By Joel Magalnick, Editor, The Jewish Sound
Nobody had planned for things to work out this way. But you might call it a happy accident that Rabbi David Lipper and the congregation to which he’d been assigned as an interim rabbi decided to remove the “interim” from his title.
“I came in expecting to stay for a year or maybe two,” Lipper told The Jewish Sound. “Being a permanent candidate in a congregation that I am serving as interim is really off the table from the beginning because the things that have to happen in order for me to even be considered a candidate are so difficult.”
But on Feb. 26, the board and congregation of Temple B’nai Torah in Bellevue voted to install Lipper as its new senior rabbi.
“He’s a fantastic rabbi. And even better, he’s an incredible organizational consultant,” said Cliff Cantor, president of Temple B’nai Torah’s board. “Both the congregation and the board realized that he was, as our interim rabbi, fulfilling all of our needs and was superior to the candidates that were applying for the permanent position.”
Lipper’s title officially becomes senior rabbi as of July 1, but in reality, “the duties are not any different,” Cantor said. “There’s no point where he stops doing one thing and starts doing everything else.”
Lipper succeeds senior Rabbi James Mirel, who retired last year, and former associate rabbi Yohanna Kinberg, who was passed over for the senior position and now leads Congregation Kol Ami in Woodinville.
“We lost our two previous rabbis and that has some considerable effect on the congregation, so the interim has to bridge that gap,” Cantor said.
Oftentimes that means mending hurt feelings, improving processes in how the synagogue runs both administratively and spiritually, and “helping to adjust the frames of mind so we’re able to receive a new rabbi,” Cantor said, so the congregation can “hire a new rabbi that can be successful rather than hire a rabbi into an environment that might not be conducive to success.”
Until his approval as B’nai Torah’s permanent rabbi, Lipper had served for six years in the interim rabbi program of the Union for Reform Judaism’s Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR). This program does exactly what Temple B’nai Torah had hoped Lipper would do: Bring in rabbis specially trained as interims for a year — and sometimes two, depending upon how a synagogue’s search process goes — to pave the way for the next permanent rabbi.
According to Rabbi Alan Henkin, CCAR’s director of rabbinic placement, interim rabbis are contractually obligated to not seek the permanent position.
“This gives them the freedom to speak hard truths to synagogue leaders, something we have learned is crucial for congregations in transition and one of the reasons many congregations have come to value the program,” Henkin told The Jewish Sound via email. “It also strengthens a congregation’s search for a new long-term rabbi, as potential applicants are assured that they don’t have competition from a rabbi already in place.”
There are, however, rare occasions where the rabbis are released from that obligation. Both the temple and Lipper petitioned CCAR, and “given that both parties felt such a strong connection with each other, we felt a waiver was warranted,” Henkin said.
Before joining the interim program, Lipper spent three decades on pulpits in Wisconsin, Ohio and Texas, but he considers Houston home. To this day, he begins each board meeting with “Let’s gather y’all,” according to the temple’s cantor, David Serkin-Poole.
Both Lipper and his board agree that a luxury of being in an interim position is the ability to speak more candidly and honestly about issues where a permanent rabbi may feel the need to be more politic.
“I tend to speak my mind,” Lipper said. “One of the members of the leadership team here came up to me during the process of me becoming the permanent replacement and said to me, ‘Promise me you will not stop being as brutally honest as you have been.’”
As he ingrains himself further into the community, Lipper said he will put more effort into education and study, as well as increasing engagement with worship. Also, “we’re working hard to re-envision a social action profile for Temple B’nai Torah and to continue to expand that,” he said.
On the bima itself, Cantor Serkin-Poole said he’s excited to more permanently be able to work alongside a man he has come to admire over the past several months.
“Both of us were thinking that it’s too bad that we’re going to have to be saying goodbye,” he said. “It’s very exciting that the hello is going to be a long-term hello.”