In honor of his Yahrzeit, I share with you now wisdom from the original Rabbi Kahn. Enjoy!

The Faithful Shepherd

A sermon by "the first" Rabbi Kahn - Rabbi Robert I Kahn

Delivered at the Ordination Ceremony at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

Cincinnati, Ohio in 1960

Dr. Glick, members of the graduating class of 1960, and friends, this is a wonderful privilege which is mine tonight. What rabbi in his dreams of his career would not include just such a moment? And when Dr. Glick advised me some time ago that the faculty and Board of Governors had awarded an honorary doctorate on the silver anniversary of semicha, dayenu! But then when he added to it later an invitation to speak this Consecration sermon, my cup ran over.

And my pleasure and my privileges doubled and re-doubled by the fact that many of you are not strangers to me. Many of you I came to meet and to know when I was here on the campus two or three years ago. Two of you are among my very own. I’ve known the Frank family since the first day I came to Texas. I had the privilege of Confirming Emmit, who serves with distinction and with courage in Alexandria, Virginia. And I’ve come to know Bernard and his wife very well in these last few years.

And as for Robert Samuels, I can’t remember when I didn’t know him. I taught him his alef bet, blessed him at his bar mitzvah, talked with his grandmother in the corner about this day, blessed him again at Confirmation and at marriage, and I’ve shared the family’s simchas and sorrows all through the years. And I could not wish for any of you who are fledgling rabbis any more wonderful privilege than raising unto yourselves disciples like these.

I stand here and I feel memories flood in. This beautiful city was for eight years my residence, this college for eight years my home, this chapel for eight years my synagogue. And how often I sat in these pews, and how many sermons I listened to from this pulpit, and how much growth of my spirit and my soul took place within these four walls.

It’s good to see again the familiar faces of classmates and school mates, of those who were and always will be my teachers, Dr. Glick, Dr. Marcus and others. And to remember with reverence those whose faces are no longer here, Kohan, Betton and so many others, zichrono livracha, who gave the unique stamp of their personality to this institution.

But most vivid of all the memories I have is standing up on this pulpit and feeling Dr. Morgenstern’s hands upon my head in the act of ordination. I can close my eyes and feel again the sense of living power as though my soul were a lamp and he turned on the switch, as though from him and through him there came a power from the ages, as though the hands of Wise and of Kohler of Rashi and Rambam and Akiva and Moses all were laid upon my head, demanding of me that I seek to live by the highest and the truest of the rabbinic tradition. Somehow I could hear a voice cry, “Who will go? And who shall I send?” And something in me responded, as something in you will respond this weekend, “Hineni sheloheini, here am I. Send me.”

To what is it that you who graduate this weekend are called? What is the vocation for which God has chosen you? What is the purpose for which Dr. Glick ordains you? What is the character of this vocation which you have chosen and for which in the mysterious realms of the spirit you have been chosen? Are you ordained to be kohein, a priest? Called to be navi, prophet? Given a degree to be moreh, teacher, pedagogue? All of these and more.

A rabbi is, of course, in a way a priest. He performs ecclesiastical functions, he leads worship, he officiates at funerals, he conducts weddings. And in the eyes of his people, he is a priest, too, a sort of surrogate of God. But we disclaim this. We insist with all our might that there are no ecclesiastical castes, no channels through which someone must go to God. But in our people’s hearts there are. A little child will come home from your religious school and say, “I saw God today. He wore a black robe and he smiled at me.” A man sitting beside his cancer-doomed wife will accuse you with his finger and say, “You’re a man of God. Why?” A rabbi is a priest, and then of course he is a prophet, or if not touched by the prophetic fire, at least a ben navi, who seeks to walk in those giant footsteps.

We are ordained to preach. We get our charter if no one else from Travers Herford, who said that rabbis are the legitimate successors and continuators of the prophetic tradition. And we will preach. We will preach personal righteousness. We will preach social justice. And we’ll make relevant the truths of Judaism to the marketplace and to the courthouse and to the ballot box. The word of God will be like a fire in our bones, and we will prophecy whether popular or no.

If the rabbi’s a prophet and a priest, then of course he’s also a pedagogue. To Isaac M. Wise this was the sole purpose of the rabbi. “The rabbi,” he wrote, “is a teacher. No more, no less.” And as a pedagogue, of course a rabbi administers the religious school, he teaches the Confirmation class and he stimulates people in adult education, he makes his pulpit a preaching pulpit. As a matter of fact, he teaches all of the time. Yoreh Yoreh it will say on your diploma—you might translate it as “let him teach continually.”

Yes, the rabbi is priest, prophet, pedagogue, and more. And it is this more, it seems to me, that gives unity to all the rest. For a rabbi plays many a role in a 24-hour period. He does many things in one day. He laughs, and he cries. He preaches, and he teaches. He goes from religious school to a bris to a funeral to a wedding. And what is it that could give unity to this varied and variegated life? What is it that gives it a single direction? To me that unity can be found, it seems, in the word “shepherd.” And we can find that word in the title we bear. For if we treat the Hebrew term rabbi as roshei tevos—as though the resh, beis, and yod were initials of three word—you come out with roeh bnei yisrael, shepherd of the children of Israel. And it is this role shepherd which gives unity to the rest of his life. It assumes the center of his being and his becoming.

Of course it’s a great tradition to be a shepherd. None of us has been shepherds, with sheep. Perhaps we’ve never even seen one. And yet somehow green pastures and quiet waters and valleys in dark shadow are part of the soul’s landscape. We know what it means. The Tanhuma suggests that the pasture was the testing ground for God, and there Amos, David and Moses passed the test. And the Midrash suggests that if Moses had not turned aside to find and rescue a little lamb that had walked away from the flock that he would not have been deemed worthy to be turned aside by the wondrous sight of a bush that burned without being consumed.

The rabbi is a shepherd and, like Moshe Rabbeinu, his life will be with his people. He will not stand on some high hilltop and point the way. He will not sit in some tall tower and commune only with God. And he will not lock his study door and bury himself in books. His life is with people, and he shares their every circumstance—when the sun is warm, he too is warm; when it rains, he too gets wet and cold. Whether in straight paths or in darkened valleys, whether in peaceful pursuits or like Alexander Good on a battleship, whether in the security of freedom or in like Leo Baeck in a concentration camp, his life is with people.

I don’t know whether you who are graduating understand this yet. You come in and out of people’s lives, you have intermittent contact, whether you’re on biweeklies or youth counseling, you touch them for a moment and then you’re gone. You are tangent to their circle. But the shepherd’s life is lived within the circle and in the dimension of time. And a flock can’t know it’s shepherd, nor a shepherd his flock, in a few months or even a few years. It’s a matter of decades.

A rabbi’s function is revealed best as the years go by and the youngsters he’s raised have youngsters in turn. It’s revealed in the times he stands by the deathbed of some patriarch whom he has come to love and admire as much as his own father. And he bears to its last resting place the broken body of a girl he confirmed and has been killed in an automobile accident, her shroud the wedding dress she would have worn. Or sits for hour after hour with the boy who loved her and would have married her. He’s revealed in the love that he has for the truant and for the wayward, and the patience he has with couples who in cruelty will spill out all of their family secrets in anger and try patiently and repeatedly to point out that duty is more important than romance.

A rabbi’s life, a shepherd’s life, is with people and the respect that he shows and the love that he shows every single member of his congregation, and those who aren’t members, too. A respect that goes with them throughout life in all of its beauty, in all of its terror.

It isn’t easy. And there are temptations. There are times when a congregation’s affection can turn the rabbi’s head and help him forget that he is creature and not creator, and that he too is sheep in God’s pasture. And sometimes in smugness and in complacency he begins to believe that people are put on Earth to admire him, and not he to serve people. Hoy roeh Yisrael asher hoyu roemosam. Woe to the shepherds who feed themselves and not their flock.

Now I’ve used the word shepherd deliberately rather than the word pastor, although pastor would have been more alliterative to pedagogue, priest and prophet. But I’ve used it because pastor connotes—these days, at least—the pastoral functions: the steady round of hospital beds, of homes, of office counseling. And it was not my purpose to proclaim that this is the only or even the major function of a rabbi’s life. Far from it. As someone has very cleverly said, you’re shepherds but not sheep dogs.

It is not only in counseling the grief stricken or helping the troubled that a rabbi shows his affection and love. It’s in every moment of his life in every aspect. If he is a real shepherd and a faithful shepherd, then what he does as priest, as prophet, as pedagogue takes on unity and takes on direction. A shepherd-priest, for example, needs no special pulpit voice, no unctuous habit. He does not pray at or for, he prays with people. He heeds the warning of the Zohar that the blessing of the priest is levatala, it is in vain if priest love not people and people love not priest. And when he officiates at some wedding or funeral, he is not the aloof professional but a close friend who shares the love that he blesses and the grief that he comforts.

And if he be a shepherd-prophet, he preaches but with tenderness and with compassion. Not like some bad-tempered Elisha who fought the bears to devour those who mocked him. And not some peevish Jonah waiting on a hilltop for the lightning to strike those whom he has denounced. He will preach—truly, deeply and urgently—but with affection, with knowledge of his people.

It’s much easier you know to orate, to pronounce and to proclaim. Then everybody who agrees with you tells you how courageous you are, and those who disagree growl a bit and that proves how right you are. But to win people? To move them, to lift them where they can see above their prejudices and beyond their vested interests and catch fire with an ideal that they have the ideal and the capacity for. It’s when a rabbi knows his people and the motives of their hearts and the problems in their lives. If they feel his respect and his affection, if they listen, they may even agree. And if they don’t agree, they don’t mumble about politics from the pulpit. They encourage him to speak and follow his convictions. Yes, if a shepherd loves his flock he can lead it to the high mountain pastures and let it feed on the heightened inspiration.

And then if the rabbi be a shepherd-pedagogue, he recognizes intuitively what modern pedagogy tells us, that we teach not subjects, we teach people. And he like Moses with that little lamb will be just as concerned about the boy who drops out of religious school as the one on the honor roll. And he will recognize that teaching is a hard job, that takes patience and time. Over and over he must teach by precept and by example, the vocabulary and the meaning of the vocabulary, the values as words and the values as truth. And it is not easy.

It is not easy to live with people, to live the rabbinate with people. It’s far easier to stand on a hill and point. Far easier to lock the door and study. Our people are demanding. I heard someone say that the Jewish congregation is more demanding of its ministry than any religious body in the world. As in the days of Moses, our people murmur. And there will be times when a rabbi’s family – and even his own physical health—take second place to some crisis lest the congregation of God be like sheep without a shepherd.

It isn’t easy. But oh so satisfying. Oh so rewarding is the psychic income of the shepherd in his real life is better than much fine gold. As he tries to lead, and succeeds in leading, to understand the words of the living God. And this task at once so difficult and so rewarding is brought into bold relief for me by an experience last fall when I saw the Broadway play The Miracle Worker. It’s the story of how Helen Keller was brought out of the dark silence in which she lived a selfish and self-centered and almost animal-like life into the light of understanding by her nurse Ann Sullivan. Magnificently acted, and beautifully conceived, it tells the story of how this nurse with a will of iron and a heart of gold managed to teach this child how to communicate, how to understand words. She used the alphabet of the deaf-mute, but because the child could not see the alphabet she spelled words out into her hands. She would have the child feel a doll and then spell out into the hand D-O-L-L over and over and so with other things. Water, house, porch, mother, father, love.

Helen Keller was bright and intelligent, as she could repeat or ape the gestures like a little monkey. But she never understood that these were the symbols of something, that there were relationships. And again and again, week after week and month after month, against every kind of obstacle, Helen herself and all her family, Ann Sullivan proceeded to repeat again and again doll, water, father, nurse, love.

The miracle took place in the very last scene. Helen Keller had her hands under a pump. The water was pouring out and suddenly she began to form the one word she had before disease robbed her of her sight and her hearing: water. And when Ann Sullivan sees that the time is right, she seizes the child’s hands, plunges them into the water and spells out W-A-T-E-R again and again and again, and suddenly, you see the light go on in these sightless eyes. This is a word! It means something! Helen Keller began to fling herself about the stage, running form object to object and coming back to learn. Water. Flower. Porch. Ground. House. Mother. Father. Love.

The miracle had taken place. And Helen Keller was begun on the road that led to the magnificent life that we all admire. And as I walked from the theater to my hotel that evening, bemused with beauty of this play, there suddenly came unbidden to my mind words from Scripture: My people have eyes but they see not. My people have ears but they hear not. Who will go, and whom shall I send?

And that night I recognized anew my purpose and your purpose. It is like Ann Sullivan who tried to work miracles in human hearts, to try to lead people to understand not just to give back on an examination in religious school. And not just to pray hypocritically, but to learn, to understand and to live by the words of our faith. Whether we be priest or pedagogue or preacher, as faithful shepherds we will try and seek to communicate the words by which our people have lived—for which they’ve died—the words that are the underpinning of our whole civilization.

Yes, the faithful shepherd if he love his people and live with them, yoreh he will teach with his lips and yoreh he will teach with his life. The words by which men live: torah, mitzvah, tzedakah, mercy, freedom, truth, love, God, peace. May he whom we describe as Soulmate bless your semikha and may the hands that are laid upon your head transmit to you the power to live fruitful lives as roeh bnei Yisrael, faithful shepherds of Israel.

The Faithful Shepherd

Rabbi Robert I Kahn

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