The Rabbi As Symbolic Exemplar

By the Power Vested in Me

Jack H Bloom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136407352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The solution to the growing problem of stress and burnout in rabbis!Written by a practicing clinical psychologist who spent 10 years as a congregational rabbi, The Rabbi As Symbolic Exemplar: By the Power Vested in Me presents positive solutions to the inevitable negative effects of symbolic exemplarhood, coaching rabbis through dilemmas of the inner soul. Being a rabbi means serving as a Symbolic Exemplar of the best that is in humankind, being experienced and treated and expected to act as a stand-in for God, and a walking, talking symbol of all that Jewish tradition represents. The burden of being a symbolic exemplar of God is extraordinary, and the struggle to live up to its requirements can be one of loneliness, frustration, and despair, alienating rabbis who tire of living in a glass house.The Rabbi As Symbolic Exemplar examines how the symbolic role that serves as the source of the rabbi's authority and power can lead to disillusionment and disenchantment. Author Jack H Bloom draws on his own experience as a rabbi who watched the successful career he enjoyed turn into one he desperately wanted to forsake and how he was inspired to become an athletic coach for rabbis. This unique book details how symbolic exemplarhood is created, what its downside is, what power it offers, how it can be used effectively, how rabbis can deal with their inner lives, and what can be done to help rabbis stay human while maintaining their leadership.The Rabbi As Symbolic Exemplar is equally effective as a complete text or as a source of stand-alone chapters on specific topics, including:

• special tensions of being a rabbi
  
• effects of symbolic exemplarhood on the rabbi's family
  
• educating rabbis on their power
  
• training suggestions
  
• curing and healing
  
• and The Ten Commandments for rabbis

The Rabbi As Symbolic Exemplar is essential reading for rabbis, rabbinical students, congregants, Christian clergy, seminarians and anyone interested in what it is to be a clergy person and how they can support the work clergy do. The book educates both clergy and laity on the humanity of clergy.Visit the author's website at http://jackhbloom.com

1

An Athletic Coach for Rabbis: The Path I Have Come?!

“Jake!! Who are you kidding? We can’t put that in.” Well, that was the best I had to offer. A joking throwaway line. The deadline passed. I didn’t come up with anything better, so that’s what my Ramaz High School Yearbook lists as my ambition. There was more truth in it than I knew. It is the road I have taken, wandering from it, losing my heading, often blown off course, yet the way I have trudged in becoming, what some have flatteringly called, a rabbi’s rabbi. It is an odyssey I want to share so you can understand how, and perhaps why I have made this work the passion of my life. To tell this odyssey I will include memoirs written at different times. They give some perspective on this autobiographical religious quest and help capture the terrain and the twists in the religious road that I have taken.

I am told that like the biblical Jacob, I was a pain in the heels of my brothers almost from birth. Though my mother wanted a girl, there I was, a four-and-a-half-pound boy, born on the anniversary of the creation of the world,¹ in, of all places, Christ Hospital, Jersey City, New Jersey. My father had my brothers walk ten miles with him from West New York, New Jersey, to visit me and our mother. It was the first day of Rosh Hashanah 5693, Saturday, October 1, 1932, a day when riding was prohibited. My b’ris² followed a couple of days later. I don’t know if my brothers were there, or who did it. I have no recollection of the day. But I know they complained often about that trek. Sol, my older brother by eight years, nicknamed Ace, recalls searching under the hospital bed for a reward that Dad had hidden there—a package with chocolate in different shapes: cigar, cigarette lighter, etc. On the way home a nail pierced the heel of Sol’s shoe, causing significant pain. Dad had to stop and ask a stranger for a hammer to straighten the errant nail out and ease Ace’s pain.

First, just to get it out of the way—about my name. All family members, following the lead of those who knew me when I was a little kid, refer to me to this day as Jackie, the familiar, affectionate diminutive of Jack. When my father started to “get religion” in the late 1930s, I was summarily notified that my name was no longer Jackie. I was now Jacob Hirsch, named for Dad’s maternal grandfather, Yaakov Hirsch Cohn/Catz. It was OK with Dad if I didn’t have that whole sobriquet, especially the “non-American” Hirsch. Harold would be my English middle name. And it was as Jacob Harold Bloom that I entered Ramaz, though most often listed as Jacob H. Bloom. All teachers from then through the end of high school referred, and where still around refer, to me as Jacob. In high school after having seen the play Harvey about an invisible rabbit, I took Harvey as my middle name and so affected for a while Jacob Harvey Bloom or, even a bit more pretentiously, J. Harvey Bloom. On my high school diploma I am Jacob Harvey Bloom. My summers were spent at Camp Massad where, though officially I was Yaakov, I became, for reasons I do not grasp, Jake. This filtered back to high school. So Jake I was informally, to all who knew me right through my Seminary years. Try as I might, I could not change it. When I showed up at Columbia in the fall of 1950, I was determined to introduce myself as Jack (probably with the Harvey). That lasted a couple of days until Gerry Kaufman, who knew me from Massad and Ramaz, came into the dorm hall and yelled out, “Jake, How are ya?” That ended that. And so it was Jake to friends, Jacob to Seminary professors, and Jack to no one until I got to Fairfield, Connecticut. There, though my first checkbook reads Jacob H., I decided to go with Jack H. Upon Dad’s death in October 1961, rummaging through a whole bunch of documents, as one will do at times like that, I came across two birth certificates: one from Christ Hospital, Jersey City, New Jersey, and the other from the County of Hudson, New Jersey. They proclaimed my name to be Jack H (without a period). My father, repenting his action, had drawn a line through that and penned in Jacob Hirsch. Somehow I had stumbled back to Jack H, my given name, sort of like Harry S Truman. When Columbia, collecting data for inscribing my Ph.D., decreed that no initials were allowed, I filled in the space with “Aitch.” They responded with an ordinary H. However all that may be, I know immediately from what era a friendship dates and what the relationship is by whether I’m called Jackie, Jake, Jacob, or Jack. This may sound all too trivial, but in some ways it is a metaphor for my religious quest. If the name is one’s identity, searching for who I really am religiously has been beset by obstacles often parading as blessings.

Whatever I was called, I was the youngest son of a youngest son, and for reasons formerly unfathomable to me, my father’s unabashed and absolute favorite. His darling Jacob. Dad was an overpowering father to my older brothers, an impossibly strict single-minded disciplinarian, possessed of an awesome temper. He “kidnapped” me from my mother, determined to raise “this one” himself. Convinced that the methods he and my mother had used were lacking, and that my mother was less than useless in this endeavor anyway, he altered many of his ways. Though no less controlling, he was incredibly more gentle with me. Not having hesitated to use the belt with my brothers, he never once physically disciplined me. Nonetheless, I was petrified of him. He heaped mounds of nurturing love upon me. All the experiences children associate with their mothers are linked in me to him. He cooked breakfast for me every day (hot oatmeal, Wheatena, Cream of Wheat, made from scratch—no “instants” for him), followed before leaving the house with Cod Liver Oil, which for some inscrutable reason I liked. He gave me baths; clipped my toenails with his pocket knife (a sometimes harrowing experience); sang lullabies (“Rozhinkes mit Mandlen”³ was my favorite); climbed into bed in the morning to read Black Beauty and Uncle Tom’s Cabin to me; bought my clothes; enjoyed being with me, whether in a rowboat on Central Park Lake or partaking in multiple food treats. We had Sunday meals at Garfein’s Kosher Restaurant on the Lower East Side, open only on Sunday so “you can be sure the food is fresh,” or at the cafeteria on Broadway and 125th Street for pancakes and genuine maple syrup, preceding and softening the impact of the Sunday morning cello lessons I detested. He was limitless in physical affection (“What’s a kiss without a hug?”). My mother, who resigned or was “fired” from raising me, went to work in the family business. A black maid, Wilhemina, was hired to care for me when I was six months old. She remained my female caregiver until we moved to Palisade, when I was four and a half. My mother, whether to deal with her guilt or to assuage me, would tell me repeatedly, “But your father loves you so much.” It was true. His love was an awesome burden and also my salvation.

My earliest remembered “religious” experiences took place in 1938–1939 after we moved to the house on Inwood Terrace in, at the time, suburban Palisade, New Jersey.

Christmastime 1938. I am taken to Macy’s and get to meet Santa. I’m not sure what I asked for, though following that encounter a ping-pong table appeared in the garage on Christmas Day. It was the same table on which I played a great deal later in my early teen years and got to be pretty good. It was also the last time I visited with Santa.

A Saturday night. After closing the store, we drove home on Bergenline Avenue in a 1938 Dodge Panel truck with the Dodge Ram on the hood in exuberant jumping posture. The truck developed an ignition fire of some kind, and we went into a Chinese restaurant at “Nungessers,” which was the boundary between Hudson and Bergen Counties, to get something to eat. It was the last time I had Chinese food until 1952.

A friend (perhaps it was Toodles, who lived down the block and was killed in a gas explosion the summer I was away at Camp Dalmaqua in 1941) shared with me a part of a sandwich his mother had prepared. I told my mother that it was delicious and asked her to make me one like that. She discovered that it was ham salad and warned me that I was never, ever, to eat that again!

The first two certainly had to be before the Lichtensteins entered our life on Purim⁴ eve 1939. Their arrival changed the kashrut (kosherness) of our kitchen and many of Dad’s habits.

Whosoever saves a Single Life, Saves a World Entire⁵

It was April 1938. Having just passed through “Anschlussed” Austria in a sealed railway car, my mother, Sally, was returning from a visit to her aged mother in Rumania. Seated at the kosher table aboard the French liner Ile de France, she was joined for dinner by one Martin Lichtenstein of Breslau, Germany. As the great ship crossed the Atlantic, the conversation that unfolded the next few days revealed that Mr. Lichtenstein had, after much effort and interminable waiting, obtained from the United States Consulate in Berlin an immigration number for his family. The number would enable them to enter the United States and so escape the storm gathering over Germany’s Jews. Immigration numbers alone were not enough. They were less than useless if the lucky possessor did not have certain affidavits from bonafide American relatives. The affidavits signed by these American citizens affirmed that not only was there a family relationship but these relatives had the means and agreed to support the new immigrants for up to five years. This was to ensure that the new refugees would not become a public charge, and a drain on the United States of America. Martin had an aunt in Detroit and was headed west after docking to ask her if she would sign for him and his family. At some point in their shipboard conversations, my mother gave Martin Lichtenstein this business card:

A month or so later, Mr. Lichtenstein showed up at the store. He was distraught and depressed. The aunt in Detroit was unable or unwilling to sign the affidavits. It was, after all, Depression time. And besides, no one in their right mind had the temerity to predict what was about to happen in the land of Bach, Goethe, and Schilling. Then began a redemptive moment. My parents, Sam and Sally, told Martin Lichtenstein that they would be his family’s sponsors. They would say that they were his cousins. They would open their books and their Internal Revenue Service records to the Immigration authorities to demonstrate that they not only were related but had the wherewithal to sponsor this escaping family. They agreed to support the Lichtensteins for as long as was needed. They would sign any and all of the crucial affidavits. According to the Lichtensteins’ son, Kurt, “They signed whatever was put in front of them.”

On Friday, March 3, 1939, the ship’s manifest of the SS Manhattan, passing the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, listed four Lichtensteins. It was some eleven months after Sally had inadvertently met Martin Lichtenstein and barely six months before the German invasion of Poland. Sam Bloom got in his truck, with the Go Where the Thrifty Go to Save logo emblazoned on its side, crossed the Hudson, and went to the pier at 18th Street to pick up the immigrant family he had sponsored and was now responsible for. Martin and Katie and their two children, Irma and Kurt, and their belongings awaited their American benefactor eagerly and with some trepidation arriving in this strange new land. It was a winter Friday and the ship arrived at 9:30 P.M. The Sabbath⁶ had in its inexorable way begun eighteen minutes before sunset. The Lichtensteins were new refugees. They were also observant Jews. Despite Sam’s pleas, despite the fact that this was their first day in the United States, and their patron had come to fetch them, and everyone would have understood anyway, they politely, but steadfastly, refused to ride in the truck on the Sabbath. What to do? Sam Bloom resourcefully escorted them to the nearest hotel. There they refused even to sign the hotel register. That experience marked a turning point for Sam. He gradually, over the next years, returned to the traditions of his ancestors and became more and more personally observant. Sam signed the register for them, returned home, and came back with the truck Saturday night after the Sabbath was safely over. He took them to the new family home in Palisade. After a Sunday’s R&R, he spent the next week finding and renting an apartment for them on 58th Street in West New York, New Jersey. Then he went on to obtain, using any contact he knew and with his own persistent style and after much effort, an Edgewater, New Jersey peddler’s license for Mr. Lichtenstein, so that he might begin earning a living. Those were the days of the Great Depression and a peddler’s license was no small thing.

I was a little boy back then. From my child’s perspective, the Lichtensteins were the source of great bounty. They gave me a mechanical toy car they had brought with them from Germany. The car had a long wire attached to a small module that I could hold in my hand. The module had a steering wheel on it and a miniature gear that could propel this wondrous toy forward or backward and in any direction I wished to steer it. A marvel of German technology! The Lichtensteins gave the family a Zeiss Ikon camera, a bellows model, with an eyepiece through which, by looking down, one would frame...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. An Athletic Coach for Rabbis: The Path I Have Come?!
• 2. Psychotherapy and Judaism Today: The Interface
• 3. Who Become Clergy?
• Symbolic Exemplarhood
• Educating About Symbolic Exemplarhood
• Using the Power of Symbolic Exemplarhood
• The Rabbi as Symbol in the Public Arena
• Index