Boettiger, is also a rabbi — was one of several religious leaders to testify in support.
“Jews believe that all humans are created in the image of God,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This means that there is a radical baseline of equality between all peoples.”
A universal truth
But the yarmulke atop Boettiger’s head shows he’s different. The rabbi acknowledges the challenge of celebrating Judaism in a White Christmas world.
“I’m constantly on the phone with schools and sports departments that schedule classes or games on Yom Kippur or Shabbat. We don’t expect people to always change their programming — just to learn that there’s a different liturgical cycle.” Being a minority in a small state has some benefits. In a big city, Jews segregate themselves into Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative synagogues. In Vermont, with only about a dozen scattered congregations and no statewide organization, “there’s much more of an inclination to work together and support each other, even where we differ.”
Boettiger cites the Hebrew term “Clal Israel” — “it roughly translates as ‘the whole community of the Jewish people,’ and teaches us how to keep in mind the needs of all the community. I think we can actually do that in Vermont because, out of necessity, we need to work together.”
That extends from his congregation to the community. Bennington’s Beth El will celebrate its 100th anniversary this year with a building rededication as well as a public reading by acclaimed author and member Jamaica Kincaid and a Bennington Museum exhibit by Vermont native and Jewish artist Emmett Leader.
“I have an adamant sense that we need to welcome interfaith families and be more inclusive,” Boettiger says. “On one hand, there is the Judeo-Christian tradition and a shared ethos. But Judaism, while it might have a lot in common with Christianity, also has many differences and distinctions and can uniquely contribute to the dialogue between religions.”
And the dealings between all humankind.
“We don’t get to a universal truth by trying to have everybody be the same. It’s through everybody committing to their own particular path, their way of doing holy work. Jews have had a hard road in the last few centuries trying to find their place in the world. There’s something about the Jewish insistence on being true to where you come from and standing in your difference.”
kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com
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