On September 15, 2014, Tablet, an online magazine which calls itself “A New Read on Jewish Life” published a piece by Yair Rosenberg - “15 American Rabbis You Haven’t Heard Of, But Should”. Since five of these fifteen are our colleagues (and of course many of us have heard of them!), this article gives us the opportunity to we learn more about them: Analia Bortz, Rachel Isaacs, Barry Dov Katz, Ethan Linden and Jason Rubenstein are among those leaders whose influence, says Tablet has been felt “around the country, in every denomination, even if you don’t know them by name.”
Jason Rubenstein reports that this Tablet article was a “surprise” to all five of them. Jason is Dean of Students at New York’s Mechon Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva dubbed “the flagship of the independent minyan movement in America” by Tablet writer Rosenberg who credits Jason for his “personal and sensitive touch” and calls him “the soul of a post-denominational yeshiva”. Jason’s role at Mechon Hadar is an example of the proliferating opportunities for rabbis in nondenominational settings as the American Jewish community continues to evolve and give birth to new institutional life forms.
And Jason is particularly well suited to this stage of American Jewish life since he grew up in a Reform congregation (Temple Micah in Washington, DC), attended the egalitarian minyan at Harvard then led by our colleague Shai Held, went to the Orthodox minyan when the egal one wasn’t meeting, spent two years at Yeshivat Ma’ale Gilboa and considered attending Chovevei Torah for rabbinical school before deciding JTS was a better match.
This varied experience has given Jason a deep respect for the panoply of Jewish life. From his youth in a Reform congregation he carries a deep respect for the lessons of tikkun olam and the larger lesson that Judaism cares about the most important things in our lives. From the egal minyan at Harvard he came to an appreciation of Shabbat and the creation of community as “a bulwark against loneliness and human frailty”. And the Orthodox yeshivot in which he’s studied have left him with an abiding intimacy with the Torah, and an appreciation for the “uncompromising power of unapologetic obligation to Judaism”.
Jason at JTS
JTS was the first Conservative institution with which Jason affiliated and it continues to occupy an important place in his life, especially for the critical relationships he forged there. He particularly credits Mychal Springer for the work in pastoral care that she supervised and for the experience of doing a fellowship with the incomparable Bill Lebeau. Jason notes that his penchant for diversity in his Jewish life was reinforced by the first year seminar with Ed Feld who noted that while JTS is a Conservative institution, “I think of myself as training rabbis, not Conservative rabbis.” His take-away at JTS was “If you believe in what we’re teaching, you’ll do great things for the Jewish people.” And Torah, Jason notes, is “better than any one movement’s version of it.”
So at Mechon Hadar Jason not only teaches Talmud and Jewish Thought to the yeshiva’s many students, but also guides them in their learning and spiritual development and prepares them to do “those front line things” that rabbis do. And his day to day work also involves counseling, including how to negotiate the inevitable issues that arise with couples who are planning to marry. And since this doesn’t sound so different from the work of a congregational rabbi, does Jason see himself going down that path? A “solid maybe”, he says. But in the meantime he continues to do the work at Hadar, a new force in American Jewish life (two of whose co-founders are our colleagues Shai Held and Elie Kaunfer). Jason – who has certainly experienced a wide array of Jewish communities – describes Mechon Hadar as holding itself to the “highest standards that every Jewish community articulates”, which makes working there “challenging and hard in all the right ways”. And there is still much to do at Hadar: after 18 months of work on Hadar’s new website, Jason, a graduate of a math-science high school where he was, “high up on the nerd hierarchy”, is proud to have made a contribution to new possibilities for Torah created by the internet!
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