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By Donald H. Harrison
 LA JOLLA, California—Ever the scholar, Rabbi Philip Graubart says he enjoys the process of constructing sermons by examining the text of the Torah portion of the week, reading classical commentaries, culling thoughts from diverse Jewish sources, and drawing upon incidents from his own life, before beginning the writing.
Sandwiched among prayer services, weekday classes he teaches, office appointments, and officiating at congregants’ life cycle events, Graubart insists upon a block of at least five hours per sermon for research and writing. Whenever he consults Pirkei Avot, the ethics of the fathers, there’s one more father whose voice he also hears – that of his own father, Rabbi Alex Graubart, who clearly was a major factor in the life of the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth El (House of God).
Imagine yourself a boy of seven, late on a Shabbat afternoon, sitting on a couch next to your father in his study, the room laden with the smell of pipe smoke—although your father refrains from indulging his taste for tobacco on Shabbat itself. Imagine reading a sentence of Torah in Hebrew, then looking elsewhere on the page for a commentary—especially one by Rashi—and then reading the same portion of the Torah in Aramaic translation. The smell of someone else’s pipe tobacco can trigger such pleasant associations for Rabbi Philip Graubart, who himself doesn’t smoke and never has. His father was his study mentor not only when he was a young boy, but much later when he was a student at the University of Judaism (today called American Jewish University). The senior Rabbi Graubart served as both a professor and as an administrator on the Los Angeles campus of the Conservative movement’s seminary program.
Not only text, but also the pragmatic issues with which a rabbi must deal were lessons that Philip Graubart learned from his father, whom he described as a restless perfectionist, who changed jobs often, always looking for a different challenge. Marriage between his father and his mother, Marilyn, was tempestuous, with several periods of separation before it concluded in divorce when Philip was 18 years old. That pain, too, has helped inform Rabbi Graubart’s rabbinate: he leads a group at the synagogue for children whose parents are divorced—a common phenomenon these days—allowing the children to talk about their feelings and helping them to get past the notion that they somehow are to blame. He tells the children that the issues that drove their parents apart often existed before the children were even born. Furthermore, he instructs, it usually serves no purpose to blame either of the parents; the children will need to have a lasting relationship with both parents.
As a counselor, Graubart also meets with couples whose marriages are in difficulty. Noting that there are plenty of other marriage counselors they could go to—some with advanced degrees in psychology—Graubart suggests that what couples who come to a rabbi want is Jewish wisdom. So, often he will start such sessions with quotes from the Torah and other Jewish sources to provide those couples with Jewish perspective. He does not always advocate for continuation of the marriage, he says; rather, in some cases, he believes it is his job to help the couple find a way to separate. Jewish sources, his parents’ divorce, his own marriage to Reform Rabbi Susan Freeman, and parenting of two sons, Benjamin and Ilan, all help Rabbi Graubart in this pastoral role.
Reflecting on the role his mother, Marilyn, played in his development, Graubart said that in addition to a fierce love for her children, she had a profound respect for education—and that it is perhaps no coincidence that he and his three full siblings all went into some aspect of teaching. By birth order, the siblings are the oldest, Beth Graubart, who taught elementary school and now owns a San Francisco tour business; Rabbi Graubart, who considers the job of educator a major component of being a rabbi; Jonathan Graubart, a political science professor at SDSU, whose published views critical of Israel have made him controversial among many Jewish community members, and the youngest, Amy Cates, who has had a career as a Jewish educator in Portland, Oregon. About his brother, Rabbi Graubart says only: “I have a very good relationship with my brother; I love my brother; I respect him, and sometimes we agree to disagree.”
By his father’s second marriage, Rabbi Graubart has two half-siblings: Hadara, a journalist with Tablet, a daily, online Jewish magazine.
As his father changed jobs, Graubart’s family moved around quite a bit when he was a young boy, but by the time Philip was 8, the Graubarts were centered in Cleveland. From congregational pulpit, his father went to the directorship of Cleveland Hillel, a position with multi-campus responsibilities but centering upon Case Western Reserve University. Young Graubart went to a Solomon Schechter School through eighth grade in Cleveland, and then spent two years at the Telz Yeshiva, an Orthodox school, before transferring for his final two years to the public Cleveland Heights High School. Next it was on to Northwestern University in Chicago, where he majored in the English creative writing program, lived on campus, and hung around the Hillel. He spent his junior year abroad in Israel at Hebrew University’s Rothberg School for International Students.
That junior year prompted Graubart, following graduation in 1982, to return to Israel for a master’s degree in international relations. He said he harbored a hope that he might get a job with Israel’s foreign service, but soon learned that his degree and English-speaking ability were insufficient inducements for that government to hire him. Disappointed in this—and lacking family connections in Israel—he returned to the United States, wondering what to do with his life.
“I had a long conversation with my father and some correspondence back and forth in the days before email, actually writing letters and getting letters back, and he very gently, very subtly suggested ‘it sounds like you want to be a rabbi. You are still interested in Judaism, you are interested in Israel, you like Jewish texts—you are drawn to the Jewish community. You could put all that together by being a rabbi,’” Graubart recounted. “A light bulb went off; maybe I had been running away from that. I had been thinking that was the last thing I wanted to do, but him saying it, sort of giving me permission, put it back in my mind. I thought about it, did some reading, and applied to rabbinical school and that was it.”
Well, not exactly. There was the problem of telling his mother, whose experience being married to a rabbi had been one of constant moves and tension. “She was not very pleased,” Graubart recalled. “She was disappointed and when I told her about it, I was nervous... She tried to talk me out of it, but being who she was, after a day or so, she ended up loving and supporting me and never brought it up again after that, although she continued to harbor reservations. … She was just afraid that I wouldn’t be happy, she was concerned about me.”
Graubart spent two years in Los Angeles in the first part of his studies, then he spent a year in Israel, and concluded his studies in New York City at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), earning his ordination in 1990 at age 28. Whereas Conservative rabbinical students spend their third year of studies in Israel, those in the Reform rabbinate go to Jerusalem in their first year. That first year of study in Israel for Susan Freeman, who came from Denver, coincided with Graubart’s third year. “Occasionally the rabbinical schools do things together, very occasionally,” Graubart recalled. “There is a seder that the schools do together in Jerusalem, so we met there. The story is that the plan was to fix us up but neither of us really knew it… they didn’t tell us, they just introduced us, maybe thinking that fate would take its course. She was actually seeing somebody pretty actively at the time, so of course I wasn’t that interested … what’s the point? But we ran into each other that year a bunch of times, at the grocery store or taking walks, things like that. I lived in Rehavia and she lived nearby. So we would run into each other in the neighborhood. We didn’t start officially dating until the following year when we both lived in New York. She was continuing and so was I, in different rabbinical schools but they were both in New York and we were living in the same neighborhood, so it was the same thing. In the fall of that year, she ended the relationship she had, and when that happened it didn’t take me very long—I was clearly interested.”
They dated a year and a half before marrying in 1988, with both of them still completing their schooling. Keeping her last name, Rabbi Freeman was ordained two years after Rabbi Graubart, and while he was waiting for her to complete her studies, he served as assistant rabbi at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City. By anyone’s definition, this was a plum assignment. There had been famous rabbis there like Milton Steinberg, and under Rabbi David Lincoln, Graubart was given free rein to create adult education and social action programs. This is a cathedral-like synagogue, with a choir and an operatic cantor, and such celebrity congregants as Henry Kissinger and Barbra Streisand. It also was a place where Israeli dignitaries would visit during their trips to New York City; with Shimon Peres dropping by so often, he surprised Graubart on one visit by greeting him by name.
How did Graubart get such a plum? He responded that whereas the Jewish Theological Seminary did not stress the practical side of being a rabbi, preferring instead to concentrate on the texts and lessons of Judaism, he had learned from his father the necessity of gaining pulpit experience. Even from the beginning of his rabbinical studies in Los Angeles, Graubart accepted student pulpits—including one at Stanford University—and while in New York, he gave numerous guest sermons as a student rabbi especially in neighboring New Jersey. In his last year at JTS, in fact, he accepted a one-year appointment in a student pulpit in Oakland, N.J., a full time position that kept him busy in addition to a full-time schedule as a graduating student. Although his grades at the Jewish Theological Seminary were high, Graubart said, what gave him the advantage over other applicants was his obvious familiarity with the pulpit—his lack of nervousness in delivering a sermon.
Graubart’s father also had prepared him for synagogue life—long before he started at Park Avenue Synagogue, he was familiar with the role of a sisterhood, of a ritual committee, and of a congregational president, Graubart said. There were other students at JTS who really had no conception of what these organizations and people did, although today JTS puts more emphasis on such job-related issues.
As glamorous as Park Avenue Synagogue was, Graubart said far more meaningful than having his picture taken with celebrities—which he did –were “the personal relationships I made with ordinary congregants, the fact that I was in their lives, at baby naming, bar/bat mitzvahs.” Although the congregants were largely residents of New York’s fashionable and expensive Upper East Side, “they are people like anyone else, with their own vulnerabilities and needs, and the gifts that they bring.”
Susan was graduating from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion while Graubart was thus honing his pastoral abilities, and the young married couple applied and were appointed to congregational pulpits in New England,
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about 45 minutes drive from each other. Graubart became the rabbi at Bnai Israel (Children of Israel) in Northampton, Massachusetts, home of Smith College, while Freeman became the rabbi at Shir Heharim (Song of the Mountains) in Brattleboro, Vermont. After two years however, Freeman decided maintaining a pulpit in a separate city worked against family interests, according to Graubart.
He explained: “Jewish life, Jewish holidays, insist in many ways that you spend time with the family. If she had remained with a different congregation, all our Shabbats would have been separate; all our Sukkot dinners as a family would have been separate. We didn’t want to live like that, we wanted to live as a family. And I think honestly, she felt that she wasn’t as committed to being a congregational rabbi as I was – I always saw that as my career and I think she was more flexible in her outlook. Like a lot of women, she wanted to spend a solid amount of time with her kids; she didn’t want to work full time.”
There was a part-time position for Freeman as educational director at Bnai Israel, and it was not until after the family moved to Congregation Beth El in La Jolla, that she accepted a full-time position at Vitas Hospice as a trainer of chaplains.
With issues like patrilineal descent, halacha, and kashrut among the differences between the Reform and Conservative movements, do two rabbis experience doctrinal difficulties in their marriage?
Such issues, responded Graubart, “hardly ever came up and they never come up anymore. Neither of us look at Judaism through a prism of the movements… we look at Judaism as being part of an organic whole. We are not strong ideological people either, other than a strong commitment to Judaism with a capital ‘J.’ So I think that is part of why we were attracted to each other. We lead a Jewish life with Jewish ritual, Jewish spirituality, in many, many different forms. It never has been an issue. I think people would characterize her as being to the right of Reform Judaism in that she really does believe in ritual. She thinks you express yourself most profoundly as a Jew through ritual, so she wouldn’t consider not keeping kosher even though most of her colleagues might not keep kosher, or she wouldn’t consider not keeping Shabbat.
“At the same time we are both liberal Jews in that we believe that women should have full equal rights, be rabbis, but beyond that we have a really flexible ideology. We don’t identify so strongly with the movements. I am in the Conservative movement, I grew up in the Conservative movement, I am a Conservative rabbi by virtue of the position I hold, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, or designing my life to be in accord with it.”
Their two sons consider it pretty neat that their mother is a Reform rabbi, especially on the second day of Rosh Hashanah or the last day of Pesach, quipped Graubart. Since Reform Jews typically schedule only one day for Rosh Hashanah observance, and end Pesach a day earlier than Conservative Jews do—that means one less day at synagogue and one day sooner to being able to eat leavened bread again. But that appears to be more a running joke than reality in the Graubart home, as both boys—respectively a twelfth grader and ninth grader at San Diego Jewish Academy – attend synagogue as a matter of preference and have many of their friendships at synagogue, according to their father.
As a couple, Graubart and Freeman helped build congregational membership at Bnai Israel from approximately 200 families to about 450 families, their post-denominational approach perhaps helping the congregation more than double its size over the decade of their service. Graubart said besides regular Conservative services, the synagogue held Reform and Renewal services and additionally hosted an Orthodox minyan.
It was a happy association but, Graubart said, after a decade he felt that he and the congregation had come to a plateau – that he especially needed new challenges. One of the members of his congregation, who also was a social friend, was Aaron Lansky, who had founded the National Yiddish Book Center in neighboring Amherst, Massachusetts. Lansky had begun the center as a repository for books printed in Yiddish, which were being destroyed or lost as Yiddish speakers in the United States died or downsized to smaller quarters. As a student of Yiddish literature, Lansky wanted those books preserved.
Graubart, a diligent reader, became immediately interested in the project and joined the center’s board of directors. Eventually, he took a full-time position as director of educational programming at the center, but soon realized that this was not the career he wished to pursue. Then he saw an advertisement for a rabbi at a congregation in La Jolla, a section of San Diego that he and Freeman had very much enjoyed on a vacation visit.
After answering the advertisement, he was contacted by Gloria Stone, a congregation member who also had served as president of the United Jewish Federation of San Diego County. Once again, the try-out process involved delivering a sermon.
What intrigued Graubart about La Jolla, besides the proverbial Southern California weather and having relatives in California, was the diversity of Beth El’s congregational population. At a recent Yom Kippur service, the president of the congregation said that 35 countries were represented within the congregation. “In New England Synagogues, it is people who have been there for generations, so I had rarely met anyone who was not born in America,” Graubart said.
“Here, even now, maybe a plurality of our congregants were born in America, but not a majority.” Among the countries with broad representation at Beth El are South Africa, Mexico, Russia, Israel, and Iran, with Moroccans, Brazilians, Argentines, Bolivians, Yemenites and Canadians adding to the mix.
“It may be the most diverse synagogue in San Diego, but there are other synagogues that are very diverse too,” Graubart reflects. “I think we are centrist in many ways; we have a central location in La Jolla, we are centrist ideologically — Conservative, but flexible Conservative—so no matter where you grew up in Judaism you can find something familiar here.”
Some of the synagogue programming takes advantage of the national diversity. “We probably had 12 programs about 12 different nationalities, just explaining how they do things, how they celebrate Shabbat, what kind of customs they have on Passover; what their charosset (a special Passover dish) tastes like,” the rabbi said.
People think of Congregation Beth El as a wealthy congregation, which recently built a new sanctuary that blends the feel of modern California building materials and an old world synagogue--with congregants looking at each other across a central floor where the bima and reader’s table are located. However, said Graubart, it is far more accurate to say that Beth El is a congregation with some wealthy people and with some people who are not so wealthy. He said a very high percentage of the congregation receives some sort of subsidy for their synagogue dues.
In fact, said Graubart, helping congregants hurdle the high cost of living committed Jewish lives –with such institutions as synagogue, Jewish school, and Jewish camp seemingly beyond the economic reach of many congregants – is a particularly important initiative to him. Young families in financial need, under a Graubart-favored initiative, find that to send their kids to preschool or to Torah school, it practically pays them to join the synagogue—so liberal are the allowances. The assumption behind this is that as these families become more acclimated to synagogue life—and as their incomes grow – they too will be generous and help provide for other families’ subsidies.
The rabbi believes that while different Jewish institutions enrich the Jewish community—whether educationally, socially, emotionally, or in advocacy for Israel—synagogues are the only institutions that combine all of these important needs. While his synagogue has grown in this decade during his rabbinate from approximately 320 families to 550 families, it is far from immune from the pressure of the internationally slumping economy. In a recent article in the congregation’s newsletter, Kolenu, Graubart pondered the phenomenon of people dropping out of congregations after their children’s bnai mitzvah, perhaps believing that they no longer need the services for which they pay through their dues. Perhaps they don’t, but others do need such services, and one ought to care about the ongoing viability of the Jewish community, Graubart said. Being committed partners to the synagogue in bringing up the next generation of Jews is an important contribution to the well-being of all Jews, he said.
With the allotted time for our interview nearly having run its course, I asked Graubart about his experiences serving this year in the rotating presidency of the San Diego Rabbinical Association, an organization that brings together most of the non-Orthodox rabbis in San Diego County for socialization and, less often, for policy making. As other SDRA presidents have before him, Graubart expresses regret that Orthodox rabbis do not avail themselves of a standing invitation to join SDRA. Even Chabad rabbis, who are regular guests at non-Orthodox congregations, remain aloof from SDRA.
With Orthodox rabbis standing apart, says Graubart, “I think it hurts the community, I think it is a shame, and I think it is slightly insulting too. The reason is they are questioning whether we are rabbis or not. There are other communities where Orthodox rabbis do participate in groups, whatever they may be called, and I think that it is a real shame in San Diego that they don’t. There are areas we can work together, and when we can’t, we won’t, but this doesn’t even give us a chance.”
As president, said Graubart, he considers his prime responsibility to be the convening of meetings, and bringing speakers to the group to help rabbis who are new to the community to become more familiar with San Diego. For example, Morris Casuto of the Anti-Defamation League has been a speaker, and heads of other Jewish agencies and organizations also are on the guest list.
Sometimes SDRA serves as a forum for the discussion of issues – such as the debate between those rabbis who believe the group Christians United for Israel deserve cooperation in the common purpose of protecting Israel, and those who feel CUFI should be avoided because of the controversial stands its leaders have taken on a variety of issues, including adversarial relationships with the gay and lesbian community and with Roman Catholics. But while the rabbinical colleagues talk about such issues, lack of consensus precludes SDRA from taking a formal position on the matter. Graubart said he believes SDRA should speak as a group on issues only when there is unanimity.
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