“It is not often that two guys from a small Jewish community like ours enter the rabbinate,” Rabbi Dena Feingold of Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha recently wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. And this fall, those “guys” will both be starting that part of their respective educational programs involving a year in Israel.
Daniel Selsberg and Benjamin Bar-Lev both have roots in Beth Hillel, a Reform congregation, but have diverged in affiliation. Selsberg, a native Kenoshan, attends the Conservative movement’s University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Fox Point native Bar-Lev will enter the rabbinate through the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
That Selsberg decided to become a rabbi surprised Feingold. He was in her first b’nai mitzvah class when she became spiritual leader of Beth Hillel in 1985, and “I never would have predicted that he would have chosen the rabbinate,” she said.
Nevertheless, she remembered him because he had “a tremendous sense of humor…. Not a lesson went by that he didn’t say something that cracked me up.” And that sense of humor “will take him very far in the rabbinate,” Feingold added.
When Selsberg finished his undergraduate study of education, history and political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he realized that he wanted his Judaism to be more than “cultural,” he said in a telephone interview.
“I knew Judaism was supposed to be a big deal, but I hadn’t yet figured out why that was. I had his feeling I needed to learn what it is people made such a big deal about.”
So Selsberg went to Israel, participating in the World Union of Jewish Students program. That experience transformed him.
“I stopped viewing myself as simply an individual…,” he said. “Being there gave me a sense of being part of a larger culture and civilization” and “that led me to a stronger emotional affiliation with the Jewish people.”
He also met Karen Cohen (no relation to this writer), whom he married about two years ago; and he began to become more observant, starting by “easing bratwurst out of my diet,” he said.
After spending a short time in India and teaching history in a Denver high school, a cousin suggested he should become a rabbi. The idea took hold.
At first, he said, he had thought of a rabbi as being “a holy man or woman.” Then he learned that the job involved “teaching, social work, [being a] counselor and community leader…. Once I humanized it, I felt I would enjoy doing it and would serve people by doing it.”
Moreover, Selsberg came to the conclusion that he was a Conservative Jew and would apply to that movement’s schools. “I wanted to be in a halachic setting, a place where teachers taught from a traditional perspective, but with a healthy dose of modern scholarship and critical methods,” he said. He chose the University of Judaism, has been there for two years and will begin his third academic year in the school’s Jerusalem facility this autumn. (The ordination program lasts five years.)
“I’ve loved every day” of my rabbinical education, he said. “I love the studying [and] the men and women I study with are great. I really feel happy and blessed….”
‘ Infectious’ spirit
Milwaukee native Bar-Lev also evolved into a rabbinical student, but his transformation began not with a trip to Israel but with a call to Beth Hillel.
He already had ties to Israel, as his father came from there. He grew up in Fox Point, had attended Congregation Shalom, Nicolet High School and the Harry & Rose Samson Family JCC’s summer camps as camper and staff member.
He decided to go to college at UW-Parkside in Kenosha because of its camp-like campus and its small class sizes. But he found there that “for the first time I was in a place where there were no other Jews.” That “made me realize how important Judaism was to me.”
So he called Beth Hillel and asked if it needed a song leader (Bar-Lev plays guitar). Feingold offered him a position as religious schoolteacher and said he “quickly became integral” to Beth Hillel’s functioning.”
“There are some people you are just immediately attracted to” and Bar-Lev is one, Feingold said. “He has an infectious joie de vivre; he is always up and happy.” Moreover, “The kids adored him. Wherever Benjy was, that was where they wanted to be.”
As an undergraduate, Bar-Lev performed various jobs at Beth Hillel: teacher, youth group director, rabbinical intern when Feingold took a three-month sabbatical. They all “taught me how much I enjoyed living and teaching Judaism,” he said. “More than anything I enjoy being with people and I enjoy sharing with people this love that I have for Judaism and for the liturgy.”
By the time he was a junior, he knew he would be applying to rabbinical school in the Reform movement. “It is really important for me to get the message out that Judaism is not something that’s stagnant, that it is ever changing,” Bar-Lev said. “One of the most beautiful things about liberal Judaism is that we can form it to our lives here and now.”
Bar-Lev will be spending his first year of rabbinical study this year at the Jerusalem campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Once he completes that, he will study for four years at the school’s Cincinnati campus.
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