My dilemma as a modern rabbi is how to answer the very modern question “What kind of rabbi are you?” I haven’t ever had a ready answer for that question. Last year at a synagogue in New York the rabbi (with whom I spent Shabbat) said to me “I thought you were Jewish Renewal until you told me that you don’t eat before you daven (pray) in the morning. Then I realised you were Orthodox.”

He got it wrong both times.

I let Jews and Judaisms merge deeply in me even as I make room for the “Other” also. I’m authentically Chasidic (spiritual/mystical) to Conservative Jews (who tend to be rational, scientific, and “mainline” about their Judaism), authentically Masorti (traditional Conservative) to Haredi (fervently Orthodox) Jews, and authentically a question mark to Jewish progressives, with whom I deeply identify, irrespective of whether they are spiritual or secular.

It’s a strange tension, one I think that is felt by Canadian Jews generally, the majority of whom were raised in progressive families until the 1960s. My mother was a so-called “Red diaper baby“, the child of communist parents, of whom there are many in the circles I grew up in. My mother was not a communist but I was raised with a Yiddishist culture instilled by the Peretz Shul (a leftist dayschool movement) in Winnipeg.

My father, unusually for Vancouver when he grew up there in the 1930s, was raised in a nominally observant home; my grandfather was one of the founding members of the local Conservative synagogue. Years later I discovered (to the extent one can discover anything about family in the post-Holocaust generation) that my grandfather was the grandson of a Polish Chasidic rebbe (inspired spiritual leader) in Cracow who was the son of a Turkish chacham (rabbi).

Can one be modern, liberal, and deeply traditional? Stay tuned to my posts at Tikkun Daily and find out. I’ll discuss that, and also other issues as they arise, in particular issues about Canada and Canadian Jews.