The New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for Its Leader
By Stephen Fried
Bantam, 368 pages, $25.95.
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Qualifications for the perfect rabbi are commonly agreed upon but rarely attained. After rushing into a phone booth and changing into his cape before racing to the bima, our hero, according to the Rabbinical Assembly, should be "someone who attends every meeting and is at his desk working until midnight, someone who is twenty-eight years old but has preached for thirty years, someone who has a burning desire to work with teenagers but spends all his time with senior citizens, basically someone who does everything well and will stay with the congregation forever." Insights into the emotional process of hiring a new rabbi are at the core of a rare front-row seat provided by investigative journalist Stephen Fried in his third book, "The New Rabbi." Guided back toward faith by his father's death, Fried follows leaders at Philadelphia's Har Zion Temple through their agonizing and at times controversial search to replace their beloved Rabbi Gerald Wolpe. The 75-year-old Har Zion is no ordinary posting, and Wolfe is only the congregation's third rabbi. The Conservative temple has more than 1,400 families with seating for 3,000 people, a $4 million budget, a thriving gift shop and catering business, and the city's only three-day-a-week Hebrew school. Through Fried's exhaustive reporting, countless interviews and eloquent prose, the search for a new man with just the right amount of saykhel expands to a national examination of the ongoing struggle for the heart and soul of Judaism. In Har Zion's case, there is a valiant attempt to prevent the congregation from giving in to the pressures of a busy, secular life and becoming a marketplace religion. As Fried writes, "The new rabbi may have to choose between tradition and soccer moms."

— STEPHEN J. LYONS

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