This coming week marks 20 years since my ordination from JTS Rabbinical School.

In some ways, it feels like 50 years, in other ways, more like 20 minutes. Through the many good and few challenging moments, were someone to ask me to summarize these years and my role, I would offer the following statement: I am a marriage counselor.

Before you jump to any conclusion, allow me to explain.

The word to “marry”, in the less traditional sense, is connecting two concepts, ideas or things. I think that is what I (and most rabbis) do most often.

In no particular order, I marry Jewish people today to older customs, ancient laws, and timeless traditions. I help marry tradition and modernity.  I help marry Jewish people to a love of Zionism and the State of Israel. I try daily to marry people to meaning when they are lost and purpose when they are confused. In essence, rabbis facilitate connecting people and feelings and ideas. Rabbis marry memory and mourning to love, history, and perpetuity. I aim to marry our liturgy to a sense of modern value and meaning.

For me, personally, watching these marriages develop and mature and blossom over time into a deep love is the most rewarding part of my career.

Like all marriages, these connecting points are filled with peaks and valleys. Hopefully, there are many more peaks than valleys. As we say when we wrap the tefillin around our ring finger in the morning, We marry You, God, forever, in righteousness and faithfulness.

Rabbis might facilitate these “marriages” but ultimately, it is you, that consecrate and consummate the moments. That is where the holiness lives and the very reason I chose this career as my passion and path.

Thank you for being such a formidable part of my rabbinate. I have been blessed to stand under the proverbial Huppah with countless members of our community watching the marriages you have had to our people, our land, our history, and our future. Oh, how I look forward to many more years in good health of the very same.

Wishing you a Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner