Another first for a black American: the female rabbi breaking down barriers
Alysa Stanton embarked on her own audacious journey. She spoke about breaking barriers, building bridges and providing, calling on people to focus on their similarities rather than differences.
Now that stage of her journey has reached its end, with Stanton attaining the distinction of being the first black woman in America to become a mainstream Jewish rabbi. History was made last week at her ordination in the Plum Street temple in Cincinnati, one of the oldest synagogues in the US.
Parallels leap out between her journey and Obama’s. She is 45, he 47. They both straddled racial and communal lines. They both faced hurdles and brickbats along the way.
In her case, her decision to enter rabbinical school in 2001 broke multiple taboos. On top of the age-old tensions between Christian — the religion of her birth — and Jew, were the bubbling hostilities between African Americans and largely white American Jews.
Even at the ordination ceremony the tensions were on display. Her adopted daughter Shana was reduced to tears by a group of white Christian protesters outside the temple taunting her and making disparaging remarks.
Last week Stanton received a letter. Inside was a tract that read “Last rite” above a picture of a coffin. “There are some sick puppies out there,” Stanton said, speaking at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati where she took her rabbinical studies. “But my God is bigger. I will not be boxed in.”
She spent the first 11 years of her life in the midwestern state of Ohio, then moved to Colorado. Her parents were Pentecostal Christians but from the age of nine she can remember looking for something else. “I was a seeker, a different kind of kid. I knew it, my family knew it.”
She experimented with many religions — Catholicism, eastern practices, Messianic Christianity where congregants speak in tongues. Though she spent some of her childhood living in a white Jewish neighbourhood in Cleveland Heights, her discovery of the religion came later.