June 2004 - סִיוָן .. תַּמּוּז תשס״ד Sivan..Tamuz 5764

Thank you, thank you, and thank you! What a wonderful Shabbat we had together! You honored me and you honored yourselves on the occasion of the Hebrew Union College bestowing upon me the degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa. The Doctor of Divinity is an honorary doctorate given to rabbis who have served the Jewish people for twenty-five years. We have had fun playing with the idea that this was my second doctorate, my double doc, although the first one, the Ph. D. was much harder to come by. To all of you who made my Doc Mitzvah/Rav Mitzvah such a success, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. So:

Doc, doc: Who's there? Rabbi! God bless you!

It is hard for me to believe that twenty-five years have passed since I first became a rabbi. But when I think about it, I realize so much has changed in those twenty-five years. My class of rabbinical students was the first not to be required by covenant to send chaplains to Viet Nam. Most of us as products of the sixties were anti-war, and some of us had even enrolled in rabbinical school to avoid the draft. Rabbis back then were very politically liberal and not very traditional in observance or training.

Almost all of us were coming to the seminary directly from undergraduate colleges. We were also among the first classes to study for a year in Israel (1974-75), developing our Zionism in the glow of the 1967 Six Day War and the shadow of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. We were young, ambitious and studious. Today, many of the students in the liberal seminaries are studying for a second career, coming to the rabbinate from medicine, law, accounting, theatre, etc. These older students are searching for spiritual fulfillment in the rabbinate, whereas many of my classmates were looking into the rabbinate in order to repair the world (tikkun olam). Today's rabbis starting out are perhaps more mature, but I think we were more enthusiastic if not more naive. The rabbinical schools have also gone through cycles of observance. Some of my classmate, myself included, had discovered some traditional observances that few of us had grown up with. We began keeping kosher, davening with tefillin, and going to the mikveh before Shabbat. We went to the Western Wall to welcome Shabbat with the Yeshiva bucherim and danced with reckless abandon with Chabad on Simchat Torah. But most of all we studied Torah. As much as we could, we studied traditional texts. Then the seminaries went through a cycle of Renewal Judaism, with more creative observances. There were tambourines and drums at worship services. Kashrut became vegan vegetarianism and the study was of psychology and ethnic histories. Some of the Renewal rabbis were more observant and traditional than my classmate and me, and others seemed more like the hippies with whom I went to college. But they all became rabbis. Then came the present generation which included the more mature rabbis who began to enter the seminaries. Some of them may retire before being honored with a Doctor of Divinity degree. These older and wiser new rabbis bring new skills and perspectives to the rabbinate. Some are returning old skills to the rabbinate (Maimonides, Nachmanides, Abravanel, and many others were financiers, physicians and legalists).

Things have changed during the last twenty-five years in the rabbinate. Politics do not seem to be spoken of from the pulpit as much any more. There is more time devoted to spiritual quest. When I became a rabbi an unpopular war was coming to an end. Now that I have reached the twenty-fifth anniversary of my ordination it seems that an unpopular war is just beginning. When I became a rabbi, spirituality meant bringing God into our world and making the world a better place. Twenty-five years later, spirituality is found in the heavenly heights and in the inner depths of the soul. But what has remained constant is that for us as Jews, and for those of us privileged to serve you as rabbis, the answers to life's questions still are to be found in the study of Torah.

Thank you for the privilege of serving as your rabbi. I look forward to many more years of studying, praying and growing near to God with you.

—Rabbi Harry A. Manhoff, Ph.D., D.D., B.D.*

*B.D. = Big Deal!

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