Elaine Zecher Our New Senior Rabbi

Our New Senior Rabbi

RABBI ELAINE ZECHER

By Rabbi Ronne Friedman

Judaism, like many traditions, assigns significance to numerology. Certain numbers are assigned greater symbolic meaning than others. Consider, for example, the following: 1 God; 2 Tablets of the Covenant; 3 Patriarchs; 4 Matriarchs; 5 Books of the Torah. Of the series of numbers, the number twelve seems to represent wholeness and completeness (twelve tribes, twelve months of the year, twelve signs of the zodiac).

In the Book of Numbers (17:21-24), the number twelve is also used to identify leadership, creativity, and heightened spirituality. God instructs Moses to carry twelve tribal chieftains, to take an identical staff for each and to place their names on their respective staffs. Aaron’s staff is one of the twelve. They are placed overnight inside the Tent of Meeting. In the morning, eleven of them are unchanged. The twelfth, Aaron’s, overnight has produced almond blossoms and ripe almonds.

In the Book of Ezekiel (43:16), speaking to the exiles in Babylonia, Ezekiel imagines the Temple restored. The hearth which sits at its center, he says, shall be a perfect square, 12 cubits by 12 cubits.

What then has all this to do with the election of Rabbi Elaine S. Zecher as the twelfth senior rabbi of Temple Israel of Boston? The choice of Rabbi Zecher assures the members of Temple Israel of a thoughtful leader whose life and work are characterized by constant and consistent creativity and soulful and ever-seeking spirituality. The hearth that she has fashioned at Temple Israel, in the larger religious and civic community and in our Reform Movement, reveals a passionate coil that burns hot with commitment to the Jewish people and carries the warmth of her wisdom to those who seek her counsel. prayer and ritual. The contemporary liturgy of our Reform Movement is a testament to her organizational energy, her intellectual daring, and her capacity to value and merge tradition and innovation, to honor the past while enabling the future. Her guiding influence is abundantly evident in the fecundity, both blossoms and fruit, of the recent liturgies published by the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

My Temple Israel clergy colleagues, past, and, by name in the present, Cantor Roy Einhorn, Rabbis Matt Soffer and Suzie Jacobson, our senior staff colleagues, Dan Deutsch and Helen Cohen, and our entire staff revel in the prospect of building the future of Temple Israel, knowing that they begin with the security of established relationship and the support of an inspired team leader who has devoted herself to our members and their families. In addition to her manifold strengths and attributes, Rabbi Zecher is also an exemplar of what it means to succeed in the establishment of a work/life balance.

As the 11th senior rabbi of Temple Israel, I am keenly aware that the excellence and strength of the congregation during the past 166 years is attributable to the clergy, lay leaders, and members who have contributed their efforts and their means to strengthen the Jewish community and the surrounding world. As we celebrate this historic moment, the election of Rabbi Elaine S. Zecher, my beloved clergy partner and friend, as the 12th senior rabbi, I imagine the first ten sharing these sentiments with me, “we have been waiting for you, and now, we extend our collective blessing in the words with which you have blessed countless children, holding them aloft, your eyes dancing to meet theirs: “May you live to see your world fulfilled, May your destiny be for worlds still to come…”

With you, we will certainly proceed “from strength to strength.”