From "Pumps at the Pulpit"
Minnesota Women's Press
December 1, 2004

"Awomen instead of amen"

Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman, senior rabbi at Temple Israel, a reform synagogue in Minneapolis, is conscious of shared leadership. In fact, shared leadership is just one of the ideas she credits women for bringing to the rabbinate since the first female was ordained in the Reform tradition in the early 1970s. “I abide by the basic belief that men and women are different.” She explained. “What women have brought into the rabbinate since 1972 is a return to healing, a return to spirituality, and the idea that leadership is a collaboration. They have brought a collaborate style of leading.”

Temple Israel is a large Jewish community of some 2,000 families. With that many members, the congregation needs three rabbis to keep up with the workload, but Rabbi Zimmerman doesn’t flaunt her title as senior rabbi. “Nobody should be in the back,” she said. “With a collaborative style of leadership, with valuing differences, no one just assumes leadership.”

It has to do with how you define success.” She added. For her, success is not solely defined by her career. She guards her day off; it’s a day she reserves for home and family. When her father needed medical help this past fall, she took a week off to help him, and she did it without batting an eye or worrying over the course the temple would take.

“If a staff member needs to be away, we fill in,” she explained. Everyone’s sanity and peace in their own lives allows them to carry on here. We have to care for ourselves. This is a demanding enough job, and in some ways I feel that’s part of my role here, to care for the staff and make sure they are taking care of themselves.”

“Women rabbis, I think, are trying to affect change, affect healing, affect balance,” Zimmerman added. “Healing doesn’t mean a cure. It’s about centering and find a psychological balance.”

Within the rabbinate, a balance in leadership between men and women needed to happen in its own time, Zimmerman stressed, and not be forced. That way, when change comes, she said, “the kind of women who bubble up are ready to take those top roles. And those women don’t let the title define them, they begin to redefine the title. It takes time, patience, understanding. But it must happen on its own. That way it becomes a real part of the system.”

“Did I ever imagine myself as senior rabbi?” she asked. “Never! And that’s what makes it all the sweeter. When I first became a rabbi, I was always the first woman in that position. But the women ordained today are following women.”

And as more women join the rabbinate, there has been a return to a multitude of female voices in the Torah that have long been brushed aside. Zimmerman pointed to Tzipporah, the first woman to circumcise her son, and Yael, a female warrior, as examples of ancient women that young Jewish students, both boys and girls, learn about today. “Those voices,” Zimmerman said, “have now become the norm.”

Strong, leading Jewish women have so much become the norm that a couple years ago, a young girl asked Zimmerman a question she had never been asked before: “Why do we say ‘amen’ and not ‘awomen’?