Joel Magalnick, Editor, The Jewish Sound
Rabbi David Lipper believes in the power of storytelling. He tells of a new documentary in which its producers built a large box and filled it with pen, pad, a video camera and one question: What does God mean to you?
“Over the course of a year, they recorded or photographed people’s reflections, images, discussions, whatever they had inside the box, and created this film,” Lipper said. “I think congregations need to do that.”
Lipper will spend one year as interim rabbi at Bellevue’s Temple B’nai Torah, following the retirement of its senior rabbi, Jim Mirel, and the departure of its associate rabbi, Yohanna Kinberg. Lipper comes into a temple that has experienced pain — some from losing Mirel, whose tenure spanned 29 years, and some from losing Kinberg, who after 10 years at the temple was passed over for the senior rabbi position.
“Most of the pain is that people haven’t had the chance to really grieve,” Lipper said. “By listening and talking to people and hearing stories and struggling through their losses, we’ll heal that.”
As a part of the Reform movement’s team of interim rabbis, Lipper’s job is to spend a year (though sometimes rabbis must be on hand for two) as a transition between a rabbi that has left and whomever takes over. The interim is not in the running for the job, and in most cases does not want to be. In Lipper’s case, he has spent the past five years doing interim work. Prior to that he spent 22 years on pulpits in Wisconsin, Texas and Ohio.
Though he considers Houston home, after his three kids were out of the house, his wife Dora decided she didn’t want to be on her own with her husband away so much. Last year, they sold the house and she began to come on these year-long assignments with him.
“At some point we’ll find a home base again,” he said.
Having now made the cross-country trek from his last assignment in Connecticut to Bellevue, Lipper said he has a much larger job than keeping the bima warm for a member’s Bar Mitzvah, for example.
“Most of my job is going to be refocusing the staff toward best practices, areas where they can really use their skills and talents,” he said. “Most of what I want to do is help this team of people come together, because they’re all new.”
Aside from Cantor David Serkin-Poole, whose tenure has spanned more than three decades, nearly all of the temple’s staff leadership has come on in the past two years.
“Everybody needs to sit down at the table and figure out what we can do best,” Lipper said.
From the outside, this may not sound like the work of someone who must give a Shabbat sermon each week or comfort a family following the loss of a loved one. But he holds a certificate in non-profit management, and “all kinds of other experience along the way,” he said, not to mention a secret weapon: His mother just retired this month after 35 years as administrator at a synagogue in Houston.
“You learn a lot…about the inside of a synagogue when you’re inside the synagogue,” he said.
Plus, Lipper said, as a leader with a quickly approaching end date, he has the luxury of honesty.
“A lot of the time settled rabbis will say they never really get to be brutally honest with their congregants or their leadership, and so they endure some frustration by not being able to speak their mind, because they’re always concerned about the next contract or the next rotation,” he said. “Sometimes you have to be honest and sometimes that honesty is painful for communities who see themselves very differently from within than an interim rabbi might see from the outside.”
At the same time, he’s able to use his year as an opportunity to hear from congregants about why they belong to a synagogue and how they got there, which is how they move forward.
“The biggest thing that I try to do with congregations is I encourage people to tell their sacred stories,” he said. “As people tell those stories, I think they appreciate where they are a little bit more.”
But Lipper realizes that with this work he must also be completely present for a congregation he’s only beginning to get to know. In fact, a congregant had passed away the morning we spoke.
“What I have to do is be the rabbi for a family whom I have not even met yet,” he said. “I do that often and fairly well. It’s a challenge. Most of it has to do with listening — being a good listener, and telling stories.”