Editor's Note: On the Occasion of my Father's Impending Retirement
A toast before a roast
By Adam Zemel, O/o/N Editor
Note: My dad, or abba, as my sisters and I call him, will retire at the end of June after 42 years as the rabbi of a reform congregation in Washington D.C. This past Yom Kippur, at a rabbinic q&a session meant to pass the time between services, a middle schooler asked him why he was stopping now. How did he know it was time?
“I didn’t like the idea of continuing this job having lost even a mile off my fastball,” he said, in the slightly-more-gentle but respectful tone he adopts with children who ask good questions in adult settings. And then, more vulnerably, “I’d never want it to get to where there are conversations about it happening in rooms I’m not in.”
This was bittersweet in the moment and even more so to remember now, but I am immensely proud of my father, 72 years old, demonstrating the grace to step away when he will be missed and remembered fondly. May he be a role model for those least likely to heed this particular wisdom. Our country, and our world, would benefit.
Tonight I am attending my synagogue’s celebration in honor of his leadership, at which my sisters and I have been invited to deliver a roast. We wrote some good jokes, which is always fun when you know your audience. Before that I’d like to share this essay, which is far more earnest, and adapted from earlier work:
My Father’s Sermons
I wrote about the link between my dad, Judaism, and my writing life in the personal statement I submitted with my MFA applications in the Fall of 2019:
“The more I write, the more profoundly I feel my father’s influence. He is a rabbi, and I have been listening to his sermons for my entire life. My father’s Judaism—my Judaism—is a struggle to understand what it means to be human. At the center of life there are things that are fundamentally unknowable and unsayable, but there is power in words that try to approximate them anyway. Whether I am writing about male friendship or siblings in childhood or the glorious messiness of adolescence, I am writing towards this contradiction.”
A few years ago I remarked to my dad about how emotional it is to hear him deliver his high holiday sermons. He speaks with plainspoken eloquence about why this season of introspection occupies the heart of the Jewish calendar. My sisters and I are often moved to tears. At some point in my twenties I learned to attend Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with a few tissues in my pocket.
My dad, more comfortable conceiving and writing his sermons than delivering them, expressed a degree of surprise.
“Well, you’re my dad,” I said, or words to that effect. And still he did not seem to understand what I was saying. But I knew his father had enjoyed a long career as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago, so I asked him, “Did you ever get to see Grandpa Zemel argue in court?”
My dad was quiet for a moment. “Yes, I remember doing that once or twice,” he said. His tone softened further. “I remember how that made me feel. I think I understand.”
So yes, his sermons affect me because I am his son, but not only for that. He has an incredible capacity to synthesize and distill dense texts into simple and relatable ideas–to perceive what is profound and communicate it within a Jewish context. Still, his sermons often include lengthy quotations from his reading, bouncing off each other in a sort of contemporary enactment of Talmudic intertextuality. In these moments, I sometimes wonder how congregants keep up–they have not had the advantage, as I have, of keeping track of the books piled on the little red bench in the front hallway of my parents’ home.
He reads voraciously. Historical and contemporary Jewish thinkers, continental and analytic philosophy, political theory and cultural anthropology, media and cultural studies, history and sociology. His favorite books open new vectors of thought and curiosity, and their bibliographies become his syllabi.
In my earliest memory of my dad reading, the book is Neil Postman’s Technopoly. He has referenced this text in sermons and synagogue newsletter columns for more than two decades, which is how I know its central thesis argues that technology has supplanted culture as the primary means of human exchange. At the time he first encountered it, when I was in third or fourth grade, I was aware of the book as a slim paperback with a cool title that my dad carried around even when he was reading other books.
A few years later, he read Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which analyzes the changing social structures and dissolving communal bonds of late twentieth century America. It made him pessimistic for a moment, but ultimately convinced him that the synagogue he’d been leading since 1983 would never function similarly to his childhood congregation in Chicago or other post-War Jewish communities. Moreover, attempting to preserve or recapture this earlier American Judaism would only lead to a faith that was creaky and gray.
Call the creaky gray stuff Nostalgia Judaism, and its encroachment is why my dad recognized the importance of Putnam’s book. The issues he discussed with colleagues at other synagogues–the crowdedness of congregants’ lives, their expectations shifting towards a more consumerist approach to participation–were not limited to the Jewish community. This was happening to communal institutions across scope and scale, a point Putnam drove home with his title: between 1980-1993, the percentage of people who had gone bowling in a given year had increased, while the percentage who had bowled as part of a league had plummeted precipitously.
Putnam convinced my father that American society was reshaping itself. How might he lead his synagogue in response? This question led him to philosopher Charles Taylor, whose A Secular Age argues that a society reshaped by modernity and post-modernity in quick succession means not the end of religion but rather its proliferation and increased importance to being human in the world. In other words, we live in a world where it is possible to consider oneself spiritual without being religious–an idea that would have made no sense before the Enlightenment. We strive individually, with our mindfulness apps and conscious consumption and ecstatic workout classes, to address fundamental needs that once were addressed by organized religion. This revelation ushered in the “if it’s not broken, break it” model of innovation at my dad’s congregation. No one would ever revitalize the Ashkenazic-community-center model that was the midcentury synagogue, so my father devoted himself to imagining new ways a synagogue could be. And he did that by reading.
Apple, tree: I am very much preoccupied by the challenges and opportunities raised by Postman, Putnam, and Taylor. Culture, technology, community, faith. What it means to believe that we play a role in something bigger than ourselves. I learned to care about these things from my dad, and I believe they are vitally important to the questions that animate this newsletter: How do we build and imagine new things in 2025, in the face of all of this? Where will we find the strength and the leverage to shift our trajectory?
Adam Zemel is the founder and editor of this newsletter, Opposite of Nihilism. He has an MFA in fiction from UCRiverside Palm Desert, and he works in the marketing department of Hebrew College in Newton, MA. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Daily Beast, and elsewhere
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One millennial grapples with truth and belief in the post-enlightenment age
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An amazing and accurate description of ‘my rabbi.’ Thank you so much. See you very soon!
This is a beautiful and moving piece of writing. Best wishes to your father as he moves to his next adventure!