By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Rabbi Nadav Caine and family are now packing up their belongings as he gets ready to assume a new pulpit in Ann Arbor, Michigan, beginning July 1.
Caine, 51, had been with Congregation Ner Tamid in suburban Poway for 12 years, starting with the Conservative congregation during the time that he was a rabbinical intern. During that time, he studied Monday through Thursday at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism (today called American Jewish University) and served Friday through Sunday as a pulpit rabbi and jack-of-all trades.
As we waited for a bruncheon honoring retiring Jewish Federation CEO Michael Sonduck to get underway, Rabbi Caine agreed to reflect on his career here.
When he was a freshly minted rabbi, “I got to do every role possible,” Caine said. “Sometimes I was caterer. I often times was janitor. I also was the sound guy, the roadie, and the spiritual leader. I felt like Steve Jobs [the founder of Apple, Inc.] in his garage and it was just wonderful. I just love rabbis who get down on the floor. You get your suits very, very dirty when you get down to play Ga-ga with kids, and the next second you are talking to someone who has lost a spouse.”
He said that when he started at Ner Tamid, “It had about 120 ‘member units,’ as they say in the business, and then it went up to around 180, and now we are down from that a little bit. The most important thing was that we diversified. When we started—and I hope no one takes offense at this—it had an older crowd who sought an alternative to the wonderful synagogue Adat Shalom down the street, which had a reputation for a good preschool and Hebrew school, while our reputation was for good davening (prayer) and a more mature crowd.”
Today, he said, Adat Shalom, which is a Reform congregation, and Ner Tamid, which is Conservative, have a close, cooperative relationship, and both now “are more inter-generational.”
“I know a lot of synagogues like to say that they are inter-generational but I think we truly are,” Caine added. “And it has been wonderful to watch how happy the older crowd has been since we have had these flourishing family services with all these kids, and vice versa, how nice it is to have kids write their class projects on Holocaust survivors within the shul—that is what shuls are all about.”
While board members of Ner Tamid typically welcomed innovation, said the rabbi, there often was resistance to change on the part of some members.
For example, he said, “right across from the sanctuary there was a storage room, where we stored all the chairs. I had the idea of turning it into a children’s playroom and replacing the door with one made of glass, so people inside would actually be able to see the bima.” Some congregants said, “don’t do that, you can’t do that,” Caine recalled. So, “I went furtively in the night, when everyone was gone, and I transformed the room. I got money from the Sisterhood that they graciously donated to me. A professional muralist put a world class mural in the room, and then I had someone replace the door with the glass door. I put in a closed-circuit TV so people could actually watch the service. Like a start-up, I did it on a shoe string, and it was a success. The reaction was ‘This is beautiful; what a wonderful initiative of the synagogue!’ There was a nursing chair, a rocker, kids’ toys for every age. You should see it when there are bar or bat mitzvahs. People can go in there with their kids and the service is playing on the TV; you can hear the bar mitzvah.”
Another initiative that Caine remembers fondly was changing the Shabbat family service into the Shabbat family experience. In the past, he said, a family Shabbat service tended to be story telling; “You would read Sammy the Spider to the kids. One day, I lined the entire center of the sanctuary with tables covered with white table cloths, candles, tzedakah boxes, challot—tons of things, a dramatic display. I said, ‘We are all going to get around the table and do the service around the table.’ At first people said, ‘I have to stand during a service?’ But people just fell in love with it, and now we’ve been doing it for about 10 years.”
The lesson from both stories, obviously, is that any new program will encounter some resistance. But if you try it, they just might like it.
Caine said that many synagogues and Jewish institutions make the mistake of trying to create programming which they think their members will like. Far more important is to understand what programs the members actually need. For example, he said, many families today have two working parents who don’t get home until sometime after 5 p.m. Schools typically let out earlier in the afternoon. What the working parents need is for someone to pick up their children. So, ‘let’s send a bus and pick up kids weekdays and have Hebrew school from 4 p.m. to 5:15 p.m” instead of on weekends, when “the kids have extra-curricular activities.”
Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor is approximately 100 years old, with an aging population and a shrinking day school, Caine said. It has approximately 450 member units – so it is approximately three times the size of Ner Tamid. “It has the history of being the only Conservative congregation in Ann Arbor. My pre-judgment—and I may be wrong about this—is that things are a little different there than in San Diego. People in San Diego have so many opportunities –soccer, dance, golf, surfing—that it is hard to get people to come to shul. People are comfortable here being Jewish without being shul members. They have other ways of being Jewish, like the JCC, or Leichtag [a campus in Encinitas offering a variety of Jewish programs]. Ann Arbor is a small town of 9,000 Jews, with one Reform shul, one Conservative shul, one Chabad, and one Hillel. All are doing well because in a small town there is a lot of affiliation, even cross-affiliation, so it is a different thing.”
When he was interviewing for the job as senior rabbi, the Beth Israel Congregation board wanted to be certain that Caine understood the congregation’s culture, and that at the same time he would apply their traditions to modern life.
Up until then, Caine said, he had a misconception about how one is hired to become a senior rabbi. “I thought I would never get a senior rabbi pulpit because I didn’t have a book. My feeling was that if you are an established author, you are in demand, first for scholar-in-residence weekends, and then a big synagogue wants you.”
He learned that this simply was not the case. “They want a person of the people,” he said. “They don’t want someone talking down to them. During my interview, I said, ‘Give me a lapel mike and let me walk among the people.’ That is what they want, as well as someone who will be your friend, will be pastoral, cares about you, and basically says, when he preaches, ‘This is what I’m going through as someone who is trying to live a good Jewish life in this world.’ What I basically talked about was how I struggle to carve out time for my family, and how I am a sandwich generation person. I take care of my 92 year old in-law parent, and my kids, 5 and 7. They liked the idea that I could tell how Judaism helps me with that. As far as writing books is concerned, they said that would mean l’d have less time for the congregation!”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com