Transcript for the Piece Audio version of The Itinerant Rabbi
SUGGESTED INTRO: Here?s a weekend job.
Deborah Kassoff works for the Institute of Southern Jewish Life and every Friday she packs her car and drives to towns like Natchez, Meridian, Clarksdale, and New Iberia. Kassoff is a traveling rabbi, and she provides religious services to congregations too small to have a rabbi of their own.
Although she always thought she?d take a more traditional pulpit, but during an assignment as a student rabbi in Greenville, Mississippi, she fell in love with the South. She was drawn to the challenge to serve communities that are outside the Jewish mainstream and to way that intensity of Southerners? religious beliefs.
Independent producer Philip Graitcer recently caught up with her in Helena, Arkansas.
/Open with singing??/bed
PG: Rabbi Kassoff is leading the final service at Temple Beth El. She has been visiting this Mississippi Delta town for the past three years, helping the aging congregation prepare for the inevitable. After today?s services, the 90 year old synagogue will become a community center.
DK: Sermon cuts
Sermon-08 (:26) The great triumph in the history of the 90 years old holy place resides not in the edifice itself not in the store or the glass or even in the store or the glass or even in the echoes of the generation of voices that whisper still in its balconies and its corners. Its triumph resides with you. You have made this space holy.
PG: In 1916 when it was built, Temple Beth El cost nearly 40-thousand dollars. It boasts a Tiffany-style stained glass dome, a holy ark of polished oak, and a powerful pipe organ that still works. The building has been impeccably maintained even though now there are hardly enough members to fill the first two rows of pews.
Sermon-17 (:10)God does not abandon former synagogue buildings per se. God abandons places where people stray from the path of righteousness.
PG: This morning, however, the synagogue is nearly full. About 100 people have come to Helena to attend the synagogue?s closing ceremonies. Some are the children and grandchildren of the remaining dozen members of the congregation. They grew up in Helena and went to Beth El?s services and Sunday school. Now they are lawyers, dentists, and financial analysts and live in places like Memphis, Philadelphia and New York City.
Sermon_20 (:20) You may be saying goodbye to the Beth El you?ve know all your lives but this is not deconsecration. Judaism does not recognize any ritual and indeed there is no need for it. We consecrate and we desecrate not by ceremony but by our purposes, our actions.
PG: Like many small towns in the South, there is little left in Helena. Farms are no longer viable and industry has moved away. The once-vibrant Jewish community, which once numbered over 150 families, is now a dozen aging men and women. Temple Beth El hasn?t had a rabbi for 20 years, so now Kassoff occasionally fills in.
0311-01 (:12)DK: When I took this job there were several people who sort of questioned why I would do that. And they suggested that I would be doing just hospice work for a congregation?
PG: As the out of towners leave, members from other congregations begin packing up the religious artifacts from Beth El to use in their own synagogues.
Moses (:21) David Solomon: I have to run to mother?s to look for Moses.
DK: I thought they found Moses.
David Solomon: They found little Moses. This is big Moses.
DK: Moses is missing and one of the congregations wanted it for their building [laughter]
PG: A torah is going to a synagogue in Bentonville, Arkansas, another to a new congregation in Russia, and the ark is going to Temple Israel in Memphis.
DK: ? I never saw what I was doing as holding the hand of the dying. But my sense is that as long as this community continues to all those things? then there is Jewish life here. This isn?t the death of the Jewish community, even if their building has closed.
PG: For several years, the congregation has been agonizing over the fate of their synagogue. Some worried that after their deaths, the building would be torn down and replaced with a parking lot. They decided to give the building to the state to be turned into a community center and museum. 87- year old Miriam Solomon, the congregation?s matriarch, is finally at ease. Last night, at the synagogue?s farewell, she told the crowd:
Miriam (:20) I see your parents. I see your grandparents. I?m old enough to know them. I think we?re surrounded by their love tonight. I think that they would be very proud of the decision we made. I think they would be very proud of us and I think we have their blessings.
PG: Although there may continue to be Friday night services in the homes of members of the congregation, for Kassoff there is a certain finality to the day?s events?.
Leading the service (:33) DK: Leading the service this morning, it was very hard and very sad. It really started to hit me. I travel to so many different communities and its ? for me ? its impossible to get too attached to any one of them. There?s a lot of history here. I empathize. I am speaking the final words of a services. This is bringing to a close a whole era for this congregation. I mean all the thing I have been thinking about and pulling together for my sermon become real.
PG: We?re interrupted by Sydney Weiss. He?s in Helena for the weekend.
fan (:24) Speaker doesn?t do it. You?re among the most gifted people to know the tenor of something very strange. There is no deconsecration service. You did not go to the book of deconsecrations and see what witticisms and?. It was wonderful?.. if there?s a home run? you hit one.
PG: When Kassoff visits the any of two dozen congregations on her circuit, she is a star. She?s been called a Queen Solomon.
ACT_09(:28) I love being a rabbi. I love leading services and having that kind of interaction with the congregation. ?. I just swoop in and am immediately embraced. The people that I am serving are so eager for Jewish contact and Jewish life. They?re thirsty.
PG: Although it would be easy to look at Kassoff?s ministry as a kind of extended death knell for a dying way of life. That?s not how she sees it. Instead, her sense of her work is spreading the essential spirit of a faith which has weathered 6-thousand years of change.
Sermon-25 (:15) May you remain strong in sense of connection and community and may you always strive in your words and deeds to live up to the legacy of this place.
May you be holy.
Suggested OUTRO
This month, Rabbi Kassoff is leaving her job and putting down roots. She?s taking a more stationary pulpit as an assistant rabbi in Marblehead, Massachusetts. She?s looking forward to sleeping in her own bed, spending the Jewish holidays with her husband, and raising a family of her own.
