Tompkins Weekly

Temple Beth El hires new rabbi



Rachel Safman with her daughter Talya. Safman is the new rabbi at Temple Beth El in Ithaca, taking over for longtime rabbi Scott Glass, who retired last year. Photo provided by Marjorie Hoffman.

Last year, Scott Glass, longtime rabbi at Temple Beth El in Ithaca, retired. After months with an interim rabbi, the temple finally has a new, permanent rabbi: Cornell alumna Rachel Safman.

Safman, a native of the Washington, D.C., area, grew up in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She attended Harvard University and spent considerable time abroad as an exchange student in Asia conducting research on the AIDS epidemic in Northern Thailand. Her travel ignited an interest in international development, which she studied for her Ph.D. at Cornell University.

After spending about a decade in the Ithaca area from the early ’90s to early 2000s, Safman took a position at the National University of Singapore as an assistant professor of sociology, where she got very involved in various leadership positions in the Jewish community.

“As an outgrowth of those involvements and my increasingly time-demanding role in the Jewish community, I kind of set for myself a test,” Safman said. “I was going to give myself a year before submitting my 10-year package to determine if I was going to remain – in which case, I would have to scale back my involvement in the Jewish community – or if I was going to jump ship, so to speak, and go into the rabbinate. And obviously, that was the path that I followed.”

She returned stateside in 2008 to attend rabbinical school at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, which she completed in 2013. That same year, Safman took on the position of rabbi at Congregation Beth El in New London, Connecticut, a position she held until becoming the new rabbi at Temple Beth El in Ithaca.

As Safman explained, this wasn’t her first interaction with the temple.

“I was active already as a preteen, as a teenager and even through my undergraduate and graduate education days,” Safman said. “I was the leader in the campus Jewish communities. I was a participant in the life of Temple Beth El for the last few years, when I was living in Ithaca, and didn’t envision that that was going to be my vocation.”

All along her journey, Safman’s approach to the Jewish faith remained centered around a belief in “universal truths.”

“It’s not a matter of I happen to prefer that you don’t steal, but somebody else might prefer that people do steal, and they’re equally good,” Safman said. “I believe that the universe itself has the thumbprint of our creator woven into its inner fabric and that that does define that there are some absolute rights and wrongs and that they again stem from a certain divine origin.”

And that impacts another strong belief that humans are meant to use the tools we have to affect positive change in the world.

“We are gifted both with the intellectual and spiritual acumen as well as the physical means to affect tremendous change in the world around us,” Safman said. “We’re intended to use our powers of discernment guided by a moral logic that we in our community learn through our scriptural and rabbinic traditions to point the world in a more perfect direction.”

When it comes to her style of leadership, Safman said she consistently keeps an open mind while being a listener and a companion for people as they walk through “their own individual journeys.”

“I happen to have been gifted a rich corpus of spiritual traditions and of rabbinic wisdom that people have been cultivating over a matter of thousands of years and that I’ve had the opportunity to study in depth and try to use that as a toolkit not just for my own life, but to share with others,” Safman said.

That approach shone through when Temple Beth El was looking for a new rabbi, helping the search committee decide on her for the position. As David Weiner and Linda Aigen, co-presidents of Temple Beth El, agreed, Safman’s personality was practically magnetic.

“She has a tremendous amount of energy,” Weiner said. “She has a young family, but she’s managing to balance all the balls in the air right now that are going to be required of a rabbi. I find her very, very accessible. The more I work with her, the more I like her.”

Aigen added that Safman was the answer to a lot of uncertainty caused by Rabbi Glass’s retirement.

“I knew it would be a huge shift for our synagogue,” Aigen said. “In any community of people, you have a wide spectrum of feelings and needs. And I didn’t know how we were going to find one person that was going to suit everybody coming in to fill Scott’s position. So, I feel like we really lucked out with Rabbi Safman because she seems like she’s going to work out really well.”

While there are always adjustments in taking a new position, Safman is tasked with becoming the new rabbi at a synagogue rocked by COVID-19. Aigen and Weiner explained that Temple Beth El follows rabbinical law, which has very strict requirements when it comes to the use of technology in the synagogue. So, adjusting for an unprecedented pandemic was challenging, to say the least.

“We were sort of forced to really embrace platforms like Zoom so that we could just keep functioning as a synagogue and be able to have meetings and be able to deal with whatever,” Weiner said. “I think the congregation has responded in a very positive way, though, and we’ve been able to do it.”

Safman has hit the ground running with her position despite COVID-19 challenges. A mother of three, Safman, and her 6-month-old Talya, are spending time back in the Ithaca community that she loves, while her husband, mother and two sons are in New London. Safman is getting to re-know the community, she said, and she’s glad to be back.

Safman said while she has great admiration and respect for Rabbi Glass, her approach to the role will be a bit different than his.

“If he’s with a rabbinate that required the rabbi to, in many ways, be the repository of so much of the community’s knowledge and ideas and pioneering thinking and goal setting, mine is a generation that likes to work collaboratively,” she said. “Mine is a generation that believes that their way to the truth scattered amongst all of us in the world are most powerful when we collect those sparks and bring them together into synergy.”

After COVID-19 exacerbated societal issues already causing isolation for many, Safman said many of her goals involve decreasing that sense of isolation and helping to bring the Jewish community together.

“One of Judaism’s core values is the preservation of life,” Safman said. “I can’t bring people together at the risk of people’s physical well-being. So, we’re exploring even as we speak with the people in our community what it means for us to come together through virtual networks.”

Her three main goals are: bring the community together to rebuild some bonds worn down by social isolation, take on larger projects tackling issues like racism and attract younger generations to the synagogue.

Safman, Aigen and Weiner all have their sights set on September, the month of Jewish high holidays Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, to try to figure out a way to have the community come together in a way that’s safe for everyone involved.
For now, Safman offered some advice for those feeling the weight of the pandemic: acknowledge the loss and sadness.

“There’s value in an optimism, but not an optimism that denies the challenges of your reality,” Safman said. “And if you don’t allow yourself to feel and acknowledge that the current circumstances are rough, then you are disempowered in taking on those challenges and grappling with them meaningfully. If there’s no problem, there’s no problem to be solved.”

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