I am fond of saying that I was a Reconstructionist Jew before I ever heard of such a thing.
Why do I say that?
As I grew up in a small Jewish community in Evansville, Indiana, I often found myself questioning and also doing things my way. At that time, we had two synagogues serving a small Jewish community. Evansville wasn’t a deserted island but as the joke goes, there was the shul we attended, and the one that we didn’t.
As the Jewish community continued to age and shrink during my childhood, the two synagogues merged religious schools when I was in elementary school. I recall asking the reform Rabbi (of the shul we didn’t attend) why we couldn’t chant the Shema in his class. I came to learn that congregants didn’t chant anything at his synagogue but rather the service songs were sung by a musically trained, non-Jewish person accompanied by piano behind a screen. I failed to connect to the Rabbi or his services.
By the time I was in high school, the two congregations fully merged after the two Rabbis retired. I remember it was challenging to meld reform and conservative traditions to the satisfaction of the majority of members. I taught in the religious school, led the local Jewish youth chapter, and ran children’s services on high holidays. I was involved and often did things my own way.
The new synagogue became known as Temple Adath B’nai Israel and hired a new Rabbi and one of the first female cantors. Even today, the Temple website doesn’t make a strong connection to any denomination and seeks to include Jews from many different backgrounds. That is consistent with my own memory of the early years when the new congregation sorted out what traditions were most important and how to honor the needs of all its members.
At college, the Hillel didn’t really suit me – so I rarely went to there. One year, I wanted a Passover seder that was more meaningful – so I wrote my own Haggadah and invited Jewish and non-Jewish friends to celebrate with me. The four sons became the four children, the Haggadah included Miriam and the midwives Shifra and Puah along with Moses and the plagues. We no longer read the traditional Talmudic style Haggadah that discussing what ancient Rabbis thought about the story in the Torah and the meaning of various phrases. The old Haggadah always seemed to me to be the opposite of what we are asked to do at this holiday – to share and tell the story of Passover. My “reconstructed” Haggadah has gone through various iterations over the past 40+ years. It is now assembled into spiral bound notebooks so that we can add and change sections as we find new songs and readings that are meaningful to our family.
As a young adult in DC, I didn’t affiliate but continued to seek out Jewish spaces. For several years, a friend and I did Jewish community hopping visiting various Havurah-style services for Shabbat. When my friend married and became involved in a congregation in Maryland – that was my first introduction to Reconstrutionism. After she divorced, we continued our seeking. I still have a copy of “Chaveirim Kol Yisraeil – a Project of The Progressive Chavurah Siddur Committee of Boston” a prayer book that was used by one of the congregations that we attended.
When I moved to Ann Arbor, my friend and I met up to attend the Havurah Summer Institute around 1996 – a gathering organized by the National Havurah Committee. It was an amazing experience with people from a wide variety of practices from around North America. It was there that I met Evelyn Neuhaus who made the annual trek east to the Institute each summer. She was affiliated with the Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Havurah – aka “The Hav” – while I attended home-based monthly services with a Havurah of 30 somethings that included Beth Israel congregants and unaffiliated Jews including AARC member Sarai Brachman Shoup who I knew from grad school.
Soon after, I started lurking around the Hav – attending High Holiday services at the Quaker house on Hill Street. I still recall standing next to Rena and Jeff Basch in 2001 – holding their infant son Ari – for a communal Aliyah for Parsha Vayeira on Rosh Hashana. I was pregnant with our first child, Avi. We were all delighting, like Sarah, in new beginnings.
Within a year or so, Jon Engelbert and I became members. We found our Jewish home with the Ann Arbor Reconstructionists. Nearly a half century later, AARC continues to be our Jewish home.
Reconstructionist Judaism encourages me to think about and find connections to our ancient Jewish traditions in a way that brings meaning to my modern life. I am grateful to have this community.
Carol is 2nd from right, with friends at the 2025 AARC Retreat at Camp Tamarack
