Rabbi Eddie Shapiro is a man of many skills and much experience; of many varied clients, both Jewish and non-Jewish, both living and dead; and of many titles.
Among them are mashgiach, or supervisor of kosher slaughter; chevra kadisha consultant, or expert on the Torah-mandated methods of dealing with the bodies and funerals of the deceased; and kashrus authority, on everything from grapes to wine to potatoes.
This Denver rabbi, however, has his own favorite title.
“I’m a blue collar scholar, you know,” he says. “I work in mortuaries and factories. My pulpit covers everything from dead Jews to Spanish speaking laborers.”
He studies the Torah diligently but is also conversant in industrial production — mechanisms, plumbing and electricity. He converses in Hebrew and Yiddish, and in English and Spanish as well. He wears a kippah and tzitzit in addition to hard hats and steel-toed boots.
Shapiro’s is an eclectic skill set, to be sure, and his occupation — or occupations, to be more accurate — are exacting, demanding and challenging. He keeps an encyclopedia’s amount of Jewish knowledge in his head, travels regularly, is away from home for extended periods, often puts in 16-plus hour days, day after day. He gets his hands dirty on a regular basis.
Although he never says so in so many words, it became abundantly clear in his interview with the Intermountain Jewish News last week that he absolutely loves it all.
Shapiro, who turns 54 later this month, was born in the very non-Jewish state of North Dakota, the son of a US Air Force officer and a microbiologist. His father was an expert in missile technology, ICBMs in particular, and in the long tradition of military kids, he and his sister grew up in a variety of locales — Cheyenne, Omaha, Tucson — most of which were places where it was challenging to maintain Jewish lifestyles or observance, especially back in the 1960s.
However, he says, his family always tried to do its best to do so. His parents, originally from the Boston area, “were Jewish virtually by osmosis,” and strove to raise their children in what he describes as a “traditional” mode of Jewish worship.
That became easier toward the end of his father’s military career when they lived in Tucson. Shapiro and his sister were enrolled at a Jewish day school there, the Tucson Hebrew Academy. “My parents,” he says, “decided that was a chance to give us intensive Jewish education and acculturation.”
The experience started Shapiro on a path of increasing Jewish observance, a process that only increased when they moved to Denver in 1985, when the family affiliated with Beth Joseph Congregation.
“I had become increasingly committed to Orthodox practice through junior high and high school, related in part probably to the Orthodox school that I was raised in,” he says, describing the process as “organic, but not necessarily homegrown.”
He left Denver, attended Brandeis University for a period and briefly lived in Los Angeles before returning to Denver in 1990. That’s when he became acquainted with Rabbi Mordecai Twerski who at the time had a shul in East Denver, TRI-Sulom, and ran a regional kosher supervisory agency. Shapiro’s interaction with Twerski led him gradually on a path toward both chasidic Judaism and kashrus supervision.
“When I moved back here as a college-age adult in 1990 I got an apartment and started attending services at TRI. I quickly became very involved in the early days of East Denver’s core Orthodoxy.
“I was one of the first checkers of the East Denver eruv over 30 years ago. Somewhere in the archives of the Denver Post is a picture of me kneeling at the base of a telephone pole when we established our East Denver eruv over 30 years ago.”
Shapiro was also involved the establishment of the Mikvah of East Denver in the 1990s, the first ritual bath on that side of the city.
“I really became involved in a lot of these community functions, in all kinds of roles, as a young single guy, and then a young married guy, in the early nineties.”
Among them was the Orthodox burial society in Denver, the chevra kadisha, which Shapiro thinks was probably the result of his having lost three close friends in high school.
“That forced me to confront my mortality in a really hard way in my sophomore year,” he says, “and I’m sure that I’ve spent something like 40 years trying to process that trauma.”
Shapiro’s involvement as an advisor — and often, as a working volunteer — for the chevra kadisha continues to this day, and remains an important component of his Jewish career.
His work in Jewish funeral ritual, tahara, is what led him to seek ordination as a rabbi, he adds.
In the course of his work for the burial society, he often had to deal with non-Jewish officials or funeral directors, or with people had no knowledge of Jewish burial practices. He found that having the rabbinical title —which he gained after completing what he calls a “400-hour classroom lecture program” — greatly streamlined and facilitated that process.
As all of this was transpiring, Shapiro’s evolution as an observant Jew, like many aspects of his life, was an eclectic process. In Denver, he now goes to services at Bais Menachem, a Chabad synagogue, although he doesn’t precisely consider himself a Chabadnik.
He does, however, consider himself to be a chasid, and considers his rebbe to be Rabbi Meir Alter Horowitz, the “Bostoner Rebbe,” and son of the late Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Horowitz.
Asked about which category of Orthodoxy best describes him, Shapiro replies with a laugh, “you’re asking exactly the right guy to give you exactly the wrong answer.”
“I wear a streimel and a long coat. I have a long beard and long peyos and I wear two pairs of tefilin in the morning because that is a chasidic custom. My wife (Beth) and daughter (Keturah) and I mostly attend the Chabad house . . . because it’s the closest shul to my house, and it’s the closest mode of prayer to the way I pray.”
Shapiro pauses before completing his reply.
“I think in one of my social media profiles I’m described as something like post-modern, deconstructed, trans-denominational chasidic.
“I feel most connected to the Bostoner Rebbe and I really take my call, my mission, from the Baal Shem, the founder of chasidism, and his students, to infuse a joyful life with divine encounter.”
Over the past several decades, Shapiro has:
• Spent weeks in Alaska, helping a team of soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces conduct tests of Arrow missiles. “It was a really cool thing for a missile brat to get to do,” he says, “and I asked a lot of interesting questions that they were not expecting from the kitchen rabbi, that’s for sure.”
• Served as a mashgiach, supervisor, of shechitach, kosher slaughter, of lambs in Colorado and beef in Nebraska.
• Performed a similar function for a halal (or Muslim ritual) slaughterhouse in Denver until he determined that the way the company slaughtered the sheep, and how it treated its mostly Somali employees, wasn’t up to his ethical standards.
• Supervised the growing, harvesting and processing of grapes — an ancient and extremely complex tradition — at a kosher winery in the Pacific Northwest.
These days, Shapiro spends much of his time in the Yakima Valley of Washington state where the gigantic Welch’s grape corporation operates processing plants. Under the direction of the Orthodox Union, he spends roughly two weeks out of every month living and working there.
This, too, is a fairly complex responsibility.
In essence, what Shapiro does for Welch is “re-kasher” its plants after it allows grapes from its other, non-kosher, plants in other locations to be processed there, which it does on a regular basis. The corporate rationale is that in order to meet stringent standards from Asian markets for grape products, the company needs to mix grapes from several production facilities in the US. To minimize shipping costs, this blending takes place at its Washington facilities, which is also where its kosher products are made.
After the non-kosher grape processing, Shapiro comes in to restore the plants’ kosher qualifications so that kosher production can recommence.
I refer to it as cutting out the holes of donuts,” Shapiro says. “I supervise and monitor and certify and audit and recondition kosher certified plants that are making special productions of non-kosher. So I’m there to meet the incoming contaminant. As far as we’re concerned, it’s a deviation from the kosher program . . . and so I meet the incoming hazard.
“I sequester an area of the plant that they’ll require for processing and packaging. I lock out all the plumbing, etc., so we can’t accidentally lose contaminant sideways. And then I monitor the formulation and the packaging to make sure they really are using up all the ingredient, because at the end, I have to account for it. And then I go back through and do a re-koshering of a little, or a lot, of the factory, depending on what was exposed to non-kosher.”
He sighs quietly.
“Then I can catch a flight home to Denver for the weekend.”
It’s an important function, Shapiro says, not only for the obvious products associated with Welch’s — things like grape juice, jam and jelly — but for the plethora of other products that use grape sugar, including soda, ice cream, toppings, baby food, applesauce, slurpees, smoothies and even something called Fruit Gushers — “a candy on the market that, when you bite into it, you get a squirt of purple goo,” Shapiro says with a laugh.
In short, nothing is simple about food production, or kosher supervision, these days.
“You know, it’s a crazy world,” Shapiro says, “with a global food economy and hyper-industrialization that we live in.”
Not everything that Shapiro does in the realm of Judaism is professional. As a “hands-on rabbi” and “person who lives a deconstructed, post-modern, chasidic life,” he finds many other ways to live and express his Judaism.
One of them is Ahavah Farm, an organic agricultural project in Elbert County run by a multi-member Jewish family. Ahavah is now a successful operation, selling produce and other products to regional residents interested in organic and locally sourced food.
Some years ago, when it was just starting out, Shapiro was asked to “farm sit” for a while as the family was traveling.
“I actually moved onto the farm for a couple of weeks and took care of the chickens and the alpacas and the greenhouses and all the stuff,” he says. “Since them I have become a friend, a guide, an advisor and consumer in their farm community.
“Just this year they started something called ‘Celebrate with the Rabbi.’ Yesterday, for Purim, I went down the farm and facilitated programming for Jewish education and enrichment.”
It’s not a professional connection, Shapiro adds, but a spiritual one.
“That is part of my Jewish community,” he says. “I have a share, I am engaged with a source of my food being directed by a Jewishly observant family in my home region that to me is very holistic and integrated.”
Another example was Shapiro’s experience with a matriarch of the Cheyenne community who, in her advanced years, had what might be called an existential crisis. This woman, who had held Shapiro as an infant many years ago and had stayed in touch with him through the years, had grown so despondent in her senior living facility, in the midst of the pandemic, that she had started a self-imposed hunger strike.
Her worried family knew Shapiro through his chevra kadisha work and, even though this was not a situation directly related to death, contacted him for help. He readily responded to their plea, drove to Cheyenne and spent hours talking to the depressed woman.
“It was in the middle of COVID. She was in a facility and she was like, well, what did she have to live for anymore? She was fed up, mad at the world.
“Her daughter calls me up and said, ‘Can you please convince my mother to eat?’ I’m like, that’s an interesting pastoral assignment. I’ll see what I can do.”
In his long conversation with her, Shapiro convinced her that she did indeed have things to look forward to and that the solution to her dilemma was to try to concentrate on these things every day as a means of approaching life one day at a time.
It worked, he says with emotion. She found meaning in her life once again and for the year she had remaining, managed to embrace life once again, reconnecting with friends and family and, yes, eating regularly.
“It gave the family a year to appreciate their mother in a whole different way and rework some unfinished business and resolve some conflicts. It was a very, very fruitful year.”
When he helped organize (not participate in) this woman’s tahara following her death, the significance of the full circle of his relationship with her became clear. She had held him in her arms as a baby and decades later, as a recently deceased person, he did much the same for her.
“In death, we kind of have to coax the soul away from the body,” Shapiro says. “Like babies, we wash and swaddle them, and ultimately tuck them into a cleft in Mother Earth, as one of her babies, into the mother from which they were formed.”
In the end, it finally explained to him why he had spent decades with the chevra kadisha.
“It’s the lifecycle, the powerful experience of birthing a soul into a body, onto the planet, getting to meet that person, getting to know them and then saying goodbye, not knowing where they’re headed.”
He offers a final, ironic but humorous sentence regarding his work with the deceased. “In 35 years of doing this work,” he says, “not one of my people has ever sent me a postcard.”
Gifted in words and creative in thought, Shapiro does an excellent job expressing himself. In light of that, his responses to the last two questions in his interview with the IJN are presented verbatim, in the spirit of giving the floor — or the bimah, if you prefer — exclusively to him.
IJN: You have been called a kashrus jack of all trades. Do you think that’s accurate, considering the range of your work in this field?
Shapiro: I like it. I hope to live up to it. Jack of all trades, with the caveat of acknowledging that I am master of none, meaning that part of my commitment to living is participating in the rabbinic system. I take that seriously. I’m not a maverick. I would never shoot from the hip, especially on community kashrus, whether it’s for my synagogue or my continent. I don’t make determinations on my own.
Jack of all trades? I love it because I don’t know anybody in my business who has worked in as many areas of kashrus as I have — everything from fresh wine production to food service.
I have stood opposite a USDA inspector and there were times when he would put his thumb up and I would put my thumb down. He would say, “What’s wrong with that, rabbi?’ And I would show him. It wasn’t a problem for him, but it was a problem for Torah.
Can you answer, in three words, this question: Why is keeping kosher and observing the other rules that Torah mandates important?
Hmmm . . . maybe we can do it in three words.
Integrity will be the first word. By that I mean system integrity, that it’s good to be a devotee and adherent of a program. Different people need different programs. Some people need weight loss, some need impulse control, some need military discipline. I believe that Torah living, the Torah lifestyle, is a comprehensive and integrated system. It addresses nearly every area of human life and concern.
The second word I’m going to call continuity, maybe covenant. There is a legacy of relationship between a tribe of people — an overgrown clan of people, Jacob and his 70 descendants — and their deity. We believe Him to be the master of masters, the king of kings, the L-rd of the universe, the creator of all. We call Him by all those names, we address that mighty power by all those names, but we are also in a vibrant covenant, a continuous and contiguous kind of relationship with Him.
That’s where education comes in. We have to teach the text to ourselves, and the next generation, about the integrity of the system so that we can perpetuate it.
The third word, I think, would be connection, or community; that having a sobriety buddy or a workout buddy is really important to success in any program. The accountability and connectedness that comes from living in a village, however big that village — the interdependence and mutual aid and counter-contribution — is really valuable. Living within walking distance of our synagogues, living within an eruv, creates interconnectedness.
Knowing and using the resources of our group can be a very rich experience.
Copyright © 2023 by the Intermountain Jewish News