Shebrew in the City
Shebrew in the City is a podcast exploring all things Jewish. Combining interviews and informational episodes, join Nicole Kelly as she discusses her journey with motherhood, spirituality, and everything from Hanukkah to the Holocaust. Giving a voice to modern Jews and spreading love and joy, whether you're Jewish, Jew-ish, or not anything resembling Jewish at all, there's something here for everyone.
Shebrew in the City
"Pretty Fly For A Rabbi" - An Interview with Rabbi Juliana Karol
Embark on a journey of discovery with Rabbi Juli, whose story is as rich and complex as the tapestry of her faith. From an early age, Juli's life within the Reform Jewish community was profoundly shaped by the presence of female rabbis, leading her to transition from a budding diplomat to a dedicated rabbi. Our conversation unveils the deep historical roots of Reform Judaism and how Juli's personal experiences – from her b'nai mitzvah to her impactful time at with Hebrew Union College – influenced her spiritual calling.
Navigating the challenges and rewards of the Hebrew Union College admissions process, Juli offers an intimate look into the preparation for rabbinical life. She candidly discusses the rigorous psychological assessments, the Hebrew competency exams, and the transformative first-year experience in Jerusalem. We also dissect the misconceptions surrounding conversion within the Reform movement, revealing its inherently welcoming nature. Juli's insight into the evolving role of modern rabbis further illuminates the possibilities that lie beyond traditional congregational leadership.
As we explore Juli's multifaceted life, we touch on her meaningful engagement with the American Friends of the Parents Circle Family Forum. Julie also shares the personal side of her journey, including her approach to motherhood in New York City and the joyous celebration of Jewish traditions through her children's eyes. Each chapter of our dialogue with Julie serves as a testament to the enduring bond between a rabbi and their community, offering sage advice to anyone considering this sacred path.
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Visiting a city for the first time and not sure what to do. A walking tour is a great place to start. Top Dog Tours is in Boston, Toronto, Philadelphia and New York City. To book a walking tour, you can visit us at topdogtours. com, and be sure to check out our social media accounts for offers and discounts. Hi, this is Nicole Kelly and this is Shebrew in the city, and today we are talking with Rabbi Juliana Karol. How are you today?
Rabbi Juli Karol:I'm very excited to be here, and you can call me Juli, I'm really casual.
Nicole Kelly:Okay, like we like casual, we like casual. So, Juli, I usually start by asking my guests what their Jewish upbringing was like, where they're from, what's a nomination they grew up with, whether or not you were Bar or Bat Mitzvah'd, so if you could shed some light on that.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I grew up in Scarstale, new York, just north of where we are in Upper West Side, and I grew up reform. I grew up at Westchester Reform Temple. It was founded in the 1950s and my mom joined with her parents very soon after it was established, maybe five years after it was established.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I'm actually at least a fourth-generation reformed Jew, because my grandfather was raised reform back in Berlin before fleeing the Nazis so reform Judaism has been the only Judaism in all of the generations of my family that were ever alive as far as I knew it, and I shared a Bene Mitzvah with my twin brother, david, and Par-Shatvai Gash. So yeah, reform is all I've ever really known, and it wasn't until I got to college that I really found out there's other kinds of Judaism.
Nicole Kelly:It's interesting that you say that you're you're descendant of reform Jews. I think a lot of people don't realize how old the reform movement is, or older than a lot of even Orthodox sex as well.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Oh, that I mean I don't know.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I can't speak with any expertise about kind of how old Orthodox sex are, but I think it's a profound point to say that much of what we see in Orthodoxy today is an outgrowth of World War II and a response to World War II, and a desire to live the most rigorous form of Judaism is a way of honoring the legacy of those who died and honoring God and trying to understand Covenantal Judaism.
Rabbi Juli Karol:But yes, reform Judaism existed way before even the First World War. It was part of the Jewish Enlightenment that really began at the end of the 19th century, and so it's been around for quite a while. And it was an attempt really to reconcile the traditional understanding and belief of Torah, Judaism of Halacha and really rigorous understanding of the law with everything we were learning about with modernity and industrialization and trying to figure out how to embed oneself in society and to succeed in that society while also maintaining an authentic commitment to Judaism. And so that's one of the reasons we're so proud to be reformed here at Rode of Sholam and just in any community. That's reform is that it's a real embrace of preserving tradition while also understanding that the world changes and people change with the world, and so we bring our tradition with us.
Nicole Kelly:I love that. That's so beautiful. I feel like I don't. I don't know if I could succinctly say it like that, but I'm gonna. That's my now explanation, I guess, why I like reform Judaism. I did not grow up with any female representation in the clergy at my synagogue at all. I grew up conservative, so it was very, very, very different. Was this something that you grew up with? Was it something you found later in life did? Was there a female representation in the clergy at your synagogue?
Rabbi Juli Karol:There was. There was Rabbi Beth Singer, who's out in the world, actually just retired from a pulpit with her husband out in San Francisco. She was Rabbi at my synagogue from when I was born. I think she participated in my baby. Oh no, rabbi Debbie Zekker participated in my baby naming. She proceeded, rabbi Beth Singer. So yes, there have been rabbi, female rabbis but Rabbi Debbie Zekker is actually one of the first 50 women that was ordained in history of Judaism and she was actually a rabbi at my synagogue growing up, and so I always saw women as potential clergy.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I never thought as a child that a clergy person was a normal job, so I never considered becoming a clergy person. When I went to college, I was aspiring to be a diplomat. I wanted to study languages, I wanted to travel the world, I wanted to be an ambassador for the country, and it was only through studying Hebrew and then Jewish history that I started on hearing my calling and started on a discernment path to actually being a rabbi now. But it wasn't the issue of whether a woman could be a rabbi, it was like if a normal person could be a rabbi and I did not think normal people became clergy.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I thought only like special, unusual, godly people became clergy and I was just a regular kid so I didn't really make that connection at all as a child.
Nicole Kelly:But female leadership was certainly present in my understanding of Judaism it's kind of like how kids freak out when they see their school teacher in the real world yes, they exist in another plane that's right.
Rabbi Juli Karol:You go to the supermarket, what I know school, kind of going back to what you were talking about before it.
Nicole Kelly:Was there a specific moment you decided to become a rabbi, or was it something that gradually happened as you learned? You know more through your degrees in college?
Rabbi Juli Karol:definitely the latter, it was a gradual first.
Rabbi Juli Karol:It was that I was at NYU, and NYU's campus is also shared with Hebrew Union College's campus, and Hebrew Union College the perform seminary, runs a soup kitchen every Monday, and when I was a sophomore in college I started volunteering at that soup kitchen and all of the students who lead it are aspiring cantors and rabbis and I was studying Hebrew and taking some Jewish history courses at the time and we were studying the same things.
Rabbi Juli Karol:They were studying it at a more advanced level, but it suddenly kind of clicked to me that their jobs and their whole lives were going to be continuing to study and doing work like soup kitchens. And that was kind of amazing to me that you could make a life around being of service to your community, studying Judaism and and then teaching and conveying that learning toward a community. So that's when I first thought, oh, maybe this isn't as unusual of a job as as I imagined. I always kind of imagined it like being a priest. Actually, yeah, I grew up around a lot of Christians too and I imagined it as kind of like a cloistered ivory tower type of job, I think a lot of us do right, like which very you literally stand above the congregation.
Rabbi Juli Karol:It's very other and I completely get what you're saying so the soup kitchen did, it broke that kind of barrier down of oh, these are normal people. They're a little bit older than me but like they're kids, I mean they're in their 20s and they're funny and they have wicked senses of humor and they're good and they share my interest. So that's really where I first started thinking about it. But my understanding of being a clergy person was always that if you were gonna be a clergy person, you'd have to spend your entire life being extremely well-behaved because you're representing a community and this isn't to say I was such a rebel.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I was not such a rebel. I'm pretty goody two-shoes type of person, but I knew that I would be representing Jewish community and I knew the gravitas of that kind of commitment and I didn't know if I wanted to. You know, have to behave all the time and you know, never get angry in the supermarket when I'm impatient on the checkout line or, you know, always walk through the street without having my phone in my hand because I want to be able to greet people. I mean, those were things I was thinking about already. That you're, you become a public person and I never wanted to be in a position to do anything that would denigrate Judaism publicly. So that felt like a really big responsibility. So I went to graduate school. I actually took a master's degree in Jewish history and then I worked. I worked at the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris. I did an internship during grad school at the Holocaust Museum. I spent two years at the Religious Action Center in Washington DC and during that period, obama had been inaugurated.
Rabbi Juli Karol:It was 2009 when I started that job and so I thought, oh my gosh, maybe I just never thought about politics, maybe I'll do politics. And so I spent that year, those two years, actually thinking Judaism, politics, like what's more of a powerful call. And it was so clear that it was Judaism. So that's what we call my discernment period. And then from there I had another job that I took on the way to becoming a rabbi, and then I went to a clinical school, so it was a journey for sure.
Nicole Kelly:I love that you talk about the responsibility that clergy members have, but I think now, even just now, with everything going on, being a Jew and identifying as a Jew can there's a responsibility to that, and I think also being a Jewish mother showing your children what it means to be a.
Nicole Kelly:Jew and I. One of the things I love about reformed Judaism is the idea of Dikkun Olam and giving back to the community and that Rodef Shalom is so active with that. Because I grew up, you know my mother was very active with preschool and my schools and you know volunteering for things and donating money, so I think that's something I definitely want to pass on to our daughter. But I love that reformed Judaism is such such a big part of that as well and that I love it.
Rabbi Juli Karol:That that's kind of was the segue into becoming a rabbi was the idea of healing the community yeah, that a job could be in service to others, and I think one of the benefits of being more of an assimilated Judaism is that you really feel a sense of obligation in the broader community in which you're apart. We're always thinking about how we can show up and serve our Jewish community and the members of our community, but our responsibility and our sense of obligation certainly doesn't end there. It expands to you know, all the people that we share this community with, that we share this world with, to the best that we can, and we're very conscious of that. So that was my doorway in.
Nicole Kelly:I think that's so important, especially in New York when there's so many different people of socioeconomic situations and we literally see people begging on the streets and you know providing help in the way we can. So can you walk me through the process of what becoming an ordained rabbi means within the reform sect? I know it's different within the different sex of Judaism, but from your personal experience I know that you have to spend time in Israel. You do have to get a master's degree. How does that work? Does it help having a degree, undergraduate degree, in Judaism? Is there an interview process?
Nicole Kelly:so if you could walk me through, let's say you know, I decided, you know, tomorrow I want to be a rabbi. What will be my first steps with that?
Rabbi Juli Karol:okay, if you decide tomorrow you want to be a rabbi, which would be fabulous by your wisdom and leadership very fast decision and I would write you a recommendation. That's nice. So In order to get into Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion, which is the reform seminar, you have to have a bachelor's degree. So first we have to confirm that you have a bachelor's degree. Do you have bachelor's?
Nicole Kelly:I'm actually going to be finishing that up soon, so let's pretend this is a few months down.
Rabbi Juli Karol:A life In a few months you are now eligible to apply. So what are they looking for? They're looking for, when you apply, if you're 22 and have just graduated, they're looking for a real demonstrated interest in Judaism. So having a major, having worked at a summer camp, those things are going to be really important if you haven't worked, because you're going to be ordained really young and there are going to be certain skills that you can only learn on the job pastoral care, teaching there are certain things that you really can.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Only you know rabying is a growth job. Everybody is their best day is probably their last day, because you can only get better with each day, since it's basically being a professional human with human beings and walking the journey of life with them. So the younger you are, the more it actually is really valuable to have a kind of a very clear and demonstrated commitment to Judaism and, having shown that you have a lot of experience in different Jewish places of work, they actually prefer for you to wait, because the idea is that you're going to be the second you're ordained. You're a rabbi to everybody, from age zero to the middle of life.
Rabbi Juli Karol:And so there's a lot that you need to know, and so having had a job and having had any kind of professional experience, that is so important because that's being a professional human You're interacting, you understand hierarchies, you understand how to meet deadlines, you have to understand how to multitask and if you haven't had a job before, you're kind of staying in the academic sphere for a really long time and there's kind of a hope that a little bit of job experience will ease the transition into actual working life in the rabbinate.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So then there's actually, I think, a little bit more flexibility on what you did. So, for instance, if you come from a theater background, you show this kind of a whole other life and demonstrated passion, but now you realize you have a calling to serve and you really want to go back to rabbinical school. They're actually going to really want to hear from you in that application. What's driving this now? But they're going to see that entire career that you had as a huge asset to the rabbinate because you bring all that knowledge in with you as life experience and as Torah.
Rabbi Juli Karol:What's Torah? It's wisdom. So you're going to have all of that already in you. The school doesn't have to give you any of that, and so that's also super valuable. So that's why applying to a biblical school is very individualistic. They're really looking at each person in their entirety, they're looking at the Torah of that human being and they're assessing is this person ready, does this person need a couple of years to work, and is this person getting into this work for healthy reasons? We all have to take kind of a psychological profiling test to make sure that we're going to be safe in this work, because it comes with a lot of power.
Rabbi Juli Karol:There's a lot of intimacy and pastoring to people and there's a lot of power with having a pulpit and having people listen to you and guiding a community and we have to be responsible about who we ordain with that power. So that is kind of. One of the practical aspects of the application process is meeting with a psychologist and doing an exam and just making sure we're all healthy and planning to do this work with the right intentions. You do a full application process. You have to take a Hebrew exam so that there's some competency, because the first year is in Jerusalem and the reason for that is manifold. The reasons are manifold, but a few of them are because people have to be able to grapple with their relationship to the state of Israel and what that means. They also need to have a good basic level of fluency with Hebrew, because so much of Jewish text is in Hebrew and it's just important to be able to make use of all of the rich texts that exists in our tradition. So much of the Jewish conversation that exists before the last hundred years is in Hebrew, so that's another piece of it as well and it also really helps this community of learners coalesce together so that first year is in Jerusalem if you're admitted, and then it's another four years.
Rabbi Juli Karol:It used to be at either a campus in Los Angeles, cincinnati, new York, or you could stay in Israel. But the Cincinnati campus due to some of the financial pressures of maintaining a big campus for not that many students, they've actually decided to just conclude their rabbinical program there. They're still offering some graduate degree courses and they have the American Jewish Archive, which is an incredible resource. It's this vast library of Jewish resources that, in particular, are related to the reform movement, but also just Judaism at large, is one of the best Jewish libraries, maybe in the world, but certainly in the country, and the librarian and the chief curator of that is a man named Gary Zola who has been leading this institution for decades, and it's really a gem of reform Judaism and it's in Cincinnati, which is where reform Judaism was founded in the United States.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Yeah, I knew that so anytime somebody converts, we send a certificate of their conversion to the American Jewish Archive, because that's where the records are kept about all of Judaism. A lot of people donate their sermons or the bodies of their work to the American Jewish Archive so that research can be done, so that again we honor the history that this movement is creating and contributing to the canon of Jewish history. That's good to know.
Nicole Kelly:I think one of the things I'm planning on doing when I finish my bachelor's is get a degree in Jewish history in some aspects, so that I'm sure I'll end up there at some point.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Well, there's a lot of places you can do that, but the American Jewish Archive will be a great resource. So then it would be four years on any one of those campuses. So it's a five-year program and after that five years, by the fourth year you earn a master's degree. So you don't need a graduate degree to enter the program. But it's certainly helpful because I placed out of some of the core requirements I was able to take more electives, which was fun for me.
Rabbi Juli Karol:We are also in consortium with some of the other universities, so I was able to study at NYU in their graduate program and get credit for those courses if it wasn't being offered in my school. So the fourth year you get a master of Hebrew letters, which is that one.
Nicole Kelly:Oh, fancy degrees on the wall.
Rabbi Juli Karol:And then there's Smicha, which is the bigger one that you get after five years.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Some people take six if they add on a degree or if they slow down their course load a little bit.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Some people are working all the time and then part of getting that ordination is doing internships at Synagogues so that you really get a lot of practical experience alongside your more theoretical studies. And ordination actually involves what's the laying of hands, so somebody, a rabbi in the community, actually places their hands on your head and they give you a blessing and as you receive that, those hands are really proxies for all of Amis or A'el, kind of empowering me as a leader. And that moment is a moment of kind of transferring trust and transferring responsibility and covenantal relationship. And so that's kind of all those years of am I worthy, am I going to be responsible? Am I going to do well by this and help lift up the name and the reputation of Judaism for all who come in contact with me as a rabbi? Is that going to be my role? That moment of ordination is what have abused me with those privileges, but then it also abused me with all those responsibilities.
Nicole Kelly:Did you find that most of your fellow classmates were a little more experienced and older, or there were younger people or what was kind of the ratio of ages?
Rabbi Juli Karol:Typically in a class there's normally at least one person in their second career who raises the age a little bit, Somebody who comes back in their 40s and 50s.
Rabbi Juli Karol:In our class there were a bunch of us who started in our mid to late 20s, so we had work experience and we all kind of cobalest because we were on the older side from some of the people who had just come out of college. So my year on the whole was probably younger on average because we didn't have a real second career person in their 40s and 50s who kind of raised our average age. But there was a social difference between people who were coming from straight from college or from one year out of college and the people who had chosen to work a little bit. There was definitely a sense of kind of, I think, seniority among those of us who had felt like we'd been out in the real world versus those who were continuing an educational experience. It breaks down over time because it's such a small class and you're really in it together and it's hard. But I think that was really the kind of array. It wasn't such a big age gap I think like maybe 22 to 32 or something like that.
Nicole Kelly:What was the average class size?
Rabbi Juli Karol:So the rabbis and the cantors are mostly separate and my class of rabbis was maybe 12 to 14 at any given time.
Nicole Kelly:Speaking of that, what was the drop rate of people deciding that this was something that they were not able to continue with?
Rabbi Juli Karol:When we got to Jerusalem it was the whole year of entering, but that would be spread over three campuses because none of the people who entered with me decided to stay in Israel and let's say that was 40 people. During that year, two people realized one that she was three people. One person left after a week because she hadn't been out of the United States ever and it was just too difficult.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So she just went home. Another person Another two people did the full year. One transitioned to NYU to do a non-profit degree and a master's, realized that the rabbit wasn't really the right calling, but that she wanted to be in the non-profit sector and she's having a great career. And then another person went to BU and pursued a PhD and then later, when we got back to the United States and the New York campus alone because that's where mine was, so I kind of lost track of the other two campuses. One additional person realized either in her second or third year that she was going to take a different path.
Nicole Kelly:That's a relatively low drop rate, I think, for any advanced degree of any kind.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Yeah, and I think the rigor of the application process is meant to try as best as possible to help people kind of move toward school if it's the right choice for them, or to be in open dialogue with them about why it might not be the right choice.
Nicole Kelly:I love how kind of involved that is. I wish even just regular undergrad was that involved. Instead of like I couldn't vote last week but now I'm going to take out $30,000 in loans and go study philosophy, and you know, just because I think it's going to be, I feel like Like people going to college would probably be a little better mentally if there was more thought put in the entire process instead of just kind of being like, well, I like this college, I think this is what I want to do. Yeah, you know.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I think about that a lot, about the difference between Americans who start college at 18 versus Israelis, who often serve first and end up starting college. And I'd be very curious if somebody published a paper about the likelihood for the degree that somebody who starts college at 20 or 21, how much that applies to their future career or how valuable that is, versus somebody who starts at 18 and how much that impacts their life. I would be very curious if somebody explored that and wrote a paper on it.
Nicole Kelly:Is this, as far as entering rabbinical school, kind of like the conversion process, where you're discouraged a little bit first to kind of make sure you actually are really interested in this, or are they very supportive?
Rabbi Juli Karol:So I love that you said that, because now you've given me the opportunity to disabuse an idea in Judaism that we discourage conversion, which is not the case.
Nicole Kelly:I'm sure that there are sects where that's possible, so that episode of Sex in the City is not correct.
Rabbi Juli Karol:That episode of Sex in the City is certainly not correct vis-a-vis Reform Judaism. Reform Judaism is embracing of anybody who wants to ally themselves with Jewish community, who wants to take on a Jewish identity or somebody who feels that they're Jewish and wants to ritually affirm that or enact that. There is absolutely no reason for us to be a barrier to a person claiming a Jewish identity or to a person allowing themselves to a Jewish identity by marrying a Jewish person or by raising Jewish children. I mean, for us that's just added strength and added blessing to our community. So we always have a conversation with a person just to learn their story and to make sure that our program, which is pretty rigorous it's a full year long, it's every week, it's an hour and a half and then you do a separate kind of a one-on-one meeting with a clergy person so that you can process your questions and wrestling as you make your way towards conversion. But that's definitely not the idea that we're supposed to say no three times to make sure a person is really authentically committed to conversion is certainly not at all true of Reform Judaism. I will not speak to other facets of Judaism, other denominations, but I will say that the seriousness with which Judaism or at least Reform Judaism thinks about identity is consistent between becoming a rabbi and becoming a Jew, which is to say that we're really curious about each person's individual story.
Rabbi Juli Karol:The seminary is curious about each person's journey to rabbinical school and really interested in allowing Jewish leaders to lead in ways that are kind of symbiotic with their strengths. So once upon a time, a seminary was really preparing people to become a congregational rabbi. You can be a rabbi now and be an executive director, you can be a hospital chaplain, you could have a podcast, you could do so many things. And the seminary is really trying to adjust itself to see how is it that each one of these incredible people who want to be of service to Am Yisrael, to the Jewish people, how can they bring their strength and be empowered and equipped with tools to help them do that to the best of their ability and, obviously, to be able to succeed in getting the best job? So that's really how it's positioning itself, which is a huge change that's been taking place over the last 15, 20 years, as more job opportunities exist for rabbis and as, unfortunately, synagogues close because not everybody wants to be a member of a synagogue anymore.
Rabbi Juli Karol:They do Jewish in a lot of different ways. So you have to be really nimble in thinking about what the job of a rabbi can be. So that's where I see the consistency that a convert journey is very individualistic and it's really about helping to understand with them the path that they're walking towards Judaism, where they're coming from, what parts of their past they're taking with them and how. We're never erasing or rendering unco sure any part of them, but adding Judaism onto that identity and welcoming them into this community, into this tradition. And the same with the rabbinate You're coming into the rabbinate as the person you always were and you're taking on all of these new responsibilities and privileges. And I think that's really where I see the parallel between those two.
Nicole Kelly:I love that you talk about not getting rid of your past especially. I think a lot of people who are thinking about conversion are not really sure of becoming a Jew is for them that they would completely have to forget their family, traditions and what was important to them or their background.
Rabbi Juli Karol:No, we would never, ever want to say that the way that a person was raised wasn't wholly enfilled with blessing, and the way that we want to be helpful to people is helping them navigate as they adopt a new identity. So now, what are you going to do when you're celebrating Christmas with your family of origin and you have Jewish children? What's a way that you can talk with your children about the beauty of those traditions, even if those aren't the traditions of the family that you are now raising, and trying to equip them with the tools to be able to do that, so that they see the beauty in the variety of traditions and faiths that are out there? We're one, so we're excited about the ways that we can be a source of support for people as they navigate that.
Nicole Kelly:So you mentioned your twin. What was it like having a dual b'nai mitzvah? There were, it was very interesting. And there was a girl in my class. She was a year younger than her twin older siblings, so her parents did a threefer Whoa. So because you can, as a female, have your bat mitzvah at 12.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Is this true?
Nicole Kelly:And she had an older sister and brother and they were 13. So they did it all together and I think you know I went. My synagogue was much smaller, so you got your own day. It was just about you. And I know a lot of people across the country and larger synagogues.
Nicole Kelly:They share with people you know they may not even have a relationship with, but what was it like sharing that experience with your brother? Was there like competition about who learned faster or which part of the portion you were going to do, or like fighting over what the theme for the party was going to be? Were there two themes?
Rabbi Juli Karol:How did that work out? So I will say that I grew up in Westchester, so there was definitely nothing unusual about sharing your b'nai mitzvah day and, because I grew up as a twin, there was nothing unusual about sharing anything, so that was totally normal. My brother and I had par-shot vayi-gash, which is the Torah portion in Genesis where Joseph reveals himself to his brothers.
Nicole Kelly:Now, that he is in this position of power. Mine was about building the temple and all of the different like measurements.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Oh man.
Nicole Kelly:It was really hard for me to write a speech about why this was important to my life as a 13 year old, because it was about building the temple.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Did you have a winter, b'nai?
Nicole Kelly:mitzvah, March 13th 1999. That's right, I thought it was very cool that it was my b'nai mitzvah. It was March 13th.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I mean, you got a difficult par-shot but March 13th is fabulous.
Nicole Kelly:It was the longest one in the book 13 on the 13th. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it worked out.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So we, I think for a minute maybe, had a conversation about who would get to give their devartora, their speech, their teaching about that moment, because that was clearly the cool moment and I relinquished that moment to my brother. So I let him do that and I actually have my devartora in my cabinet here. My dad, when I got this job, he had saved a folder of things from my b'nai mitzvah and he gave them to me and I have them in my study here, because the senior rabbi of my congregation is Rabbi Rick Jacobs and he is now the president of the union for reformed Judaism. I actually worked for him before I became a rabbi and I was supposed to have my b'nai mitzvah on December 11th but my parents decided to change it. I think actually and mom and dad, you'll correct me if you ever listen to this, but I think it's because my brother and I said we want to actually be 13 and our birthdays December 14th, so we switched weekends, did it on December 18th, but our senior rabbi was set to lead the services at Biennial, which is this huge every other year gathering of all of reformed Judaism that used to take place before COVID and no longer happens. It's a huge honor to lead services at that conference because thousands and thousands of people come and they all pray together. So he wrote me a note that I have celebrating my b'nai mitzvah.
Rabbi Juli Karol:The only thing that was, I think, unusual about sharing was that we got to have all of the honors for the aliyot when you get called to the Torah.
Rabbi Juli Karol:We didn't have to deal with another family kind of having half the service and being present in a service where you don't really know the other student as well or you don't know their family members. So my sister had to share and I remember she shared with a lovely family and I remember my parents having at least one meeting where we actually went to that family's house and we talked about the weekend to make sure that the parties wouldn't conflict and just to make sure that everybody was copacetic on how it was, they were making their plans and it was exactly the way you would hope something like that would unfold. Everybody was so civilized and respectful so we didn't have to manage that because everything was just our family. So sharing was like a huge privilege actually, because you didn't have to navigate any of those dynamics and we were really the last b'nai mitzvah I went to over a hundred b'nai mitzvah because I'm a twin and everybody thought they had to invite both of us and Skarsdale's a pretty Jewish place.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So it was a very, very busy year and a half for us and we were like the final one. We didn't have a theme because my parents were not those kind of parents.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Our b'nai mitzvah party was in the social hall right behind the synagogue. Right after it was a luncheon party. We got the DJ, we had chicken nuggets, the parents had whatever their fancy plated meal was, and what I remember is we had a beautiful cake, because a young man in our class, his mother, made these very fancy cakes and it looked like a basket of fruit.
Nicole Kelly:Oh, that's really cool. I had a giant pink Torah cake. Oh, giant, looks like a Torah.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Yes, but she put in because I was 13, so these were our values. She put in a little basketball in the fruit basket for my brother and a little Tiffany bucks in the basket for me because I had to think for Tiffany jewelry as a seventh grader, which, of course, I think a lot of us did.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Yeah, so that was really. You know, there was no particular theme, but we danced all afternoon and our giveaway was that that gum that is like a foot of pink gum, that's all in a circle I'm trying to remember the name of it, like bazooka or something. It was like I know what you're talking about, it's not it's not fruit by the foot, but it was like gum by the foot. Yeah, and that's what we gave people, and people are actually quite pleased with that, just getting some gum. I mean, who doesn't like gum? Who?
Nicole Kelly:doesn't like. So you talked about this. Prior to joining the clergy, you worked at the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, as well as the Union for Reform Judaism. What did you do there? What are those organizations? For those of us listening who don't know what that is, I'm happy to tell you.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So the Union for Reform Judaism is actually the, the organization that unites all of the reform congregations, and so, as of now, there are probably 800 to 900 congregations that actually call themselves reform. But in order to be part of the reform movement, you pay dues to the Union for Reform Judaism, and the president of that organization, rabbi Rick Jacobs, is my childhood rabbi, and that's basically to ensure that you know, as things happen in the world, that there's a voice of reform Judaism and that you can kind of look to a person to basically speak on behalf of the reform communities. We obviously don't have a pope, we don't have one person who kind of unequivocally speaks without anybody else, and so of course, rabbi Jacobs can say things and people can disagree, but he's been elected and put into that position in order to represent reform Judaism not just in the Jewish world and with Israel, but also just kind of in the world at large, because obviously there's a lot happening and reform Judaism wants to have a voice, and to that point, when politics are concerned, that's where the reform, the religious action center of reform Judaism, comes in. It's called the RAC for short, and that's actually the lobbying office for reform Judaism in Washington DC.
Nicole Kelly:Oh so Reform Judaism has lobbyists, we have lobbyists and I say something someone you were talking about politics. You can do, if you're interested in Judaism and politics, exactly, not know that.
Rabbi Juli Karol:If you are interested, if you're listening to this podcast and you are in college and thinking about ways to combine your love of Judaism and politics, you can do the Mahon Kaplan summer internship at the RAC or, when you're done, you can apply to the Eisen Dreath legislative assistant fellowship, which is what I did, and you can work for a year lobbying from a Jewish perspective on all of the different pieces of legislation that we care about. So what's so important about the RAC is that often when religious people go to Capitol Hill, they have an agenda that doesn't align with the religious agenda of the religious action centers.
Nicole Kelly:I can only imagine what those things are.
Rabbi Juli Karol:For instance, when I go and I lobby on a woman's right to make choices about her body, I'm doing that because my Torah says in Leviticus that the mother's life and the child's life that are in her room are not separate, that the child is actually part of the woman and so her life takes precedence.
Rabbi Juli Karol:And I'm saying that as a religious person of faith. I'm arguing that point about reproductive choice and a woman's autonomy, and it's so important because there are a lot of places where we work in coalition with religious people around immigration, around economic justice but then there are a lot of places where there is not unanimity among people of faith in this country, and so that's where our voices really stick out is to be able to say hello. I'm a person of faith, I pray all the time, and the God that I pray to kind of instructs me in my covenantal relationship that this is the way that I want the world to be. This is how I want women to be treated. This is how I want people to get access to medical care. This is the quality of life I think people should have, and a lot of this is rooted in my traditions and my beliefs. Gun control is another great example of that.
Rabbi Juli Karol:The reason that it's so easy for us to lobby for real restrictions on gun control is because we privilege life, and so and that's coming from a religious place yeah, so that's what the Religious Action Center does.
Rabbi Juli Karol:It really works as being the voice of reform Judaism on Capitol Hill, and so it's very explicitly a political lobbying office, and so that's where I worked from 2009 to 2011. And then, when I moved to the Union for Reform Judaism in 2011, I had just applied to rabbinical school, but my childhood rabbi had been elected to the presidency of the Union for Reform Judaism, so I actually went to work for him to help facilitate his transition from my childhood synagogue into his role as the president, basically serving as an administrative assistant. But then I deferred for a year to enter rabbinical school because he had a roll out for a year where he basically heard from congregations about their hopes and what they saw as the challenges of reform Judaism and what they were hoping the Union would do, and so he needed a person to really own the strategy of that piece of his work, and so I worked with him on a year to do that.
Nicole Kelly:That must have been very helpful. Coming into becoming a rabbi yourself is first hand hearing all of the complaints and concerns of the synagogues throughout the country.
Rabbi Juli Karol:It was fascinating because I grew up in the Northeast and had a very particular understanding of Jewish life.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I happened to be married to a person, my husband Adam who grew up into Pika, kansas, as the son of the only rabbi in Topeka. So through my marriage I gained a great exposure to how different it is to grow up Jewish in this country. But also through my job I got to hear such different voices of clergy and, interestingly, whereas so many of my colleagues who came into rabbinical school had experiences working in synagogues so new in depth, like the individual culture of one or two synagogues or summer camps, I had never worked in a synagogue really or a summer camp, so I only really knew my temple. But I had this vision of the landscape of reform Judaism from more of a macro level that I got from my job. So I, coming to wrote a show. It was an intern was really my first opportunity to be a rabbi position, rabbinic intern in a synagogue and understanding the day-to-day dynamics of the job. Before that I kind of understood the politics of the movement but I didn't really see the inner workings until I started school.
Nicole Kelly:You also mentioned you spent time at the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris. I am always interested in how different European countries present Holocaust history and the responsibility they take for what happened. How does France present Holocaust history and their participation in the Holocaust?
Rabbi Juli Karol:So I'm not an expert on France writ large, so I will decline to answer that question.
Rabbi Juli Karol:But I will say that the Memorial de la Shoah, which is in the Marais, which is in the 4th arrondissement in Paris, it's actually the place of the first memorial to anybody who died in the Holocaust, because it was inaugurated as the war was ending, and I want to trust my memory, but I may be wrong, so feel free to publish this and just say, if I'm wrong, that the rabbi was wrong. And then I'm acknowledging that this isn't a firm point in my head, but something is telling me that the location of where the memorial was established may have been some kind of archive where they were keeping documents related to what was happening during the Holocaust, and I think that that's why that location was chosen. The actual building of the building happened, I think, in the early 2000s, so they had a memorial, but the museum it took a while to actually fundraise and to create. And what's very powerful about this space because they have a lot of moving exhibitions and then they have a permanent exhibition is that when you walk into the actual space of the memorial, outside are just stelae of names.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Yeah, I remember when I went.
Nicole Kelly:Of Jewish people who were deported, yeah.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So, interestingly, one of the names on those stelaes is Mois Amarillo, which is the name of my great-grandfather, who was rounded up in the Veldiv and who was put in the camp that was getting ready to deport people. It was that big stadium that I'm trying to remember. Anyway, my grandmother was a Lutheran German and had connections and was able to get fake papers to actually get him out before the deportation to Auschwitz, but his head had already been shaved and he thought that his life was over.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So another Mois Amarillo ended up being deported to Auschwitz and dying but it was not my great-grandfather who was actually saved by his wife and being able to have those connections.
Nicole Kelly:We're going to talk about that later, because one thing I'm really interested in is Holocaust, generational trauma, but we will actually we can do that now as a Jew. In general, we carry this generational trauma of thousands of years of persecution and possibly trying to hide who we are and trying to figure out, keeping one foot in secular society but also being a Jew as someone who has roots in Europe during the war. Do you think you carry any of that trauma with you? Any of that? I don't know history.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I certainly carry the history. My family has one of those crazy survival stories. So I think I have to be very careful with using the word trauma, since I think so many people in our community are descendants of soul survivors, people whose entire families were wiped out, people who had grandparents who were the only person who survived or who escaped, and that was not my family's story. My family's story is that my mom's family came over before the war. They were part of the large immigration that came over in the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s, so they were economic immigrants and I'm sure that their journey was difficult and certainly making their way in this country was very trying but not traumatic trying, immigration, trying Whereas my dad's parents, sylvia and Felix, my grandma, sylvia, is still alive. She's 97 and lives in the house where she raised my dad.
Nicole Kelly:Wow.
Rabbi Juli Karol:They, my grandfather Felix. His father was a very successful businessman and knew when Hitler was elected that he would not have a future in Germany. So they left a second that Hitler came to power and were able to take their assets with them and kind of start their lives anew, whereas my grandmother, who was raised by a Greek Jewish father and a Lutheran German mother, was a. They were a little bit less sensitized to what was going on because they were so embedded in secular society. So she left residence in 1936 and was actually held in an internment camp for a while, because they were German refugees and they had in those days you kind of bought your passport. So they had passports that weren't really aligned, and so she and her mother actually were held in an internment camp for a few months and then she ended up surviving the war in France.
Rabbi Juli Karol:And for anybody who's familiar with the kind of history of World War II, only 20, only quote, unquote 25% of French Jews were killed during World War II because they only tried. They tried to only deport new immigrants to the country. Because they did believe or so they say that French people who were French by birth that their Judaism was kind of a non-issue. They believed in Lysite, which is the value of secularism, so they weren't going to separate any of their Jewish French countrymen from anybody else, but people who were newer immigrants who came over during the war, came over as Jewish refugees, and so it was kind of the sacrifice that was made or whatever deals they were making with the Wehrmacht in order to be able to kind of endure the war. So I'm not going to kind of render a commentary on an impossible situation that I didn't live through. But the 25% of the people from France who were killed during the Holocaust, most were not born there and that's why my grandfather was rounded up. My great-grandfather was rounded up because he was not French by birth and then he was lucky to be saved.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So there's definitely because I studied Holocaust history as an undergraduate. I wrote a thesis on Holocaust history as an undergraduate. There's a lot of I'm a naturally empathetic person, but when you're burying yourself in Holocaust history you're imagining a lot of trauma and you're reading a lot of really scary things that human beings did to one another and what they endured, and I think it's possible to experience a lot of pain in studying a really dark part of history and that I certainly carry with me. But I think I carry that with me more because I chose to pursue this as an academic discipline and my family told more of a story of gratitude, of surviving and of what this country afforded my family. So there was like a great sense of relief in what America made possible for my family, rather than trauma being kind of the principal tale that we told. So that's kind of how I would say that I relate to it.
Nicole Kelly:You are on the board of American Friends of the Parents Circle family forum, a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization. Can you tell me a little bit about what the organization does and how you got involved?
Rabbi Juli Karol:Sure. So this is an organization that works with Israelis and Palestinians who have experienced the death of family members relating to the conflict somehow. So it doesn't have to be in war. It can just be that in some kind of act of violence that had anything to do with the ongoing conflict that a death of a loved one took place, and so that could be an inability to get medical care for someone because they couldn't cross a border. It could be someone who was in a car that blew up because somebody threw a fire bomb, and it could be anything in between.
Rabbi Juli Karol:And a lot of people have lost loved ones in this conflict on both sides. And because that price is impossible, that particular group of people on both sides understand something about what this conflict costs and they can relate to one another and they can actually find comfort in one another, in building relationships and in kind of grieving together and walking this walk, because losing a child, losing a parent, losing a loved one, is a kind of burden that somebody who hasn't experienced that may not be able to relate to. And so it's an organization that really serves to offer services of being able to offer counseling, being able to offer art therapy, being able to offer dialoguing opportunities, and one of the most important things it does is it actually, until recently, would bring both Palestinians and Israelis who have survived these kinds of tragedies into the school system in Israel, and very often these were the first Palestinians that Israeli students ever had an opportunity to meet. And so it's such an important organization? Because the driving ethos of the organization is to show up to provide support for people who are grieving and who will be grieving their entire lives, and to say that the grief is the thing that actually is bringing us together, fueling the hope that we can find some kind of resolution and find some pathway forward toward peace for both of these people.
Rabbi Juli Karol:And the relationships between these grief-stricken human beings are very tight and very strong, and many of them have used this opportunity to be able to seek light and seek hope. So that's really what the organization does, is it really just tries to provide support for grief-stricken people and hopefully, to bring them together and to allow their stories to illuminate a little bit more of the human facet and the human cost of the conflict? And the reason I got involved was because they came and they did a program here where we heard from an Israeli and a Palestinian and it was a very powerful program. It was one of the only programs I'd ever attended about the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis that offered me any hope, because these people came as brothers Really brothers, that's beautiful.
Rabbi Juli Karol:And so I just had a very illuminating experience and kind of went about my life. And then the director, shiri Orian, who does incredible work, reached out to me a few months later and had a bunch of questions about how to navigate the American Jewish landscape and getting into more synagogues, and I obviously had a lot of opinions and a lot and she said, wow, like you would be like helpful, do you want to join our board? Feel like you could be helpful with us figuring out how we spread the work of this organization across the United States of America. So the American Friends is really a fundraising organization that supports the work of this organization and we're really just there to help raise awareness about their work and to help bring comfort to these grieving families.
Nicole Kelly:So your father-in-law is also a rabbi? Yeah, I'll be it from a very different landscape, as you mentioned. Do you guys ever talk shop or do you ever ask any advice or anything like that?
Rabbi Juli Karol:Sure, yeah, Absolutely, not only my father-in-law, but my uncle-in-law, his brother, so he A lot of rabbis in the family, a lot of rabbis in the family I married into.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So my father-in-law, Rabbi Larry Carroll, served. He started his career in oh dad, don't get mad at me, I know it's a Midwestern city and he was an associate rabbi at a large Midwestern synagogue and then he was the solo rabbi of Tobica, Kansas, for over 20 years. Then he was in Dover for a little while in New Hampshire and he concluded his career in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So, he is brilliant and he's also a musical rabbi, so he really has just a very different perspective on American Judaism than I did. First of all because he was solo, so he was the only call you could make in town and as a result of that, because he was in smaller communities, the day-to-day work of managing the congregation wasn't necessarily as intense as a congregation of 5,000 people like we have here. But he then needed to be the mouthpiece for Judaism in the city that he lived. So he did a tremendous amount of organizing work and interfaith work and he was really critical in a lot of the work they did in Tobica, kansas, to memorialize the Holocaust. He was also involved with the Brown v Board of Education creating that memorial space and I think he served on the board of that and he was just a person who his entire life, well beyond the synagogue, was really to representing Judaism in Tobica, which is the capital of Kansas, and had a fascinating career.
Rabbi Juli Karol:But the amazing thing is is that if you have a congregation of 100 families, like he did, or 1,800 families, like we do, the problems that people have and the challenges that they have are not different, and so he's a great person to process with and to talk about just navigating the day-to-day challenges of the rabbinate, or how it is that we talk about a difficult topic from the Bema, or just he knows everybody because he's been around for so long and he was a real convention goer so he knows every single rabbi, and so it's always interesting when I meet somebody new and he can say, oh yes, I studied with them at such and such a convention in such and such a year.
Rabbi Juli Karol:He has an amazing memory. So, yes, we talk shop all the time. He's incredibly wise. He has a lot of skills that I don't have like musically. He's a guitar player and he composes music, and my husband is also very musical because he's now retired. He has this perspective and this equanimity about the work that I, as a person deeply embedded in it, cannot always harness and muster, and so he's a good check against some of my passions.
Nicole Kelly:So, talking about knowing all the rabbis, do you ever interact with clergy of different sex, or is it mostly with reform rabbis?
Rabbi Juli Karol:So I am part of an alumni network from a fellowship I did during rabbinical school called the Wexner Fellowship, which recently actually changed how it's structured. But when I was doing it for about I think it had 33 years worth of classes where they brought together rabbinical students, phd students and people doing kind of nonprofit work from all of the different sex of Judaism in order to kind of really foster community across all the different work that we were doing, to break down some of those barriers and to be able to kind of think about Jewish leadership in America at large. We're only one of the programs that they do. They also did something for a lot of Israeli leaderships in government. They also do something for lay leaders who are older and who are leading in their communities and a lot of them who are doing philanthropic work. So I was just one of these many Wexner programs, but that means that I was with rabbis who were studying at Yeshiva University and Yeshiva Chovevei, tora Jewish Theological Seminary, reconstructionist I mean all of the different seminaries, and then people who were going into scholarship, who were definitely from different denominations of Judaism but were pursuing secular degrees in academia or in nonprofit leadership. That's the main part of my life where I'm interacting with people from different facets of Judaism, and some of my closest relationships with Orthodox Jews come out of that fellowship.
Rabbi Juli Karol:It's a little bit harder, I would say, on the day to day, be interacting with other people from different denominations.
Rabbi Juli Karol:But I would say in a moment like this where Israel's under attack and we're all trying as an Upper West Side community to respond, there is definitely a lot of collaboration across synagogue. So we had a vigil on October 10th, but on October 9th our senior clergy, rabbi Spratt and Candor DeLau were at Ancheh Chesed, which is a conservative synagogue, and they were representing our community there. So in times of distress a lot of those kind of barriers break down and there's a lot more collaboration, of course. But then also there are fellowships and learning opportunities where you can opt into more diverse communities of Jews. But I wouldn't say on the day to day at all. On the day to day my work is so focused on just this single community and all of the people inside of it. So it's certainly not a daily interaction, but I would hope in a year that I would have a few points of contact or a few points of learning with people from beyond the reform movement, but it's not the easiest thing.
Nicole Kelly:Do you feel like you have to show up or present yourself in a different way, as a woman who is a Rabbi as opposed to a man?
Rabbi Juli Karol:I think it's important to show up as me and I have certain ideas about being a Rabbi and wanting it and wanting how people interact with me to be about interacting with me as a Rabbi not necessarily me as woman.
Rabbi Juli Karol:However, part of the ethos of my rabbin is warmth, and I think it's a feminine warmth because I'm a mother and because I'm very friendly and so I'm just very comfortable with the fact that I'm a woman doing this work and I try to dress modestly in my work because I don't really want my clothes to be the conversation. I want, like my rabbinette, to be the conversation. I want the experience of the person I'm with to be the conversation. So I think I make certain decisions about how I move through my work in order to make sure that the focus is always on people and on the Rabbi-congregant relationship.
Rabbi Juli Karol:But I really celebrate that I get to do this work in my body and as a woman, in the way that being a woman helps me add strength to this work, and I think the most explicit way that I do that is I make text study sheets all the time to teach and my goal is to never have less than 50% of who's represented on that sheet be either women or non-binary people. So that's like my little private way of making sure that more voices are heard, and I think I've made that choice as a woman. But I just feel great joy and privilege that I was born in a time where I get to do this work as me, and I think it's just really fun to be able to every day expand the idea of what a rabbi is, because I'm doing it as me as opposed to doing it the way that it was done for the many, many thousands of years before women could be ordained.
Nicole Kelly:So you and your husband have two small children. How has becoming a mother changed your relationship with Judaism? And even as a rabbi, I know that when I became a mother, I feel like my relationship with Judaism changed completely. I became more observant. I'm obviously more involved with a congregation. Was that the case for you?
Rabbi Juli Karol:I was already in rabbinical school when I became a mom. I had my son when I was in the summer between my fourth and my fifth years of rabbinical school. So I don't think it changed my relationship to Judaism in terms of my level of observance or in terms of my understanding, but it certainly expanded my relationship to Judaism because all of a sudden I got to live Judaism through the eyes of my children, and so I signed up for a PJ library and got started being able to we love PJ library.
Nicole Kelly:For those of you that don't know PJ library, they send free books basically every month if you sign up, and they're about Jewish holidays and things like fall and they're great. It's a great resource if you'd like to read with your kids and they're developmentally appropriate.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Yes, so you get the board books for your babies and then you get more advanced, you know, lift the flat books. So that was really a joy for me to start seeing all the ways in which we and we do spend a lot of effort on this Jewishly to try and inspire a love and a joy in Judaism for children. And so that means music and that means play and that means holidays and it means art projects. And being able to be in charge intentionally about my child's Jewish education was such a joy. I mean the creativity that exists in the Jewish world around bringing children up in a Jewish community is unparalleled.
Rabbi Juli Karol:The ways in which we are able to teach them about communal joy, about what it means to have a synagogue place where you go there and the second you walk in you can be silly and you can move around with your body which is not always easy in an apartment on the upper east or west side that it can be this big space where you run around and feel safe and get to make art and sing and eat pizza and find joy and find your people.
Rabbi Juli Karol:To me that was like one of the discoveries of parenting and Judaism that I couldn't have anticipated. I already knew intellectually all the things I loved about Judaism and when I wanted to be a rabbi, but being able to be a beneficiary of all the work I was doing, to be a parent and also be a rabbi, so to feel a little bit of what we're trying to give to all of those people who come into our doors that was the expansion was that I get to now be two things in this building both parent and rabbi. That is really kind of the change that I experienced.
Nicole Kelly:What does a typical Shabbat look like in your house? I know you're not here every Friday. There's like a rotating cast of favorites. It's always fun to see who's leading Friday night services or Saturday morning services. How does that work? If you're not working at your house, what do you guys do?
Rabbi Juli Karol:So, just to clarify what the rotating cast is, this community has four rabbis, two cantors, one rabbinic intern and one cantorial intern, and so we don't always have to be on the Biba every Arab Shabbat and every Shabbat morning. And so the idea is that we take off a Shabbat every four to six weeks or so so that we can be with our families, which is an immense privilege of being in a large synagogue.
Nicole Kelly:My father-in-law didn't have that privilege growing up yeah, Growing up we had a rabbi and a cantor and they were there for all holidays and everything.
Rabbi Juli Karol:And that's part of the job and that's really what you're signing up for.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So for me it's such a privilege that I get to be with my family. What Friday night looks like at our house is that we will dinner is about five o'clock, for the kids 5.15. So and we let them watch TV when they eat, sometimes because we want them to eat. So we will let them have like their first 20 minute show and have eating of their dinner, and then between the first and the second will light candles and we'll say the blessings over the wine and we'll say the blessing over the hull and then we'll say the blessing over our children, which is called beer cut Kohanim, which is the priestly blessing that we offer our children on Shabbat. And if I'm not home on Friday nights, my husband does it for them without me, but he always will save it for bedtime and the hope that I might get home from services and time to be able to give them their blessing. And that's what it looks like. We eat some Hala and then I'm probably in sweatpants because I don't have to work and there's a lot of snuggling.
Nicole Kelly:Casual Shabbat yeah.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Exactly casual Shabbat. There's a lot of snuggling and we sit on the couch and we read and we just end the week together. It's not at all a hoopla, but because of the week being an intense week, I wouldn't say that we spend Shabbat with anybody else. If I'm not working it's. I don't have a habit of going to other people's homes or even welcoming people to my home on the Shabbat that I'm not working, because that's actually the time where I get to unwind and have one-on-one time with my family, which is actually kind of hard to come by because the kids are getting bigger and they have crazy schedules. So it becomes really sacred time for us to just be a foursome just my husband, my children and me and to just be and the blessings are a part of that that help us transition. We often actually zoom my husband's parents and we do the blessings with them.
Nicole Kelly:They live in Kansas City now.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So we'll all do the blessings together and we'll probably talk to them on Zoom. The kids will talk to them for 10 minutes or so, and which basically means my son taking screenshots of them a thousand times on the iPad while we tell him not to, and then we let them go and they get to have a second episode and we talk to my in-laws and that's. I would say that's kind of a typical if I'm not working Friday night.
Nicole Kelly:What do you think some of the challenges of reading children in New York City are? I feel like it is very. I grew up in very suburban Los Angeles so it's been very interesting trying to raise a child here. What are some of the challenges that you find?
Rabbi Juli Karol:The biggest challenge I notice is that there's no backyard.
Rabbi Juli Karol:That for me the biggest issue is you know my children the intention around play has to be so much. There has to be so much greater intention around how kids' free time and play time is scheduled. We're very lucky in that the boy across the hall from us is in between my children's age. So there is one relationship in their life where somebody can run over and knock on the door, and that is actually. This is the first department we've ever had that.
Rabbi Juli Karol:In most departments people don't talk to their neighbors. Sorry, that's true, new Yorkers are very nice and they're very helpful, but they're not always the most neighborly with their actual neighbors. But we have a neighborly relationship in our current living setup, which is wonderful, and so our kids will have a little bit of like that, you know, after bath time, playing for 20 minutes at the neighbor's house, or he'll come to our house. But on a weekend I'm working. On Saturdays I'm often officiating benign mitts for a leading worship, and so my husband is one on two. So everything just has to be so much more scheduled and I didn't go up being that scheduled.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I remember like being on a soccer team when I was in third grade. My older son is first, so we're talking about two more years and he's not showing himself to be such an athlete. Be prepared, I'm gonna be pushing him toward the theater world.
Nicole Kelly:You guys can handle him. Yeah, he can send him our way.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Yeah, he'll be a tour guide. It's just really difficult to kind of think about outside Right now. The biggest thing that kind of stresses me out is that I don't know how to teach my son how to ride a bike, because I don't know where to go.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, it's crazy. And where do you keep the bike? I?
Rabbi Juli Karol:was we're lucky, we have a bike room. You're very lucky, but we don't have a bike yet. But when we do have a bike we will have a bike room. So right now our plan is we're going to commit to some point where, over like a four to six week period, we're gonna drive to Skarsdale to my grandma's house, where she has a long driveway, and we're gonna spend like an hour over like four to five weeks with my son in the driveway Because we don't know where to go in New York City.
Rabbi Juli Karol:But isn't that crazy that we had to drive 45 minutes To learn the right bike.
Nicole Kelly:Isn't the whole point of a bike to not use a car I like it's just so silly but we don't really know what else to do.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So it's hard. The kind of outside free time part I think of raising a kid in the city is difficult. But one of the amazing assets, I think, of raising a kid in the city is that on a rainy day we go to the Met, we go to the American Museum of Natural History. My kids have school friends, they have playground friends, they have dance friends, they have theater friends, like there's a different group of friends for every single activity that they're interested in. And because they go to this school, the Road of Sholom School, which is a reform Jewish day school, they get a lot of the diversity and their friendships in the other parts of the world we take them to.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Whereas when I was growing up my synagogue friends, my after school friends, my school friends were all the same people we were all just in the same town and I had my summer camp friends who, shock of shocks, were very similar to my school friends. So I didn't get that kind of diversity. So I think the assets of raising a kid here far outweigh the difficulties. But I think from a parenting perspective of young children not being able to say like, run to the neighbor's backyard and play there for a few hours. That's hard.
Nicole Kelly:That's really hard. Everything is very scheduled. I feel like I'll pick my daughter out from school and I'm like, okay, we're gonna do this, and then we're gonna go to the park and then we're gonna. It's very scheduled and the classes in this neighborhood are a whole. I feel like I need an episode just on the classes of the Upper West Side, and that being a full-time job.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Like freshman year, trying to figure out like which ones you're gonna get into.
Nicole Kelly:Exactly, and it's just it adds up. It's so expensive. So you talked about rabbinical internship. You interned here and you're now a rabbi here. For most people I'm assuming this is not the case that they're ending up at a synagogue close to where they're from. Is it just kind of what is the process of once you're ordained or you're at the process of becoming interned? How does that work? Do you apply a difference in a gog, because you get choice, or is it just kind of like well, wherever you end up, you end up. I feel like it's kind of like maybe being a doctor when you're finished with your residency. It used to be so.
Rabbi Juli Karol:it used to be like that. It actually changed after I was ordained, so we used to have like a matching process.
Nicole Kelly:Oh cool.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Which I avoided because I was offered a job here while I was still an intern, so that meant that I didn't have to go into placement, and placement is what happens at the end of your fifth year. When you go and you try to get a job, you write a vision statement. A lot of people create websites, they put their resume together and then they put everything out there. During COVID, all of the interviews were on Zoom, but in an ideal world you might have a first round interview on Zoom and then, if they want to learn more from you, they fly you or they bring you out to the community. You get to meet the leadership. You maybe give a sermon, you maybe teach a class, and they really get to meet you and host you. Now the placement process is no longer.
Rabbi Juli Karol:It used to be that the fifth years basically had this special time where all of the communities that were willing to hire an assistant rabbi who had an opening they flew to one of the three campuses and they did the first round of interviews in person, and so they flew all the students who were not at that campus in, and so for three days you just had interviews and then from there on it was who's going to do a site visit and where are you going to go. And then there was match day, where you couldn't communicate, and then on that day you would wait for the call. But of course that's a very imperfect system because people don't want to miss out on their first choice, but sometimes people would, some of the congregations would get stressed and so they would worry that maybe their first choice wasn't going to go for them because, like how it's like dating, like you don't know, and it was a very stressful process. So they tried to change it a few times and ultimately they did away with the system. So now people apply to jobs and they're competing with every other rabbi that's out there.
Rabbi Juli Karol:It's still a real privilege in the hiring pool to be an assistant, because if you're looking to hire an assistant, you're still looking for a new graduate, and there's a lot of reasons for that, but the main one being that they're looking to shape and raise up a new rabbi.
Rabbi Juli Karol:And if you have somebody who's five or 10 years into their career, of course they're still being shaped. But they are who they are. They come with their skills and they come with their preferences for the work that they're looking to do and how they're looking to make their mark on a community, whereas somebody who's new in the field kind of comes just ready and hungry to work. That's certainly how I was and that's a profile that a lot of communities are looking for when they're trying to hire for an assistant. So it's not like the privileges of being newly ordained are completely eliminated, but you don't have this structured process. That's kind of, where you walk through every step and it's really legislated by the seminary in partnership with the CCAR, which is the union for all of the rabbis. Now it's basically you apply for jobs and you see what happens.
Nicole Kelly:That sounds very stressful. I feel like there are a lot more incoming rabbis than retiring rabbis or moving rabbis or things like that.
Rabbi Juli Karol:They do study this, the CCAR Commission studies to kind of understand the movement that is happening. But what's interesting is that people there are more than just those jobs. So somebody might be leaving a job in a synagogue but taking a job in a nonprofit. Or somebody might be leaving a job in a nonprofit and now taking a job in a synagogue. So that means one less job in a synagogue for a newly ordained person. So all of that movement means that it's kind of unpredictable. But I think because the numbers that the seminary have been graduating recently I think are maybe holding a bit steady. What I have heard is that there are enough jobs for graduates.
Nicole Kelly:Oh, that's great, which is a good thing, that's great.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Which is a good thing, if the market is saying we have jobs for you, which wasn't the case, let's say, like in 2009, with the financial crash. That year, there were very few jobs and a lot of people had to figure out what they were going to do in the interim. That's not the case now. I'm pretty sure what's happening now is that people are being ordained and they're finding work, which is wonderful.
Nicole Kelly:This is the only synagogue you've worked at. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Well, officially, yes, but I did a fabulous summer shadowing internship when I was going into my fourth year of rabbinical school at BJBE congregation outside of Chicago, which is actually the congregation of our wonderful rabbi Deborah Goldberg.
Rabbi Juli Karol:And I worked with rabbi Karen Kedar, who is one of the first female ordained rabbis in the country she was among the first 50. And she was an incredible teacher and I shadowed her for two months over a summer and learned a tremendous amount from seeing her community. She actually led an entire building project of their synagogue and so the whole synagogue building tells a story, and just understanding how her mission and vision drove her rabbinate, the amount of learning I did with her in those six to eight weeks were pretty transformative for me as a rabbi. So even though I wasn't really on their payroll, it was definitely certainly like on the map of my life, a community that I count. So I will say that that Chicago community did teach me a lot and I worked very briefly at Temple Shari Tbilah on the East side as a religious school teacher. So I guess I have that too. But those are the only places.
Nicole Kelly:What made you decide to stay? After you were an intern, I decided to stay while I was an intern.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I went to Rabbi Levine, our senior Rabbi emeritus, in maybe the November of my fourth year, which was only my. I'd only been on the job for 16 months and I said I will do anything to stay here Because this community is so engaged and so rigorous in its Jewish commitment, it's so Jewishly literate, it's so New York and I am so New York and I love this building and I love this people. And what I really really admired was that the clergy in this community care so much about being clergy to their flock that this is a very inward facing clergy team. And I got into this work because I wanted to serve a single community.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I'm a very monogamous Rabbi. I really wanted to form a covenantal relationship with a single community and to just be there and walk with them and that was the incredible example that I saw from Rabbi Levine and Rabbi Spratt and Rabbi Weitzman, who's now a senior up in Albany, and Rabbi Laufer, who's now in Los Angeles, who is my mentor. They were all so focused on service to this place and to these people and the Derek Eritz, the honor that this community gave to their clergy, including the cantors, and the collaboration between the cantors and the rabbis, which is so incredible and so admirable and so unlike anything I'd seen before that I just thought, if I could stay here forever, I should probably tell him and I also I'd fallen in love with this place and I didn't want to leave.
Nicole Kelly:What advice do you have to somebody who is interested in becoming a rabbi?
Rabbi Juli Karol:That's such a good question. I think the advice that I have to a person interested in the rabbinate is first to spend a lot of time in a synagogue community and to start understanding that interest. What is it that you're passionate about in Judaism? What's driving you? Is it that you love worship? Is it that you love study? Is it that you love volunteering and doing active Tikkun olam?
Rabbi Juli Karol:I think spending a lot of time in a synagogue so that you understand the kind of circadian rhythms of Jewish life is hugely important because, as I said at the beginning of the interview, this is a big responsibility and one of the things a person has to assess is am I up for this responsibility? And there's no judgment against anybody who decides oh, I'll be a lay leader, I'll serve on the board of trustees, I'll lead a committee, I'll bring my Torah of theater and tour guiding and podcasting to this community and I'll help in all of the ways that I know how there are so many ways to contribute to Jewish community beyond being a clergy person. So it's important to spend a lot of time in a synagogue to really assess is that the role in Jewish life that's calling to you? And if that is, then go for it. Apply to rabbinical school, write a vision statement, think about what it is that you can do to add strength to Amir Sura'il and to bring light to the world. I mean that's what this job is really existing. To do is to bring strength so that we can move the door of our door from one generation to a next and keep the kindle. They keep the flame of Jewish tradition alive.
Rabbi Juli Karol:If being a rabbi is the way, after spending time in a synagogue context, that a person feels that they can do that, then I think there's nothing should get in their way. But I also would really celebrate a person discovering all of the myriad Jewish opportunities for Jewish leadership that exist in the Jewish world and asking themselves are there other ways to contribute Jewishly? Because we would be telling the wrong story if all we said was the only way to be a leader in Judaism is to be a rabbi or to be a canter. You can be a teacher, you can be a member of a board of trustees, you can work and you can volunteer with any number of fabulous nonprofit organizations. You can lobby with the rack, you can go call your legislators. I mean you can help philanthropically.
Rabbi Juli Karol:There are just so many ways to lead Jewishly, and so anybody who's thinking about being a rabbi, I would just say I would invite you to think about Jewish leadership, writ large and then kind of discern is the rabbin at the path for you? And if so, like go hazakvah amats, have strength and have courage. But if you discern along the journey that there are other ways that call to you, that's also so beautiful and so holy, and we need you, this person that we're talking to, we need you to do that. So it's all so critical.
Nicole Kelly:So this next section is kind of stolen from the actor's studio. They're just short form questions and answers. So what is your favorite Yiddish word? I'll say even Hebrew word, because I know you have extensive knowledge of Hebrew.
Rabbi Juli Karol:I already came up with this because I think this is such a good question Yenneville. Yenneville means far away and my parents would say I grew up in Scarzill, which has five elementary school districts, and I lived in Greenacres and Quaker Ridge. If I wanted to play it in Quaker Ridge my parents would say that's Yenneville, I don't want to drive over there. It literally translates to other world. Yenneville is my favorite because it was always this like ugh, I have to drive 15 minutes.
Nicole Kelly:Yenneville. I will be using that when I talk about commutes. Now that is, I love Yiddish because even if people don't know what the word means, like just the saying of the word, it's very like you feel it in your body.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Oh yeah, like it's frustrated Yenneville.
Nicole Kelly:What's your favorite Jewish holiday?
Rabbi Juli Karol:What is my favorite Jewish holiday? Where do I get like so much joy? I think Sukkot is my favorite Jewish holiday because it's the relief of being done with the high holidays.
Rabbi Juli Karol:And it wasn't Sukkot growing up, it was obviously Hanukkah growing up because I wanted to get presents. But now it's Sukkot because there is a. The kind of joy is like the joy of running the marathon and finishing and like that French fry you eat afterward oh, I'm done and I get to eat whatever I want because I've been running for 40 years. And now I'm done and I have my metal and I have my aluminum cape and I am a superhero Like building that.
Rabbi Juli Karol:Sukkot is our superhero move. We're like we have gotten through another high holidays. We have done this crazy marathon of. It's not just Rosh Hashanah, then it's 10 days and then it's Yom Kippur, which is Rosh Hashanah, with fasting and solemnity. So it is like a way to start the year and so Sukkot is like this kind of silliness, almost in the relief that you've made it through. But what I love so much about the Jewish calendrical year is like we do our Super Bowl at the beginning of the season, at the end. So that's like the permission that I need to rabbi for the rest of the year If I can get through the high holidays and have people feel like we brought meaning to their lives and help them kind of change the page into that next chapter and they felt that that was ritually authentic for them. And by the time Sukkot comes around, I'm like shigging that lulav and I am just like living my best life.
Rabbi Juli Karol:So I don't think any other moment in the year kind of compares with the relief of Sukkot, and Sukkot also encompasses some Khatorah and unfurling the Torah and dancing with the Torah and starting over from Deuteronomy to Genesis. Just all of that encapsulates this kind of unfettered joy that comes both with just Jewish joy and really taking pride in our traditions and in the beautiful symbolism and choreography of what we do and why we do it. But because of where it comes, it's the relief that makes it stand out.
Nicole Kelly:I always wanted to have a Sukkot in the backyard, but it was one of those things I think I never said that I wanted, and now I live in New York City. So, I don't think that's ever going to happen.
Rabbi Juli Karol:We have Sukkot here. Our Sukkot is your.
Nicole Kelly:Sukkot. If you were to have a Bat Mitzvah today, what would the theme of the party be?
Rabbi Juli Karol:That is such a good question. I actually think I wouldn't do a theme. No theme, I think, because I'm a rabbi, I have to say like the theme would be the Bat Mitzvah. So I, like I would love to say that there would be a theme, but I would actually just be more confused, more concerned with the music. I would have like a very intense techno dance playlist that would be like aggressive and amazing.
Nicole Kelly:I love that. What profession other than your own would you want to attempt?
Rabbi Juli Karol:There's a couple, but I would love to be a children's book author, which is what my dad did. I have a very whimsical mind and I think having children has made me take that whimsy much more seriously, so I would love to do that. I also think being a children's librarian would be an amazing job and I think about this all the time. One of my intellectual passions is reading books by food writers and in another life I wish I were confident in the kitchen because I'm fascinated by food and chefs and restaurant culture and all of that. I certainly am not tough enough to be working in a restaurant that is not how I'm wired but that whole world is so kind of inspiring to me and the magic that happens in a kitchen and the collaboration that happens and the transformation of ingredients into food is super fascinating. So that's not like if I wasn't a rabbi, it's more if I was a different person. But I'll answer that question too.
Nicole Kelly:If heaven is real and God is there to welcome you, what would you like to hear them say?
Rabbi Juli Karol:Your life mattered.
Nicole Kelly:I'm going to cry. I feel like that's all anybody really wants. I love that. I love how simplistic and beautiful that is. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. Thank you for having me.
Nicole Kelly:So for those of you interested in checking out Rodeph Shalom it is on 83rd and Central Park West on the Upper West Side you can visit the website and the clergy here is fantastic. So anyone who is in the area and looking to check out some services or find a new home, I definitely recommend coming and checking it out. Thank you so much. I hope you have enjoyed listening to this episode. I know I enjoyed recording it and talking to Rabbi Juli. This is Nicole Kelly and this has been Shebrew in the City.
