New rabbi in Princeton unites Athens and Jerusalem

By Michele Alperin
August 1, 2008 

The new rabbi of the String of Pearls congregation, Donna Kirshbaum, grew up in what she called a "vehemently secular household," and she only began to set down her own Jewish roots while living in the Missouri Ozarks as co-owner of a dairy farm.

Although Yiddish school in Philadelphia as a child did give her a Jewish connection, it also conveyed to her a sense of "the dead end of secular Judaism."

"It gave us some Jewish identity," she explained, "but an identity that couldn't, for me, grow and enrich me -- because it was tied to the Jewish people but wasn't tied to something larger, what we call God, a spiritual Judaism."

In high school she went through her "Quaker phase," getting involved with the American Friends Service Committee and counseling high school students about being conscientious objectors. Her love of Quaker values also inspired Kirshbaum to apply to and then attend Swarthmore College, where she was an Ancient Greek major and a Latin minor, graduating in 1974.

After college Kirshbaum taught Greek and Latin to high school students and two years later went to England where she freelanced as a cellist and then studied with a member of the Amadeus quartet.

From England she moved to backwoods Missouri in the Ozarks, where she found her way back into the Jewish community. It was after she had children (she has three sons, two who graduated from Princeton University and one who is now at the University of Vermont) when, she recalled, "I organized holiday events for the Jewish back-to-the-landers who lived there, and I took on a Shabbat practice that has stayed with me ever since."

That practice has evolved in the 30 years since, but started with Friday night dinner, brachot, and "a commitment to negotiate the boundaries between necessary work and rest." After all, she explained, "on a dairy farm, you can't stop milking cows."

Kirshbaum attributed her growing interest in Judaism, in part, to being surrounded by Mormons, who saw themselves as the remnant of the lost tribes and needed to create a relationship with modern Jews. "It forced me to figure out a little more about my identity," she recalled.

After a number of years in Missouri, Kirshbaum moved to Baltimore, where she taught Latin and Greek at a variety of levels, from elementary school to college. She joined the Bolton Street synagogue soon after its founding, eventually becoming the principal of its Hebrew school and bolstering her knowledge of Judaism through reading, workshops, and "going to shul a lot."

Kirshbaum was also active in the Baltimore Jewish Council as an organizer of yearly home gatherings where Holocaust survivors were able to speak to people about their experiences in an intimate setting.

In the broader Baltimore community, she served as storyteller-in-residence for the Walters Art Gallery for almost a decade, and many of her programs had a Jewish connection. The museum had many pieces related to Adam and Eve, the creation, and other early biblical heroes, as well as Italian art related to King David, which worked well for biblical and other Jewish stories. She would select three or four stations in the museum where her audience, usually of parents with children, would sit as the story unfolded.

She also had a story series where she offered three different perspectives on how the Trojan War began, focusing on "the stories we need to tell ourselves to engage in war and support a war."

The decision to go to rabbinical school was, for Kirshbaum, actually the culmination of a dream she had had since she was 8 years old, when she remembers telling her mother she was going to become a leader of the Jewish people.

For many decades that dream lay dormant, but in the words of a Langston Hughes poem, "Hold fast to dreams, for when dreams go, life is a barren field, frozen with snow," she started to think about her own future as her middle son left for Princeton University. "I suddenly got a taste of how it would be when the third one left," she said. "It seemed like if I wanted to die a grateful old lady rather than a bitter old lady, I'd better do what I was compelled to do since I was eight, or at least give it a try."

Upon discovering that Stafford Loans could be used for a religious education, she decided to take Hamlet's advice. "He said, after all, ‘the readiness is all,'" quoted Kirshbaum. "I decided to risk a lot to go to rabbinical school at a relatively late stage in life and see whether I could indeed start a career."

It wasn't easy, taking her six years, the first three as a commuter from Baltimore. Kirshbaum's experience with extinct Mediterranean languages gave her a bit of a boost in learning biblical Hebrew but her knowledge of classics got in the way when she started to study Talmud and midrash.

"The precision that goes into classical scholarship and the care for distilling information until you get to one grammatical or syntactical truth was the opposite of what I needed to study Jewish texts, which are all about a multiplicity of voices," she observed. She did make it, with the help, she said, of prayer, perseverance, patience, luck, and the support of "incredibly dedicated and loving faculty members and friends there who thought I could get Athens and Jerusalem to meet in my own soul."

Rabbinical school was a special time for Kirshbaum, who had never felt more at home than with teachers and colleagues committed to spending their lives exploring the Jewish textual traditions. "I know what a powerful feeling it is to feel as if you've found your own tribe -- when you've found your own tribe within the larger tribe," she said.

It was also a time during which her three sons were also students, the oldest having started medical school the year after Kirshbaum started rabbinical school. She remembered boasting to one of her sons that she had stayed up all night to finish a paper, and his response was "Mom, that is so retro, can't you organize your time any better than that?"

She actually got a lot done during rabbinical school, even outside her studies. Her first project had to do with her wish to leave rabbinical school with an advance directive for healthcare and a healthcare proxy. "I wanted to confront my own death in a way that would be helpful to my heirs," she said. She started a drive for other rabbinical students to do the same, so they could start conversations both in their own families and eventually with their congregants.

She also was involved in a bone marrow donor drive. "We connected it to genocide in Darfur," she said. "An issue that is not often raised when we deplore mass killings is the depletion of genetic pools."

About both of these projects, she observed, "I got to know firsthand the power of not just seeing a project through to its conclusion, but taking on something with larger consequences."

Kirshbaum is ready to step into the next phase of her life, where "the challenge is to bring that kind of passion out of the walls of the seminary." Personally she has also had an important life change, marrying Louis Friedler in May. They live in Swarthmore, Penn. in a house where Kirshbaum babysat 34 years ago.

The String of Pearls congregation reminded Kirshbaum of the synagogue she had helped found in Baltimore. "They are interested in making it their own and authentic to who they are," she said. She also mentioned the informality and congregants' interest in growing Jewishly.

When asked what she will bring to the 50-household Princeton congregation, Kirshbaum emphasized that she did not want to impose any particular perspective. "I want to share the depth of experience that I've been privileged to learn about in rabbinical school," she said, "in the usual three areas of Torah, avodah, and gemilut hasadim, which Rabbi Sid Schwartz, who founded Panim, has paraphrased ‘learning, spirituality, and acts of justice'." She added that "those things are going on at a high and wonderful level already."

One aspect of her new congregation that Kirshbaum admires is its openness to anyone interested in Judaism and its approach to intermarriage. "To its enormous credit," she said, "String of Pearls faces honestly, openly, and with great seriousness the challenges that interfaith families bring to Jewish life and practice."

She saw her own challenge with the congregation as twofold. The first issue is standard fare for a growing synagogue -- maintaining the warmth and intimacy of a small group as the institution grows. The second is "making sure that as we deepen all these commitments to Jewish life in all its richness we don't cut ourselves off from people who are just meeting the tradition for the first time or just want to explore it."

Observing that the Jewish community has already pulled down boundaries that limit the participation of women and gays in Jewish life, Kirshbaum mused about possible further changes. "All Jews have to rethink how we've defined ourselves for thousands of years in terms of boundaries and to rethink otherness," she said. Then she asked. "Is there a new kind of Jewish self-definition that is not based on boundaries?"