In September 2024, Rabbi Jodie Gordon was installed as senior rabbi at Hevreh of Southern Berkshire in Great Barrington, a Reform congregation with the largest membership of any synagogue in the Berkshires.
Arriving as a rabbinic intern in 2012 and assuming a full-time position two years later, Rabbi Gordon has helped define Hevreh’s identity over the past decade, both as a rabbi and director of education of the congregation’s religious school. She has led four trips to Israel for b’nai mitzvah students, and shares her often irreverent takes on Jewish life and practice on the OMfG Podcast (co-hosted by Rabbi Jen Gubitz), now in its fifth season. Her contributions to this paper’s Rabbi Reflections always display insight, and her account of her family’s sojourn in Tel Aviv during a 2022 sabbatical charmingly conveyed her love of Israel and the satisfactions of living Jewishly in the Jewish state.
She succeeds Rabbi Neil P.G. Hirsch, who assumed the role of Senior Rabbi Successor at the Isaac M. Wise Temple in Cincinnati last summer. Without question, now is a challenging time to be a rabbi, given the post-pandemic reimagining of worship and community and a post-Oct. 7 2023 landscape of heightened tensions both within Jewish institutions and from without.
In November, the BJV caught up with Rabbi Gordon to talk about her experience at Hevreh and her goals for the future. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
The BJV Interview: Rabbi Jodie Gordon
How do you see the congregation growing and evolving in the next few years under your rabbinate?
Hevreh is at an interesting place in its history – we just marked 50 years of existence as a congregation. We marked 25 years in our building here on State Road, and it's my 10th year full-time at the congregation. To me, it's a time for really leaning into who we are. We came out of COVID and, in a post-pandemic reality, our community grew. We opened an early childhood center in 2020. Our religious school grew. This is a chance to harvest seeds that we've been tending to for many years and pointing our way forward for the next 25 to 50 years.
Something that was important to me in thinking about all of the things that needed to be put into place as we move into this next chapter was helping to start a new interfaith clergy association here in South County, which hasn't existed in any formal sense in eight years or so. I've been working hard on that with some colleagues and it is getting ready to launch soon. The Berkshire is our home and Hevreh is an important point on that map not just for members of our community, but for the larger community. How do do we continue to be a place that can feel like home, that can be a place of sanctuary, of spiritual recharging? It’s not because we want people to come here and hide out from the world, but we want people to come here and feel like Hevreh better equips them for living in the world and for being a part of the larger Berkshire community.
This effort has been driven by a communal desire to be a part of the community that we live in, even as we've struggled with the specter of antisemitism in the Berkshires, or even just our fears around it. If you want to move beyond that and lift up Jewish joy – an important phrase in this community for the last number of years – I think a part of it is weaving ourselves into Great Barrington and into South County. We want it to be a good place to live. We want it to be a safe place to live for everyone who's here. We want it to be a meaningful place to live where we take care of our neighbors and do good work for the world. How am I going to do that as a leader of this community? For me, the answer is in partnership with other people doing similar work.
How has the post October 7 world changed your perspective as a rabbi and how did it change the congregation and its perception of itself?
A point of pride for me is that we didn't just start talking about Israel on October 7. In a lot of communities, broadly speaking, Israel can be and has been for a long time a topic that is hard to talk about. Or maybe you're not quite sure how to talk about it – you're worried that you're going to alienate this population or that. That has not been my experience at Hevreh, where we've built up, not just ‘trust,’ but on-the-ground experience. I've taken four groups of students and parents to Israel together over the last six years. I think that's an important piece of the culture – having people in the community who have lived experiences of having been to Israel together with their rabbi, with their classmates, with the other parents who have helped each other setting up an oneg during their kids' b’nai mitzvahs. And now – they're traveling together.
In terms of how October 7 impacted my rabbinate: I think back to that first Shabbat, which was October 13 of last year, that first Friday night. There was something about the experience of needing to lead in that moment that I know I will never forget. It was a packed house. The first Friday after Simchat Torah is usually people when are all ‘shuled out.’ But people felt called to be here. And I think we've seen that throughout the year, that it wasn't a one-off. I think we've continued on this trajectory of togetherness.
And the other piece of it is that October 7 changed the way we pray, and I think it changed the way we talk. Not just the way we talk about Israel, but the way that we speak to one another.
How has the way we speak to one another changed in your estimation?
What I've been able to witness [at Hevreh] is that there is a commitment to being able to stay in community with one another that has pushed a lot of people to think about how they speak to one another in order to make space for everyone. It's not that everyone here is of a unified mind on Israel, on the war, on what should happen next and how we should understand it here as American Jews. There's actually a broader range of opinion than you might otherwise guess. We've been able to drill down and distill [communal discussions to] the question about being a human being and being a mensch, to be a real human concerned with the well-being of humanity. What does that require me to say right now? What does that require me to acknowledge? When I pray, how do I make my prayers feel specific, as well as universal and inclusive? Those are the things that I've wrestled with at various points throughout the last year.
The two worst things that I can imagine happening is one, that people cede their seat at the table of Jewish life because they can't get their heads around the Israel question one way or the other. One day this war will end. It might not be as soon as we hope, but one day this war will end. And at the end of that war, if people have the sense that, in their own Jewish communities, they no longer have a place at the table, what have we done? The other is that for me – as somebody who does consider themselves a loving and proud and critical and thinking Zionist – is to ask why would someone want to cede a seat at this metaphorical table? I think it's my job to create a space where, regardless of whether or not we share a vision for what Israel becomes and how it gets there, that your Jewish life here as an American Jew living in Great Barrington who wants to have a place to go for Shabbat shouldn't go away. So, it's a great balancing act.
You asked at the beginning about my rabbinate. This is an opportunity to have a ‘next phase’ at someplace that I love. Most people don't get a gift like that. Most people, if they want to continue to grow and change and do new things, they usually have to go somewhere else. I've been here a long time and I've done a lot of different things here. Now, with all of those different experiences behind me, it's an opportunity to chart the next course forward. We have an incredible board, an amazing staff, and a kind and enthusiastic and engaged community. When you start with those as your raw ingredients, it's exciting. Like, what can we do next?
Photo: Rabbi Jodie Gordon (center, holding mic) at her installation as senior rabbi of Hevreh of Southern Berkshire.