Excerpts relating to The Bronfman Fellowship, from Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi’s Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging, by Rabbi Angela Buchdahl ’89:
“And then, at age sixteen, while on a summer program in Israel, I had a transformative reaction to the enduring exercise of Jewish study. When I was first guided through a piece of Talmud with its core text in the middle, surrounded in the margins by centuries of rabbinic commentary, so many thoughts started firing, my brain hurt. Ancient questions felt relevant, prescient. ‘How did they know?’ I would ask of the sages who lived millennia before me. Once I realized that a rabbi’s job was to immerse herself in this ongoing conversation, it became the only thing I wanted to do.” (p. 3)
“The intense weeks of the Bronfman program included speakers who have stayed with me – poet Yehuda Amichai, writer A.B. Yehoshua, feminist icon Alice Shalvi, politician Naomi Chazan – luminaries who shaped the intellectual and cultural ethos of modern Israel….
What strengthened my Jewish resolve was immersing myself in Jewish text itself. It was a part of my inheritance I had never fully mined: the granular dissection of verses, the rigorous ethical demands, ancient disputations that felt utterly relevant. Rabbinic sages spoke from the page, responding to the big questions of life I wanted to explore. My head throbbing from turning the words over and over, I was never so excited by text study. If this is what Jewish learning was all about, I wanted more of it.
Somehow the discipline and exhilaration of study felt like God’s way of telling me not to doubt my Jewish core. Even when others kept forcing me to doubt an identity I’d never questioned before, I managed to hold fast to some kind of Jewish anchor. Throughout that Israel summer, moving through the country’s shuks and shuls, vineyards and beaches, hills and ruins, I felt my connection to Judaism deepen.” (p. 94)