by Sharon Niederman

Rosh Hashanah, 5761. More than 200 Jews sit on folding chairs in a bare-bones, 60-year-old, obviously retrofitted building where the sound of the shofar has never before been heard. Both men and women are draped in tallit, while a long-haired woman rabbi dressed in Birkenstocks and a white robe leads the service on an improvised bima (the reading table for the Torah). Above her hang colorful cotton banners, one for each day of creation. The Torah rests in a plain, but fine, wooden ark carved by a woodworker in the congregation, on an altar decorated with sunflowers, gourds and apples.

Participants look with wonder at the freshly-painted walls of this former Baptist church. Many must be thinking of time spent this summer cleaning and painting the building. The transformation is amazing.

Members of this modest congregation are teachers, doctors, social workers, artists, retired librarians, public servants, employees of non-profit organizations, carpenters, helping professionals. Many are members of interfaith families, some are part of same-sex households, and quite a few are single parents.

Most moved to New Mexico from other places, and most have never before been affiliated with a synagogue. Most are “returning” to Judaism; virtually all are seeking a Judaism that feels more meaningful than that with which they were raised, if they were raised at all Jewishly. As the community has created this physical home, they are simultaneously creating, with the leadership of Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, that new kind of Judaism.

Albuquerque, N.M. may not seem a likely spot for a historic breakthrough in Jewish life, but no one has refuted the city’s title as home to the first congregation founded by a woman rabbi to acquire its own synagogue.

In this small Sunbelt city of fewer than 12,000 Jews, five synagogues and two havurot (informal Jewish groups that meet regularly for discussion or prayer), Rabbi Gottlieb has guided her Congregation Nahalat Shalom (Inheritance of Peace) for 18 years from living rooms and backyards to rented churches and schoolhouses and finally to this former church.

Situated on a half acre, the building at 3306 Rio Grande Blvd. NW was vacant and suffering from neglect. Now it has been transformed into a basic but warm 225-seat sanctuary, an art gallery, library and cheder (study) room.

It has been nearly a three decades-long journey to her first permanent home for Rabbi Gottlieb, who began her rabbinical studies in 1972 at the Reform branch’s Hebrew Union College in New York. When she was refused access at the Conservative branch’s Jewish Theological Seminary, she sought private instruction with several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Irving Greenberg, an Orthodox rabbi and an unorthodox thinker about the role of the Holocaust and Israel in Jewish history.

From 1973 to 1979 she served as rabbi to Temple Beth Or of the Deaf in New York City, mastering sign language in the process. Over the next seven years she was accepted for study with rabbis and teachers across the spectrum, including Zalman Schacter, Everett Gendler, Wolf Kelman and Elie Wiesel, finally reaching her goal of private ordination in 1980. Rabbi Gottlieb was one of the first 10 women rabbis ordained in the United States.

Remaining on the outside of established institutions, Rabbi Gottlieb has faced years of exclusion by mainstream male rabbis that has included not only isolation but the questioning of her rabbinic credentials. “There has always been resistance to women’s creativity,” she maintains. “And the indulging of cultural misogyny comes out full force when one is challenging an issue agreed upon by the status quo.”

While breaking down barriers for women in Judaism and teaching her interpretations of the “white letters” of the Torah, the spaces around the inked script where, she says, the invisible stories of women are embedded, Rabbi Gottlieb continued to perform internationally as a storyteller. She initiated Rosh Chodesh (new moon) and other ceremonial groups around the country and spoke widely on the new Judaism that has since become known as “Jewish Renewal,” a grassroots movement that draws on all branches of Judaism as well as older, submerged traditions such as Hasidism and Kabbalah.

From shofar blowing at dawn in the Sandia Mountains to tashlich (the symbolic casting away of sins on Rosh Hashanah by throwing bread into flowing water) on the Rio Grande to Rosh Chodesh in Jemez Mountain hot springs, this emphatically Jewish Renewal congregation of 150 households has evolved a style of Jewish observance suited to the times, place and spiritual temperament of the membership while remaining deeply rooted in tradition. The description “Southwest Center for Jewish Renewal” affixed to Nahalat Shalom’s name indicates its membership in the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, or Aleph, a network of 60 congregations nationwide.

Described by Rabbi Gottlieb as a “spiritual kibbutz on American soil,” Nahalat Shalom is an umbrella for the wide interests of its members with a diversity of activities from the familiar such as cheder, Torah study and publication of a monthly news journal, “Desert Sage,” to those that impact the wider community such as providing meals for the homeless and maintaining an ongoing Arab-Jewish dialogue. Other activities reflect the distinct flavor of the congregation including an artists’ collective which sponsors exhibits in the temple’s gallery and creates the congregation’s ritual objects, an inter-generational Klezmer band, coffeehouse gatherings where music and poetry are exchanged, study groups in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism and the Sephardic Project that allows Jews of Spanish and Middle Eastern heritage to seek and share their cultural roots. In addition, the Ruach Retreat Center presents classes in yoga, meditation and massage.

“This is an extended family that is so rare in modern society. The congregation supports each individual in finding his or her own answer. It does not dictate answers. In Sabbath and other services, we really participate — it’s not just the rabbi talking to us,” says Bob Levin, a respected elder and six-year member. “The common bond here is that we are all on a Jewish quest,” he says.

An understanding of the environment and the inter-relatedness of all life through the practice of “eco-kashrut” expressing a “green” Judaism and an activist stance toward peace and reconciliation, as well as an emphasis on the Shekinah, the feminine aspect of God, are themes frequently articulated by Rabbi Gottlieb.

Services reflect the rabbi’s strong feminist commitment, with complete equality between genders as well as active participation of congregation members. In addition to Hebrew and English, services customarily contain some Spanish and Ladino, which reinforces ties to New Mexico, where some raised Catholic are discovering that they are descendants of Jews who fled the Inquisition.

Yet Rabbi Gottlieb’s vision cannot simply be summed up as “feminist.” In her introduction to Rabbi Gottlieb’s book, She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism (Harper San Francisco, 1995), Ellen Umansky writes, “What Lynn sought — as early as the 1970s — was nothing less than the transformation of Judaism itself. ... Yet Lynn has never been afraid of controversy, for in all of her endeavors, she has been motivated and guided by a religious vision of souls in harmony with themselves, other living beings, and the world in which we live.”

The “transformation” to which Umansky refers emphasizes creativity as it seeks to eliminate beliefs around Judaism as a “fear-based” religion. Joy and celebration are placed at the center of practice. “God wants our joy,” is a phrase often spoken by Rabbi Gottlieb, who is the divorced single mother of a teen-aged son, Nataniel.

Yet there are aspects of Rabbi Gottlieb’s vision that make some within the Jewish community uncomfortable. In particular, her stance on Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation has roused criticism from the mainstream Jewish community. Andrew Lipman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Albuquerque, voices some of these feelings when he says that there has been “mixed fallout” toward Rabbi Gottlieb’s views. “She has been highly critical of Israel and the Israeli government. I think her views tend sometimes to be unbalanced,” he says. “She can go too far,” he continues. “This is such a sensitive issue, and Lynn’s statements can give credence to those who want to characterize Israelis in an unfavorable light.”

At the same time, Lipman also values the “extremely important role Nahalat Shalom and Rabbi Gottlieb play in our community” with its very large percentage of the previously unaffiliated, where it is “very important we reach everyone.” He sees the acquisition of a building as “truly a coming of age of the congregation, giving it a permanence in the community.”

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