The winding road to the rabbinate
Rabbi Stephen Landau joins Tikvoh Chadoshoh
By Cindy Mindell
BLOOMFIELD - The call comes from someone “deep in southwest Texas, headed for New Mexico.” It’s Stephen Landau, the new rabbi at Tikvoh Chadoshoh in Bloomfield, and he’s driving through the familiar landscape, visiting friends and family, catching up on rest, before taking the Connecticut pulpit on Aug. 1.
Landau is a Dallas native who lived and worked in New Mexico for 20 years before deciding to become a rabbi. A carpenter by trade, he was ordained on June 1 from Hebrew College in Newton, Mass.
“My heart is here in many ways,” he says of the American southwest, “and I always expected to return here or to the mountain states of the American west. But something happened when I went to visit Tikvoh Chadoshoh. Even though I had other opportunities, they basically won my heart.”
Landau will succeed Rabbi Lily Kaufmann, who served Tikvoh for seven years and left this summer to become the Theresa Berman Director of Jewish Learning at Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka, Minn.
“There was something very non-concrete about my attraction to Tikvoh,” Landau says. “The congregants’ attitude and culture, the community they’ve built over 70 years, match my dreams and vision for community. It has a lovely, chavurah-like intimacy that you don’t often find once a congregation gets bigger than 50 or 60 families. They care very deeply about each other as individuals and Jews, and they’re very good to their rabbi. They’re easy to love.”
Landau says that while he always identified as a Jew, he was raised in a Jewish-secular family, with a high degree of ethnic, cultural, and historical identity with Judaism. “I’ve always been a person intrigued with the unseen, with what we don’t see or know,” he says. “In a Jewish sense, I’ve always been intrigued more with the questions much more than the answers.”
From adolescence on, he embarked on a spiritual journey that led him to non-Jewish traditions. “Not that I was rejecting my identity or Judaism,” he says, “but I had never met anyone who could teach me Judaism in that way. I was a culturally identified Jew interested in spirituality, but found it in non-Jewish places.”
In 1985, however, Landau began to study his own tradition.
In 2000, a close friend received her fourth cancer diagnosis, and Landau helped create a Share the Care group of friends and family. “Share the Care is bikur cholim in a wonderful instruction manual,” Landau says. “The experience of organizing that team and running it and serving this woman and her family was transformational for me, and made bikur cholim very alive for me. My friend did not survive. But the process of serving her and her family for a year, and having the vivid experience of the deep psychological, emotional, and spiritual validity of our way of life, put me over the edge. The day she died, she was 53 and I was 47, and I realized that I too will die one day. I didn’t want to be remorseful and regretful and pissed off when my time came to die, so what did I want to do to make sure this didn’t happen?”
The answer was to learn as much as he could of Jewish tradition and pass it on. “It wasn’t about becoming a rabbi, but about giving a certain validation to my own tradition n a tradition I found very useful, interesting, and valid among many valid paths,” he says. “I had a deep flash of insight that the others weren’t my traditions, even though I was finding them useful, and I realized that I hadn’t spent serious time learning about my own tradition.”
Within a week, Landau knew he wanted to attend rabbinical school. Because of his age and the way he throws himself into projects, there were no half-measures. He sold his business and spent six months studying in Israel. He had heard that Hebrew College in Newton, Mass. was planning to open a trans-denominational rabbinical school in two years. While in Israel, he met and studied with Rabbi Ebn Leader, who would join the school’s faculty when it opened a year early, in 2003. Landau was in the school’s first graduating class n he calls them “pioneers” n in June.
The new rabbi says that he loves his old carpentry trade, and still works with his hands at every opportunity. While carrying a full course-load at Hebrew College, he renovated a house he had bought in Newton. Now he gets to help craft a congregation.
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