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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
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The Children's Rabbi
Rabbi Rosalin Hermes Mandelberg '86 dons
costumes to teach children the joys of Judaism
By Tom Nugent
Assembled the night before from cardboard and brightly colored tissue
paper, the jumbo-sized potato latke dangled on a string from the dancing
rabbi’s neck.
“I am a latke, and I am waiting for Hannukah to come!” sang Rosalin
Hermes Mandelberg ’86, as she entertained an enraptured audience of
about 20 children, age 6 and under, at the Ohef Sholom Temple last
December in Norfolk, Va.
 For the 42-year-old Mandelberg, the senior rabbi of the 3,000-member
reform congregation, dressing up as a traditional Jewish potato pancake
and then singing and dancing her heart out for the kids in the
synagogue’s Tot Shabbat (children’s Sabbath celebration) is a “wonderful
way to teach the joys of Judaism.”
It’s also a vividly effective strategy, she says, for underlining her
message about the often overlooked “life-affirming and laughter-loving
side of the Jewish faith. I think it’s a real misnomer—this idea that
Judaism is only about tragedy and suffering. What I’m trying to teach
these kids, along with their parents and grandparents, is that Judaism
offers us a joyful way to live, and to find deep, authentic meaning in
our relationships with each other.
“I don’t mind putting on different costumes in order to get my point
across,” explains “Rabbi Roz,” who has been known to deck herself out as
a basketball-sized matzo ball for Passover and even as a fiercely
gobbling, red-wattled turkey for Thanksgiving—a holiday that she says
the Pilgrims based on the Jewish harvest holiday of Sukkot. “Whether I’m
wearing a latke for the kids or a [liturgical] robe in the pulpit, I’m
always trying to communicate the joys of my faith.”
Born and raised in Los Angeles, the high-spirited Mandelberg was named
senior rabbi a year ago, after a nine-year stint as an associate rabbi
at one of Baltimore’s largest synagogues. A rarity among America’s
Jewish rabbis—the vast majority of whom are men—she says she was chosen
for her current high-profile post because “this congregation responded
warmly to my message of hope and joy about what it really means to be
Jewish, in a world where our history so often seems to be dark and
painful.”
The daughter of a sabra—native-born Israeli—and a Romanian father who
survived imprisonment during the Holocaust and then emigrated to the
United States, Mandelberg says she also learned “a great deal about
finding joy and laughter in the midst of tragedy” while studying
African-American women writers as an undergraduate at Pomona College.
“I arrived on campus in the fall of 1982,” the English major recalls
with a nostalgic chuckle, “and right away, I was fortunate to meet two
English professors who introduced me to the work of Toni Morrison and
several other black women. I was amazed to find out that these women had
written so powerfully about worlds that were turned upside-down. They
told stories about women whose lives were fraught with challenge—but who
had nevertheless managed to create rich, meaningful human relationships
for themselves.
“These black women knew what joy was, and most important of all, they
knew how to laugh.”
Inspired by the two English professors (“Cris Miller taught me how to
write, and Martha Andresen taught me that I had something to say”),
Mandelberg spent five years in rabbinical school after graduating from
Pomona in 1986. As a rabbi-in-training, she found herself increasingly
drawn to the liberal-minded tradition of Jewish values based on a strong
belief in the sacredness of every aspect of life. That 5,000-year-old
tradition of exuberant charity and vitality is wonderfully embodied, she
explains, in such mystical and life-affirming visions
as the philosophy of “radical amazement” propounded by the 20th-century
Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
“Being a rabbi in today’s world isn’t easy,” she says. “You look around,
and you see Israel struggling with the war in Lebanon. You see endless
conflict in the Middle East, and terrible problems here at home. Even
within our own congregation in Norfolk, you find plenty of tragedy and
suffering. Just the other day, we lost a member to suicide—a terribly
painful experience for everyone involved.”
In spite of the inevitable tragedies, however, Mandelberg insists on
emphasizing the brighter side of her tradition. “In some ways, I think
Rabbi Heschel’s joyful vision is the same vision you find in a writer
like Toni Morrison,” she explains. “It’s an attitude that says, ‘Don’t
worry, as long as we hang onto our faith and our hope and our love for
each other, everything will be fine.’”
Energized and uplifted by this hopeful outlook, Mandelberg says she gets
a great deal of satisfaction out of teaching kids about Judaism by
costuming herself for storytelling sessions in which she can underscore
the powerful messages to be found in dramatic holiday sagas, such as the
one built around Hanukkah.
After cavorting about a makeshift stage in her latke getup at Ohef
Sholom, the high-stepping rabbi went straight to the punch line, as she
described how the threatened Jews of another time and another place
successfully withstood a brutal onslaught by some high-powered Assyrian
enemies.
“They wanted to have a celebration,” she explained joyfully, while
detailing how the victorious Jews had feasted on potato pancakes and
other goodies after the rededication of the temple in Jerusalem. “They
had survived,” she told the children, “but they only had a tiny bit of
oil left.
“And yet that little bit of oil lasted eight days—a miracle!”
For Mandelberg, whose husband Marty also teaches in Tot Shabbat,
“miracles” like the one that took place at Hanukkah are all around us,
if only we will “open our eyes and see them.
“I want to help people to experience the beauty that’s all around us,
and to feel the joyfulness that lives at the heart of the Jewish
experience,” she says. “To accomplish that, I’m willing to wear any
costume, anytime!” |
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