Interview with Rabbi Suzanne Singer of Temple Beth El in Riverside, CA.
Why did I decide to become a rabbi? It’s kind of a long story. I was a TV producer and journalist for twenty years. The way I ended up there was that I had majored in comparative literature when I was in college but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. When I graduated, I had a choice between getting a Ph.D. in literature and writing papers that only three people could understand, or doing something that had a little more social impact. I thought I could write articles or produce films that would expose people to issues that are important, so I chose the graduate program in TV Journalism at U.C. Berkley and entered it very idealistically. I actually spent those twenty years doing work that I felt good about but TV is a pretty nasty environment. I did mainly news and public affairs programming. I produced some documentaries and was a programming executive at PBS where I put a number of documentaries on the air. I briefly produced a children’s series for preschoolers called “The Puzzle Place.” In my last job I was executive producer of POV, which is a documentary series on national public television.
As a result I did work that I felt good about philosophically but, as I said, the environment was very, very nasty and I never felt good about that. I knew somehow that this was not what I was meant to do in my life. I had always tried to figure out what I was all about, what I was meant to do. I could never quite figure out what that was. You should know that my mother was a survivor of Auschwitz. That had a very strong impact on who I am in terms of feeling that I had some obligation to make the world a better place. That is why I had originally gone into journalism.
Many years before I did anything about it, I suddenly had this idea that I was going to become a rabbi. I felt that that was a very strange thing because my family was not at all interested in religion. I had gone to religious school when I was a kid and I was Confirmed, but basically my family was very anti-religion and certainly my mother, because of her experiences, was very ambivalent about Judaism. So it seemed that it would be a very odd thing for me to be doing, and I just kept pushing it away. I think the idea of becoming a rabbi was sparked by a friend of mine, who was a filmmaker and had decided to have a Bat Mitzvah when she turned 40. She asked me to be part of her service, and I ended up going to classes with her and to services, and it started getting me inspired again. I mean I had been interested when I was a kid but then I just kind of lost it. I kept pushing away the idea of becoming a rabbi, but every time it would come back, and I would say, “This thing is crazy!” When I finally started telling people about wanting to be a rabbi, they would respond, “Just because you love Judaism doesn’t mean you have to become a rabbi.” Or, “Can’t you just make films about Judaism?” So I kept rationalizing it away because I thought, “Here I have a career. How can I start all over again?”
Finally after many years, I was in New York producing POV, and I visited Hebrew Union College, which is the seminary for Reform rabbis. They had an adult education program at the time, and I started taking classes and I just got more and more inspired. I had a friend with whom I had worked at PBS, who had decided to become a therapist. She was living in Albuquerque and I was living in New York and we were e-mailing each other and I kept saying I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. She decided to practice on me, so she sent me some questions and I would answer, then she would ask me more questions, and I would answer again, and after a few months I printed out all that I had written and I realized that I knew what I wanted to do: I just hadn’t been listening to myself for about 10 years! It was screaming out at me and I just kept ignoring it.
I guess this is what Christians label a “call” but we don’t use that terminology. I decided I was going to go back to school. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do aside from studying Judaism, and I wasn’t really sure about being a rabbi yet. I thought I would maybe get involved in adult education, since that had inspired me.
I went back to school and got a masters in Judaic Studies and people kept asking: “Well, are you going to be a rabbi?” I would answer, “No, no.” But I kept taking the classes that rabbinical studnets were taking. At one point I had gone to the head of the Rabbinic Program in Los Angeles to express my interest, but then I wrote him a letter and told him I didn’t think so. I kept thinking about it, though, and I finally wrote him another letter a few months later telling him I was interested in applying. I thought he would respond with something like, ”You’re a very confused person and we will be need to discuss this.” Instead, he said, “That’s wonderful. Are you applying for the December deadline?” It was already December by then. So I did apply but didn’t tell anybody, not even my husband, until two weeks after I sent in my application.
The minute I was back in school, I asked myself, “What took you so long? I should have done this 15 years ago.” It’s been 16 years since I left television and I have never, ever looked back and wondered, “Oh I really miss it; why did I leave?” I felt that I had absolutely done the right thing but I guess I wasn’t ready before, though I wish I had been. I’m feeling very much that I am doing what I was meant to do.
At the start of this interview, you asked me what I believe in but in Judaism, it isn’t so much what you believe as what you do. Yes, we believe in one God but we don’t even agree as to what that means. You say you’re an agnostic, but it depends on what you mean by God. I certainly don’t believe it’s an old guy sitting up there running the world or any version of that. Unfortunately I believe that most of us have what is called a “pediatric notion” of God, which is an old guy with a beard up in heaven. That is not what I believe, certainly not after what my mother experienced.
I am the rabbi at Temple Beth El here in Riverside. The name Beth El means House of God -- the El stands for God. God has a lot of different names. In fact El Shaddai is actually from the word Shaddayim which means “breasts,” so it is a very female name. God is neither male nor female, and is both because, literally or metaphorically, God created human beings in God’s image, “male and female God created them.” I prefer not to refer to God as male or female because God is beyond our comprehension. A lot of people think they know what God is or wants, etc. That is why we are told not to make images of God, but some people think they know what God is and this limits God.
On the one hand I think there is a certain non-rational part of why I became a rabbi, because it was something that came to me and wouldn’t let me go. Yes I was inspired by my friend’s Bat Mitzvah but I could have just as well not been inspired. Again my family and my sisters were not at all interested in religion, so it is not as if it was instilled in me in any way. I think it is something deeper and it just comes from some other place. Maybe God? Maybe DNA? Maybe there was a rabbi in my family many generations ago. On a rational level, I can say that being a rabbi appeals to me in a lot of different ways. For one thing I can at least do my small part in making the world a better place, both on an individual level because I can help people through counseling, and also on a broader level because I have always been involved in social justice as a rabbi. It also appeals to me intellectually. I love to study and to find a lot of different meanings in the texts. I love to lead services and to be creative about how services are led.
There are a lot of different aspects to being a rabbi. I have also been involved in interfaith work, especially here I Riverside. I also have a desire to preserve Judaism and that is very important to me because of my mother’s experiences. I don’t want to give what is called “a posthumous victory to Hitler.” That isn’t my term, it is a term from a theologian named Emil Fackenheim, a Holocaust theologian, a Canadian who died about six years ago. In Judaism, there are 613 Commandments and he talked about a 614th Commandment which is not to give Hitler a posthumous victory by allowing Judaism to disappear. Survival for the sake of survival is certainly not THE goal, and I think Judaism has a lot to offer. Unfortunately, I worry about its future, especially that of liberal Judaism. People are not joining synagogues as much and they are not feeling as connected to the tradition as they once perhaps were, and this is kind of scary.
I’ve been a rabbi for eight and a half years and I’ve been very very happy that I’ve done this. I think I’ve made a difference, though maybe not as much as I’d like to, but I don’t think that I have just been spinning my wheels. I feel quite fulfilled doing God’s work here in Riverside.
Rabbi Suzanne Singer
Temple Beth El
2675 Central Avenue
Riverside, CA 92506
(213) 793-1560 (cell)
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