A Jewish Woman of Color Reads “Heart of a Stranger”
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl understands the assignment: to offer her story in memoir form, along with nuggets of the Jewish spirituality available from her pulpit at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. In my mind, Central Synagogue is as close to a megachurch as Judaism gets: ultra-palatable and perfectly packaged. Heart of a Stranger offers up repurposed sermons, long melodic sentences, and a collection of tidy vignettes with lines carefully toed. Reading it felt like having a Rosh Hashanah that lasts the whole week long.
There are some incredibly wise insights and soul-healing offerings from Buchdahl’s Torah and from her life. Yet I’m curious: What’s not in the book? What won’t she say? Buchdahl’s position at Central means that she doesn’t have the luxury of unvarnished writing the way that other writers might. To her credit, Buchdahl gives us a front-row seat to the major turning points in her journey to and through rabbinical school and her rise through the ranks. She was better known as Cantor Buchdahl when she first came to Central Synagogue. Beginning her tenure as a cantor gave the “good liberals” at Central Synagogue plenty of opportunity to get accustomed to her beautiful Korean face on the bimah every Shabbat and holiday.
It’s hard for me to see how a [compatriot? sister?] Jewish woman of color becomes the head rabbi of the largest synagogue in New York City without a nice stretch in an adjacent position like that of the synagogue’s cantor. Time after time, we see Jewish institutions asking Jews of Color to remain at the sidelines. Rabbi Buchdahl takes her place; center stage and mainstream. She writes bluntly about how her rise to Central Synagogue’s top spot offended the sensibilities of people invested in a narrow definition of Jewish identity; this is a highlight of the memoir.
Her childhood is another; she’s the product of two loving parents from very different cultures, which made for a very interesting upbringing. Her sister, Gina, left Jewish faith and practice in adulthood, a story that’s all too common for many Jewish youth of color. The most poignant moment of the book is when young Angela is herself faced with the idea of leaving Judaism. These moments are hallmarks of what it means to be a Jew of Color in America.
Buchdahl’s Korean-Buddhist mother supported and participated in Jewish traditions and has probably attended more synagogue events than the average American Jew. Serving as the book’s comic relief and feminist icon, Buchdahl’s mother was the first in the family to graduate from college. In 1950s Korea, there was a taboo against the union she entered into with the Jewish-American serviceman who led the English language practice groups.
Buchdahl’s mother never officially converted to Judaism but incorporated parts of her white Ashkenazi husband’s culture into home life. The maror on their Seder plate was often kimchi, spicy fermented Napa cabbage. Even her Buddhist- inspired teachings like “Be one with the mountain” evolved into “Hashem echad” (G-d is one).
Her father, having generations-deep roots in Tacoma, Washington, made sure to immerse his children in Jewish institutions and stayed connected to the Jewish people socially. Images honoring the memory of Buchdahl’s ancestors on the walls of their synagogue anchored her within local Jewish history. By providing young Angela opportunities for song leadership, her father’s synagogue was the perfect incubator. It provided the legitimacy, position and belonging that she came to need once she finally left to encounter a Jewish world which was not as welcoming. But by then, the inner core had been formed and the wind would just have to blow around her.
Rabbi Jacqueline Koch Ellenson, a feminist pioneer of Women of the Wall, an organization fighting for women to pray with tefillin and Torah scrolls, invited Buchdahl, then a Yale student, to prayers at the Kotel. The thinking that passionate feminists don’t care about religion couldn’t be further from the truth. Buchdahl’s account of her experience with Women of the Wall emphasizes their fluency in Hebrew and traditional liturgy. She writes, “I joined in (the Shema) a little too loudly, trying to assert my place in the group.”
I have also sung too loudly, letting others know that I, as a Jew of Color with fledgling Hebrew, belong.
Like every engaged Jew with a modern life, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s relationship to stricter Jewish observance is complicated. In Heart of a Stranger one moment an esoteric tradition is scoped and scoured for deep insights while a few chapters later, a halachic restriction is dismissed as an annoying quirky inconvenience. Yet Buchdahl has the historical and cultural context to actually make these decisions with the degree of information they deserve.
What’s most important, given the wide readership and success of the memoir, is that Buchdahl describes how it feels to grow up as a Jew of Color in the United States. While I am Black and she is Korean and roughly 15 years older than I am, our childhood struggles with belonging rhyme perfectly. Surprisingly little has changed for Jewish kids of color because these systemic problems, which form in childhood, keep getting cast as the character flaws of individuals instead of as institutional projects. Initiatives like the Shalom Curriculum Project that teach kids about Jewish diversity are crucial to changing the stories of the next generation. No child of color should need their parent to be the rabbi of the synagogue to feel at ease with their Jewish identity.
Shoshanna McKinney Kirya-Ziraba is the founder of Tikvah Chadasha Uganda and a writer focused on Jews from diverse backgrounds.
