Today is the funeral for Rabbi Joel Wittstein. We're not in London. How could we be? And yet how could we not be there for this? On Tu B'shvat, a festival of celebrating trees, plants and life, our rabbi is being laid to rest. I suspect that he would have liked that.
On Friday afternoon, the girls and I attended a friend's daughter's birthday party. After an hour of jumping and playing and having a great time, we came home to make dinner and head to bed. Ben was two hours south in Pittsburg, KS, teaching cello at the university down there as a sub for the day.
I put on a show to distract the girls while I started to make dinner and then I stopped to check my email after I had put food in the oven. There it was. An email from a friend of ours back home who had heard the news and realized that we wouldn't have known what was happening. We knew that Rabbi Wittstein had been ill a few years prior and that he was on extended leave from Temple Israel but we didn't know the end was near. Would we have tried to see him a few weeks ago? To be honest, I don't know the answer to that.
When we moved back to London in 2007, we sent him an email letting him know that we wouldn't be returning to Temple Israel. Rather than give him all of our reasons, we shortened it to one thing: We had been attending a conservative shul in Kansas and it seemed to be a better fit for our family at this time. He was deeply hurt by this and there was a rift that perhaps should never have been there. We (separately) ran into either the rabbi or his wife a few times over the next year. Each time that I saw his wife, she commented on how surprised and shocked they were to hear that we had switched to the conservative shul. To say it was awkward would be an understatement. That said, I just re-read my email correspondence with him in which he expressed his sadness at our switch but also affirmed that we'd still cross paths from time to time. Maybe we should have been more open about our reasons - and yet how would that have been productive? We didn't want any hurt feelings, but how could he not have taken it personally on some level given that he married us and performed our first born's naming ceremony?
Let's go back in time to the fall of 1998. Newly engaged, Ben and I approached the rabbi at the conservative synagogue in London. He refused to marry us unless I "converted". Despite my having a Jewish mother, since I didn't grow up practising Judaism he felt that a conversion was necessary. Whether or not I agree with how "Jewishness" is determined, it's been that way for hundreds of years and this rabbi really shouldn't have said what he did. We found out a few years later that this rabbi was notorious for pushing people away. It's ironic that he considered one of his strengths to be the area of outreach. He's no longer in London, which is what made it possible for us to make the switch for the year that we were home in 2007/08.
In any case, he wouldn't marry us so we went to Temple Israel and approached the rabbi there. We had attended High Holy Day services there and while we disagreed with much of what the rabbi said, we admired the strength of his convictions and how warm and welcoming he and the congregation were. Rabbi Wittstein asked that both Ben and I attend his "Intro to Judaism" course since neither one of us was really practising anything at the time. We were happy to do so and thus began our journey with Rabbi Wittstein and Temple Israel.
We met with the rabbi a few times prior to our wedding in August 1999. One time was particularly memorable. We were in his office at the old temple site on Windermere Rd. and Ben was noticeably not paying attention. Being young and unsure of ourselves in the company of the rabbi, I wasn't about to call him out on it at the time but as soon as we left the building I demanded to know what he thought was so much more important than discussing our upcoming marriage. "There was a beaver outside the window!" he exclaimed excitedly. Oy.
I remember our rabbi talking about how he had to ask us questions of intent during the ceremony and I remember that the wording he came up with was exactly what we would have chosen for ourselves. I'm sure I still have it somewhere, along with a beautiful letter he sent us shortly after our marriage. I'd be a liar if I claimed to remember anything about our wedding ceremony though. The things that stick out in my mind were the fire trucks roaring by and the cantor accidentally telling us to kiss instead of drink the wine. That, and us running back down the aisle and earning a minute or two of privacy before everyone caught up with us!
We joined Temple Israel and remained members there until we moved to Kansas in the summer of 2005. Over that time, we became increasingly disgruntled with reform Judaism for various reasons. Although we enjoyed listening to Rabbi Wittstein's sermons, we found ourselves frequently disagreeing with him yet respecting him through it all for his eloquence and sincerity and just plain openness.
He was a big supporter of music and the arts. Our trio performed several concerts at Temple Israel and he was happy to have us there. I remember feeling sad in the spring of 2005 as we prepared to perform our last concert there. He didn't know yet that we were planning to move and he approached us with an idea he had for us to do a concert series there. He was very disappointed to learn of our plans to move, yet supportive at the same time.
Rachel was often the only child at services and she was most welcome there. One Saturday morning the rabbi asked a question during his sermon. It wasn't really a question that was meant to be answered and at that very moment, Rachel chose to yell out "Yeah!" as loudly as she could. She would have been about a year old at the time.
It would be so easy to turn this post into a list of our reasons for not having returned to Temple Israel or to reform Judaism, but I won't do that. To do that today would be to dishonour Rabbi Wittstein and I won't do that. No matter what our differences were, he meant a lot to us and he will be sorely missed.
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