Every Friday night at Central Synagogue in Manhattan, the sanctuary’s 1400 seats are–unusually given national trends–mostly filled for services. Additionally, approximately 50,000 people across the country and the world watch Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the synagogue’s senior rabbi, on livestream.
On the High Holidays, that number swells to almost a million with worshippers beaming in from more than 100 countries.
Buchdahl has recently published her first book, Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi’s Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging, which brings the qualities of her pulpit to each page, with profound results.
The multifaceted book is both a memoir and a spiritual guidebook. Each chapter is followed by a d’var Torah – literally, a word of Torah – that is, in effect, a mini-sermon, highlighting words such as attention, humility, tikkun, or repair. They carry the same dynamism, love, and care as their longer counterparts.
Buchdahl was born in Seoul and came to America with her Korean Buddhist mother and American Jewish father when she was five. They settled in Tacoma, Washington — her father’s hometown — and belonged to the synagogue where her father and, eventually, his daughters became b’nei mitzvah.
Early in the book, Buchdahl lays down a theme: the first time she felt like an outsider was in her small Jewish community. From that experience she writes that an outsider’s superpower is to “cultivate radical compassion for others who have been dismissed. We learn to press past the gatekeepers, turn exclusion into empathy, rejection into resilience. We stumble upon the blessings that come from inhabiting the heart of a stranger.”
Buchdahl’s Jewish joy began with her beautiful singing voice at the age of ten. She recalls, “When I sang Jewish music and prayer, I came alive and felt like God heard me. The sense of belonging was visceral, corporeal, through these melodies. I felt and witnessed an instantaneous community.”
It was also the beginning of a Jewish journey which took her to Israel for a summer at age sixteen on a prestigious Bronfman Fellowship. That summer, Jewish study enthralled her and the Talmud inspired her. She writes, “I was first guided through a piece of Talmud with its core text in the middle, surrounded in the margins by centuries of rabbinic commentary. So many thoughts started firing, my brain hurt. Ancient questions felt relevant, prescient.”
The fellowship also led her to question her Jewish identity when more traditional students in the program bluntly told her she was not Jewish according to Jewish law because her mother was not Jewish. The affront made her feel like a stranger among those she considered her people, her community. She channeled her pain into embracing her Jewish identity and braiding it with her Korean roots. In college she decided to put doubts to rest about her Jewishness and converted with an Orthodox beit din, or a rabbinic panel.
She writes, “I did not undertake this ceremony to gain external approval; it was a way of ritualizing the internal journey I’d been on.” Furthermore, the word conversion was never on the table for Buchdahl. She saw her immersion in the mikvah as a “reaffirmation ceremony” in which she would “celebrate the many threads that make up my Judaism.”
Since then, Buchdahl has smashed the stained-glass ceiling many times over. She is the first woman to lead Central Synagogue in its 153-year history, and the first Asian American to be ordained in the United States as a cantor in 1999, and the first to be ordained as a rabbi in 2001.
Throughout the book, Buchdahl has great spiritual joy to communicate.
In her short sermon on tikkun or healing, Buchdahl finds the perfect artistic metaphor for transforming loss into healing. Buchahl’s mother had given her a 15th century white vase from the Chosun dynasty from which her family is descended. The vase was accidentally broken, and a friend suggested that Buchdahl salvage it through the Japanese art of kintsugi – a method of repairing broken or cracked ceramic pieces with a mixture of lacquer and gold dust.
Kintsugi literally means “golden repair,” and dates to the fifteenth century. Initially, Buchdahl bristled at using a Japanese art form to repair her vase. Nevertheless, she acquiesced and found a kintsugi artist in Brooklyn. The artist essentially wrote her own version of a d’var to Buchdahl about the essence of tikkun. Buchdahl described the artist’s note as, “a small yet cosmic tikkun.”
The artist wrote, “I will be emotional when I will fix your vase. I know the past history. It makes me sad and want to close my eyes. As a Japanese [person]. I am able to fix a broken Korean vase. I would like to restore it with the utmost respect to your mother.”
During the pandemic, Buchdahl experienced sacred time which she understood as akin to Shabbat’s sacred time, and as Abraham Joshua Heschel described it, “a palace in time.” In 2022, she stepped into the difficult role of negotiator by telephone during a hostage crisis at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. One of the terrorist’s demands was to speak to Buchdahl because he thought she was famous and influential. Despite unbearably tense moments, the situation was resolved relatively peacefully. However, in her sermon the following Shabbat, Buchdahl’s words rang out in strong declarative sentences:
I remain deeply unsettled. And if you are a Jew in America today and you are not feeling unsettled, you are not paying enough attention.
I am unsettled because the world has only the most simplistic understanding of antisemitism. And we saw how dangerous this age-old conspiracy theory can be.
I am unsettled because I saw firsthand that you cannot negotiate with a terrorist.
A year later, Buchdahl came to her congregation and told them ein milim, she had no words to describe October 7. With grace and wisdom, she consoled them as she acknowledged their pain when she said, “In a cosmic, haunting echo of what was happening to our family in Israel, the Torah cycle moved from Devarim, which literally means ‘words,’ to a world that was tohu vavohu – formless and void. Israel and the entire Jewish world passed from Devarim to ein milim.”
The final chapter in Heart of a Stranger brings readers to Seoul National University, where Buchdahl gave a speech, she playfully titled “From the Chosun Dynasty to the Chosen People.” In it, she framed the blessings of belonging to the Korean and Jewish people, “as well as the gift of knowing the heart of a stranger…as both an insider and outsider.”
Then she gave thanks for America, “as the only place I could have fulfilled the promise of my particular divine blessing as an immigrant Korean and as a Jewish woman with the heart of a stranger who dreams of becoming a rabbi.”
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