The St. Louis Park native will serve the shul as assistant rabbi and director of lifelong learning
By ERIN ELLIOTT BRYAN / Community News Editor
Rabbi Jason Rodich describes the Minneapolis Jewish community in which he grew up as “profoundly transformational.” He and his family were members of Temple Israel, where he attended religious school, and he was inspired by the support he received during a sometimes difficult adolescence.
“I came out [as gay] at a young age. Public school wasn’t so great, but my youth group, my Jewish community knew how to wrap their arms around me. And it gave me a sense of what Jewish community could be like,” Rodich told the AJW. “I wanted more of it. I wanted to do that in my life. I wanted to build community that was like that.”
Rodich is now the assistant rabbi and director of lifelong learning at Shir Tikvah Congregation in Minneapolis. He is passionate about education, social justice and community organizing — all things he hopes to bring to his new position.
“For me, Shir Tikvah was a place that really matches my values, is building the kind of community that I want to not only have for myself, but I am excited to be here and roll up my sleeves and do that work with this congregation,” Rodich said.
Rodich attended the St. Louis Park schools from kindergarten through 10th grade, and graduated from the Perpich Center for Arts Education. He received his bachelor of arts degree in cultural studies from The New School for Social Research in New York City.
Following college, Rodich returned to the Twin Cities, where he worked with homeless and at-risk youth as a case manager and outreach worker for four years, first at the Bridge for Youth in Minneapolis and later at Face to Face Health and Counseling in St. Paul.
“It was during those years that I also started to think again about the rabbinate. I loved the work I was doing, but I wanted more than the social worker approach. I wanted to bring in the spiritual,” Rodich said. “I remembered the experiences I had as an adolescent and how transformational that had been for me, and I wanted to bring in that more holistic kind of way of being in the world. I also love my community and I wanted to serve it.”
Rodich also worked at the Minneapolis Jewish Federation on its annual campaign.
In 2009, Rodich began studying at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. Rodich lived in Jerusalem for a year, like all first-year Reform rabbinic students, with his now husband, Fran Benjamin, who grew up in Minnetonka.
“That was an amazing year for us,” Rodich said. “And also a year for me of really reconnecting to Israel and figuring out my relationship to Israel, a very powerful experience.”
At HUC, Rodich was awarded the Rubin Memorial Prize for Scholarly Writing and the Samson H. Levey Prize for Outstanding Student in Rabbinic Literature. He is also a recipient of the prestigious Wexner Graduate Fellowship for his rabbinical studies, which is how he first met Rabbi Michael Adam Latz, Shir Tikvah’s senior rabbi, and also a Wexner graduate.
And after his first year of rabbinic school, Rodich worked with Latz as an intern at Shir Tikvah.
Rodich and Benjamin later returned to Los Angeles, where Rodich served as the student rabbi of the rural Congregation B’nai David in Visalia, Calif., and later as the community organizing and social justice intern at Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles.
Rodich began his work at Shir Tikvah on July 14. He will spend his first year evaluating the congregation and building relationships with its members, as well as partnering with Latz.
“As a newly ordained rabbi, one of the most significant things that you’re looking for is mentorship,” Rodich said. “In many ways, the rabbi that you become is so grounded in your first senior rabbi. So that was an important choice for me and Rabbi Latz was a huge reason why I’m here.”
And Latz couldn’t be happier to welcome Rodich.
“The rabbinate can be a profoundly lonely business, even though we work with people all the time, because you care about something so much and you want everybody else in the community to care about it with you,” Latz said. “So when you have the blessing of trying to find a rabbinic partner to do this work, and you feel that someone is such a powerful match for who I am as a rabbi, for who this congregation is, who is brilliant and passionate and compassionate and an inspiring teacher and who lives Judaism in everything that he does, it was obvious to us — and a privilege that [Rodich] wanted to work with us, too.”
Latz said Rodich is willing to grapple with tough decisions and to put in the necessary work to build a holy community in a changing Jewish landscape.
“Fifty years ago, when Jews all married other Jews and lived in Jewish neighborhoods and Jewish women stayed home to raise their Jewish children and Jewish men went off to Jewish businesses and they had Jewish friends, religious school and Hebrew school served a very important purpose,” Latz said. “Today, when half of our families who show up — who are joining a synagogue, thank God — either weren’t raised Jewish or aren’t Jewish themselves and they turn to us as partners in raising the next generation of Jews, we can’t simply supply them with the answers that worked two generations or a generation ago.”
Synagogues, Rodich said, need to become “adaptable organizations as a permanent feature of who we are.”
“We have a community full of people who are hungry for deeper meaning, deeper spirituality, deeper substance in their lives, and we have an opportunity and an obligation to go there together,” Rodich said. “People’s lives are constantly changing, the lives of our communities are not static. And the lives that we’re living right now are so chaotic and so crazy, so often lacking in real spiritual depth and meaning, that the challenge to provide that is even greater and more urgent.”
And moving forward, Latz said the “gift and the challenge of the future is that we don’t know how it’s all going to roll out.”
“The best you can do is try and root yourselves in a tradition that offers a brilliant voice of conscience for how to behave as a human being and what you have to offer, and to find people who are willing to roll up their sleeves with you and do this avoda, this sacred work,” Latz said. “No matter how it unfolds and rolls out, to have that partnership is really a tremendous gift in life.”
(American Jewish World, 8.1.14)
