Today we spotlight Deborah Goldberg, alumnus of the Avodah Justice Fellowship in Chicago, graduate of Hebrew Union College-Cincinnati (HUC) and rabbi at Congregation Rodeph Shalom on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
She sits down with Avodah to discuss how her experiences in the Justice Fellowship and HUC propelled her career and commitment to Jewish communal life.
How did you end up in your current role?
I’m originally from the Midwest, outside Chicago. I spent my summers in Wisconsin at the Reform Movement’s first summer camp, OSRUI. I studied history and political science at Washington University in St. Louis.
I was ordained from HUC Cincinnati in 2021, and I’ve been in New York since then. I fell in love with the community that I’m a part of right now. I moved to this synagogue and this apartment site-unseen, in June 2021, I’ve been here ever since, and it’s been really wonderful.
I really love the work that I get to do as a rabbi. I work with our 20s & 30s community and our intro to Judaism students. It’s been a really amazing last couple of years, and I feel really lucky that this is where I landed.
Avodah and HUC-JIR recently announced an official partnership, in which Avodah alums, staff, and participants will receive up to 5,000 in merit scholarship towards rabbinical, cantorial and the Jewish nonprofit programs. What was your experience like in both programs?
I was in the inaugural Justice Fellowship in Chicago in the winter, spring of 2016. One of the reasons I applied to the Fellowship was because the facilitator of the fellowship, Aryeh Bernstein, was someone I worked closely with at the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (JCUA). Aryeh is an amazing teacher, and I trusted that if he wanted to be involved in something, I wanted to be involved too. So I applied! JCUA was incredibly supportive of me participating. They knew that Jewish learning was something that I was looking for.
Being a part of the Avodah Fellowship was a way to incorporate Jewish learning as a part of my professional development. But that learning also really filled me up personally.
I started HUC in the summer of 2016, a really wild time to begin a rabbinical journey. I’m really grateful that those two pieces of my life overlapped at the time that they did.
I saved every handout from the Avodah fellowship, and used them to help create text studies and for sermon inspiration as a student. I still think back on that time in the Fellowship, and it really solidified my love for Jewish learning as an adult. And it solidified that these two pieces of my life–Jewish social justice and Jewish learning, and hopefully being a teacher of Judaism, were not mutually exclusive.
That was both comforting and exciting at the moment that I was turning in my application to HUC.
Why did you decide to enroll in HUC and become a rabbi?
I grew up in the Reform Movement, so I have always been a Reform Jew. When I was thinking about rabbinical school, I knew HUC was the place for me. I did a little bit of additional research to confirm that, but HUC matched my theology and experience with Jewish life in America and worldwide.
I think Avodah helped broaden my experience and connection to Jews who don’t happen to be in the Reform Movement in a really meaningful way and helped me solidify, “Yeah, this is what’s right for me, and I get to feel really confident in that.”
I decided to go to rabbinical school for a number of reasons. My work with JCUA and subsequently getting to be a part of the Avodah Fellowship really confirmed for me that I loved being part of Jewish professional life. Part of what I was doing in that job and in that Fellowship was making absolutely 100% sure that this was the kind of life that I wanted to be living.
And I didn’t want to go to school without knowing that. Having worked for Jewish organizations, having been involved in social justice–these were two of the pushes towards getting additional training to get to be a leader of Jewish community.
What experiences and resources from Avodah do you draw from as a rabbi?
Avodah has amazing resources. It’s one of the places that I send my Intro to Judaism students to go find resources.
It’s one of the places that I link to for Passover resources for my congregants. It is one of the first couple of websites that I go to when I don’t know exactly what I’m saying in a sermon. When I have a nugget of an idea for a sermon but I don’t have all the details, I go to the Avodah website because I know somebody smart is going to have said something about this before and it’s all in one place.
As a rabbi, I aspire to be learning all the time. But there are only so many hours in a week, so sometimes knowing that there is a bank of resources that have been vetted by trusted people that I know will be in line with the Jewish values I hold makes my life a lot easier.
And the materials aren’t just for rabbis. They’re for lay leaders. They’re for parents who want to talk to their kids about Jewish values and texts. They’re for college students who are wondering how to explain something that they know and feel deep within them but are looking for the right language.
What would you say to someone who was in your position before you did the Fellowship, before you became a rabbi, who is interested in the intersection between Jewish learning and social justice?
Do it.
Maybe this sounds cliche, but I think community is more important now than ever. I started rabbinical school in the summer of 2016. I was in Israel when Trump was elected. I was in my fourth year of rabbinical school when we shut down for COVID. I did my last year of rabbinical school online, and I was in the third year of my rabbinate when I woke up on October 7.
My school and my rabbinate has been defined by questions of community and how we gather and who we are as Jews, as Americans, as American Jews. And I think any time we have the opportunity to be in community with thoughtful, committed, engaged people, we should take it.
Community is not something I take for granted, and it’s not something that just happens. It’s something we have to make. I think Avodah has such an amazing track record of building these kinds of spaces. In addition to being the beneficiary of the Avodah community, I also got to learn first-hand how to build these kinds of spaces.
I think it’s really worth the time to sit in community with other people who are also willing to sit with tough and big questions about what it means to be Jewish, American and human in today’s world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
