NJ Jewish News on-line | A ‘rabbi's rabbi,' back in the pulpit

Temple Har Shalom's new religious leader Rabbi Randi Musnitsky,
left, chats with Resa Drasin, vice president and head of the search
committee that selected her. Photo by Elaine Durbach

The atmosphere in Rabbi Randi Musnitsky's newly redecorated office at Temple Har Shalom in Warren is warmly inviting, as much an expression of her taste as the welcome she wants to extend to her new congregants.

She offers a guest homemade cookies from a box brought in by one of those congregants, adding a proviso: "You can have any of them except that one, with ‘beshert' frosted on it. That one I want to keep."

The Hebrew word — roughly "meant to be" — sums up the way Musnitsky and temple board vice president Resa Drasin of Warren described how the Reform congregation came to hire this slender, dark-eyed woman as its new rabbi.

Drasin, who headed up its 20-member search committee, said, "We were told that you can't expect perfection in a rabbi, that you won't find all the qualities you want in one person, but Rabbi Musnitsky comes pretty darn close. Can you see why we feel so incredibly lucky to have her?"

Musnitsky took over the position — and the now golden-brown office — in late July, succeeding Rabbi Jeffrey Kahn, who had been with the congregation for six years. He made aliya to Israel with his family just a few weeks before that.

The "beshert" part could start with the fact that Musnitsky had known Kahn since their days as rabbinical students at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. She also knew the congregation's lay and professional leaders from her most recent job, as regional director for the New Jersey/West Hudson Valley Council of the Union for Reform Judaism. In that capacity, she provided guidance and support for 55 congregations in the region, including Har Shalom — giving her the opportunity to determine that the temple's lay and professional leaders "are an amazing team," she said.

Musnitsky said she decided to become a rabbi when she was 14. She lost her mother that year and was given such comfort by the family's rabbi, Rabbi Bernard Frank of Philadelphia, that she decided to follow in his footsteps. "That's what I wanted to do for other people," she said. "From then on, I never considered doing anything else."

With a grin, she added, "No one said, ‘You can't be a rabbi.' I don't know whether anyone took any notice of what I was saying, or if they just assumed I'd forget all about it."

She was ordained in 1983, "one of the top 40, as we like to say," she said, referring to the first 40 women rabbis in the movement. She served for 18 years as a pulpit rabbi before going on to become "a rabbi's rabbi" as URJ regional director. She spent seven years in that position before deciding it was time for another change.

Drasin and her colleagues were thrilled, she said, when they saw Musnitsky's application. It came in January, about two months after they had started their search. They might have stopped right there, but true to the process she herself had urged them to follow, they continued to carefully review all 27 applications that came their way before finalizing their choice.

Musnitsky is married to Rabbi Ronald Kaplan, religious leader of Temple Beth Am in Parsippany. The two met as rabbinical students at HUC, and were married — against the advice of the college leadership — because of the professional strain such a union could cause. Still, they have managed to balance the demands of their matching careers.

Born and brought up in a Reform family in Philadelphia, she graduated from Brandeis University in Massachusetts and then Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem before going on to HUC in Cincinnati and completing a postgraduate degree in pastoral care and counseling.

After ordination, she and Kaplan both served with congregations in Cincinnati. They moved to the East Coast after the birth of their first child to be closer to her family. He served congregations in Philadelphia and south Jersey before joining Beth Am six years ago. She became assistant rabbi at Temple Emanuel in Cherry Hill, where she stayed for 14 years. They put down roots in Livingston, where they still live — though she said they wouldn't mind moving closer to Warren.

With Jonah, 21, entering his senior year at Boston University and Rafael, 18, who has just graduated from Livingston High School, heading to Israel for a year, she felt ready to resume the more intimate connection she loves, being a pulpit rabbi, especially at a temple she already liked so much.

Musnitsky said she hopes to build on the strengths of the congregation and enhance its sense of community. Founded in 1970 as the Mountain Jewish Community Center, it now has a membership of over 400 families, with around 175 children in its early childhood program and 500 in the religious school, including over 100 in its Hebrew High School.

"We want our members to feel this is their home — spiritually, emotionally, ritually, and socially," Musnitsky said. "And we want to reach out more to the broader community — to the Reform movement locally, nationally, and internationally, and to other religious groups. This is part of our effort to help repair our world, part of getting together and sharing our gifts and our resources."

For the selection committee, there might have been a dilemma about appointing a third woman to its religious leadership — in addition to Cantor Anna Berman and Rabbi Kim Geringer, who serves part-time — but Drasin said that was never an issue. "The search was really gender-neutral," she said. "Rabbi Musnitsky has the qualities we were looking for, and she brings such an amazing perspective to the position."