The Milwaukee area’s synagogues have had rabbis who have been scholars and authors, some of them internationally renowned, like David Shapiro and Joseph Baron.
But The Chronicle cannot recall any, at least in its non-Orthodox shuls, who have been authorities on Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism. This month, one such rabbi has come to town.
As of July 28, Rabbi Yitzchak Evan Berman is the new spiritual leader of Beth El Ner Tamid Synagogue (Conservative, though not officially affiliated with the movement) in Mequon. He follows Rabbi Gideon Goldenholz, who recently moved to Florida.
Berman, 36, arrives not only with academic degrees, rabbinical ordination and some years of career experience. He is the author of “Shepherds, Sages, Meditations and Dreams: The Gateway of the Sephirot,” a self-published book about Kabbalah; and he told The Chronicle that he has a second such book in the works.
Moreover, one of the first things he will do at Beth El is teach a three-part class on Kabbalah that will meet in a private home on Tuesdays, Aug. 8, 15, 22 — and that is open to the general community.
This embodies two of the major goals he will pursue at Beth El. One is to impart knowledge of Kabbalah.
“My interest has always been to help Jews develop a spiritual connection to each other, to God and religion and Israel,” Berman said in a recent telephone interview. “Kabbalah is a mystical pathway in Judaism to develop a deep spiritual connection.”
A second is to help develop Beth El’s connection to the overall Jewish community of Milwaukee, he said.
“I want for myself and my family and the entire synagogue to be able to contribute in any way we can to the greater Milwaukee Jewish community,” Berman said.
This second goal, in fact, appears to be a major part of the plan that Beth El leaders had in mind when they hired him.
“It’s our intention to reestablish our place in the greater Jewish community,” Beth El’s president, Circuit Court Judge Glenn Yamahiro, told The Chronicle in a telephone interview. Further, it will seek to do this through “expansion of adult education and youth programming,” he said.
And Berman “stood out” from the some 25 applicants for the position because of his academic qualifications, his “significant experience” in teaching adults and children, and “his success in working with youth and motivating youth to become active participants in synagogue activities,” Yamahiro said.
In fact, Berman has already worked on this latter project as well. At his first Sabbath service at Beth El, he started and led a youth service during the regular Sabbath service that among other things included a Jewish Jeopardy game.
He also said that on the first day of religious school, the children will be going to a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game.
Berman said he is seeking “to make the synagogue experience fun and exciting for kids of all ages.”
Moreover, Berman is “obviously a person of great kindness,” Yamahiro continued. “He’s the kind of person we felt very strongly that congregants would want for all their important life cycle events.”
Meaning and purpose
Berman is also a native Midwesterner, which was one of the reasons he said he wanted to come to Milwaukee from his previous post at the Monsey Jewish Center in New York state.
He grew up in Edina, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis. He said he was raised in the Conservative movement and celebrated his bar mitzvah in Israel.
He got his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, with a double major in religious studies and philosophy. He said he had a long-standing interest in “the spiritual path” and in meditation. “I always felt as though it was necessary for me to try to find meaning and purpose in life.”
At first he considered pursuing a career in academia, in religious studies. But during his undergraduate years, when he was 20, he returned to Israel on what he called “a kibbutz trip” and “I was just overwhelmed by the land and the people and the religion.”
From that experience, “I felt I wanted to teach Judaism from the experiential level, the personal level, from the standpoint of somebody who believes in the religion, not from the standpoint of somebody who stands outside it academically,” he said.
Berman made aliyah, married an Israel woman — Dafna, with whom he has two daughters — studied at the Bet-Midrash Sephardi in Jerusalem and received two rabbinical ordinations, one from the school, the other from Israel’s Chief Rabbinate.
He then decided to return to the United States because, in part, Israel doesn’t need another rabbi, he joked. But also, he said, “I wanted to try to increase to the best of my ability the connection of all Jews, regardless of denomination, to their heritage and to each other.”
Berman also has worked at a congregation and a Solomon Schechter Day School in St. Louis; and at the Wexner Jewish Student Center at Ohio State University.
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