What courage it must take to wake up at the age of 48 and decide, cold turkey, to make a career change. 
 Lynne Goldsmith, rabbi of Temple Or Hadash in Fort Collins, did it. In self-deprecating fashion, Goldsmith does not call her about-face to the rabbinate an act of courage.

Rabbi Lynne Goldsmith

“If somebody had told me how difficult rabbinical school was going to be, I wouldn’t have done it,” laughs Goldsmith.

“Ignorance is bliss, I guess.”

About one-third of the rabbis we have profiled in the last couple of years reveal to the IJN that the rabbinate was not their first, or perhaps even second career. Many have come from working in Jewish charitable organizations or educational fields, so those endeavors are, in some ways, linear to a line of work in the clergy.

Goldsmith’s transition was different. Most of her adult life had been spent as an accountant.

“People say, ‘Oh, you must have gotten the call.’ I think if I’d gotten a call, I would’ve told G-d He got the wrong number,” jokes Goldsmith.

“I had been doing accounting for 20 years, and accounting is very, nice if you’re that kind of a person.

There’s always an answer, and you can always fix something in that line of work.

“I was doing accounting for a synagogue, and when people died, sometimes there weren’t enough Jews in the building for a minyan. The rabbi would run around and grab any Jewish people in the building, so I ended up going to a lot of funerals for people, and I had no idea who they were.

“I went to one lady’s funeral, and the rabbi said during the eulogy, ‘Her life was not as fulfilled as she would’ve wanted it to be.’

“I thought, she was 87 years old. What was she waiting for? I realized I was in my late 40s, and I didn’t want to be an accountant for at least the next 25 or 30 years.

“That was the turning point.”

Goldsmith admits she had a deficiency in Hebrew, so she learned the language. Then, in 2000, Goldsmith applied to Hebrew Union College and was accepted. As is customary at HUC-JIR upon acceptance, Goldsmith was dispatched to Jerusalem for the first year of the five-year rabbinic school trail.

“It is very intense — I mean, really intense,” says Goldsmith. “If I hadn’t gone about this by taking one year at a time and started thinking about what’s ahead of me or what’s behind me, I never would have made it.”

Goldsmith persevered, and was ordained in 2007. She became pulpit rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in Dothan, Alabama, population 71,072, where Goldsmith immediately found benefits of being a rabbi in a small town.

“Because we were the only congregation in a 100-mile radius, I never felt any anti-Semitism,” Goldsmith says. “I never heard that. It was mostly just people who don’t know Jews or anything about Judaism, so it’s more of an ignorance of who we are than anything else.

“One man asked me where we did our animal sacrifices, and I told him we haven’t done that for about 2,000 years.”

In 2017, Goldsmith retired. She and her husband Rob moved to Broomfield to be close to family.

Enter Or Hadash, Fort Collins. The shul needed a rabbi, and Goldsmith was eager to keep her toe dipped in the waters of being a congregational rabbi. She spends one weekend a month in Fort Collins, and is also part of the shul’s weekly Torah study.

“I love some of the insights they come up with,” says Goldsmith.

“It’s a small community, but it’s very tight knit. Everybody gets along and everybody has to pitch in.

“What I like about being part-time is that I can do a lot of different things I like to do. They know I have a life here in Broomfield, but I’m available if there happens to be a death or if someone is very ill, or if somebody wants just to talk, so I’m in contact almost all the time.

“I don’t have the day-to-day pressure of being a full-time rabbi. In Alabama, I led services while also teaching in the religious school, and I was very involved in the interfaith community.

“I don’t have that as much now.”

Or Hadash has made overtures to make Goldsmith their full-time rabbi, but Goldsmith likes the arrangement as is.

“I love it there,” says Goldsmith, “but I want to keep it the way we’re doing it.”

While pondering a request to sum up her rabbinical purpose, Goldsmith turns to the wisdom of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who wrote The Dignity of Difference.

“I love the way he writes,” says Goldsmith, “though I’ve realized he was no friend to Reform Judaism and he probably wouldn’t consider me a rabbi because I’m a woman.

“A Presbyterian minister in Dothan told me about the book, where Sacks wrote that we are all created in G-d’s image. The difficulty, Sacks wrote, is trying to find G-d’s image in someone who is not like you.

“That, to me, is really telling. If you can talk to somebody who you disagree with violently and still see that image of G-d in them, things are going to be OK.”

It might have taken Goldsmith a bit longer than most to come to that realization. Better late, of course, than never.

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