Rabbi Irwin Keller
A Long Wait
I was in 3rd grade when I knew I wanted to be a rabbi. For more than a half century I have danced around that desire. When, as a 22-year old, I began to apply to rabbinical school, I had just come out of the closet and no rabbinical school in the U.S. would accept openly gay applicants. The common wisdom was to lie. But lying felt deeply out of integrity in the pursuit of such an intimate spiritual calling.
So I let it go. And got called into service elsewhere. Because there was an epidemic unfolding, full of loss and demand. I became a street activist and a legal advocate. I ran an HIV legal service organization in the San Francisco Bay Area. And then to temper the sadness and intensity of that work, I co-founded a drag a cappella quartet called The Kinsey Sicks. I spent 21 years writing and singing and touring as Winnie, the den mother of the group, who would shamelessly tell stories about Shemini Atzeret on stage, blithely unaware that no one in the audience understood.
Life unfolded. I became part of a family that formed around deep friendship and shared intentions. We were (and are) four adults raising two children, living together on the land.
Over all those years, I continued to read and study, including attending an amazing weeklong intensive with ALEPH, taught by Reb Marcia, Reb Elliot, and Reb Zalman in 2004. For a moment I thought, “Hmm. Maybe.” But I was touring for a living and couldn’t go back to school at the same time. I finally said goodbye to the thought of the rabbinate – I grieved; I said kaddish.
But then the little synagogue I had joined – Congregation Ner Shalom in Cotati, California – lost its rabbi. And in the chaos that followed, I volunteered to lead high holy days. I brought my years of longing to this moment. I brought my music, my love of the liturgy, my lifetime of happy Judaism, my desire to feel the Divine, and my experience of being an outsider. It struck a chord with the congregation, and the Board of Directors asked if I would come on staff; they would drop their rabbinic search.
Since 2008 I have served as Ner Shalom’s Spiritual Leader, and it has been the most fulfilling work of my life. I am grateful to the leadership and the ever-growing roster of creative, soulful congregants who have encouraged me and found their own Jewish empowerment alongside me. This is my community and I bring them with me into this smicha. We are all experiencing this energetic shift together.
Despite having taken on the role of Reb Irwin at Ner Shalom, I was still not quite ready for rabbinical school. I was holding tight to my lifelong identity as an outsider. At last, after the death of my mother in 2013 and my retirement from the Kinsey Sicks in 2014, space opened up in my life. And then suddenly, and with force, the call returned: to go to rabbinical school – to be learning, labbing, preparing, deepening. At last I said “yes”.
I am now receiving my smicha at age 60. I read the gematria of 60 as כלי (kli), meaning “vessel” (this word is also an element of the Divine name called the Name of 72, and is seen as the triad of letters synecdochically representing the entire powerful and lengthy name). In this year of being 60 I hold the intention to be a clearer and more capacious vessel for the Divine, carrying out whatever work, whatever deployment, is before me, as powerfully as my abilities allow.
Gratitude
I am grateful and humbled to be receiving my smicha from the ALEPH Ordination Program – to be part of Reb Zalman’s lineage, to be my teachers’ student and my peers’ colleague.
I could not have reached this day without the patience and support of my astonishing husband, Oren Slozberg. Or my co-parents, Anne and Suegee Tamar-Mattis. I am grateful to my sister Lynn Keller for always – always – making me think I could do anything. I am grateful to be family with Lynn’s partner Sue Draus and my brothers-in-law Elon Slozberg and Doron Hovav who crossed oceans to plant themselves solidly in our lives. I thank our kids – Ari and Squid – for learning to swim like otters in the many currents of our big queer family’s interests and loves and values.
More and more in my life I am aware of the ancestors and guides who populate my dreams and whose touch I always feel at my back. I am grateful for their company and contact.
I arrive at this moment carried on the wings of Congregation Ner Shalom. I have never been part of such a heart-filled creative community, and I am grateful for your love and support. A special thank you to my close counselors, Shari Brenner and Shoshana Fershtman, without whose important encouragement I might not have done any of this.
I am grateful to my fellow stewards of the Taproot Program for pushing me to dig deeper and find gifts I hadn’t yet had the confidence to bring forth.
I am grateful for the depth of care I have received from my mashpiot, Rabbi Shohama Wiener and Reb Shulamit Fagan. I am grateful to my classmates in the AOP, especially my study partners Rabbi Amy Pessah, Rabbi Caryn Aviv, and Rabbi Shir Yaakov Feit. Much love and thanks to the folks who were mentoring me before I chose to enter the program: Rabbi Eli Cohen, Rabbi Eli Herb, Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, and Cantor Cory Winter.
And finally, I have more gratitude than any gematria calculator could measure to my teacher, rebbe and friend, Rabbi Elliot Ginsburg. I would not have been in this program without your encouragement, and I have been blessed and inspired to spend these years (and G-d willing more to come) witnessing your God-filled, joyful neshomeh and intricate mind close up.
In Memoriam
How strange to be at this milestone only after my parents are no longer here to physically share it with me. Marilyn and Jerry Keller were remarkable people – musical and funny and loving. They embraced both their children’s unexpected life journeys with enthusiasm and defiance. I wish you all could have known them. My mother’s yahrzeit is tonight, beginning right during our smicha ceremony. I hold both my parents here with me today. May their memory and their presence be a blessing.
Photo: Chime Costello
I have been lucky and blessed in my life to grow up with many fine Jewish teachers. From age 5 until this year the most important one was Rabbi Mark S. Shapiro of Congregation B’nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim in Glenview, Illinois. He encouraged me at every turn; he placed opportunities in front of me; he wrote me letters (mostly in Hebrew) no matter how old I was; and he was always happy to read the sermons I’d post on my blog and tell me how proud he was of me. His death this August, on the same day that we lost our classmate, Reb Sarah Tauber, was a hard blow. I am today wearing his tallit, loaned by his family, so that I can feel his presence in the fullest way possible. I am part of his lineage too.
Where You Go I Will Go
In my Senior Teshuvah, submitted to the ALEPH Ordination Program, I explore the ritual and symbolic possibilities in Ruth’s Oath to Naomi when used as a wedding vow for same-sex (and other non-traditional) marrying couples. Click the button to download and read it.
A Spectacle of Love
I gave this TedX Sonoma talk in 2017 about the San Francisco same-sex weddings of 2004, and how they changed America – and me. This experience feeds not insignificantly into the “Where You Go I Will Go” teshuvah linked above.
Adonai Ori
I sat vigil on a Thursday night in August, as my childhood rabbi, Mark S. Shapiro, and my classmate, Rabbi Sarah Tauber, were both dying. This is the song that came to me, using the words of Psalm 27, our companion text for the month of Elul.
Between the generations.
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