Who gets to pick a new rav for our shul?
Moshe: Haven’t I earned the right to have my voice heard?
Honestly, Rabbi Weiss couldn’t have picked a worse time to make aliyah. Although any shul president could tell you that there’s never a good time to have the rav move away.
Not that he hadn’t given us fair warning. He’d told the board at least a year ago that he’d been with us for over 30 years, most of his children lived in Eretz Yisrael, and he was strongly considering acting on his dream to retire there. So we saw it coming, but you know how it goes. Time crept along, we’d made an effort at finding a new rav, but the most promising candidate had fallen through at the last minute. Too soon a year had gone by, the shul was busy with a seudas preidah and arranging the gift, and before we blinked, it seemed, the Rav was somewhere across the Atlantic and there we were, with a jarringly empty seat at the mizrach wall.
“We’ve got to get serious about this, gentlemen,” I said, opening the board meeting without the usual round of banter. “We’ve had a few résumés submitted but no one who really meets our specific needs. And the shul needs a rav.”
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