I’ve been waiting a long time for this opportunity—the opportunity to pay tribute to a cherished mentor and a dear friend, Rabbi Avi Winokur.
The annals of synagogue histories are replete with stories of contentiousness between Senior Rabbis and Rabbis Emeritus. Not here. Not with Rabbi Winokur. No one with his generosity of spirit nor genuine desire to see me and the synagogue succeed, no one with his pure sense of gratification at seeing others grow and flourish would be the source of that sort of disharmony.
We live in a world with perceptions of scarcity. We imagine other peoples’ successes diminish our own. Studies show that we frequently adjudge our happiness not simply by what we have, but by what we have in relation to those around us. If comparison is the thief of joy, then many of us have been robbed. We work so hard for our own successes and affirmations, that when others around us succeed we can’t help but feel a sense of deprivation. What about me?
Not so with Avi.
Avi is not a saint. None of us is. But his big-heartedness, his genuine empathy for the sorrows and joys of others around him, puts him as much in the running as anyone you’ll encounter.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. As many of you know, Avi’s and my relationship started long before our sharing the bimah here at Society Hill Synagogue, even if he remembers our origin story a little bit better than I do.
As many of you know Avi and my father Daniel were classmates at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in the late 1980s; Avi extended his time at RRC so he could study an additional year in Israel, so my father graduated in 1990 and Avi in 1991.
My father, unlike me, started rabbinical school married with children, so I was present for those years. I was present, in a sense, for Avi and my father’s chevrutah, their learning fellowship, in rabbinical school at an age not much older than my daughter Lila is now. In your memory book you’ll find a picture my mom submitted of five- or six-year-old me, with my sister and dad in Jerusalem, along with a couple classmates and an only slightly younger-looking Avi Winokur some 35 years ago.
After my father’s sudden death in 1990, the year he graduated from school, and Avi’s subsequent relocation to a pulpit at Shirei Shalom in Monroe, Connecticut, our families, through no fault of anyone, inevitably began to lose touch.
But fate had another chapter in store for us.
Flash forward some 23 years later and I’m back in Philadelphia attending rabbinical school at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, coincidentally, like Avi, having tried out the legal profession for a few years; I think I jumped ship even faster than he did.
It’s getting near the end of my first year of school, and I’m looking for an internship to get some work experience while in school, and, lo and behold, into my inbox filters the following job posting: the Kleinbaum Congregational Internship at Society Hill Synagogue in Center City Philadelphia. Now, you should know that “Kleinbaum” refers to Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, the nationally-renowned spiritual leader of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the world’s largest LGBT synagogue, who, by the way, also happens to be retiring this year, and who, by the way was also friends and classmates with my father and with Avi at RRC. A congregant of hers funded an internship in her name that would place RRC students at congregations looking for internship support.
The rest, as they say, is history. I applied for the position and here we are.
Only, tomorrow’s not promised. Just because we had a previous connection didn’t mean it was going to be a match made in heaven.
This is where I feel inspired to invoke the passover song, Dayenu, once again. Dayenu: that would have been enough, would have been plenty. If we had only had the opportunity to reconnect after all those years and had a meaningful reunion and not necessarily had the opportunity to work together. Dayenu. That would have been enough. That would have been blessing enough.
But we had the opportunity to work together. What a blessing that has been.
Now, if we had only had the opportunity to work together, but it had not blossomed into a nearly decade-long working relationship in which I had the tremendous opportunity to learn from him and succeed him as rabbi of society hill synagogue in a relationship that has involved mutual support and affirmation, dayenu. Working together a little bit would have been blessing enough.
But as you know, how I just described it— mutual affirmation, succession, operating on similar wavelengths—is exactly how it happened. What a blessing.
Still, had it just been a dynamic working relationship, filled with mutual respect and admiration, leading to a professional succession plan, and not blossomed into something beyond a working relationship—a friendship. Dayenu.
That type of special working relationship would have been more than enough.
But indeed, we are not just colleagues. We are friends. Close friends. I love you, Avi. And that doesn’t roll off the tongue for me.
Posthumously, my dad was awarded the levav chochma award by RRC, an award to rabbis who, during their lives, acted to better the Reconstructionist movement in keeping with its ideals. The name of the award comes from Psalm 90 verse 12 which says,
לִמְנוֹת יָמֵינוּ כֵּן הוֹדַע וְנָבִא לְבַב חׇכְמָה׃ Teach us to count our days rightly, that we may obtain a wise heart.
When I think of the phrase levav chcocma, wise heart, in addition to my father, I think of Rabbi Avi Winokur, because if you know Avi, you know that his heart is perhaps the central feature of his being; it’s his essence. The phrase “wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve” might as well have been concocted with Avi in mind. Only our synagogue President Carmen Hayman gives Avi a run for his money when it comes to the readiness of tears to flow at an auspicious, or even an everyday, occasion.
Avi’s heart has in some ways been the centerpiece of his rabbinate. We may think of him as an intellectual fellow; a former lawyer, someone who loves the intersection of contemporary law and Torah, someone for whom the scholar Robert Cover’s “Nomos and Narrative” is in many ways an urtext, wrestling with the notion of how mitzvah, commanded-ness, compares to our constitutional version. And we hope, if you haven’t already, you’ll contribute to the Rabbi Avi Winokur Legacy fund, which, among other causes help us raise money to fund a speaker series in his honor. There are envelopes in your memory book to help pay tribute to this intellectual legacy of his.
And yet to me, no quote better embodies Avi’s essence than from the teacher of teachers, who said so many beautiful things, Maya Angelou, when she famously said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Avi has a preternatural gift for impacting how people feel, especially helping people feel comfortable, at ease, accepted, and embraced, no matter the circumstances. My wife Caroline recalls a run of the mill congregational annual meeting we had a few years back, just prior to the pandemic, when some technical difficulties led to an awkward delay. Avi, who was sitting amongst other congregants at the time, and who had no responsibility for the technology or anything else happening at the front of the room at that moment, jumped up, without hesitation, to engage in some self-deprecating distraction for the restless masses.
There wasn’t a second thought about it. He had an instinct that the people up there who had to deal with the technology, ahem, me included, could use the spotlight turned away from them while they dealt with the problem, and so he jumped up to entertain the crowd.. No matter that he had to come off a little silly with his antics; that was his gift. He was gifted in that way, and it was his gift to us, helping us feel at ease.
It has become en vogue to talk about relationships in the context of building up synagogue life. What really helps synagogues thrive is an investment in relationships, contemporary textbooks will tell you. Coffee dates, schmoozing, just being together. Avi always got that, instinctively. If 80 percent of success in life is just showing up. Avi has shown up, again and again, to all the of the relationships in the life of the congregation.
Of course, he wouldn’t be able to show up in this way, if it weren’t for Susan Berman. As Caroline has also helped me understand, when you have young kids at home, or the incredible challenges Susan and Avi have faced raising their son Rafi, for a rabbi to be present to the 5-600 people in the congregation who need him requires real sacrifice on the part of his family, and especially his spouse. There would be no retirement celebration like this without Susan.
I consider Avi one of my best friends, in some ways a strange experience for me to have with one of my dad’s contemporary, but nonetheless true.
And, while there are some surface similarities in our profiles, we approach the job of rabbi at Society Hill Synagogue in dramatically different ways, and yet there is no doubt he is my rav—my rabbi.
עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב, וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר.
Appoint for yourselves a rabbi and obtain for yourselves a friend. How lucky am I that that person is one and the same for me. Thank you, Avi. Mazal Tov.
