National Post (National Edition)
Gay rabbi aims to crack ‘stained glass ceiling’
Senior female rabbis are still rare in Canada
MONTREAL • When Rabbi Lisa Grushcow, the first openly gay rabbi of a large synagogue in Montreal, was preparing to begin rabbinical school, she faced a daunting choice: love or serving God.
Her world was suddenly turned upside down in the late 1990s while she was studying religion at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, and fell in love with a woman she met at a conference. This posed a problem: The Conservative rabbinical school she planned to attend did not ordain openly gay rabbis.
Rather than abandoning her vocation, she opted instead to join the Jewish Reform movement — a liberal progressive denomination that accepts gay rabbis and same-sex marriage.
“Coming out,” she added, “brought me closer to God.
“It was the first time in my life when being good at something and working hard weren’t enough to open the door,” said the bookish 44-year-old rabbi, who speaks with the soothing voice of someone used to softening life’s upheavals.
Now divorced, and remarried with two daughters and a third child on the way, she said her struggles had helped shape her inclusive approach to Judaism during posts in New York City and in her current role as the first female senior rabbi at the 137-year-old Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, a sprawling Reform synagogue in Montreal’s affluent Westmount neighbourhood.
Named one of “America’s most inspiring rabbis” by the Jewish publication The Forward, she has edited a seminal book on Judaism and sexuality, works to improve ties between Canadian Jews and Muslims; and counsels lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Jews from Newfoundland to Mexico.
And while Judaism has a long history of trailblazers in gay and gender equality — the first female rabbi, Regina Jonas, was ordained in Berlin in 1935, and the Reform movement formally endorsed the ordination of gay clergy in 1990 — Grushcow is playing a leading role in breaking what she calls the “stained glass ceiling” in Canada, where senior female rabbis remain rare.
She observed that, in a historically patriarchal religion, “people expect their rabbi to be a stand-in for God, who they think looks like a guy with a beard sitting on a cloud — I don’t look like that.
“Being a divorced and lesbian rabbi and mom deepened my understanding of human experience,” she added. “It broadened who I can relate to.”
Stephen Yaffe, a former president of her temple, who was on the search committee that hired Grushcow in 2012, recalled that some congregants initially expressed concern. “For some people, the fact that she is gay and female was a big deal, and some said, ‘This is not who we are,’” he recalled.
But he said Grushcow had quickly convinced the doubters with her empathy, intellect and ability to connect with people. Before long, the temple’s benches were overflowing with young people. Having the comic timing of a Borscht Belt comedian also helped.
The rabbi recalled that a stranger recently made an appointment to ask her to adjudicate a family inheritance dispute. When the bemused rabbi asked, “Why me?” the woman replied, “Rabbis are free, and I didn’t want to pay a therapist or a lawyer.”
Her success at expanding Judaism’s tent was evident at a recent gala evening at the synagogue honouring her seven years’ service. Mark Fishman, a rabbi in the Orthodox tradition, which historically does not sanction gay relationships, observed that when it came to his own spiritual health, “Rabbi Grushcow is my rabbi.”
Born in Ottawa to a Conservative Jewish family and raised in Toronto, Grushcow credited her mother, a management consultant, and her father, the owner of a software development company, for instilling in her at a young age that girls could do anything.
After studying political science at McGill University, she studied Judaism and Christianity in the Greco-Roman World at Oxford, where she earned a doctorate. In 2001, she married a female rabbinical student; two years later, Grushcow was ordained at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City.
Upon graduation, she joined Congregation Rodeph Sholom, a prominent Reform synagogue in New York City. She stayed for nearly a decade — what she calls her coming-of-age as a rabbi.
A year after she moved to Montreal in 2012, her first marriage fell apart.
On a recent day when she went to offer condolences to a family in mourning there were not enough people to say kaddish, the prayer for the dead, so the rabbi rang doorbells in the apartment building, looking for worshippers to join them. According to Orthodox Jewish tradition, 10 men — known as a minyan — are needed to say the mourner’s prayer. When the rabbi invited women to join the minyan, she recalled, several had tears in their eyes.
“They felt for the first time that they counted,” she said.