Rabbi Lederman Drawn to Micah’s Community-Building, Risk-Taking Style

In her mid-20s, Esther Lederman was in Washington, working at a group seeking Middle East peace when she consulted a career counselor.  She wanted help deciding what direction her life should take.  The counselor suggested she consider becoming a rabbi.  “That was the last thing on earth I ever expected to be,” Rabbi Lederman, Temple Micah’s new assistant rabbi, said in a recent interview. So she thanked the counselor, but—at least initially—rejected the suggestion and continued to work for Jewish non-profit organizations for several more years.

What had triggered the counselor’s recommendation was the young woman’s reply to the question: What do you really love to do?

“I love to create community,” Rabbi Lederman recalls saying. To which the counselor responded, “Then become a rabbi—rabbis create community.”

The conversation, from the late 1990s, stuck in the back of her mind, eventually leading her into the rabbinate.

Micah’s emphasis on building community was a major part of its appeal to Rabbi Lederman, along with the opportunity to work with Rabbi Zemel.
“He’s a risk taker, willing to shake things up.  That’s something I want to do more of,” she said. “I’m anxious to learn what he can teach me. I really like being mentored.  I’m 35 now, so I have a lot of life experiences, but I’m still fresh at being a rabbi.”

Ordained in May 2008 at Hebrew Union College in New York, she spent her final year in the seminary and her first year after ordination at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan, where she held the Marshall T. Meyer Rabbinic Fellowship. A popular, independent synagogue, BJ—as it is called—is known for its lively services replete with singing, musical instruments and dancing.

“Temple Micah reminds me of B’nai Jeshurun in many respects,” Rabbi Lederman said. “The synagogue has movable seats and the bima isn’t high or separated from the congregation. So, it’s very democratic. There’s a lot of spirit, a lot of ruach.”

She led Micah services for the first time on Friday, July 24. She won’t lead Saturday morning services until the fall because congregants lead those services during the summer. “I love the lay participation,” she said. “It’s fabulous. That people want to and have the knowledge to lead services is phenomenal.”

An initial priority of her Micah portfolio is outreach to the 20s and 30s cohort, a task she handled at BJ.  “The rest is still a work in progress. But I hope I get to do a little bit of everything,” she said. “That’s one of the things I like best about being a rabbi. I’m never bored. The work is full of surprises and challenges. I meet interesting people, and being rabbi is an entryway into somebody’s life. I feel very privileged to do that.”

If the rabbinate didn’t come naturally to her, tikkun olam (repairing the world) did. Rabbi Lederman grew up in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, in a family active in social justice causes. Her father, now retired, worked for the Canadian environmental protection agency.  Her mother, a psychologist, works with the prison system, dealing with the rehabilitation of sex offenders.  Her brother, Mathew, is a musician in Montreal.

When she was a child, her family attended an Orthodox synagogue but switched to Conservative so that Esther could become a bat mitzvah. “Of course, it wasn’t yet quite egalitarian,” Rabbi Lederman recalled.  “As a girl, I couldn’t chant from the Torah or even have an aliyah—I chanted Haftarah.”

She developed her joy in Judaism at summer camp sponsored by Habonim, the progressive labor Zionist organization.

Indeed, after she graduated from McGill University in 1996 with a major in political science and Middle East studies, she went to work for Habonim, becoming national youth director. From Habonim, she came to Washington to work for the Israel Policy Forum. And that’s when she consulted the career counselor.  “I was going through a kind of spiritual crisis,” she said. “There was no camp to go to anymore.”

Then she discovered Reform Judaism. She moved to New York and took a job with the Commission on Social Action, the New York office of the Washington-based Religious Action Center, the social-justice lobbying arm of the Union of Reform Judaism.

“I was blown away by the rabbis there,” Rabbi Lederman said. “They were very social-justice minded.  They engaged with the world. They were concerned about health care and poverty and other policy issues.  These were my kind of Jews!”

She finally got her first aliyah in Israel in her mid-20s. “I was moved to tears, reaffirming for me my choice to live life as a religious and liberal Jew. It was a spectacular moment,” she said.

During her three-year tenure at the commission, she gradually decided that maybe the rabbinate was for her after all. She was accepted at Hebrew Union College in New York in 2003 and went to Jerusalem for her first year of seminary studies. That was the third time she had spent a year in Israel. Between high school and college she worked on a kibbutz near the Lebanese border, then spent her junior year of college in Tel Aviv. “So I’ve had three very different kinds of experiences in Israel,” she said.

At Temple Micah, Rabbi Lederman said she is looking forward to becoming part of a well-rounded community.  “I like having fun. I like to bake. So I love to host parties,” she said. “I like having people laughing and eating and drinking.” She also enjoys travel, reading and “time outside. I’m a real nature lover.”

She does yoga—“it quiets my mind”—and she is enthusiastic about sports. “But I’m from Canada, so hockey was our game,” she said. “However, Rabbi Zemel has set up a whole baseball curriculum for me.” She said she hopes to become conversant in baseball as she learns to fit into the overall Micah community.