{Rabbi Eric Matthew Rosin} “My approach is often to show how Torah and Judaism are real and relevant for me, and I hope that congregants can translate that into their own lives. I’m very grateful to be doing this with my life — and very grateful to be doing it here.”

 

Rabbi Eric Rosin knew that he was going to be a rabbi from an early age.  As is often the case, however, he didn’t realize that he possessed this knowledge until his very late twenties.  He had grown up in a Reform household, but by the time he graduated from college, he had begun to move toward Conservative Judaism.

 

He was an active member of the Jewish community from his teen years through his college years, during which he majored in Judaic Studies at Yale.  He remained active in the Jewish communities in Washington, DC and Los Angeles in the years after college; in 1994 he found himself graduating from Law School and receiving a master’s degree in Communications Management from the University of Southern California.  After four years of a legal career in Los Angeles focused largely in the entertainment industry, devoting 80 grueling hours a week to crafting briefs, motions and depositions, he discovered that if he was going to spend most of his waking hours tied to his job, he needed to be doing something he was passionate about. He left the practice of law and began studying for ordination at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, the then-recently constituted Conservative seminary in Los Angeles. 

 

Rabbi Rosin soon realized that his knowledge of secular law was not particularly useful when delving into the intricacies of rabbinic texts. Far more useful has been his background as a mediator. Settling disputes helped him learn to really listen to people and delve into “what their interests, desires, needs and wants are.”

 

After ordination, Rabbi Rosin served for two years as the assistant rabbi of Temple Beth-El in Richmond, Virginia.  In the Fall of 2004, after two very fulfilling years in Richmond, Rabbi Rosin assumed the pulpit at Kesher Israel Congregation.

 

 

 

 

 

Jewish Exponent

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When I was in my last year of Rabbinical school, one of our Practical Rabbinics professor recommended that we read a book by the management expert, Peter Drucker entitled, Managing the Non-Profit Organization. Recently, I was thinking about one of the anecdotes that I believe I first read in that book.

 

Discussing ways that leaders can accurately gain information about their organizations from the perspectives of those whom they serve, Prof. Drucker relayed the practice of the Chief Executive Officer of a non-profit hospital. Each year, this executive would check himself into the hospital for two days in order to experience the intake and care procedures from the perspective of a patient. Imagine the contrast between an average day in the CEO’s professional life, dressed in his suit, looking through spreadsheets, meeting with colleagues, sifting through emails and speaking on the phone, and, on the other hand, two days confined to one of two beds in a shared room, suit replaced by a hospital gown and meetings replaced with random appearances by orderlies and medical staff bringing food and medication, taking blood and blood pressure and temperature readings. 

 

Prof. Drucker’s point was not that one way of gathering information about the health of the hospital was better than the other, but rather that both were vital.

 

This point came back to me last month during the process of conducting my grandmother’s funeral and spending shivah, the seven days after the funeral, with my family in Michigan. Because of the demographic make up of our congregation, I perform many fewer funerals than many of my colleagues. Nevertheless, I have met with many families in mourning, conducted many funerals, delivered many eulogies and visited many shivah houses since my ordination.
I’m not surprised that experiencing this process with my own family and after the loss of my own grandmother was different. I am surprised by how different it was and by the ways in which it was different.

 

Professionally, helping families through the funeral and mourning process is one of the most profound privileges of the rabbinate. It is an invitation into the life of a family when they are at their most vulnerable, when their feelings are closest to the surface and when they are reaching out to each other for love and support in the most pronounced and unselfconscious manner that will ever occur. Every rabbi feels the responsibility of stepping into such a charged milieu and the tremendous gift of a family’s trust under those circumstances. On more than one occasion since my arrival inWest Chester, I have had to pause during a eulogy, overcome with the depth of the loss and the beauty of the love which surrounds the death of someone whom we love. At my grandmother’s funeral, I stopped completely several times. Some of the liturgy simply wouldn’t come out. I finished chanting the Twenty-Third Psalm in little more than whisper, acutely and physically aware that my grandmother whom I loved lay in the casket behind me.

 

Usually when I conduct a funeral, I look out at the mourners and the community that has assembled to support them and I take great pride in the way that the members of Kesher Israel with whom I have gathered in happy times and sad times come together in order to be with each other in times of loss. At my grandmother’s funeral, I was surprised at how different it was to look out from the podium and to see my own immediate and extended family and all of the family friends whom I had known my entire life who were there to provide us with comfort.

 

And finally, during the days of Shiva, I was shocked by how different it was to be one of the people receiving condolences rather than being a well wisher who was offering them. I have often advised mourners during shiva to give themselves permission to leave the public rooms of the house in search of solitude if they need to. I had trouble doing so myself when my social instincts urged me to greet each guest and to listen to each story. (I also learned quickly to hear the comfort that people intended to offer instead of the actual words which they spoke, which were not always helpful.)

 

Over the course of my week in Michigan, I came to recognize in a very personal way both the value of the Jewish ritual practices which surround death and mourning and also that they do not free us from the pain of loss or make the experience easy. Instead, they place these difficult times in sacred and social contexts, helping us with words to express our grief and providing us with the presence of our friends and family to remind us even our pain takes place in a world that is still filled with others who love us. May the experiences of loss and grief in this community be few and far between.