I’m a member of NAORRR, the National Association of Retired Reform Rabbis. Really! It sounds like the start of a joke, but this organization has been around for decades and over 300 retired rabbis join together the first week of January at its convention. We alternate between the East coast (almost always Florida), and the West coast (usually southern California). Each year those ordained fifty years ago are honored. My turn is in 2022 and I look forward to joining with my much older classmates celebrating that milestone.
Of course if our celebrity classmate is present the rest of us will be “The Forgotten Thirty-Five.” You see, Sally Priesand, the first woman rabbi*, was in our class. On June 2, 1972 the 35 men stood in her honor when Rabbi Dr. Alfred Gottschalk, the president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, ordained her. When we walked out of the historic Plum Street Temple in Cincinnati where the ceremony always takes place, there were cameras and journalists all over the street to report on this momentous occasion. No one cared about the rest of us, but that’s ok, Sally deserved it. (Someone said to me, “I’m sure your parents were excited.” And I replied, “Oh, they sure were…they were excited to be there for Sally’s ordination!”)
When Suzy visited me during my time in seminary, she sat in on one class. It was Biblical Aramaic (ZZZZZZZzzzzzzz). When class was over, Suzy said, “You guys should be ashamed of yourselves. Sally showed each one of you up!” And she did; she shined in every class. As she said, “I have to. There’s at least one professor who would love to find a reason to kick me out. That cannot happen so I have to be as perfect as possible.”
I hope Sally and the rest of the living members of the class of ’72 will be in good enough shape to join on the East coast for our Golden Anniversary.
*Regina Jonas from Europe might have been the very first woman rabbi but there is a question about the legitimacy of her ordination in 1935. She died in Auschwitz in 1944. The Conservative and Reconstructionist movements also have women in the rabbinate. Rabbi Avi Weiss, a modern Orthodox rabbi in a very prestigious congregation in Riverdale, New York, established a seminary for women from which the first woman rabbi was ordained. On the occasion of Sally Priesand’s (and my) ordination, her congregation had a program that included all the first women rabbis including the Orthodox one. I had the honor of being the only one from our class who attended that event and let me tell you, it was phenomenal.
(Speaking of rabbis from Judaism’s different branches, the story is told of the woman who wanted to buy stamps in the post office. The clerk asked her, “Of what denominations?” The woman replied, “My, my, it’s come to that, has it? OK, give me 10 Orthodox, 15 Conservative and 16 Reform.”)