Rabbi Joseph Wolf

Frankel: Let’s begin by having you state your full name, date, and place of birth.
WOLF: My full name is Rabbi Joseph A. Wolf, and my place of birth is Boston, Massachusetts. March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day, 1951.

Frankel: Let’s start with your early life in Boston. Can you describe your family who lived in your household?
WOLF: I grew up in a duplex, for all intents and purposes. On the bottom floor were my mother and my father. I was the oldest of four kids. I have two younger brothers, Rob and David, and a younger sister, Barbara. Two, four, six, eight — very regimented in when we all arrived on the scene. And upstairs was my maternal grandmother. There’s a picture behind us that you’ll want to see of the first Hadassah contingent gathering in the State of Israel, when it became a state. We think it’s 1951. She led a contingent of women from all across New England. So my grandmother lived upstairs and was a very, very positive influence on me.

Frankel: Did you know your maternal grandfather?
WOLF: I didn’t know my grandfather. I’m named after him. His name was Joe Feinsilver, Yosef Eliahu HaKohen]. If you go around to Israel you’ll find several other Yosef Eliahu’s. No, he died quite young — in 1947. He was a Zionist, came from a Zionist family. His father, Shmuel Sholem Feinsilver, who lived in Worchester, Massachusetts, was a talmid chacham [Torah scholar], and was very well respected. As of the early 1920s, that was a family that was totally Zionist-connected, involved. One of Joe’s brothers, Oscar, spoke Hebrew in his household. My uncle, I knew him quite well, he and his wife. They spoke Hebrew all the time with their kids.

Frankel: Modern Hebrew, not Ashkenazic Hebrew?
WOLF: Sephardic Hebrew. She taught Hebrew, his wife. She eventually, at age 83, made Aliyah after he died and lived in Israel, was fluent in Hebrew.

Frankel: When you said they were Zionists, were they also Orthodox?
WOLF: My great-grandfather was Orthodox, totally. His kids were not. They broke out into the world. I have letters from my grandfather Joe to my Grandmother Sarah prior to them getting married in 1921, about the State of Israel and how they had to go there, unbelievably interesting letters.

Frankel: Who came to this country? Who were the first born American and the immigrants?
WOLF: In that family — that’s the really Jewishly-rooted family, my maternal grandfather’s family — there were six kids. In other words, my maternal grandfather had one brother and four sisters. The first three were born in Europe, and the latter three were born here.

Frankel: So your maternal great-grandfather was the first one here from Europe. Where in Europe?
WOLF: The original shtetl was called Zhetyl [today’s Dzyatlava, Belarus].

Frankel: Where is it today, do you know?
WOLF: Yes. It’s near Slonim, between Lida and Slonim. It’s where the Chofetz Chaim [“Seeker of Life,” Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan] was born. It’s in Belarus. I very much hope to get over there. And everybody who hears me says, “Belarus! What are you, crazy? How are you going to do that?” I’ll rent a car [chuckles]. But I really want to go, and very few trips go over to Belarus. It’s south of Vilna. I figure it’s not that far from Vilna. My maternal grandmother’s family, her father was a furrier, we think in St. Petersburg.

Frankel: In Russia.
WOLF: Yes. They came over. He died rather young, my great-grandfather, and my great-grandmother took over the furrier business. I can remember going and visiting there in Everett, Massachusetts. But the Jewish piece was already history, the religious piece. On my dad’s side, we really know the most about his mother’s family, my paternal grandmother. I have a whole long audio cassette of her, the equivalent of four sides of audio cassettes.

Frankel: Of interviews?
WOLF: I interviewed her, my grandmother, because she loved to tell stories. And boy, did she have a story. She came from Vilna, and she came from a family that split up. Her father ran off with, I guess, the daughter of the bakery-owner where he worked that she called “The Moo-mee” or “auntie”. And she has this hysterical family story about her being called to travel across on an ocean liner by herself to meet her father and his new wife in Boston.

Frankel: So her father had run off to the United States?
WOLF: That’s right, to the United States, came via New York and went up to Boston and called for her. She was sent for (her father wanted her to work in his store) and was apparently — this was a very coiffed, very socially astute woman who just wanted to tell her story, and her story was about being a hellion as she arrived on the Lower East Side and did not want to go to Boston. When she finally did go to Boston, she gave him absolute terror when she came up to live outside of Boston in Lynn, Massachusetts. I have all of her recollections . . .

Frankel: How old was she when she came over?
WOLF: She was around 11. It’s a great story, and she loved telling it, very animatedly. She spoke of great respect for my mother’s side, for my mother’s mother, because my mother’s mother was the leader who really was moved to Zionism, and moved to learn more deeply from her husband’s side, my matriarchal grandfather, that family.

Frankel: Did you know your paternal grandfather?
WOLF: I did, very well, and my son Simi (Simeon) is named for him, Simon. A lovely guy from Boston. Again, not particularly in the religious scene. Of course, when he got older, he was in shul every Shabbos, which was very perplexing to me to see. “Wow! Gee! Grandpa’s in shul every Shabbos. He’s there more than the other side of the family. He’s there every Shabbos. If ever I want to go, I know he’s there in that row of seats. How did he get there? He never was there when I was much younger.” But he went back to it. He actually grew up in Boston. He liked to say he was British because his family, elder brothers and sisters, parents, had transited from eastern Europe, Lithuania, via England.

Frankel: And so your grandparents were very Zionist. Did it trickle down to your parents?
WOLF: Oh, my gosh. Israel was everything in my home. I think if you could put a flag in the living room, it would be a Hadassah national flag. Everything was around going to Israel. Everything. Both my grandmother and my mother, especially my grandmother, always flying out to make speeches all over the place. My grandmother was known for giving talks off the cuff, could go and give a lecture to lots and lots of people. My mother was supposedly the same way, but she would later confide — and she’s just turned 90 — that it was much more difficult for her. But she’s also very articulate and was staunchly connected with Jewish learning and the whole Zionist movement and the State of Israel. Everything was Israel, everything. So I grew up, and I was going to go to Israel. Period. That was my dream, to go to Israel.

Frankel: Did your parents go to college?
WOLF: Yes. My mother went to Mt. Holyoke and went on to Simmons and became a social worker at the Jewish Family and Child Services, naturally. My father went to Harvard. If he were alive, he would say, “I went to Harvard. Go figure!” I still say it with the same inflection because he couldn’t believe that he went to Harvard; he never thought of himself in any way as an intellectual.

Frankel: So it was because of the intellectual part, not that there was a quota system?
WOLF: No. It wasn’t even self-effacing as much as he was incredulous that — he never thought of himself as all that smart. He was smart, but he just didn’t fit the type of a lot of other people that he did know from Harvard, who really showed it off. He was proud to have been there, but — my dad was a musician. He was a salesman during the day, but he was a professional musician, and he played in some rather important and rather prestigious, I found out later, repertory organizations at Harvard. I didn’t realize until quite late in the game that he was a fairly adept classical musician. I knew him as a jazz guy. But he was at Harvard.

Frankel: What did he study?
WOLF: He studied sociology, but — the reason I’m pausing is that when you asked about college and all that, I had to think because I know there’s something else to say. My maternal grandmother hung out with a bunch of Radcliffe women. My grandmother had salons, upstairs. That’s what it was like. As a widow. She had a license, but she didn’t drive as long as I knew her. She was always being picked up, taken away to give talks. Every day there were many people in her living room. All these older people, older people who were younger than I am now. I thought of them as old. They were a very interesting collection of people. The reason I bring it up is that they went, in that generation, to Radcliffe and Wellesley. And who was the person they venerated? My grandmother, who didn’t go to those colleges. She didn’t go to college as far as I know.

Frankel: So what kind of education did you get, both secular and religious?
WOLF: Secular, I grew up in public schools in Brookline, Massachusetts. Religious, I went to your typical Hebrew school five days a week and probably excelled in getting thrown out of Hebrew school. But that said — because I was into athletics — I secretly loved it. Not necessarily the teachers. Some teachers I really clicked with. But I loved it, meaning I was absorbing Hebrew. I loved Hebrew. So I would ride my two-wheeler to the other side of town — there was an Israeli family that moved in — just to be near them, just to listen in, because I was always trying to pick up what Hebrew they knew. I was always absorbing all the vocabulary, and grammar. I was very good at this stuff. And I also loved Biblical texts. If I learned something poetic out of Tanakh [Hebrew Bible], Nevi’im [Prophets], I just held onto it, but I would never admit that. I created havoc throughout Hebrew school.

And then my parents forced me not to play football in high school and to go to the Hebrew college Prozdor, where I continued to create havoc. It was a five-day-a-week program, but I went to camp, which I’ll explain about later, which cut out two of those days. In reality, I was hardly ever present, but when I was present, I really loved learning. That means modern Hebrew literature. That means Bible. I just couldn’t let on. I would not blow that cover. And really, what changed my life was that I went to this — luck of the draw, I ended up at Camp Yavneh in New Hampshire.

Frankel: What is . . .?
WOLF: Camp Yavneh is, but especially then in the ’60s and before that, it was a Hebrew-speaking camp. It was populated by a number of Orthodox observers, and Israelis would be brought in to head up cultural areas like dance or music or arts and crafts. At that camp there were actually some fairly famous people, later on famous.

Frankel: Was that only during the summer?
WOLF: Summer. I’m talking about summer camp.

Frankel: Do you recall some of those names?
WOLF: Yes, I do. Arie Lamdan was an artist, pretty well known in his time. I think he still is well known. Stanley Sperber was the head of Zamir Chorale for years and years. In Israel, I believe, he is still connected with the choral scene. Josh Jacobson is the head of Zamir Chorale in Boston. Mattitiahu [Matthew] Lazar was the head of Zamir Chorale in New York. Aryeh Routtenberg was the head of Kerem, the CIT program. He has been living since 1967 in Gush Etzion, is a world-famous moreh-derekh [guide, lit. “one who teaches the way”] and teacher of Israelis. He’s like the ultimate guide of guides, but not just guide. He teaches eretz Israel. Do you know him?

Frankel: No, but a guide in Israel . . .
WOLF: He is a gem, a gem. Probably a couple of others. At any rate, it was a Hebrew-speaking camp. Here’s a funny story: in high school, I never would have been caught dead going there. My parents asked me many times, “Would you go there?” I said, “No way!” And they gave up. And then one day, in high school, I was a freshman on the basketball team — actually, the high school, attached to a college was known as the Hebrew Teachers College in those days [now it is Hebrew College]— an older basketball player from another suburb came over to me, and a cheerleader from my own high school — who I was enamored of — said, “Why don’t you go to Camp Yavneh?” I said, “Sure!” I came home, and I said, “I need to go to this camp.” My parents looked at me just completely perplexed. And it took not even ten seconds to sign me up. I was just there. I began a long career for the rest of my siblings at that camp. They lasted for decades, literally decades, on staff, all the way up to the camp corporation. But I was only there for something like four or five years. It changed my life.

Frankel: Does it still exist?
WOLF: Yes. It thrives. In Northwood, New Hampshire. Camp Yavneh.

Frankel: There’s only one such camp?
WOLF: There’s only one camp. A number of people who started it came from Camp Massad originally, in the New York area. There were people who were Orthodox observers. There were people who were survivors who taught, older generation, one of whom I recently contacted. We studied in the morning. I’ll tell you what. I learned the foundation to Jewish history at that camp. I actually paid attention to this teacher, and that’s why I called him in Brooklyn. He’s quite old. I said, “I don’t know if you remember me. I went to this camp where you taught,” and I said, “Camp Yavneh.” He said, “Northwood, New Hampshire. Under the trees!” He had this British accent. And I said, “You taught all of this history. I can still remember everything you taught, the full scope of Jewish history.” He said, “What’s your name?” And I said, “I’m a rabbi.” “You played basketball, didn’t you?”

Much more importantly than what I learned in classes there, I was soaking up being Jewish. Being Jewish, I remember talking about it like, “Oh, it’s a full-time thing. This is a real, deep, celebrated — it’s a spiritual culture. It’s the whole thing.” Even if I wouldn’t show it, I was absolutely enamored of it. It was the most magnificent thing. I loved camp, and I made friends who were kind. My friends were hellions at home, and here I had all these kind, thoughtful people. They’re lifelong friends.

Frankel: Was it co-ed?
WOLF: Totally co-ed, very important for me.

Frankel: Was it affiliated with any synagogue?
WOLF: It wasn’t affiliated with anything besides the, at that point it was called the Hebrew Teachers College. It was affiliated. There were all kinds of folks there. There were people there who are friends of mine to this day, who are progressive types of people. There were people there who are Orthodox who live in the territories. One of those people who I played basketball with there is a rightwing terrorist in Israel who did some things that — I have his book. I cannot visit him. He did some things that were horrible. He was involved in incidents in the ’80s where his cell maimed two Palestinian mayors of villages. He himself was a mayor of Shilo. I have friends across the spectrum in Israel from the mid-’60s, and they came from that camp. I still visit them; I know them.

Frankel: When you say you didn’t realize that Judaism was a 24-hour, you didn’t feel that at home?
WOLF: At home, my parents succeeded very much in inculcating this idea that being Jewish is something, not only that you’re proud of, but that you have to learn. They did that. And it wasn’t only an academic thing. It was also a kind of home, a family life that was rich. Now I want to give them credit, and I want to tell you where the limits are. Every Friday night we had a Shabbat dinner at which my father made Kiddush. I mean the whole Kiddush — not half a Kiddush, so help me — but really made Kiddush. There was always a challah, and there were always candles.

And they invited a couple of elder family members, and all of us kids knew we could bring in one or two friends. That’s a big deal in and of itself, but I’ll tell you what — I was just with one of those friends. I grew up with a bunch of friends who came from dysfunctional families; it’s no accident that they were hellions. This particular friend, possibly my oldest, someone I played sports with all the time, he said, “I came to your house. Your house was a refuge.” These kids gathered there. They were playing ball in the backyard, but they knew at a certain time there were these smells radiating on Friday afternoon, and they were invited to stay, and they sat down at a table where there was conversation and people were good and kind. Usually there was an uncle or an aunt. A couple of those friends weren’t Jewish. One even offered to blow the candles out after the meal [laughter]. He lives up in Victoria, and I always remind him of that. He had no idea. That was a big deal.

You realize these things much later on, and I’m realizing more and more that it was a big deal. I’m only catching on in the last few years that the other homes, where I knew the parents, the parents were either really bad or absent. And certainly, not only did they not sit down to dinner, but there was nothing. There was no Shabbat. There was nothing even vestigial. Not saying that this was in any way shmirat Shabbat [observing all of the duties of Shabbat in a traditional way], not in any way. But the Kiddush and sitting down to that Shabbat dinner as a family and the candles on the table drove home a message to me.

At that point, I can’t say that there was much more, but my mother was always after me, trying to get me to go to shul on Shabbat morning. At a certain point, I went a few times, and I would often go as a teenager by myself, meaning I would walk the mile. I would walk. Why? I think I walked because I started to learn at the camp that that’s the rhythm of Shabbat. I want to say I would walk with a kippah, but I don’t know. That maybe came a little bit later. I walked, and I took some pride in dressing up, and it was an incredibly important piece of growing up. They didn’t do more than that. Every holiday was very important. Sukkot. We did not have a sukkah. I had an uncle who had a sukkah, and it was the strangest thing in the world in the 1950s to know that someone had a sukkah at home. I didn’t want to go that far with it, but we knew that this counted.

And when I went to the camp, not everybody was observant, but I met a number of people for whom this was of the utmost importance and were Orthodox, and I paid attention to what they were doing, and I recognized that Shabbat was something very — it was to be experienced. And I had that great teacher, Aryeh Routtenberg, who came back from the Six Days War, and fresh, within the month, would soon marry a daughter of one of the few survivors of the Gush Etzion terror back in ’48. So he came back, and he would teach us Yermiyahu [Jeremiah]. The Six Day War was just like a religious moment to all of us. And the music. It was my orientation at that point. Prior to that, I had one mentor growing up. I’ll just mention it quickly. He was Rabbi Joe Lukinsky, of blessed memory. He died only a couple of years ago. He became a great theoretician of Jewish education at the Seminary, JTS. But he was an assistant rabbi in Brookline first, and he was also a former baseball player.

Frankel: Professional?
WOLF: Triple A, almost major leagues. The quietest, most gentle, most humble human being anybody will ever know, but like a granite rock. And he took me to a baseball field and hit fly balls and gave me two books. He gave me Agnon’s Days of Awe, and he gave me Heschel’s The Prophets. I kept them with me; they were always on my shelf. And he kept me in there. If a rabbi can hit the way he can hit — I just hung in there through the camp thing and then, mysteriously, got into Brandeis.

Frankel: One of the questions, before you move to Brandeis, the shul you went to, was it a Conservative shul?
WOLF: It was KI, Kehillath Israel, in Brookline, which was the Conservative — I say the because all these great, all these wonderful rabbis, all these wonderful USY [United Synagogue Youth] stars, people at the seminary to this day, went there, and I did nothing like them. I know them. Barry Holtz is my very good friend. My mother would say, “Why can’t you be like Barry Holtz?” His joke today is, “I never became a rabbi; you were the one who became a rabbi” [laughs].

Frankel: So you were not a member of USY?
WOLF: No. I wouldn’t do anything that was . . .

Frankel: Were you aware of Soloveitchik’s school? Maimonides [Maimonides School in Boston founded by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik].
WOLF: He lived around the corner. My mother would say, “That’s a very great man walking in front of the house.” I can picture him walking by the house. I saw his picture on the ketchup bottle, heksher [kosher certification]. I knew what Maimonides was, what it was about, but Orthodoxy was completely separate from my experience, as separate as Reform was. Reform I would never go near; I was totally bona fide Conservative. It really clicked pedagogically that to be Conservative was to really love these texts and get into the argumentation. It was love and argumentation. I think that’s what clicked in for me. But I knew nothing about Reform; I knew nothing about Orthodox.

Frankel: Did your parents encourage you to apply to certain schools?
WOLF: You’re talking about college now?

Frankel: Yes.
WOLF: I have to tell you, I eventually became a voracious reader, voracious. I never stopped reading, and I haven’t stopped reading since when I was in the Seminary. I couldn’t read as a kid, and I think I may have been ADHD. I don’t know. Back then I just never could read. I couldn’t stay with a book. So in high school, I was getting by, I say miraculously. I don’t know how I passed anything. I have no idea. This is a really important piece here. I had an English teacher who was — and he’s still around — he was Catholic, Italian, gay, an amazing teacher who taught literature. He taught me how important books were, even though I was yet to read. And he did something else that was huge for me. This was my junior year, because I had to apply afterwards. He said, “You’re not doing anything in high school. I want you to do an independent project. I would like you to read this philosopher whose name is Martin Buber.”

Frankel: He suggested that?
WOLF: It came from George Vigliorolo. And he put me on a life trail. I went home and read everything I could by Buber. Now how I could read that stuff — it was hard. To this day. It was a matter of concentrating. There was something going on where I recognized — I remember thinking as a kid, “Buber’s saying everything I believe. It’s funny, he puts words to everything I feel. I thought that first” [laughs]. Everything he wrote about was so powerful to me. I and Thou. I’m sure I must have missed like fifty percent of it, but . . .

Frankel: It’s a hard book for anyone.
WOLF: It’s a hard book to read. I just pulled it out recently. In looking at it, I can still remember. I just thought, “This is amazing stuff.” And this is representing what Jewish — it’s about epistemology. It’s about how you know what you know, how you know what you experience. It spoke to me, and I just devoured it and wrote something. I don’t remember where it is, but I wrote this big, long thing for him, and I was blown away. On the basis of that, I discovered who wrote about Buber was Nahum Glatzer. And Nahum Glatzer, of course, was Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s crony. And where did he teach? He taught at Brandeis. Suddenly I was applying, and I’m sure I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t get into many places, nor was I particularly interested in anything outside of this intellectually. But on the basis of Nahum Glatzer being a teacher at Brandeis, I applied, and mystery of mysteries I got in. My marks, I couldn’t tell you how I got by in high school, but I got in, and then everything changed. Everything changed.

Frankel: In what way?
WOLF: I was there in 1969. So here I was. I come into Brandeis and I’m in this dorm, in what we used to call the “kosher quad.” I’m surrounded by all these people who were saturated with Camp Ramah — I’ll give you an idea of who’s in the dorm. Danny Matt [Daniel C. Matt] lives across the hall. Michael Strassfeld lives down here. Jeffrey Dekro, who founded the Shefa Fund, lived a floor over. I could keep naming names. Other friends who became rabbis lived down the hall — two, three of them. One, who is responsible for talking me eventually into going to the Seminary after Brandeis — because I didn’t know what I was going to do — he was there, and he left the following year to become one of the great child psychologists on the Upper West Side. He was there.

But immediately, here I am surrounded by all these folks who are doing Judaism. In addition to a couple of other people I know, how can I — across the hall, Danny Matt’s in a pillow fight with his roommate, and he’s driving everybody crazy. He’s this little guy, and you want to pick him up and hurl him across the room. He says, “Joey, you want to study? Let’s study in a study group,” which he just wrote about in terms of how he got into translating the Zohar, that he took a course in Martin Buber, from Arthur Green, who was teaching over there. And I know Arthur; I know Arthur from then. So we started studying Martin Buber together. Danny wore a little train engineer suit, sometimes put a shirt under it, and he was always childlike. He still is. I was surrounded by these people who were totally enthralled with Jewish stuff.

Frankel: But was it not like Camp Yavneh?
WOLF: It went up a notch. It went up a notch because these were effectively either the crème de la crème of the Conservative movement, which meant that the best, the real thinkers, people who thought pedagogically, all of them, and/or these were the founders of the Havurah, the original Havurah. So there I was visiting in Somerville with these folks who were rehabilitating Jewish life. Now me, I was a jock. I was on the freshman basketball team at Brandeis. I’m still pretending that this stuff doesn’t affect me, but it so affects me.

And then there’s a huge other piece. My freshman year, even though I still wasn’t a serious student, I took a course with the person who was the most profound teacher in my entire life and still is. It’s Buzzy Fishbane [Michael “Buzzy” Fishbane]. I never looked back. I studied Judges and then a course in Deuteronomy. It was in fall and spring. We sat around the table. Michael Strassfeld, Everett Fox was there as a graduate student, and, I think, The Big Book of Jewish Humor, Moshe Waldoks, was in there.

WOLF: It’s Michael Fishbane. It’s his first assignment ever as a teacher.

Frankel: He’s older than you?
WOLF: Yes. He was a rookie teacher. Now I have to tell you, he changed my life. He changed everybody seated at the table. Years later I was at a workshop that he led for Conservative rabbis. It might have been 20 years later in upstate New York. I went only because he was going to teach there. He was, at that point, teaching Hasidic texts around a table, and most of the colleagues didn’t know — they had never done Hasidic texts, and that was my bread and butter. I was sitting next to Michael Strassfeld and Rachel Cowan was leading a breakout group, and we were enjoying it, but the rest of the colleagues didn’t know what was going on.

I was sitting at that corner of the table with Michael Fishbane (who was “looking in” on these rabbinical colleagues), and we had a deal that after he’d lead his own teaching, the two of us would go cross-country skiing. He’s a little guy, and he took off fast, and I followed him, and suddenly he came to a halt about a mile and a half on this freezing, snowy turnaround. He said, “Look, what was this like? What was it like?” I said, (and I was telling the truth), “It’s as if [it’s] 1969. I’m sitting at that same table.” He proceeds to name everybody around the table in 1969, and he gets it right, because I haven’t forgotten. In short, studying with him was such a religious experience because the text was live. It was profoundly important, and he would always look you in the eye. At that point he had a black beard, although now it’s all white, coal black eyes, insisting that you parse what’s going on, who’s speaking the words.

Now in that whole group around that table – getting back to Brandeis – I was the one who could explain the text. I’m not talking about the deep meaning; I was the one who could tell you the Hebrew. I could explain the grammar, anything about it, and so these people from Ramah and Havurah folks, they were wondering, “Joey’s got a knack for the formation of the words.” Buzzy would look at me, and he’d look around the room, and I would be able to plug in. It was so potent for me. And it was at that point that I bought my first kippah, my own kippah. It was a kippah sruga [knitted kippah]. Growing up, only Orthodox people [wore kippot]. I had a beautiful kippah that I’ve got now. And I had my own Tanakh. I was learning. Now, I didn’t do anything in any of my other courses at Brandeis, meaning outside of this stuff, because I still wasn’t capable of really reading a lot. Political theory, humanities, I had great teachers. Waste of time. I should have gone much later, when I could read.

Frankel: What was your major? Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, because it was the only thing that I could do. And I just loved that moment of learning. Sure I studied with Nachum Glatzer, and I wrote an honors thesis for him eventually on Buber — no, it was on Rosensweig. I worked with him pretty extensively, but the real learning was with Fishbane.

Frankel: Can we go back for just a second? Did you have a bar mitzvah?
WOLF: Sure I had a bar mitzvah. I had a standard Conservative bar mitzvah with a standard speech that was written for me by someone else.

Frankel: You did not read in the Torah?
WOLF: No Torah. Couldn’t get close to the Torah. A little eastern European gentleman chanted every week. I read the haftorah, but for years I didn’t know what the heck it was. I discovered it much later; it was Machar Chodesh [title of the haftorah reading that’s read only when the Shabbat immediately precedes a Rosh Hodesh on Sunday, the next day]. So I didn’t know why it never came around, and then one day I discovered much, much later, “Oh! Now I get why!” I didn’t know what I was doing except for doing it. I did it, and I remember looking around and seeing both sides of my family were all there – and it was for me. Very important, I know, but it went right by me [laughs].

Frankel: So back in Brandeis, that clearly was what you were interested in. Did rabbinic school cross your mind at that time?
WOLF: Never.

Frankel: Never?
WOLF: Not at all. What changed also was the junior year abroad. The junior year abroad was critically important. I always wanted to go to Israel, and I went, actually, six months earlier with my family. We took a family trip, finally. We could afford to go, six of us, a big deal for my parents, ten days in Israel. It was like, “Oh, I’m coming right back for my junior year. I can’t wait. I can’t wait!” I remember getting to Israel. I was exempt from the ulpan [Hebrew immersion program], which was a blessing but it was a curse because — now what do I do to meet people? All the American students at Givat Ram were busy. But later on I hung out with all these incredible people who were there that year, 1971.

Frankel: It was Givat Ram, not Mt. Scopus?
WOLF: We opened up Mt. Scopus, meaning Mt. Scopus was just being opened as dorms. Most of what we were doing was done at Givat Ram at that point. Here’s the one impression I wanted to share with you. It was, let’s say, a Sunday or a Monday, and it was Givat Ram, and a lot of these people were saying to each other, Americans, “What are you doing Shabbos? What are you doing?” And I was milling around, starting to get very nervous. As far as I knew it was Sunday or Monday, and people were talking about Shabbat. I started to realize, I’ve got to get into this rhythm.

During that year I met great, great friends. I’m talking about Americans. Of course, I met Israeli friends, but Americans who are lifelong friends, who came for the most part from Ramah or Yeshivah, but mostly the Ramah crew, who I am still very friendly with — mostly on the East Coast, Boston or New York or Philadelphia — who were observing Shabbat, who had big Shabbat gatherings at home. And we proceeded to do that, too. I lived in an apartment with an Orthodox guy that I knew from Camp Yavneh and someone from Brandeis, who’s the guy who talked me into going to rabbinical school eventually, so suddenly it was very, very significantly a part of my rhythm.

Then I remember at one point Buzzy, Michael Fishbane, came over and was in the backyard — he was on a sabbatical, just a couple of months in Israel — and he turned and he looked at me. There was a whole bunch of us there, and he said, “Joey, when are you going to get serious?” He asked that point blank, “When are you going to get serious?” It forced me to take myself more seriously, in that junior year, which was so important for me.

While I was having the time of my life, I was out there just enjoying people, I was also taking an extraordinary number of courses, many at Givat Ram, in Jewish studies, in text. With Rivka Schatz, with Shalom Paul, with Moshe Greenberg. I studied with the greats. I studied Mikrah. I studied [Machshevet Yisrael]. I studied Torat HaMaggid with Rivka Schatz, mystical texts with Liebes. I studied with all these people, and the other Americans in there are still my friends this day. And we’re all part of that originally, that chevrah [society or close-knit group] that comes either out of New York or out of the Havurah in Boston.

We’ve come into Jewish life over time rather subversively. Not politically, but in terms of our wanting — this stuff was about life; it wasn’t about posturing. I have a friend who is a philosophy professor at Wheelock in Boston, one of those Jews I met in ’71, who’s an old hippie. He used to have long blond hair; it’s now all white. He’s utterly observant, and he became the quasi-rabbi. He revived a huge synagogue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a place that was only elderly people. It’s mobbed. He’s been doing that for 35 years. He never pretends he’s a rabbi, but can he give a drash! Can he give a talk. He’s one of those people who just came in the back door. All from 1971. That’s where I met Noam Stampfer. We were all part of that same big chevrah. Suddenly this stuff was integral to me. It was now hugely important to me. I needed to do something about it. I wasn’t sure what.

Frankel: How about politically when you were that year abroad? Were you involved in any way?
WOLF: I just wrote a little piece on this because I had to think about it somewhat. I recall that Noam and I went to a weekend seminar, I remember, with Jewish and Arab leaders, but they were Arab leaders within the Green Line. Noam and I would frequently took long walks, we all did, into the West Bank, sat, had tea with Palestinians. We thought everybody loved us, and we were all very happy about that. Noam and I walked over hills to Nebi Samwel through what is now suburban Jerusalem, all developed. Politically, we were, well — I remember writing home, “Israel is about this idealistic thing where people will get along.” So politically, it wasn’t a change in me until I went back for another year of learning from the Seminary. Then already, in’76-’77, something was changing. I remember going and having a meeting with the Palestinian newspaper, Al Fajr, with a couple of people who are now, well, one is a rabbi at Tufts, and the other one is a rabbi in DC for many, many years. Lifelong friends. See, that didn’t change yet for me, while I was in Israel junior year abroad. Just a few years later.

Frankel: When you went back following the year abroad, did you become more observant?
WOLF: So I went back and finished up. Well, I was married before.

Frankel: While you were in college?
WOLF: No. I met a woman who was my first wife, the mother of Simeon and Sarah, in my junior year abroad. She came back, transferred to Brandeis; we finished up at Brandeis. I finished up at Brandeis, and I can’t say much happened during that last year, whereas the year after Brandeis I felt compelled to study two things. One, I felt compelled to know how to pray. I said, “Enough of this already. I need to know how to pray. It’s wrong.” So I spent every week adding a little bit more to my morning davening, which started out with “Ma tovu.” I remember using the World of Prayer by Elie Munk, just knowing what every unit was and expanding it. If I had any questions about what I was supposed to do, I have a friend to this day, now he’s a Chabad hasid. I’d call him, “What goes now?” “You don’t have to do that; you have to do this.” I’d say, “OK, I’ll read about it.” I’d read about it, and I’d add it. I’d know the Hebrew; Hebrew was never a problem. I was just trying to know what to do. I started davening in the morning. I got some tefillin and . . .

Frankel: Was that the first pair you got after . . .?
WOLF: It was probably the pair I got at my bar mitzvah, bar mitzvah tefillin. I always had the stuff, but like everybody else, I never took them out. To put on tefillin and to actually do this thing was new. That happened the first year after Brandeis. I was at this crossroads: What am I going to do? I don’t know what I’m going to do, and I don’t know what I’m going to be. People ask me, “Did you always know you were going to be a rabbi?” I chuckle and, sarcastically, reply by demonstrating that it was like a direct path. I always do this thing where I say, “Oh sure.” And I proceed to walk in a straight line. . . backwards. I never knew. I just didn’t know. How do you figure out these things?

But I knew I wanted to learn how to daven, and there was something else I wanted to do. My parents always referred to this teacher they had — they grew up in the same synagogue that I grew up in — who was still alive. He was in his ’80s. He was an old man. I’m forgetting — I think his name was Mr. Harris. He knew Talmud. I can brag about all kinds of Jewish literature. I could read short stories, I could get through any Biblical text, [but] I’d never touched Talmud. This guy, maybe he could teach me some Talmud. So I sat with him and tried to learn Talmud during the year. What it did for me really, was I got to see what the Talmud was, but it was not serious. So I did those two things. But prayer was really important.

So it’s the first year after seminary, and I didn’t know what I was going to do, and my friend said, “Look” — I was talking to him in New York, and he himself had decided to go from Brandeis to the Seminary. He said, “Why don’t you come up to the Seminary?” (He would leave the Seminary a year later to become a wonderful psychotherapist.) I go down to New York, and arrange an interview, and I did something that is both laughable and pathetic. In my view, I belonged in the Seminary and could get in, and I wasn’t going to play any cookie-cutter games. I wasn’t going to dress up, and I wasn’t going to try to be someone I wasn’t. In other words, I was full of “I wasn’ts.” When they told me, “You’ve got to learn x and y” — I think it was probably, Me? (said sarcastically) Go over Yehoshua and Shoftim and I Kings and II Kings — for trivia? I said, “I’m a Bible major. I’m not going to learn trivia.”

I went to the Seminary for the interview. I was with Noam the night before. He was at NYU Law School. I blame it on him. I did nothing to get ready. I don’t even know if we got any sleep. I walked in in jeans and probably a flannel shirt, probably wrinkled, walked into an interview. I come into this room. 25, at least, bearded individuals. I now know who they are now, but didn’t then. They were the g’dolei ha-dor.

Frankel: Do you recall some of them by name?
WOLF: Yes. Haim Dimitrovsky, Avraham Holtz, Finkelstein.

Frankel: He was still there?
WOLF: They were the people. They sat there. The people sat there. David Weiss Halivni. All these people are sitting there. Who else are they going to? If it’s 25 people, they don’t have another 25 people to do this. They were all sitting there. There’s not one smile in the bunch. They were asking me very serious questions. One of them said, in Hebrew, “I understand you’ve studied some Hebrew literature. Have you studied some Agnon?” Well, I studied with Gershon Shaked in Israel, the expert! So they switched the interview into Hebrew. They asked about a particular story. I spoke about it. It was so serious, and I was not a serious person. At a certain point, I think it was like a hiccup. I just could not take any more. Someone asked, the question that came up was, “What is the most painful aspect of Jewish life to you?” And I said, “That’s easy — milah. (circumcision)” And I looked around the room.

Frankel: Did they laugh?
WOLF: Not one laugh [Frankel laughs]. Unbelievable. It was not even the beginning of a laugh, and I knew I was smoke. I just knew this. All the other people who were coming in, by the way, in my view they were obsequious. They were the old style, that generation of rabbinical students. They were very serious, and they were all dressed up, starched shirts. I knew there was not a chance I would get in there. Sure enough, I was rejected. And I was very upset. Very, very upset.

Frankel: So even though you felt guilty, you still wanted in?
WOLF: I was a very convoluted personality. I did not get in and was very upset, and I remember talking to Professor Fishbane at Brandeis about it. He sat with me patiently for an hour, was very sympathetic, and said, “Stay with it. Don’t worry.” Suddenly I start to find out from a number of other people who else didn’t get in in the past. Other Havurat Shalom (Somerville, Massachusetts) people, people who went on to become professors, people who were well respected. I didn’t quite get it yet; I thought it was just me. And I start to feel better, but by the fall, I decided I’d go anyway. I’m a total nut. I went anyway. I still remember. It was cold; I was miserable. It was even dark on the Upper West Side. It was raining. I went in and sat in the mechina class uninvited, went and Danny Boyarin was the Talmud teacher for the Mechina class (the preparatory).

Frankel: He was teaching there?
Wolf : He was the teacher who would bring people into Gemara, or he took one of two groups. One group would go to Gemara with him. Boyarin was not a nice guy. And he said, “How many of you are married?” I look around and I’m the only one, and he says — already I’m rejected, right? — he says, “You’ll never make it” [laughter]. My worst day.

So I went, and people would say, “What are you doing here?” I had a standard answer, “I’m a non-matriculating student.” I don’t even know where I learned to say that, “a non-matriculating student.” It was brutal. Teachers were not nice. In Boyarin’s class, there were something like seven kids in that group. Three of us made it. The other four left the program! The three of us who made it, one, I’m convinced he’s deranged. I think he’s still functioning as a rabbi of sorts in Winnipeg. But the other two were myself and Jon Slater. Jon has done a lot of translating of Hasidic texts, and he is the scholar in residence at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. John’s really smart and he’s a mensch. He’s a lifelong friend. The two of us can laugh. We could always laugh. But he has a very gentle personality. So he was my hevruta [study companion].

So I survived, but I’m still not in. I was working hard at Talmud because Talmud for me was like a math problem, and I never did math. And I had all this time a reading issue. I had to just stay with it. So I went through all five or six years of the seminary. That was my objective. Not only did I do it, I always took the hardest Talmud classes, and I ended up doing very well in Talmud with Israel Francus.

Frankel: He’s the one who wrote the Aramaic . . .
WOLF: He did it. That’s right. He had the toughest classes, and man, I did it, and not only did I do it, I really, really liked it. It taught me that I can do any text. Whenever I think first, “I can’t do this text,” [I then think] “Oh yes, I can do it.” That’s what I did at the Seminary. But I still wasn’t in, right? So at the end of the first year, I had to go back. They took me through that entire procedure again. They had me go back into that interview with all those people. I remember Dimitrovsky looking at me, the great scholar, and he very sternly said, in a totally ambiguous way — I didn’t know what he was saying — he said, “See, Mr. Wolf, what you have done. I see you have done everything in your power to defy the will of this committee.” I didn’t know what he was saying. I couldn’t tell if it was thumbs-up or down!

Frankel: Was it good or bad?
WOLF: I had no idea. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that I got a letter that said, “We decided to admit you.” Essentially, it was very tough for me at the seminary in the sense that I was not there with a deliberate professional plan, to put it mildly. I didn’t have a plan to be a congregational rabbi. That was not my thing. I was a pure student, thinking of myself at Brandeis, and at Havurat Shalom, that generation of pure learners. I’ve always liked teaching, explaining to others what’s valuable, but I didn’t go in to be a congregational rabbi. Never was in my mind. I had one really close friend at the Seminary continually, and that was Levi Kelman. He’ll come and speak when they do that retirement dinner for me. Levi will come from Jerusalem.

Frankel: Is that Wolfe Kelman’s son?
WOLF: And so Wolfe became a safe person for me. His home was very important to me. Levi is my very good friend, a lifelong friend now. We could always laugh about it. He could laugh, but after all, he sat on Heschel’s lap. I was laughing, but I was really someone who was on the outside. But at the end, I remember Wolfe calling one night in my last year at the Seminary, saying, “Joey.” I said, “Yes?” I was watching television, the mini-series Roots. I think it was a terrifying scene with the Ku Klux Klan. And he said, “Joey, go to Austin, Texas.” I said, feeling shaken, “What?” He said, “Go to Austin, Texas.” And I said, “What for?” I’m still looking at the white hoods. “For an interview!!!, he says, and I’m thinking, “In the South?” And suddenly I realized, “Oh, my God! I’m going to be a rabbi!”

Frankel: Until that point?
WOLF: I refused to look it in the eye and hadn’t translated it into doing this thing.

Frankel: But did many students go with the intention of becoming academics?
WOLF: Not many, a few. I can think of one that I remember. And I don’t think he became an academic; he became a rabbi. I just was, not quite in denial, but suddenly this was my career looking me in the eye. And I went to Austin. I checked out a few other places that were okay. But I went to Austin, and I knew that was supposed to be a great place. Danny Matt was in Austin; he was at the University of Texas. And I did Shabbat services and spoke, and it went very well. I remember going back to the hotel and feeling very depressed. This could be my whole life. It was a big synagogue. It was like being at Neveh Shalom. It was like standing up in a big, huge place. It was just not who I was. It was not the kind of work — I could do it, but I was overwhelmed. And they wrote back and said, “We want you to be our rabbi,” and I’m like [makes sound as if gasping for breath, big intake of air, then laughs].

Frankel: You were in your last year?
WOLF: Yes. Suddenly I was the rabbi in Austin, Texas. I go down there in August. It was the hottest day of the year. I was there a year ago because someone I loved very much had died, and I went to visit his widow. I realized it was thirty-five years to the day, because it was August 1st when I was there. It was hot. I remember wearing a seersucker suit, and I remember the tie. I hate suits and ties. And I’m standing around in this weather thinking, “This is my whole career. I’ll never make it. I’m choking.” I did it for five or six years, but it was not me. It was someone else. It was not something I did well. And I really wasn’t, in many ways, evolved enough yet as a human being to recognize — I was 28 years old. I really didn’t know enough to realize you have to be who you are. You can’t fake this. You can’t be someone else. I knew another rabbi, whom I adored, another Conservative rabbi. He had been in New Orleans, where my first wife was from, but he’s been in Israel now for years and years. A very good friend to this day, Victor Hoffman, who is like a straight arrow, and just someone who is so nice and so kind, in many ways so square, a wonderful person. That’s not me. I tried to emulate his model which was ridiculous, but at that point I didn’t get that.

On the other hand, I was succeeding professional, but with some challenges. I was politically going quite left, and I was saying things from the pulpit that nobody in their right mind could possibly say, especially in Texas. Like on Rosh Hashanah, “This is the birthday of the world; get out of oil.” In 1979. I had people quitting. An older man who had said, “I’ll pay for paving the parking lot” changed his mind. Forget that! People going apoplectic over things I was saying. I had an older, like in loco parentis, wonderful personality saying, “Joey, whoooaa. I don’t know how you said that out loud.” An older guy who was a revered, dedicated patriarch of the shul, very, very liberal, said, “Nobody’s been able to say these things ever in this place. Joey, I don’t know.” He’d be grinning and shaking his head. I’m sure I was making all kinds of mistakes.

People liked me, but I just had to end that whole thing. I won’t go into details of how it ended; it ended very poorly. Not because they fired me. I quit. But it was a horrible life transition. Essentially, I will say that I was trying to be someone I couldn’t be. Not only the rabbinate, but it was my family, my private life. Sometimes you have to be shot out on a rocket ship to realize where you are. Even in that horrific moment of life change, where there was a lot of fear involved, I knew it was for a good reason. And I got some very good advice. The advice came from the father of the country and western singer Kinky Friedman, who also wrote some best-selling mystery novels and still writes. He’s a character and well-known around the country, Kinky. But his father Tom Friedman, a psychologist who ran a great Jewish summer camp down in Texas, said, “Joey, whoa! I’ve got some advice for you: Go West.” [laughter]. And I knew, it’s time to get on. But before I did that, I spent two years on the Rio Grande border.

Frankel: In a congregation?
WOLF: Yes, I took a job. They came after me. They wanted me to be down there. I wanted to do something that would give me some time to think, to do some work, political work maybe. First Sanctuary period, immigration, so there were people trying to get into the country. People were getting locked up. So suddenly the tiny Laredo, Texas congregation was calling me. I said, “I’m going to give that two years. It’s not a good place to be, but I’m going to make the most of that. I’m going to learn how to speak Spanish, and I’m going to chill.”

I have one unbelievable thing to tell you, that you want to know about Laredo. I’m down there for the first High Holidays. You can imagine. It’s 110 degrees on the Rio Grande. I’m sitting at a hotel pool right on the Rio Grande on the American side; it’s called La Posada. A mariachi band is playing there. I’m sitting around the pool. I have, I remember totally, a Kedushas Levi text (Hasidic) laid out in front of me. I’ve got a baseball hat on, and I’m reading this Chasidic text. It’s hot. It’s really hot and I’m sweating. And the mariachi band is playing. Across the pool, I look up and I see a man who is unquestionably a mirror image. He’s Jewish. A goatee. He too is studying some kind of a sefer. This is absolutely crazy. He looks up; I look up. We pretend like we’re not looking at one another.

As I tell it now, I really cannot believe it. So we’re like [demonstrates some sort of pose, laughter]. And this goes on for about 25 minutes. He’s a bit older than me. He gets up, and I notice he’s walking around, and I’m thinking, uh-oh. He comes around the pool. “Vus smachtu.”[Yiddish phrase].” What is going on, I’m thing? Here I’m as far away from Jewish civilization as possible. He introduces himself: he’s Jacob Petuchowski, the late professor of Jewish theology. Apparently, he went to Laredo every year for the High Holidays. He had these relatives in Monterrey, Mexico, and he would visit during the intermediate days. He would open the door of the otherwise-dormant Reform synagogue in Laredo. He’d be there for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I honestly thought this was one of the craziest things that has ever happened to me, for sure.

But that was my introduction to being in Laredo. It was two crazy years. I gave myself two years to do that. The congregation was not particularly serious, nearly inactive – except for a couple of adult education programs I would drum up. And my two oldest kids, Simi and Sarah, were little, and I wanted to be in touch with them, to be able to visit weekly. My marriage had broken up.

Frankel: Before you went to Laredo?
WOLF: Yes, and so I wanted to be in driving distance. Every week I would shoot up to — it’s four hours, and . . .

Frankel: To Austin?
WOLF: Yes. I would shoot up there and spend two nights with them, pick them up from childcare or Montessori, and hang out with them. I would be with them during the day and spend time with them as much as possible, and be in their lives. It was very difficult for all of us. Then I said, “I know I won’t be able to be a presence in any significant way if I don’t get on with my life.” So I gave myself two years.

It was coming down to the wire, and I got a call from an old friend from the Seminary days. She was a student before they admitted women. Lynn Gottlieb, who is very lefty, and to this day a very, very good friend. I owe her everything. She called me and said, “Are you still down there?” I said, “Well, do you have another plan for me? I’m about running out of time.” By the way, during the two years Wolfe Kelman would call me every once in a while and would say, “I have a synagogue for you in Miami, 1800 families.” “No, no. I don’t want to do that,” I’d tell him. “I have a synagogue in Minneapolis, 1400 families.” “No! I’m done with that.” So Lynn called and said, “I have a place for you. I know this place. They do everything you’d love to do.” She described who they were politically, spiritually. I said, “Wow! This sounds really interesting. Where is it?” She said, “Portland, Oregon.” I said, “Portland. Trees. I don’t know anything about Portland. Do you know anybody?” She named Elden and Margie Rosenthal.

Frankel: But you knew Noam [Stampfer].
WOLF: I knew Noam, but Noam was not a member of Havurah. More importantly, actually, I didn’t even know where Noam was. The last I saw Noam was in New York, and Noam was not in great shape in those years. I wasn’t in great shape for other reasons. We’ll just say that we went [gestures in opposite directions] like that. It had been something like seven years. No animosity, but I didn’t know where he was. Honestly, I remember thinking he’d moved to the Virgin Islands or something. I didn’t know where he was.

But Elden and Margie called me and said, “Do you know anybody for a reference, from Austin?” I replied: “Well, is there someone you know and I’ll proceed from there.” Whereupon they named a couple. And I just laughed because the couple they named were hippies. They were a hippy couple I knew who owned a record store in town. I thought, what kind of a place is this, Havurah Shalom? But I said, “I know them, Lewis and Jan. Yes, I know them.” So I called Lewis and Jan and said, “You have to give a rabbi a reference.” They were laughing their heads off, and they recalled that they’d met Elden and Margie somewhere on a vacation. Anyway, in two weeks I was up here in Portland, had the most sensational time interviewing around the clock incessantly, and I loved it. I loved the questions they were asking. I loved the intensity and the seriousness. I loved it. That was it!

Frankel: What was their affiliation at that time?
WOLF: They were officially in the Reform movement. Their description was that they couldn’t do anything right by the Reform movement, and they thought there was something wrong with them, not the Reform movement. They thought there was something wrong with Havurah. It took some time for me to explain it. There was nothing really Reform about who they were, in fact. I surmised that they were really best suited for the Reconstructionist movement.

But in terms of my own process, I had already told Wolfe, “I’m not doing the big Conservative scene anymore.” And I basically said, “I’m just going to go wherever I want to go.” I ended up out here. At Havurah, there was some concern. If I’m Conservative, how am I going to mesh with everything they do? I was totally, totally amazed for two or three years the way they operated here because they were — on the one hand, they were very anarchistic; on the other hand, they were so serious about so many important questions that nobody would ever ask anywhere else. They were serious as Jews. When Arthur Green came out here to be a scholar-in-residence, he used to say, and he still says this on the East Coast, “Joey has a bunch of people who don’t know anything about Torah, but they give a pretty good drash.” In other words, they were talking Torah. It was a whole set of weird circumstances. Right away, I loved this place.

On the way here, I called to find out where Noam was. I decided what I would do. I thought, “Noam is from there. Maybe by some strange chance, he went back there.” I dialed up information, got a number, called and said, “Hello, Noam?” He said, “Joey!” He knew my voice. He said, “Don’t tell me. You’re coming up here.” I said, “Right!” He said, “You’re going to be the rabbi at Neveh Shalom.” And then he said, “Wait a minute. My father’s the rabbi there.” I said, “That’s right.” Then he said, “I know where you’re going. You’re going to Havurah Shalom!” I said, “That’s right.” “Come and stay with us.”

And so I immediately stayed with Noam. The first night he took me to see his parents. I hadn’t seen his parents since — I had actually met them in Israel. The first thing he did was he took me — I was completely lost. He’s immediately driving into a giant parking lot, and I’m looking at this immense Ten Commandments [laughter]. I said, “Aren’t we going to see your father?” He said, “Oh, you’ll see!” He took me there. And so I stayed with Noam for the time being, and then he came over and joined Havurah pretty soon. That was amazing. It was so amazing for me to be in this place with him. That was just great.

Frankel: Do you care to say anything about how you got married the first time?
WOLF: Sure. I met a woman in Israel in junior year abroad whose parents, by the way, were in the inner circle of UJA. Her father, Herb Garon, no longer alive, good friends with the Shenkers. I’m still very good friends with her mother, Margot Garon, in New Orleans. They’re from New Orleans. Her father was this amazing guy. He took great pride in getting — very, very, very big givers. I can’t count that many figures, must be seven-figure minimums to really be devoted to give to Israel. I’ve met everybody in the Knesset through him. Not because he was important; he wasn’t. He could just speak, great at the lectern, a marvelous entertainer, about the issues. And at that point, I was still utterly right there. I believed in Israel 100%, believed that the leaders knew exactly what they were doing. When I began to raise questions, we could always talk about it. He had his doubts, and he could talk about his doubts with me. My first wife, who is remarried, lives in Little Rock today.

Frankel: Her name?
WOLF: Her name is Kathy Garon, very involved in the Jewish community.

Frankel: At what point did you get married?
WOLF: We got married in 1974, a year after Brandeis, just before I went to the Seminary.

Frankel: What did you do during that year?
WOLF: The year off?

Frankel: Yes.
WOLF: I always taught. I always taught Hebrew school and tutored, multiple jobs and loved it always. Worked with multiple kids and families through Brandeis.

Frankel: And you were living in . . .?
WOLF: Waltham, right outside Brandeis. Kathy’s mother, to this day, is the girlfriend of the 92-year-old father of one of my best friends in the rabbinate, Allan Lehmann, who teaches at Hebrew College in Boston. We always joke that we’re in the same family. So Kathy and I were together officially for 11 years, until we went off to Austin together and tried to make that scene work. The truth is that was not destined to happen, either way, that scene in Austin, and our marriage was not destined to work.

Frankel: Both Simi and Sarah were born in Austin?
WOLF: Yes. Simi and Sarah were born in Austin. They moved, a little under two years later, to Dallas. They grew up going to a day school in Dallas. The day school was run by Eddy Feinstein, another peer of mine from the Seminary. He’s a big Conservative rabbi now. He has Schulweis’s synagogue. I did his own wedding to his wife (also a Conservative rabbi), At any rate, the same crew. Not much more to tell, I don’t think, other than that the whole thing was not destined to fly. But when I came here, I was thrilled to be here. It seems like yesterday. The whole thing is a wonder to me, a wonder. My jaw was dropped open for two, three years, just so much about what was happening here. Yes, in Havurah itself, but also how beautiful Portland was, and then I met Lisa. And I met Lisa through a beit din [rabbinical court].

Frankel: How so? You were serving on the beit din?
WOLF: No. Someone you know was converting [laughs]. His name is Rick. So Rick was converting to Judaism the first time. The second time, the third time, it was a joke. He did updates. Rick and Sura were getting married. And I have a way of organizing a beit din where I will sit on the beit din, and I will get two other important members of the community to serve on the beit din. Not halachic [according to traditional Jewish law], no pretense of that, but two people on the beit din who can facilitate the conversation. Boaz [Frankel] served on one of those.

Frankel: Yes, that’s right; he did.
WOLF: It was lovely. So Rick was converting, and one of the members of the beit din had to suddenly leave town. I said, “Rick, is there someone you’d admire to be there in his place?” And he said, “I know this woman in my law firm. She’s younger. She’s very smart, she’s very serious about her Jewish identity, and I admire her a great deal. Would you be able to coach her on what it is that this other guy was going to review him on?” Now I didn’t remember this, but she mentioned it to me recently. There’s a book by Heschel that I had assigned. Lisa came to me and said, “I’ll read the book.”

So I go to this beit din, and I meet Lisa, and I think — I’d already been tipped off she’s very beautiful— well, I’m not sure if I’d been tipped off, because I think the plan was that nobody wants to meet me because either I’m divorced or I’m trouble, I don’t know. I’m in between. I’m not a safe bet or whatever. In the meantime, I found out that Lisa was the daughter of Alvin Rackner, who was the head of JFCS [Jewish Family & Child Service]. I served on the board there as soon as I came to town. I had no money, and I pledged way too much money to their additional endowment campaign. I was paying for five years, because I really liked the way he ran the agency. I had gone to lunch a number of times with Alvin, who I thought was quite, quite dignified, a very articulate leader. I really respected him. The notion that I would then even be thought, was even thinking of being mixed up with Alvin’s daughter, I thought, “I don’t want to mess this up. I love Portland.”

I remember several times I was going to lift the phone, and then I’d refrain from following through on it. Then I ran into Lisa after the beit din. It was a total coincidence, and we both thought, “This is beshert [predestined].” I ran into her at the Oregon Mountain Community — at that time, in Oldtown. I must have been buying a tent or something, for going hiking and backpacking. And Lisa, I don’t remember what she was buying, but she heard me — I was on the phone, as usual, calling my kids in Dallas. It tried to call every other day,. And I remember that seemed to make a big impression on her, that I needed to call my kids.

Then we went for a beer somewhere. And soon, very soon, we were together, and as far as I was concerned, I was the luckiest person in the world. I had come to Portland, and Portland was magnificent, and the Havurah was work that I just adored. I adored the work. I adored the people I was working with. And now I had met this wonderful woman I could make a life with. I couldn’t even believe it. It was very fast that we decided we were getting married.

Frankel: Were they members of Temple Beth Israel at that time?
WOLF: Lisa wasn’t. The Rackners were. That’s right. They were members of Temple Beth Israel. Shirley soon announced to Alvin that they were coming over to Havurah.

Frankel: And Lisa went nowhere?
WOLF: Lisa was new in town. Lisa was very young. She had just come back from law school at NYU, was just beginning her career and was coming a couple of times to Havurah, but I had not really met her.

Frankel: So they knew you came from JTS; you knew they weren’t really Reform. So how did the congregation evolve?
WOLF: How did the match work?

Frankel: And clearly, you were the second rabbi.
WOLF: I was the third rabbi. Actually, the first rabbi was a part-time rabbi, Alan Berg. The second rabbi was Roy Furman, who was Reform, whom I didn’t know, but when I met him later on, I thought, “Wow!” He was an extremely smart man and very creative. I thought, “How did I ever follow this guy? I can’t live up to this.”

I think I considered myself — I think I had a pretty chutzpidik idea that was that some of us who grew up in the Conservative movement could chart our path distinctly from the Conservative movement, in terms of the mother ship being the Seminary or the Rabbinical Assembly. Of course, Wolfe Kelman was known for taking liberties, being a free thinker, and I always had his backing. I always knew that he was a very creative thinker, outrageous, would do things that his movement itself might not do. And I was friends with Levi Kelman. We kind of had this pact. We were at the Seminary to do whatever we were going to do. I didn’t feel bound by anybody. In fact, I always felt like I was paying homage, but in no way governed by their decisions. There’s more to this, actually. You may not know this, but for this interview it’s very important. I was expelled from the Rabbinical Assembly about six months ago.

Frankel: Just recently?
Wolf: Yes, before retirement [laughs]. I made the grade. It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. About three years ago maybe, I got a call. Lisa got a call early in the morning. I was working out, doing yoga or something, and Lisa said, “You got a call from someone at the Rabbinical Assembly, someone whose name is Julie.” I said, “I don’t know any Julie. Oh, maybe Julie is the person who occupies the desk that Wolfe used to.” I was very calm. I called and said, “Hi. How are you? We’ve never met. What’s up? Nobody ever calls me. What’s going on?” We had a nice chat, and she said, “I don’t even know how to bring this up.” And I said, “What is it you want to bring up? Don’t worry about it. I won’t make any problems with you.” She said, “I don’t know what to say.” I said, “Say it.” “Is it true that you do interfaith marriages?” I said, “I’ve been doing interfaith marriages for thirty years.” She said, “I don’t know what to say.” I said, “That train left the station a long time ago for me, honestly.”

In fact, I remember I was at the Seminary and women weren’t counted. Women couldn’t be rabbis. I said, “This is not for me.” I was outspoken about it, totally outspoken. I got behind some of the first women who became rabbis there. When it came time for commitment ceremonies for gay and lesbian Jews, I was never going to wait for the Rabbinical Assembly to say yes. I’ve been doing them forever. I argued loudly, vociferously — I actually went to an RA meeting and joined with a couple of colleagues who — they’re pretty great friends from Rabbis for Human Rights and other stuff. West of the Hudson, west of the Mississippi, it’s a different reality. You’re closing the door on many, many potential Jewish families. You close the door on all kinds of kids who are growing up who would like to think of themselves as Jewish. In fact, a number of people coming from Havurah have kids, one partner is Jewish and one isn’t, and after 20-30 years, one of the partners converts. Someone is doing that now, with me. But the kids can read Torah. They end up in minyans elsewhere that are much more observant than what I have. In fact, they laugh at my minyan at Havurah because it’s not serious enough, as far as they’re concerned!

I said, “You’re closing the door, and that’s a terrible mistake.” “Well, I don’t know what to do,” she says. I said, “Don’t worry about it. In fact, I’m happy. I just paid dues. I pay $1,200 bucks a year because I’m happy to give it as a way of saying this is my upbringing. There were a few amazing individuals who made a difference for me. “I don’t know what to do, ” this woman who is the Executive Director of the RA says to me. “Do whatever you want,” I reply. So she said, “I’ll refer this to a committee.” I said, “You can refer this to any committee you like.”

It takes about two years. I get a call from some other rabbi. [Wolf’s voice lowers in imitation], “I’m calling on behalf of the committee.” I said, “Who are you?” “I’m Rabbi such-and-such of the such-and-such Committee . . ..” I said, “That’s great. How can I help you?” “Hello. I understand that you’ve been doing things that run contrary to the will of – “ I said, “Again, if you don’t want my money, I’m going to be retiring in a year. Just let me know.” He said, “Well, you have three options: you can revoke your policy, you can resign from the Conservative Movement, or we can expel you . . ..” He said this thing to me, and I wrote Levi in Jerusalem, who was laughing because he joined the Reform Movement long ago. Lynn Gottlieb, the rabbi who had earlier (many years earlier) connected me with Havurah thought it was also very funny.

It took me five minutes to write a letter. Lisa, who is a legal writer, who usually can find mistakes in what I write, said, “This is the best letter you have ever written.” I wrote, “Look, I am not about to resign. Do whatever you want. Just let me know so that I can make a public announcement so that everybody will know.” So on Simchas Torah this year, FedEx — yes, they handed it to me and I took it into my house on the festival. It was this letter that had arrived. It said, “You are expelled, and a happy and healthy New Year” [laughter]. It actually said that. And, strangely, I actually received, for the first time in my life this year, a birthday card from the Rabbinical Assembly. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s nuts! So I clicked the picture. I sent it to Levi in Jerusalem. He writes back right away, “This never happened to me. How come I couldn’t pull this off? How did you get to do this?” Barry Holtz, on the Seminary faculty, I had coffee with him. I said, “Well, they finally did it!” He looks at me. He said, “You got thrown out. Wait. Don’t tell me. Israel! No, interfaith marriage.”

Frankel: You wanted to maintain your connection with JTS, even though . . .
WOLF: Right. When I came here, I was astonished at certain things going on. I was astonished that on Yom Kippur — it was Elden. He walked up to give a drash, and it was right before the Amida. He gave a famous drash in which he said that effectively he didn’t believe in God, or prayer doesn’t work, or whatever it was. It was just the wrong time, and it was too brazen. And usually I follow someone and I’m able to ad lib something that transitions to the next prayer. I can’t tell you — it was a millisecond before the words came out of my mouth . I didn’t know what I’d say. I’d need to “make sense” of people’s honest qualms – or throw back at them the weakness of their arguments. There was nothing Conservative by any stretch of the imagination about Havurah – but it was still “serious’.

And you had people animatedly living in a serious way, involved in everything from prayer to politics. Governance was not about institutional ego; it was about listening and diversity, but not diversity for diversity’s sake. It was listening carefully and respectfully. I had all kinds of things going on. I said, “This is a real happening place.” Then, when I was teaching, people were just amazing in classes. And then, of course, I started meeting the kids. It was a shock and it wasn’t a shock, but the kids were wonderful. Even at high school age, I thought, there’s something different. The kids were amazing. The kids were respectful, and they were engaged, and they were caring of each other. I was totally amazed.

Were there any doctrinal problems? Surely interfaith marriage was hugely different. They put that on the table from my first interview. I knew that was an earthquake was going to begin to shake things sooner or later. I was ready, but I was cautious. I needed to pay attention to who these people are, what’s going on, who’s really serious about this, or do they just want to look me up in the yellow pages. There were some people I would throw out. I also found that if I threw people out, people were quick to go [clap, clap, clap]. In other words, I am expecting to get punished, and they were respecting my deliberation. So it was a very serious place in terms of respect that I got for my own decisions. Being a rabbi here opened all kinds of doors, all kinds of possibilities.

Frankel: Now when you came, there was no building yet.
WOLF: No building.

Frankel: So was that hard to . . .?
WOLF: I was impressed by the fact that it was a community first, no building. The building was the “B” word; you couldn’t say “building.” It was clear to me that this was a group analogous to the people I came from in Somerville (the original Havurat Shalom, in Massachusetts) who weren’t interested in establishment Judaism. It was the old Jewish counter-cultural, the old Jewish Catalogue bunch, all those people I’ve known over a lifetime who wanted to reinvent Judaism. So the building was not the focal point. I was fine with that. I had to find where to meet with people, like at Starbucks. That was a problem.

Frankel: And so where did you have services?
WOLF: We had services at the beginning at the MJCC, in the lobby. They were amazing there. I think it was actually a great venue at the time, great bunch of interesting people, fabulously creative people. However, I found out soon that already that was a political issue for the community. How can you allow a group to meet at the JCC? One particular rabbi was having difficulty with that. Not surprising, in retrospect, but it was interesting.

Frankel: Who initiated in the end, the building?
WOLF: The building was something that we were feeling increasingly that we had to do because we were just getting very big. When I came, we were 90 households. We were getting big, not really big, but we were getting big enough that the focus as a community — you couldn’t be focused. You needed that spot to say, “Okay. Now we can coalesce. We can convene.” So we were forcing that. From the larger community’s perspective, of course, they were pushing us out. I was one of the first to tell one colleague in particular, “Guess what! You don’t have to push us; we’re doing that. It’s going to happen.” And it happened easily.

Frankel: And how was your relationship with your Board of Rabbis? Is that something you had experienced elsewhere?
WOLF: Yes. I was the fourth rabbi, meaning you had three rabbis sitting at the table. By the way, I have to be honest, those three rabbis — it wasn’t quite like the official version. Three rabbis spoke on three different plateaus. They spoke like parallel lines. They did not talk to each other. They pronounced past each other. For me at least, it was easy in retrospect, easy at the time to see why that was happening. Yonah Geller was the sweet, sweet guy. He was always trying to mend fences and alleviate tension. But basically, it was three rabbis who agreed to sit together, and then there was me. It wasn’t all as functional as it might seem it will be written up. But the main thing was — here’s what happened at the Board of Rabbis. I immediately was brought in to the one thing that they did, and that was the Introduction to Judaism class.

Frankel: It existed already.
WOLF: It existed already, so I was brought in to teach. It was a terrible, terrible class. The way that course was established was indefensibly horrible. And after one semester of teaching, I told my three colleagues, “I am not coming back to teach in that class.” They expressed shock, dismay, “What are you telling me? You have to teach that class.” I said, “I will not be associated with that class. This is a terrible course.” They all said, “What?” I said, “This is a terrible course.”

Frankel: Who developed it?
WOLF: Who is a good question because there was nobody who authored that curriculum, that course. Nobody was accountable for it. For one thing, it was at the time maybe seven or eight sessions. That was it. It was vague, no continuity. If someone at the last minute said, “I’m going to be out of the city,” you never knew what was going to happen. Nobody advocated for the people in the class. The people in the class were lost. I hated it. I said, “I will not come back. I cannot teach this.” I said, “Listen, you want me to teach in that class, I’m going to rewrite that course. I’ll tell you how long it will be.” I came up with something like18 or 20 sessions. I wrote out a curriculum which is the basis for the curriculum today. “In addition,” I said, “you need to sell a certain list of books. I will write a syllabus, or a bibliography of books that we will have on hand. And they’re going to be really good books, the best books that we have now. In addition, this group needs to make sure that the folks who take that class have a genuine advocate who is there week to week, a layperson who is someone they can turn to, not us.”

Frankel: There was no such person?
WOLF: There was never such a person. Nobody was in charge of this thing. It was a disaster. So sure enough, we hired Vicky.

Frankel: Vicky?
WOLF: Epstein. Vicky Epstein began as that person, and she was terrific. We’ve had terrific people. Vicky Epstein was just great! It was a brand-new role, and she was a sparkplug and an advocate. She was on their side. She could communicate to the rabbis, “This isn’t getting done.” And some recommendations. We each taught something like three, four times. Suddenly it was serious. I’ll tell you, the course changed, not only in terms of the substance, but also the kinds of people who started taking it and the way they related to each other, because they got to know each other. It became, over the years, much, much livelier. It was no longer just a rubber stamp. Because basically it was a rubber stamp for the rabbis who were interested in doing the weddings for those people. I never sent anybody to it because in the beginning it was terrible.

Frankel: But they were open, they didn’t object to you rewriting? Or was it a fight?
WOLF: You should have seen the way it went. So one colleague who was particularly obstructionist and obstreperous grandstanded once or twice too many times with me. I slammed my fist on the table, and I said, “You may get away with this elsewhere. You will not pull this stuff with me.” And he did it around the issue of Havurah being at the JCC; he pulled something out of a hat, and I said, “Oh, no you don’t!” And I let him have it. And another colleague, who you know very well, was a combination of grinning and looking like he couldn’t wait for this other colleague to be put in his place. And the third colleague was basically just wanting out of the situation].

Once we established the limits, then no problem. It was a year or two later. I was the president of the Board of Rabbis, and I said, “Look, it’s not just about the Introduction to Judaism class. There’s stuff we can do in this community.” And we actually had a very significant meeting, not just a meeting. What am I talking about? It was a very significant seminar with EMO [Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon] out at Menucha [Menucha Retreat and Conference Center]. We had a retreat at Menucha with all the bishops and leaders of the church in Oregon, and the Oregon Board of Rabbis. I brought in Yitz Greenberg, they brought in Krister Stendahl, and we did ecumenical dialogue. They brought in someone else as well, James Forbes. And we did some very serious theological dialoging. The Board of Rabbis can do more than sit around and talk about the introduction class. Of course, we had to make the introduction class work [laughs].

Frankel: So did you have more than the one retreat?
WOLF: That was the big thing we did on my watch.

Frankel: I see.
WOLF: Now I have to tell you, you asked about the Board of Rabbis. I was part of the Board of Rabbis for — I still am officially; I pay dues — probably up until about the last 15 years. I stopped being active on the Board of Rabbis. And by the way, as more and more colleagues came to town, there was lively discussion. A lot of nice people. But I realized a lot of the discussions, for me at least — two-hour meetings — were about money and trying to build a mikvah, and wrangling all the money from the Federation. Administrative discussions that — I would get a headache. I literally came out of there either fuming or with a headache, and I pulled back. I went in there thinking initially that it’s about spirituality, it’s about religious questions, and as that shifted away, I confessed to my colleagues, it’s not my interest to play that role of administrative dickering. So I receded from action, activity, involvement with the Oregon Board of Rabbis. I continued to teach, always taught.

Frankel: Do you feel it has a purpose?
WOLF: Yes. I’m not against, in any way, the principle that people should get together, convene, and be collegial. I think that’s important. It has more to do with my own temperament, that to sit around a table with many rabbis just because we are the rabbis in town, it’s not the way I operate. I think in Boston, by the way, or in Philadelphia, or in big communities, there are rabbis who show up at those meetings, there are rabbis who temperamentally, that’s not the way they want to do it. They want to meet with one another at a time, just quietly. There are a couple of rabbis I will get together with and we’ll spend two hours together. We don’t talk about anything to do with money or anything like that, and it’s much more collegial, quieter.

Frankel: When did you decide to join the Reconstructionist movement, and whose decision was it?
WOLF: I recommended to the group when they were losing a lot of sleep, or they had a bad conscience about the Reform movement, around 1993-94. I suggested that this group operates, in my view, the modus operandi — not necessarily theology, but the modus operandi — is like the Reconstructionists. They were scouting us out anyway.

Frankel: They meaning . . .?
WOLF: The Reconstructionist movement. The more they had people reach out to us, the more I realized these are the people who, when I was going into JTS, some of these people were going to Philadelphia. So we had friends. My friends were more traditional than they are, but we have friends [inaudible]. And when they came out they would say, “Wow! This is really amazing.” Again, they weren’t big egos. And the minute we said we were interested, they’d send people out, and the people they would send out were like us. They were just like us. There was no big hierarchy, and they weren’t posturing or anything like that. Then when we were really interested, we’d start to ask all kinds of questions. We instantly meshed with them. They thought we were just like the way they hoped their congregations were. They loved what we did, and they wanted to have conferences out here. It fit very well, extremely well. I think, actually, that the denominations, at this point, are maybe less significant, including the Reconstructionist affiliation at this point in time. But back then, it was a great fit and instant support, and occasionally some great consultation as well.

Frankel: So besides changing the prayer books, were there other changes that you felt needed to be implemented?
WOLF: For one thing, I was always of the belief that it’s a really good thing for people to be connected to other folks who are like them all around the country, to get a sense of momentum and identification, plugging in with issues that move Jews, and also figuring out why — basing their governance decisions not only on values, but on texts. The connection was articulated magnificently. It provided a lot of fodder for discussions about raison d’être: What are we trying to do? Who are we trying to raise? How do we do our politics? What does it mean? Who are other people doing these things? So it felt very, very good, although it wasn’t a total fit for me. This reminds me, there’s an issue right now that has a lot of problematic aspects — in Philadelphia, with the Reconstructionist movement — one right now, which is problematic for me, is the idea that you’d have rabbis who marry people who aren’t Jewish. That’s a . . .

Frankel: Neither of the . . .?
WOLF: No. Meaning a rabbi, who obviously is Jewish, but marrying a partner — rabbinic couples that only half is Jewish. I think that’s incredibly, incredibly problematic. Those are the things that come out of Philadelphia. Ki mitzion, tetzei torah [“For from out of Zion will go forth the Torah” — a line from the Torah service], but out of Philadelphia. You never know what’s coming at you. So it’s shifted a bit, and I think that over the years we’ve become a good deal more traditional, not in governance, but in terms of what we value. A kind of fidelity to texts and davening [praying]. Even the way we daven, that we appreciate matbeah shel tfilah [lit. “the formula of prayer’]. Getting back to what you asked about the prayer book, the prayer book to me is not — it has certain advantages to it, the poetry and the translations and transliterations, very nice. The text itself, they made decisions that I know even the chancellor of that seminary, Arthur Green, initially said to me, “Oh, my God. This is terrible.” You can’t change the Kiddush.

Frankel: But don’t they have more than one version?
WOLF: I don’t know. I haven’t looked at that. There are things in there, even something as small as — like mechaye hametim [revival of the dead — the issue is whether or not this reference to God resurrecting the dead should be included in the daily prayers] — all kinds of issues that really hark back to the 1930s and 1940s, and changes that were just not palatable, ideas that were just not palatable for 1930s and 1940s America. Times have changed. They deleted whole segments of prayer in there that — it’s not my prayer book. That’s why I’m a traditionalist. And that’s where, in fact, I’ve kind of put over on people that there’s a value to being a part of traditional liturgy.

Frankel: Before we move on to your extracurricular activity, was Mordecai Kaplan still teaching when you were . . .?
WOLF: No, he wasn’t. He was still alive, but no, he wasn’t there. And I’m not a Kaplanian. I come from the school of Heschel.

Frankel: What are some of the organizations? I know that you were involved on non-Jewish boards.
WOLF: I’ve been involved in a number of political things. So if you go way, way back, I was on a big Governor’s Task Force for Family Law, rewriting family law legislation. I was the one clergy person there amongst an array of lawyers and mediators and judges, almost like a sitting duck. It was a great, great committee that lasted for three years. I won’t forget because I saw someone recently, and we were remembering that Kate Brown was part of that at the time. That was one thing. Before I forget altogether, I was part of the founding board of Black Parent Initiative.

Frankel: Is it still . . .?
WOLF: Yes. It’s a very important thing. Charles McGee is the head of that. I’m very proud of that.

Frankel: Did you seek out those involvements?
WOLF: Me seek out boards? I would never seek out a board ever in my life. I run away from those kinds of things. I don’t like to sit on boards. That’s not the best use of my time. I’ve done it, but if I’m not really serving a purpose, I will get off. I was on, as I told you, JFCS a long time ago, and actually happily at the time. I was on the national board of Rabbis for Human Rights, North America, before we made it T’ruah. They were very important to me. My whole politics shifted over time. It started in the days of Begin, Lebanon, the First Intifada. I worked very hard working with people who thought there was a peace process. I was very involved with Americans for Peace Now. I wasn’t on their board, but I was always very connected with — their founder is someone — we’ve been in together for almost 30 years. He still comes out, and we haggle over what we could do to make things better.

Frankel: Then there’s the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. What is that?
WOLF: So the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. I was part of their third cohort. They’ve had something like 13, 14, 15 of them. The Institute for Jewish Spirituality, again, a number of people who came out of the original Havurah in Somerville, recognized that in rabbinic life, initially in rabbinic — it went to cantors, it went to educators and lay people — initially in rabbinic life there were a number of people who, sadly, didn’t feel like what they were doing was real spiritual work — like they were dying, rather than thriving. These colleagues, friends, John Slater my Talmud buddy, Arthur Green, and some other very important people decided that what they wanted to do was reinvest in the spiritual arts, everything from davening to meditation to yoga to honest conversation to going on retreat, going somewhere beautiful to do these things. And so very successfully, very successfully, they began by taking cadres of people who were predisposed to do these things anyways. And studying Chasidic texts, which of course, for some reason, in my generation of rabbis nobody knew anything about. I’ve been studying those texts since 1979.

Frankel: You’re talking about texts, not the stories?
WOLF: Not the stories, the texts. I was collecting those texts and using those texts. I remember in Austin, I was teaching those texts. I love those texts. But most folks didn’t know what this world was. In those texts in many ways are sort of like — not codes in the sense of halacha [Jewish law], but codes or shorthand or cues for reimagining, reinventing what a spiritual path or spiritual behaviors are all about, even Mussar [a Jewish spiritual practice that gives concrete instructions on how to lead a meaningful and ethical life]. Where are we supposed to go when we pray? All the questions about what is a spiritual life? How do you lead it day to day? So they wanted to bring this to people who were predisposed to this anyway. Essentially it’s everybody from older rabbis to very young rabbis . . .

Frankel: Across denominations?
WOLF: Yes, although very few Orthodox if any, maybe one or two.

Frankel: Is there an annual convention, or is there material that they put out?
WOLF: So what happens is there’s a commitment over three years, I think, to go to two retreats a year, and each one of those retreats lasts for three, four days, something like that — East Coast, West Coast. One on the East, one on the West Coast. You were with a cadre, a cohort of approximately 40 people.

Frankel: All rabbis?
WOLF: Only rabbis. In this case, it’s rabbis. There’s one for cantors. The leaders are a meditation teacher, maybe a yoga teacher, one or two Chasidic text teachers, and one or two who are watching and involved in the overall tenor of where it goes and the kinds of conversations that might take place, individualized conversations throughout. So I did that, I think in the third cohort, a wonderful, outstanding group of people.

I would say through IJS, Institute for Jewish Spirituality, which I support a lot, and my experience with Rabbis for Human Rights — Israel’s RHR is a separate organization at this point — but with Rabbis for Human Rights, North America, all within the last 15 years, I would say I got to see there was a whole new generation of rabbinic colleagues, aged 32 to 40, who across the denominations were fabulous. Things have changed. There are a lot of very creative, agile minds, people who are asking spiritual questions, who are using art, who are thinking politically, who are generating community in ways that I was waiting for. When I first became a rabbi, I would say for approximately 20 of those years, I was not proud. I didn’t know hardly any colleagues that I really felt were doing any work that I valued, around the country. Now I just say, “Wow! These younger rabbis are doing great, great things. They’re amazing people!”

So I met them through IJS, through Rabbis for Human Rights, North America, involved not only on Israel issues, but on issues around torture, around hot issues like fast food restaurants, the treatment of migrant laborers who raise tomatoes and stuff like that and get horrible pay, and what can we do as leaders across America to raise the pay scale. Wages. Now a hot issue, and I think it’s a very important issue, is incarceration, incarceration rates in the Black community and stuff like that. These are Rabbis for Human Rights issues. Of course, I got involved via Israel, but I was on the national board. Great colleagues, some of the same colleagues that I had met back in 1971 on my junior year abroad.

Frankel: Now you also were involved with some dialogue group with Muslims and Arabs?
WOLF: Right. I co-founded a dialogue group with Wajdi Said in 2001. Very powerful experience. We each . . .

Frankel: After 9-11?
WOLF: Before. So that when 9-11 happened, we were already a group. It was very powerful because I insisted that we get, I can’t say it was a full spectrum of the Jewish or Muslim community, but a spectrum in that we had people who were rather establishment, centrist kinds of folks, people who were very progressive. And the same thing on the other side, if not exactly the same. We had people who were Muslim, Christian, people a long time from here, people like Nohad Toulan of blessed memory, who was a revered leader the Arab community here in town, and a renowned expert in urban studies at PSU. We had people who were from Gaza, people just moved to the community who were actually born in Gaza, who had family there.

What was interesting about that whole experience over three years was that we weren’t just like the kind of dialogue group who just sits down and does it for cosmetics. The group really wanted to dig in and say, “What can we do? What can we do to establish who we are, to get into areas that we didn’t think we could get into, and maybe even impact our own communities?” And we shocked ourselves that we agreed on areas we never even thought we could get close to talking about, around Israel and the territories. People were frank. They were candid. We were able to say things to each other. We were able to bring up Darfur. That’s when Darfur was new; nobody knew what it meant. At the same time, we would grapple with some of the hypocrisies in Israel.

Frankel: You speak in the past tense. Is it no longer functioning?
WOLF: No, no. It was only three years. And it disbanded because some of us, I’ll include myself in that, we felt we wanted to do it in order to speak or move for change within our own communities. I felt, on our side, we needed to move and talk in synagogues, not only this one. Neveh Shalom, Shaarie Torah. We needed to talk about what we agreed on. There were other people in the group who said, “No. We won’t go that far. We don’t want to do that.”

And so at that point we realized we had come to the end of our rope, for those of us who really didn’t just want to sit and eat. So we called it a day. Very often, people get in touch with me to say, “Joey, how do we continue to do this? How do we do this again? How do we set it up?” People in the Muslim community. But personally, I’m not into dialoguing just for dialoguing’s sake, to say we have a dialogue group. The whole public relations thing is not compelling to me. It’s the digging in deep. It’s not all about what I think is right; it’s about doing hard work. So that lasted for a while. That was amazing, an amazing experience, I must say. Very powerful. Again, I run into people who were part of that experience in either community — very important. I have very important friends in the Muslim community. My sister came to town just before the weekend. We went to have breakfast, and sitting in the next booth was someone I met maybe a month into being here, a leader in the Palestinian community. He is like a cousin to me. We both are always going like, “Oy! Let’s have lunch [sighs].” That’s right. That was a very important thing to me that I was involved in.

Frankel: When you came, the Board of Rabbis consisted of the three rabbis, and you were the new one on board. Looking back at the community, has it changed for the better?
WOLF: I think this is a great community. I’m not one of the naysayers. I think that the more diverse the community can be, the more — diverse isn’t even the main thing. People are always saying, “Oh, we’re not together enough. We don’t work in some imagined, choreographed manner. . ..” I’m at the opposite end. I think that if you allow people to be autonomous, they create robust communities. I love that you’ve got Kesser and you’ve got Havurah. I always say, “They are the poles, and real powerful poles in this community.”

Frankel: Even if they don’t intersect?
WOLF: I think we do [laughter]. I have no problem going to Kesser — because of my gender, I know. I like to daven. I love to daven. I have done what I do, to reach across a gap between people who feel at home with tradition and those who are ill at ease with it, in a pedagogical way, but I as an individual love to daven, so I’m very happy to daven where there is davening. Politically, we’re like, no way. We understand the universe so differently. But sweet people! I love seeing Tzvi Fisher. I like seeing Ken Brodkin. I like those folks. I always say that’s a sign of the robustness of the community. I think this community — I don’t think there’s any comparison to the way it was. It was old fashioned. But I think this is great. I think when you’ve got people drilling down in their own groups, like Ariel Stone. Josh Rose is a wonderful colleague. No surprise there. I saw him growing up. I just love that this can happen, this community.

Frankel: Briefly, do you want to just say about the birth of your daughters? And I’ll have one more question after that.
WOLF: My daughters, Amelia and Gavriella. Amelia is studying at Mahon Hadar. They’re both so amazing. Gavriella every day calls. It’s almost time for her to call now. She is the kindest person, so kind, and smart! And she’s thriving in New York. She’s in the fashion world. She always wanted to do that. From Lincoln High School right through to Wesleyan, her mind has opened. She reads everything and asks questions. She’s just so thoughtful, it’s amazing. She’s a great person.

And Amelia, gosh, I never thought I’d be able to say this, but I have a kid who entered this world of Jewish texts. She always cared about this stuff, but I think I did something very important for her. I kicked her out of town. I said, “Reed, that’s great, and Chabad at Reed, that’s terrific, but now you need to go to New York because you have to discover the people like you who are progressive thinkers, who are politically very, very with it, and at the same time they’re very observant and they study all those Jewish texts and are scholarly. There are scholars out there who will teach you.” Whoa! So I went to Mahon Hadar with something like 40 other rabbis to see if I could still study Talmud. It worked well, but what I saw were all these young people. And Amelia is fine. She’ll never look back. She loves Talmud. She’s liable to go, if not JTS, it’s going to be something like that. She’s an advocate, so probably for the learning, but probably to do something organizational. She’s just amazing. The two girls, they’re just amazing people, and I adore them, and I’m blown away by what they can do in the world.

Frankel: So let’s shift to Israel. You said Begin, it started there, and . . .
WOLF: I was going to Israel up until maybe a year ago, a year and a half ago, every year, working on one delegation or one mission after another. Totally involved. Israel is still my dreamscape. But I’d say that as of the time of Begin, and as of the time of Lebanon, and then with the opening of the archives, we learned about the others, the historical picture and the other narrative. I was always working on a two-state solution and the peace process and trying to figure out ways to get out of the territories because I was convinced that was something we could do: we could negotiate, we could haggle. We could build a future, not by fixing things unilaterally, whether conquering or pulling out unilaterally. You need to haggle. You need to invest.

And it obviously hasn’t happened. It hasn’t happened, truthfully, because of the lack of Palestinian leadership in the years of Arafat, who was a disaster. I met him with Americans for Peace Now. I remember him nearly losing it when our delegation forced a question about succession, who would take over? Who was he raising up? Who was the leadership? Where was the accountability? Even in terms of budget, where was it all going? And during those years, he really was not — we know he was not a good leader. He was a revolutionary, but he was not a good leader and was doing nothing about governance. He didn’t have any backing when he was coming up with a supposed peace plan.

On the other hand, on our side — oh, we’ve been over that so many times. It’s been one failure of leadership, lack of leadership — we don’t have to review politically what’s happened. In 2001 — it seems like a long time ago; 9-11 was 2001 — there was a solidarity rally here. I later found out there were solidarity rallies all over the country. There were other rabbis like myself who got embroiled with that. What happened here was that I was at a Board of Rabbis meeting, which was a rarity. Our Federation director couldn’t make that meeting, was on a conference call with us — which was kind of amusing for the people there — but was insisting that there be some kind of solidarity rally. I am in a position in my community to say what I feel like. The other rabbis in that room were very skeptical, didn’t like it, and were being forced into doing it the way of the Federation. I said, “You can’t just have a solidarity rally because there are nuances now,” meaning it’s not a football game. It’s not line up on one side of the stadium or the other. It’s how do you work toward peace? And the Federation would really have nothing to do with it.

And there were like three or four days before the rally, and I kept pleading for some kind of nuance and was told summarily that it couldn’t happen. At the 11th hour, I didn’t have a plan or a strategy. It’s not my style to lead a demonstration. It certainly wasn’t my style to be on the outs when it comes to Israel matters because it is my whole life, but I found myself in the 11th hour coming away with a tremendous banner that someone made. It was what I would have put on it: Love Israel: End the Occupation. I came to that rally, and people went berserk. They behaved very poorly. I was spat on. People were yelling at me, cursing me. A cantor was cursing me. All kinds of crazy things happened. In addition to that, someone high up on Federation staff, a professional supposedly, tried to get the Jewish Review to write articles against me and my position. In other words, the Federation deliberately tried to undermine me. Havurah decided, through its leadership, to tell them if they did that they would sue them. There was a meeting of the Federation board at the Benson, a breakfast, at which not only I came, but Rabbi Stampfer and Rabbi Rose came in my defense.

Frankel: Rabbi Emanuel Rose?
WOLF: Emanuel Rose. And they read the riot act because they were aghast at what had happened. Our Federation executive director turned red in the face, was utterly embarrassed in front of the Federation board. They backed down and insisted that the Jewish Review, at that point, would not publish those things and print some kind of retraction. Bottom line, that whole event, it was very traumatic. I have to say that for those two girls, my daughters — they were involved in an Israel Independence Day choir for the Portland Jewish Academy — that became a moment in their growing up that — it was shocking. It was very hard. It was hard for me to assimilate the crazed antipathy. I asked myself, “How could this be happening?”

But I realized there are fissures. I could say there are huge fissures now in American Jewish life. I know part of that, and I understand that that ship has sailed, meaning that there are whole parts of the Jewish community who are willing to be unequivocally critical of what the government decides to do in Israel, and yet they still love and embrace the narrative. And then there are people who think that the only way to love Israel is to support everything. Of course, there are people who hate everything; they’re self-hating. But I’m not even talking about them. But this is the way it is, and the discourse has become almost as flimsy and pathetic as what’s going on right now between Trump and Cruz. It’s not honorable, and it’s a poor reflection of the American Jewish community.

Later on, I learned that what had happened here in Portland had taken place in a number of cities, in which those fissures were suddenly out in the open. So for me it was hard. I was traumatized to the extent that I could never — sure, I go back to the MJCC every once in a while, but I can’t go into that building without reliving that moment. I can’t really operate in that section of town without thinking about that event. I’ve gone to other meetings subsequently, more recently, when political figures have come to town. I’ve even had to speak at the Community Relations Council. I can’t believe I have the presence of mind at least to go in there and represent myself or others. When I do, I know there are people who are seething, and I can see the smoke coming up. Do I get gratification out of that? No, I don’t get any gratification out of that. There’s no joy in spite.

Frankel: Do you have students who are in college today who come to you and say, “How do I deal with BDS? I love, I’m supportive of support Israel, but where is that line between . . .?”
WOLF: This morning. I was at the minyan. Go figure, Havurah has a Wednesday morning minyan. Don’t ask me how that happened. We have a robust Wednesday morning minyan. One of our members brought his daughter from Brown, and Brown right now is going through tremendous debates, fissures over the Israel question that involve open Hillel, not open Hillel, affiliated with the national policy. Crazy stuff is going on now at Brown. She was saying, “Oh, my God. It’s so crazy.” And one of the things that she was bringing up, she said, “It’s so hard for coalition building.” That was her term. She’s very smart. Of course, she’s at Brown. She’s very smart. And that’s a way of saying, one of the things that’s most terrible on campus, or anywhere, is when people are yelling at each other. If you’re a change agent, you’re trying to be heard. You’re trying to involve yourself. Going back to Buber (“All real living is meeting”), you’re trying to connect and listen, too, pay attention, be respectful, be mutually connected. That’s really hard right now on campus.

You asked, “Do I talk to kids?” Yes, I talk to kids all the time. I just did a database of all the kids that I’ve worked with over the years here, and shock of shocks, I didn’t even anticipate, didn’t expect this — I guess I never thought about it — there are 385 kids. I have all of their addresses. I’ve talked to many of them recently. My own kid, Gavriella, when she started out she was originally at one of the Claremont colleges. She later switched to Wesleyan. She called me one night from California and said, “Dad, there are Jewish people . . ..” They didn’t have a Hillel back there; it was a Jewish Student Union, I think. It was trying to organize about Israel. They were selling T-shirts that said, “Less Hamas, More Hummus.” She said, “Can you talk to me about this? Because it seems awfully idiotic.” Some of her friends, she can’t talk to. They don’t understand how offensive and dumbed-down this is. Which epitomizes many discussions I have with kids.

I had a discussion with a kid yesterday. A kid came in here, 26, “Should I go on Birthright? What do I need to know about Birthright?” Always when I’m talking with kids, it’s very delicate. Why? I want them to embrace and love their story, the Zionist story as well. I want them to understand the potency of that narrative, how important it was, and how, if they had been there, or if I had been there, when you’re building the State, how it is that these narratives, these positions, built confidence in people who had nothing in Poland, had to be swept off their feet to go somewhere, had to invest in their own character. And then, in the end, in the days of the Holocaust, how you had to take action and, fortunately or unfortunately, use force to get done what you needed to get done in the hour. Later on, you do the work and you recognize what happened wrong and you, hopefully, build a narrative of reconciliation. You own it. But I want the kids to embrace this thing.

So how I talk to those kids is about how someone like me is a “has been.” I’m the past. It’s not important what I do. I know I’m dripping with grief. I’ve worked really, really hard. I’m sad. I don’t like where the Israeli leadership is. I don’t like what the government is doing with the occupation, the territories. I can’t live with that. I can’t abide it. And I’m almost poisoned by my grief. I know that people like Amelia, or this kid who came in this morning, or the kid at Brown, that these people have all the energy. They have the spiritual vitamins. They’re going to figure out new ways to get done what needs to get done. They’re not tortured by the grief. They might get angry, but they’ve got all this energy and they have a future, and they can come up with new angles. They can be sharp and critical, too. But I want them to embrace the powerfulness of the narrative, of what it meant to go and make that state happen.

I also deal with the left wing. I deal with people of the political left. I deal with all the people who are obnoxious, people who don’t embrace it with love. On the contrary, they’re afraid of embracing it because there’s something missing in their own biographies. They’re obnoxious. It’s incredibly tiring and sad. I will support them if they are arguing against the occupation, but the rest of the time, what do you say — you don’t want to breathe in the foul odor. So it’s been a mixed bag. Yes, I consider myself a “has been” on this stuff because I’d rather hope that younger people can come up with new avenues of grappling with some of the hypocrisies and make that society build the sense of idealism again that’s more than just conquering territory.

Frankel: So what are your plans after you retire from the pulpit?
WOLF: I like to cook [laughter]. I love to cook. I just love to cook. And I really love to read. I started out this whole thing by saying I couldn’t read [laughs]. I love to read. I read all the time. I read everything that gets written. I love to read fiction. So I read constantly. I like to write. I’ll probably write a good deal more. Writing is very hard for me. I don’t know any writer who hasn’t responded, “Are you kidding? Writing is so hard!” I always say that if I had hair, I’d be tearing it out. But I do like to work on something with writing. I don’t know what it will be, but I like doing it. I play piano, and I just got the piano tuned for the first time in a long time. I plan to practice a lot. I love classical music. So I’ll play piano. I was also saying I like to hike a lot, but I’m getting older, and I hope I can hike. My knees are starting to hurt quite a bit, but I like to get outdoors and all that kind of stuff. I think I’ll do a lot of that.

I’ll have to find something to do as a volunteer where nobody knows me, something absolutely stupid but hopefully helpful to an organization. I like the Oregon Innocence Project. I like the work they do in terms of the incarceration problem and wrongful convictions and stuff like that. But I don’t want to do anything that’s public. I just want to do it quietly. I guess the other mandatory thing is to eat lunch with other retired people [laughter].

Frankel: Sounds like good retirement plans.
WOLF: Yes. I saw your husband. I saw him walking in Freddie’s [Fred Meyer].

Frankel: He goes every day for his coffee.
WOLF: Coffee. Right! He must take an hour to drink that coffee because he looks like he’s wandering around in the upper stratosphere, and he’s in the vegetable section at Freddie’s. I didn’t want to bother him because I thought he was thinking very ethereal thoughts.

Frankel: Any last words about Portland, your life, or your experience, your career?
WOLF: I will say that I’ve been filled with wonder — we use the words blessings and miracles and wonder and all that. I can’t get over all the good fortune, that there is so much good. And the people I work with, the people who have surrounded me. My family, of course. This opportunity for me to do what I love to do has been just amazing. I’ve been so fortunate. Now I know that people aren’t always fortunate. Someone told me once, earlier on, you make your own luck. Yes, but bad things happen to good people, and a lot of good people really suffer. I’m grateful. I’m incredibly grateful. I’ve met wonderful, wonderful people here. Lisa has opened doors for me in terms of honesty and recognition of who I am and who I’m not.

My kids have been amazing. My older kids have given me all kinds of gifts and humor, unbelievable humor. That’s probably the best thing they’ve done. They’ve said some of the funniest things to me. Simeon said recently, “Dad, I’m thinking of coming down for the High Holidays.” I said, “Simeon, you coming for the High Holidays?” “Yes, of course. You’re going to give the last drash. I want to be there. I want to be there for the last drash.” In fact, it surprised me. [He said], “I forget that there will be several Shabbatot that you’ll be going around to stadiums all around the country – your goodbye tour. ” [laughs]. They make me realize — they make me laugh at myself, and I love it. It’s been very joyous. I will say that your friend and my friend, Noam [Stampfer], was part of that joy. I miss him a lot. That was very special for me coming here. Again, he was part of the humor. He was possessed of that capacity to reflect and say, “You never know where this road is going.” But just to be able to study and look at those texts and see the truth in those texts and see the truth in the people you work with to make this life what it is, to make it better. I’ve been blessed, I’m happy, and I’m grateful.

Frankel: Thank you very much.
WOLF: My pleasure, my pleasure.