Hear, O Israel

Rabbi Darby Leigh: Winding road to rabbinate.

by Carolyn Slutsky
Staff Writer

While he was traveling the country on a tour bus as a working actor, dreadlocks cascading down his back, becoming a rabbi was the farthest thing from Darby Leigh’s mind.

But last weekend Leigh became the first deaf rabbi ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and one of the only hearing-impaired rabbis in the country, a milestone that points to the increasing diversity being found within all pockets of Judaism today.

That milestone was cemented at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, which last weekend ordained its first deaf rabbi in 15 years, William Tepper, since Rabbi Rebecca Dubowe became the first deaf woman ordained in 1993.

Steve Brenner, president of the Washington Society of Jewish Deaf, believes the

Jewish community’s openness toward hearing-impaired people has improved.

“The acceptance/inclusion of Jewish Deaf by the Jewish community has been progressively [better] since 1990 when the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) was signed,” said Brenner in an e-mail message. “More and more local Jewish agencies are providing interpreters for lectures and meeting. The same thing applies with synagogues ... [that are] more empathetic to the needs of Jewish Deaf people.”

Brenner adds that deaf Jews often have trouble communicating with hearing members and clergy at synagogues and that, among other challenges, few educational opportunities exist for deaf children or adults, all factors that can keep them away from organized synagogue life.

Darby Leigh’s life has been a study in transcending those barriers. After graduating from the University of Rochester, Rabbi Leigh worked with the National Theatre of the Deaf, a touring company whose main audience is hearing and in which he performed all around the country, including Off-Broadway.

Life on the road can be a spiritual one, and Rabbi Leigh added Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and other works by Beat writers to his reading list cultivated as a comparative religion major, where he studied Eastern practices, the Koran and African tribal religions — everything, it seemed, but Judaism.

“I’m a lifelong truth seeker, interested in questions of truth and meaning, why we’re here and if our daily life is the totality of the universe or if there’s something else going on.”
Now 35, Rabbi Leigh has been deaf since birth, and his parents, also deaf, enrolled him in speech and listening therapies from the time he was an infant until, at 16, he felt he no longer needed it. Consequently he speaks with just a slight accent, lip-reads fluently and knows American Sign Language, allowing him to move easily between the deaf and hearing worlds.

Eventually, in his younger life, the appeal of constant touring wore thin, and he returned to New York. After a stint as a social worker at the Society for the Deaf he began a master’s degree in religion at Columbia, and within two weeks of starting the program he says he knew he wanted to be a rabbi. He went through the application process with dreadlocks because it was important to be accepted for all the pieces of his past.

Dreads, he says, are perceived as a religious symbol, and years earlier when people asked about his hair enough times he decided he had a cultural responsibility to understand Rastafarianism’s roots, which he found could be traced to the Hebrew Bible. He read about the Nazarites, ascetics who renounced wine, grapes and haircuts, choosing instead to remain nazir, or separated, and felt instantly connected to the idea that there is a time in life when man should not be part of a community.

Learning about these connections, “the corners of Judaism that had yet to be illuminated for me,” he gave up thoughts of becoming a Buddhist monk and turned instead to the rabbinate, embracing the tradition he had learned as a child at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue.

“I’m a Jew, it’s in my blood,” he says, slapping his veins with his hand.

He was unfamiliar with Reconstructionism, but in his search for the right rabbinical school was often told his philosophy resembled a Reconstructionist approach to Judaism, and he remembers reading a book about the denomination, “sitting with a highlighter in my apartment in Park Slope going, ‘That’s me! That’s me!’”

A visit to RRC, which is located outside Philadelphia, confirmed that the school and its students and teachers felt like home, and the school has worked with him to pay for interpreters and get him the resources he needed to succeed and flourish.

In addition to the Reform and Reconstructionist movements, other denominations have programs targeting deaf Jews. “Our Way” is an Orthodox program for the deaf and hard-of-hearing established in 1969, and Ramah camps and other Jewish institutions also hold programs and try to make themselves accessible. Observers say public Jewish events, like High Holy Day services and rallies, have increasingly been interpreted and therefore accessible over time.

Rabbi Daniel Grossman, who is hard of hearing himself, started studying ASL as a student at RRC in the 1970s, eventually accepting a part-time position serving the Hillel at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester. He was among a group 30 years ago who tried to make Jewish life more accessible for the deaf by interpreting Jewish rituals and life cycle events, even helping to create a dictionary of Jewish signs like those for Hagaddah, tallit and rabbi.

Rabbi Grossman, who now serves at Adath Israel Congregation in Lawrenceville, N.J., a Conservative synagogue that includes some families with deaf members, says that there’s a difference between acceptance and welcoming of people with disabilities and differences, and that while the Jewish community accepts deaf Jews, there’s more it could do to welcome them.

“You’re dealing with a population who grew up without synagogue life because there were no interpreters. They’re just getting their feet wet, and synagogues need to understand that there’ll be times when they’ll hire an interpreter and no one shows up,” says Rabbi Grossman of the current generation of deaf Jews. “You have to be willing as a community to make a real commitment. Otherwise you’re sending out a teaser, and I think the deaf community has been burned by that often enough.”

And he faults some synagogues for not being as open to hiring interpreters and embracing deaf members as, say, many fundamentalist churches, which he says make a point of having interpreters there week after week.

For Rabbi Bill Tepper, 50, the road to the rabbinate was similarly winding. Rabbi Tepper earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in drama and spent 15 years as a high school drama teacher in Toronto, where he became increasingly involved in synagogue life.

Eventually, he says through a phone relay service, “I reached a point of no return, where it became very urgent for me to begin to share my Jewish self with others, to grow intellectually, emotionally and spiritually in the most Jewish way possible.”

Rabbi Tepper, who does not know ASL but reads lips (a skill he was able to transfer to Hebrew during a year studying in Israel), says his teachers and classmates at HUC were very accommodating and supportive of his need to sit near the front, be spoken to directly and get help taking notes.

“Hearing impairment is an invisible challenge, not like a person walking with a cane or in a wheelchair,” says Rabbi Tepper. “Unless you tell people you can’t hear, they simply don’t know.”

Rabbi Tepper feels that some segments of the Jewish community have been more embracing of diversity than others, reflected in the ways they worship, their customs, the accessibility of the synagogue building or the programming, and that no two communities are alike because no two people are alike.

This summer, Rabbi Tepper and his wife, Deborah, will move to Chattanooga, Tenn., where he will become the rabbi at Mizpah Congregation there.

Meanwhile, after five years of rabbinic study, he believes that whether deaf or different in some other way, the Jewish world should strive to accept all.

“It’s incumbent upon Jews to demonstrate compassion, understanding, be accommodating and give the best of themselves, not just to other Jews but to all people with whom we share God’s earth and our streets, parks, stores, schools and everything,” says Rabbi Tepper.

“The Jewish people have a responsibility to embrace and welcome, so every constituency, young, old, able-bodied and challenged, have access to the most meaningful Jewish experience, so he or she can live the most meaningful Jewish life.”

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, where Rabbi Leigh served as an intern, says the fact that he’s deaf is only one piece of who Rabbi Leigh is, similar to how her congregation, New York’s synagogue for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Jews, is a mix of individuals with many traits.

“We didn’t hire him because he’s deaf or despite the fact that he’s deaf,” she says, adding that CBST makes a point of having sign language interpreters at many of its largest services.

“In many deep ways there’s a profound connection between our community and Darby as a teacher. He understood gayness because of his experience as a deaf person in a hearing world, he understood the relationship of being a minority culture in a dominant culture.”

Rabbi Leigh hopes the next step on his journey will be as rabbi in a congregation, where he can help deaf Jews integrate into the community but also perform all the rabbinic functions — counseling and life cycle events and leading services — that he has been studying over the past six years.

“Being deaf is consciousness-raising: it’s a reminder that we’re all different people in the world, that diversity is a core value,” he says.

And he looks forward to, as it were, hearing from congregants for years to come.

“My ears may be broken,” he says, “but I make a great listener.”

The “Toward Inclusion” series thus far has reported on the community’s increased awareness of and funding for autism, and documentaries that deal with difference in Judaism.

Email: carolyn@jewishweek.org

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization