SHANNON LEVITT | STAFF WRITER

Chai, before she even became a rabbi, there existed a hint of the path she would walk.

During her bat mitzvah at Temple B’nai Shalom in Fairfax, Virginia, the young Segal said, “Dear God, this is my time. This is my prayer. This is my moment.” She elaborated by pronouncing her moment as one connected to the Jewish future.

Temple Chai congregants learned this piece of her story from Segal’s own rabbi, Amy R. Perlin, who not only presided at the bat mitzvah but “saved every note, every email, every recommendation, every question” that Segal ever sent her.

“I can trace the making of your rabbi, her thoughts, her lifelong desire to make Jewish choices and the Jewish song in her heart,” Perlin told approximately 400 people in Temple Chai’s sanctuary, who had come to watch Segal be installed as the temple’s senior rabbi on Friday,

Senior Rabbi

Rabbi Amy R. Perlin, left, offers blessings to Rabbi Emily Segal, center, as Cantor Ross Wolman and Rabbi Bonnie Koppell stand next to her at her installation at Temple Chai on Friday, Jan. 6.

Jan. 6.

“This is your moment Rabbi Segal, and we are blessed to share it with you,” Perlin said.

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Segal invited everyone to come in, find their seats and welcome the presence of Shabbat.

The song-filled service was infused with emotion from the moment

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“Powerful and emotional” was how Martin Schultz described it. The longtime CBI congregant theoretically understood what a baptism was but that idea “was nothing like this,” he said. He watched as even people with physical limitations, some using wheelchairs and canes, refused to be deterred and stepped into the river one at a time.

And when they came out, Kahn was standing on the shore with a towel, ready to assist the newly baptized.

When Schultz first heard about the trip, he immediately signed up for what would be his third visit to Israel. He hoped this time would be “an intense learning experience,” he said. “It worked out to be a whole lot more.”

Pilgrim Rest Elder Richard Yarbough said that having everyone present for the baptism gave the moment “a different feel, a different significance. We were blessed to have our friends from CBI witness it,” he said.

CBI Rabbi Sara Mason-Barkin explained that for the Jews in the group, who often experience their religion more with their brains, witnessing something so heartfelt and tangible left them asking themselves and their rabbis, “How can I experience Judaism more from the heart? What can we do Jewishly that is tantamount to this baptism experience?”

“Our members really saw what that faith system, their religion, their pastor, means to them and it was very extraordinary,” Kahn added.

Much more was to come.

The two congregations have come together a few times in the last three years, and the idea for the trip sprung unexpectedly from one such moment. At a joint Torah session over Martin Luther King

Jr. weekend in 2020, Kahn asked how many people from Pilgrim Rest had been to Israel. No one had and in an off-hand comment, he suggested both congregations go together.

Later that day, Yarbough told Kahn, “I hear we’re going to Israel together.” Off-hand comment or not, it was settled — they were going.

Then came COVID-19 and the shutdowns that delayed the trip again and again until last fall.

Those delays, while frustrating, also gave the congregations time to build a relationship. There were more joint Torah sessions, concerts and CBI even started using the large Pilgrim Rest sanctuary for High Holidays once they could be in person again.

“That brought us closer and helped our community feel like their space was our space and our space was theirs,” Kahn said.

Kahn and Mackey hosted learning sessions before the trip, both for religious knowledge and so people could get to know one another before the sometimes awkward intimacy of spending a lot of time in close quarters — sharing meals, riding on the same bus and staying at the same hotel — inevitably brings.

“What was really cool on the trip is that everyone pretty much showed up to everything no matter how tired they were,” Kahn said.

He planned an itinerary that included all the major Christian sites balanced with important Jewish ones so everyone could learn together. Even Kahn and MasonBarkin, who have both lived in Israel, saw places they had not seen before, or if they had, they saw them with new eyes.

“It opened up the meaning of what Israel can be when you experience it in a context that is not only a Jewish context; the more we understand the depth of connection for more people, it amplifies

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People used a WhatsApp thread to talk about the things they had just seen and get excited for everything still ahead. They also used it to make dinner plans, shopping excursions, update one another on who was feeling rundown, send well wishes and just to talk. Many people continued using it once they got home.

There was no top-down order for people to try to form friendships, Yarbough said. It happened organically.

“That fellowship started even at the airport and it was beautiful. The people who naturally gravitated to one another will continue to be in each other’s lives,” he said.

Helene Miracle from CBI and Angela Johnson from Pilgrim Rest arrange movie dates and text each other every few days to say “Hi” and check in.

The baptism was one of the trip high-

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PROUD MEMBER OF lights for Miracle, who said it was a “heartwrenching experience to see the tears and emotion” of her new friends. She felt the same when she visited the Western Wall for the first time.

Miracle knows that keeping friendships going takes work, but it’s worth it. She hosted a party for everyone before the trip and would like to get everyone together again.

“Maybe only 30 will come but it’s a way to build bonds, and I know the others felt it too. They wanted to get to know us just as much as we wanted to get to know them,” she said.

Johnson said being baptized was an amazing experience, but she also got a lot out of going to Masada and trying to imagine the Sicarii rebels hiding there.

“That was unreal for me. It was hard to grasp what the people were going through,” she said.

Johnson also valued the bus trips and the “robust conversations” everyone engaged in — everything from politics to questions about faith and culture.

Pilgrim Rest is a Black congregation, and though race was not the central topic of the trip the way religion was, nobody wanted to ignore it. One of the tenets of the trip was to create lasting friendships, which means feeling safe with one another, safe enough even to talk about difficult things.

Johnson said the trip proved that Jews and Christians could come together, whether Black or white, “take a trip and have great conversations over dinner, go shopping and have a good time.

“We didn’t always think about race or religion; we just saw each other as people.”

Still, most of the group discussions were centered on religious similarities between Jews and Baptists, rather than around race, “which is much harder, more sensitive and requires more trust,” Mason-Barkin said. “Our group of 80 wasn’t in a place to sit down and have a deep conversation about race.”

Before the trip, Kahn and Mackey held some learning sessions. During one, the group watched “Shared Legacies,” which tells stories of the coalition between the Jewish and African American communities during the civil rights movement. In the film, a rabbi says that until someone knows his pain they cannot love him.

Mackey echoed that sentiment, saying he wanted to love Kahn but needed to know what his pain is.

“It’s the whole, healthy part of relationship building,” Kahn said. “We’re going to take our time getting to know each other and learning what our pain is and what our experiences are.”

When they went to Yad Vashem, a place Kahn has been many times, he spent the whole time thinking about slavery, something that hadn’t happened before.

“I kept seeing these pictures and thinking, ‘Oh my God! I’m with 60 Black Baptists from Phoenix!’ I haven’t unpacked it yet but I was able to say to Pastor Mackey, ‘I started to think about your pain differently.’”

CBI and Pilgrim Rest, both the institutions and the individuals, are still in the early stages of their relationship. The challenge is to keep expectations realistic, especially for those who are pressing to be already further along, Kahn and MasonBarkin said.

“It seems so basic, but we’re at step one. The first thing we need to do is be in proximity to one another,” said Mason-Barkin.

Although the trip was an intense and immersive first step, the real work is to keep showing up for each other. People from CBI went to Christmas services at Pilgrim Rest and invited the Baptists to Chanukah parties. As soon as they returned from Israel, Kahn volunteered at their food pantry.

“Pastor Mackey and his wife were there and we schlepped boxes together, and that’s how we keep the relationship — you have to work on it,” he said.

That work will sometimes be hard, especially when it involves issues surrounding antisemitism and racism, but it still needs to be done if the friendships are to be real, he said.

For example, “Jews want to talk to each other about what we as Jews are going to do about antisemitism,” said MasonBarkin. But Jews aren’t going to solve that problem. It will be addressed by “building relationships with people who are not Jewish just like we create a less racist world by building true, authentic, loving relationships with people of other races.”

“This means we show up the next time a Black kid gets shot. We show up and we sit there and we cry with them,” Kahn said.

Doing the work is “the real meat of this story,” Mason-Barkin said. And it isn’t done yet.

Happily, sometimes the work is so easy it doesn’t feel like work, as in how people talked about their kids and their jobs at meals and at the hotels.

“We talked to each other like people without an agenda, and that was kind of the magic,” he said.

Before the trip, nobody knew quite what to expect, and two months later, they’re still figuring it out. What everybody does agree on is that this is the beginning of the story, not the end.

Johnson is anxious to do more with the new friends she’s made but doesn’t want to confine it to the cohort on the trip.

“I want to show other people what’s possible,” she said.

Miracle and Shultz agreed.

“There is not one person who will ever forget this trip,” Shultz said. JN surprised and delighted by how many people had come to support Segal, who is “an inspiration to us.”

Stacey Leshner usually brings her kids to Tot Shabbat, but she prioritized coming to Segal’s installation, especially because they have something of a shared history. Though not the same age, they grew up in the same place, went to the same synagogue and had the same rabbi. Leshner joined Temple Chai two years ago and remembered being taken aback when she saw that Segal would be the new rabbi.

“It’s such a small world,” she said. Leshner’s parents came to watch Segal be installed, too.

Segal’s parents, in-laws, husband and children, as well as a few local rabbis, were in attendance, but they made up only a tiny fraction of the flock of people.

The boisterous and responsive crowd was so large that Segal quipped that if she didn’t know any better, she might have slipped and said, “Shana Tova” rather than “Shabbat Shalom,” drawing a comparison with the traditionally robust attendance during the High Holidays. Even Temple Chai President David Weiner commented on the turnout, saying he was consigned to sit with the choir because there were no empty seats.

As the evening progressed, various members of the temple were invited to participate in the service: the choir, the youth choir, board members, past presidents, people with January birthdays and those with January anniversaries — a group that included Segal’s parents.

Temple Chai Associate Rabbi Bonnie Koppell playfully teased Segal at one point by holding up a sign with her initials “RES” and then wondering aloud what the “E” might stand for besides “Emily.”

“We are ‘ecstatic’ to welcome you to Temple Chai. We are ‘extremely’ inspired. You are an ‘extraordinary’ leader, ‘energetic’ and highly ‘educated,’” she said, emphasizing every word starting with an “e.”

Then she paused and asked everyone in the sanctuary why they supposed it was that in staff communications, Segal uses the initials “REES.” What could the extra “E” possibly stand for? she asked before continuing to riff on possibilities.

“Is it because she’s ‘exemplary,’ ‘essential,’ with an ‘enlightened’ and ‘engaged’ style?”

While all of that is true, Koppell said, that extra “E” is most likely to stand for Elizabeth, her middle name. But apparently, it’s also because she likes how closely the fuller set of initials, REES, resemble the word Reese’s on her favorite candy, peanut butter cups.

The crowd laughed and cheered as

Koppell presented Segal with the gift of a huge Reese’s peanut butter cup, the biggest she could find.

Halfway through the service, Segal introduced Perlin, “my rabbi, my teacher, my inspiration and my mentor,” explaining it was Perlin who taught her that to be a rabbi is “to open your heart and love your people.”

Perlin nodded to Segal and told the congregation, “I love her,” to which some members loudly responded, “We do, too!”

Then Perlin regaled listeners with memories of watching the young Segal grow up and take an active role in her temple’s community, of officiating her lifecycle events from her bat mitzvah to her wedding and assisting her on the road to the rabbinate.

Perlin always knew her protégé was special, especially given that in nearly 50 years of teaching, Segal was her only confirmation student to produce not one but three separate confirmation essays.

Perlin asked Segal’s clergy partners, Cantor Ross Wolman and Koppell, to join Segal as she received the community’s blessing. They stood at her side and lifted a cloth, a healing quilt made by Temple Chai’s Shalom Center, above her head. That led to a bit of levity in an otherwise solemn moment when it became clear that the already tall Segal — even taller in heels — could not quite stand upright under the cloth without hitting her head.

Everyone chuckled as she made the best of it and Perlin, who is much shorter, laughed and said, “I have no problem!”

Once Weiner had passed Segal the Torah, he gave Wolman and Koppell an assist, helping to raise the cloth high enough for the senior rabbi.

Perlin told Segal she now inherited the long rabbinic tradition of training the Jewish people and exhorted her to continue the tradition by being deliberate in her judgment, raising up students — and sending them to rabbinical school, she cheerfully added — and protecting the integrity of the Torah.

“Through you, Emily, the old will be made new and the new will be made holy,” Perlin said.

As Segal began to pray for the strength she would need for the momentous task of serving as senior rabbi, she became overwhelmed with emotion momentarily and had to pause before promising to bring honor to her “precious Temple Chai family.”

She told her congregation that she felt its strength and the power of its heritage and legacy.

When she first met with the rabbi search committee in the fall of 2021, Segal knew that moving to Phoenix and becoming Temple Chai’s rabbi was her true path. She promised members both her presence and her continuity.

“I cannot wait to create our future together in the days, in the months and in the, God willing, many, many years to come,” she said. JN