Community Blog For Future Rabbis, Many Paths to One Beit Midrash
As a new academic year gets underway at Hebrew College, we are delighted to welcome a new cohort of students to our Rabbinical School. Over the coming months, they will find their rhythms in the Beit Midrash, get to know one another and the wider Hebrew College community, and begin the work of rabbinic formation. They arrive with experiences, questions, commitments, and perspectives that they will weave into the fabric of our pluralistic community of learning as they learn, pray, and grow into rabbinic leadership.
From all across the country, this cohort has followed many different paths to rabbinical school. They have worked as Jewish educators and communal professionals, preschool teachers and social workers, artists and performers, organizers and advocates, scholars and scientists. They bring experience in theater and film, music and poetry, immigration justice and refugee studies, environmental work and Jewish youth programming (and, in one case, a PhD in mathematics!). Their Jewish journeys are varied, shaped by summer camp, synagogue communities, university Jewish life, deepening encounters with text, and years of asking what it means to build a meaningful Jewish life. We look forward to the ways these different experiences will meet, challenge, and enrich one another in the years ahead.
For some, the path to rabbinical school emerged gradually. Nate Schaff grew increasingly curious about Jewish life toward the end of college at the University of Colorado Boulder, an interest that led him to Pardes in Jerusalem. There, he discovered a passion for Jewish learning, and quickly realized that he wanted to pursue rabbinical school. “Text study specifically is what started the love,” he said. His approach to learning is both rooted in tradition and deliberately contemporary: he has explored rabbinic stories alongside the music of Bob Dylan, asking how a modern voice can change the way we encounter an ancient text. Elyse Krause’s journey also began with a period of questioning. During COVID, she found herself on a spiritual journey that led to Judaism; she joined a synagogue and embarked on a conversion journey which included an introduction to Judaism course and Hebrew study. As her learning deepened, she began to imagine a future in which she could help others explore Judaism. What began as a quiet thought eventually became something more certain: “Not only want to go to rabbinical school, I want to be a rabbi.” For Alex Bennett, previous experience in Hebrew College’s Hiddush Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Leaders confirmed that this was the community where they wanted to immerse in Jewish learning. “It was really affirming to be like, yes, Hebrew College,” Alex recalls. “I can see myself here for several years to come.”
For Elyse, the sense of rabbinic possibility took shape through Ta Sh’ma, Hebrew College’s open house for prospective students to experience the Rabbinical School firsthand. Elyse remembers encountering a community where she could experience “big pluralistic davening, and also a reform minyan,” while learning alongside people whose Jewish backgrounds and practices differed from her own. Testimonials from the alumni panel and conversations with enrolled students helped her imagine the range of ways a Hebrew College rabbi might build a life and career. AJ Helman, another new student, similarly found that the prospective student day offered something that a website or conversation alone could not: a chance to experience the students, faculty, learning, and prayer that would become part of daily life. The visit helped turn the possibility of rabbinical school into a place they could imagine themselves growing and belonging.
Now, as the high holidays near a conclusion and the academic year begins in earnest, these students are starting to make that community their own. They will bring different histories and practices to the Beit Midrash, different questions to their learning, and different visions of what rabbinic life can look like. We are excited to welcome them, to learn alongside them, and to see the many ways their paths will continue to unfold at Hebrew College and beyond.
Meet students and faculty at one of our fall open houses, Ta Sh’ma (Come & Hear) November 16 (in-person) or online (Dec. 6).
Learn more and register.