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<\/a>Rabbi Allan Tuffs, who now lives part-time in south Florida and in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, has published A Rabbi\u2019s Journey: Roads Traveled Lessons Learned \u2013 Stories from an Unconventional Rabbi\u2019s Career<\/em>. The 54 bite-sized chapters (coincidentally, he notes, the same number as parshas in the Torah) range from touching and hilarious to insightful and tragic.<\/p>\nTuffs was born in Vancouver \u2013 he\u2019s 10 days older than the state of Israel \u2013 and his home life was tough. His mom had a mental illness and his largely absent father had alcoholism. He and his sister would end up in the foster system.<\/p>\n
The bookish, thoughtful Allan devoured everything he could read about Israel (among other topics) and, when he was invited to join the Labour-Zionist youth group Habonim, his life changed and everything else is as result of that connection.<\/p>\n
\u201cHabonim was kind of like a family to me, it really was,\u201d he told the Independent<\/em> in a telephone interview from North Carolina. \u201cThe people were warm and inviting and I was looking for my place in the Jewish community.\u201d<\/p>\n Being the product of an intermarriage \u2013 \u201cMy father was not Jewish, my mother was,\u201d he said \u2013 made the young Allan feel like an outsider.<\/p>\n \u201cIntermarriage was still somewhat rare in those days,\u201d he said. \u201cI did not have a real religious background. I guess I was spiritual. I was very proud of my Jewish heritage and Habonim was very Jewish, very Israel-oriented, and it had a deep sense of purpose. It was kibbutz-oriented and there was this idea that the Jewish people had a role in the world, to repair the world, so to speak. That appealed to my youthful idealism.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had meetings almost weekly,\u201d he added. \u201cHere we were, these young kids.\u2026 I don\u2019t really know if we understood what we were talking about, but we studied some of the great early socialist Zionist thinkers.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to their interest in Israel, social justice causes closer to home also drove the Habonimniks\u2019 activism.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were pretty uniformly against the war in Vietnam,\u201d he said. \u201cWe were quite disturbed by the racial injustices happening in the United States and also we were involved in fighting for Indigenous peoples\u2019 rights in Canada. There was this sense that we are going to make the world a better place because we are Jews, because we have this ideology, because we are cognizant of the whole history of being a minority, being persecuted.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1969, Tuffs headed to Israel and lived for two years at Kibbutz Menara, almost flush against the Lebanese border (and, coincidentally, now part of Vancouver\u2019s partnership region in Israel). It was during the War of Attrition and the reality of the conflict was intense. Concentric rows of barbed wire were interspersed with landmines and German shepherd dogs patrolled the perimeter of the kibbutz.<\/p>\n While socialism, not Judaism, was the religion of the kibbutzniks, Tuffs notes in his book that a fortuitous meeting in Jerusalem changed the young man\u2019s path again. Working in the holy city to earn a plane ticket home, he encountered an Orthodox rabbi from Seattle, with whom he began studying Budokan karate and Talmud. Among other things, the mix of eastern and western influences would follow Tuffs through his life. He integrates contemplative and meditative practices into his Judaism and practises yoga.<\/p>\n Returning to North America \u2013 and Habonim \u2013 Tuffs worked as a counselor at the movement\u2019s camps in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.-adjacent Maryland. While in the D.C. suburbs, he started teaching Hebrew at a Conservative synagogue. He was hired for his language skills but the gaping holes in his Jewish knowledge \u2013 he never had a bar mitzvah \u2013 led his employer to suggest taking a few courses at Baltimore Hebrew College. This was the beginning of \u201ca lifelong love of Jewish learning,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n Now in his mid-20s, he still wasn\u2019t sure what to do.<\/p>\n \u201cI was scholarly, but I would never be a scholar \u2013 too solitary,\u201d he writes. \u201cI was interested in psychology, but the thought of listening to people\u2019s problems five days a week gave me a headache. I\u2019m something of a \u2018ham\u2019 but would never be an actor. I\u2019m a do-gooder \u2013 hardly a way to make a living.\u2026 What profession would allow me to do a little of all these things?\u201d<\/p>\n Turns out the rabbinate fit quite nicely for 40 years. While a child of intermarriage with no early Jewish education might not seem a top candidate for the clergy, fate intervened again. Tuffs\u2019 Hebrew language skills got him a job running a Conservative synagogue youth group in Maryland on the understanding that he would become shomer Shabbat and keep kosher. The job, in fact, put him under the wing of the rabbi and gave him more experience.<\/p>\n \u201cThis opportunity amounted to a rabbinic internship,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n Tuffs spent two years learning the ropes of the rabbinate. He began leading Shabbat services at a local nursing home. In 1977, he entered Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, spending the first year on the Jerusalem campus and four more at the institute\u2019s New York centre.<\/p>\n He experienced \u201cimposter syndrome,\u201d partly because he had only one Jewish parent. But, he concluded, \u201cwith such a high frequency of intermarriage these days, who better than a rabbi of mixed parentage to welcome others like himself or herself into the Jewish fold? Suddenly, my rabbinate had renewed significance and purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n In his book, Tuffs reflects the tumultuous and historic times he has lived through. After receiving his ordination, his first convention of the Reform movement\u2019s Central Conference of American Rabbis, in 1983, saw the historic decision to recognize patrilineal descent.<\/p>\n Over the next 40 years, as he shares, he navigated synagogue politics \u2013 some comedic, some sad, including a corrupt sisterhood president and an authoritarian, bullying board president. He discusses his decision to officiate at same-sex weddings, his activism on behalf of persecuted Christians in the Middle East, and his congregation\u2019s support of orphans in Haiti.<\/p>\n The tragic collapse of a condominium building in Surfside, Fla., in 2021, hit Tuffs close to home. A young couple whose marriage he had presided at just weeks earlier were killed in the disaster.<\/p>\n The hurricane that devastated parts of Florida and other states in 2005 ravaged his temple. The silver lining was that Tuffs was able to be part of a rebuilding project that made the sanctuary more welcoming, removing the elevated bimah that instilled \u201can air of un-approachability\u201d for the rabbi and cantor.<\/p>\n Perhaps because he came to the Reform rabbinate with some Conservative movement experience, Tuffs considers himself on the traditional side of Reform. He wears a kippa and dons a tallit when praying, something that was unusual in some American Reform congregations when he started out.<\/p>\n \u201cI embraced the growing trend in the movement toward reintegrating older, discarded ritual practices into religious life,\u201d he writes. \u201cAt the same time, I was sold on the Reform idea of personal autonomy in matters of ritual practice.\u201d<\/p>\n He would serve at congregations in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania before spending 25 years at Temple Beth El, in Hollywood, Fla., from which he retired a year ago.<\/p>\n Fate almost brought Tuffs back to Canada before he ever made it to Florida. Desperate to escape the Wisconsin winters, he was invited to consider a position at a synagogue in Ottawa. His mind was made up for him when a congregant enthusiastically offered: \u201cRabbi, you\u2019ll be able to skate to work on the Rideau Canal four months a year.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to all else, Tuffs obtained a doctorate in ministry, for which he wrote a dissertation about masculine spirituality, which was published as a book. He was a rabbinic fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem for five years and studied at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality.<\/p>\n Reflecting back on his life, Tuffs can\u2019t recall precisely where or how he first connected with Habonim. Everything that came after, though, can be traced back to that early Vancouver connection.<\/p>\n Tuffs\u2019 book is available in ebook format on Amazon, though it is currently not available to order in Canada as a hardcopy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A recently retired rabbi who was born and raised in Vancouver is offering an insider\u2019s look at life as a congregational leader. Rabbi Allan Tuffs, who now lives part-time in south Florida and in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, has published A Rabbi\u2019s Journey: Roads Traveled Lessons Learned \u2013 Stories from an Unconventional Rabbi\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[22596,218,22597],"class_list":["post-42153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-allan-tuffs","tag-judaism","tag-rabbinical-life"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}