last word
Rabbi Jacob Staub
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
F or those who don’t know Rabbi
Jacob Staub, it’s hard to imagine
that someone who has been a
rabbi for the past 45 years, at one point,
didn’t want to be Jewish at all.

For Staub, 71, director of the online
platform Evolve: Groundbreaking
Jewish Conversations and professor
emeritus of Jewish philosophy and
spirituality and director of the Jewish
Spiritual Direction Program at the
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
in Wyncote, the path to embracing
Judaism really was a reconstruction.

But six decades ago, Staub’s rela-
tionship with Judaism was much more
fraught. Raised in a Modern Orthodox
home in the Bronx, Staub was “destined
to be a rabbi,” according to his parents,
as he performed well at his yeshiva.

His parents named him after Rabbi
Jacob Joseph, the chief rabbi of New
York City’s Association of American
Orthodox Hebrew Congregations. Still,
Staub resisted his Jewish upbringing.

“I couldn’t do it,” Staub said. “It
was clear subliminally, unconsciously,
I probably was looking for a way out.”
By the time Staub was about 12, he
realized he was gay.

“Somehow, the whole paradigm
crumbled,” he said.

Staub would sit at the Shabbat table
on Friday nights, but he wouldn’t sing.

At some points growing up, he con-
sidered himself an atheist, not know-
ing that Judaism could exist outside
Modern Orthodoxy.

His parents were patient with him,
and Staub’s attempts to escape Judaism
were never successful. As Staub was
growing up, his parents listened to
WEVD, the most popular Yiddish
radio station in New York, tagged “the
station that speaks your language.”
Determined as he was to reject his
roots, when the Yiddish music washed
over him, he couldn’t help but feel moved.

“I felt emotional; it touched me,” he
said. “I tried to get over it, but I couldn’t.”
28 Staub and Judaism continued to play
tug-of-war for years. Despite a strong
resentment toward Israel on the eve of
the Six-Day War, an international pro-
gram at SUNY College at Old Westbury
saw him study in Tel Aviv.

“In Israel, I tried lots of different
things: I lived on a kibbutz; I went to
K’far Chabad; I almost stayed there,”
Staub said. “I actually wrote a letter to
the Lubavitcher Rebbe while I was at
K’far Chabad because it didn’t take me
long to get swallowed into Chabad.”
During his stay, Staub met the
AUGUST 18, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
woman who would become his girl-
friend, and later ex-wife. In his letter
to the Rebbe, Staub sought advice and
counsel, determined to “convert” him-
self to being straight.

Staub later transferred to SUNY
Buffalo, where he studied medieval
and modern English, spending his
days translating Geoffrey Chaucer’s
“Canterbury Tales” before realizing he
wanted to change course again.

“It really became very clear to me
that I would always be a tourist in
Chaucerian England, and that I’d
much rather be doing this in Hebrew,”
he said.

He attended the Middlebury Bread
Loaf Fiction Writers’ Conference
toward the end of college, where he
discovered the works of Mordecai
Kaplan, the father of Reconstructionist
Judaism. “It was perfect,” Staub said. “Mordechai
Kaplan had been raised Orthodox, and
he had embraced the reconstructed ver-
sion of Judaism. And I read everything.”
Staub moved to Philadelphia in
1971, matriculated into RRC in 1972,
and became ordained as a rabbi in
1977, concurrently attending Temple
University to get his master’s and doc-
torate in religion from 1972-1981.

Though initially pulled toward aca-
demia, Staub returned to RRC after
receiving his Ph.D. from Temple.

“[I] just realized I had the oppor-
tunity, with the help of colleagues, to
turn RRC into the seminary I wish
I had attended,” he said. “What that
meant to me then was reaffirming some
traditional stuff in a new language for
people to make it more appealing to be
more observant.”
In the 45 years Staub has been affili-
ated with RRC and Reconstructionism,
he’s seen the movement transform.

“Fifty ago, we were revolutionary,
in terms of discussion of God ... all of
those theological issues,” Staub said.

“There was no talk — until the ’80s,
anyway — of including lesbian and
gay Jews, let alone genderqueer [Jews].

We’ve become much more open to
excluded groups. We lead on intermar-
riage, on Jews of patrilineal descent,
first bat mitzvah, all these women’s
rituals for baby naming, miscarriages,
first menstruation.”
Ultimately, Staub said, his work at
RRC was to help build a community,
democratic and diverse, and, above all,
welcoming. “I wanted to bring the riches that I
had rediscovered and reconstructed to
a larger world,” he said. JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com Courtesy of Bryan Schwartzman
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