Helping Students Craft a Vision for Jewish Life at its Best: Rabbi Lisa Grant, Ph.D. on her Career at Hebrew Union College

Rabbi Lisa D. Grant, Ph.D., Eleanor Sinsheimer Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish Education, is retiring after a quarter century at Hebrew Union College, during which she also served as Director of the Rabbinical Program in New York beginning in 2018. Since she first joined the faculty in 2000 as a professor of Jewish Educational Leadership, Grant has dedicated her career to researching and teaching about adult Jewish learning, the professional development of Jewish leaders, Israel education, and Jewish peoplehood. Her publications include Israel Education Matters: A 21st Century Paradigm for Jewish Education (coauthored with Ezra Kopelowitz in 2012); International Handbook of Jewish Education (coauthored with Helena Miller and Alex Pomson in 2011); A Journey of Heart and Mind: Transformative Jewish Learning in Adulthood (co-authored with Diane T. Schuster, Meredith Woocher, and Steven M. Cohen in 2004); and most recently The Year of Mourning: A Jewish Journey (2023).

A well-respected scholar, beloved teacher, and accomplished administrator, Rabbi Grant has also worked to transform rabbinical education in her roles as lead faculty for the Mandel Fellowship in Visionary Leadership (2006-2011), and as the director of the Mandel Initiative focused on building capacity for visionary leadership (2012-2016). In her six years at the helm of the New York Rabbinical Program, Rabbi Grant played a key role in redesigning the curriculum and the College’s overall approaches to clergy formation. We caught up with her at her office in New York for a look back at time at Hebrew Union College.

The rabbinate was a second career for you. What led you to it?

Lisa Grant: My first career was in health care planning. At the time, I was living in West Hartford, Connecticut. I enrolled in a two-year program in adult Jewish learning, and pretty early on, I discovered that I had a real thirst for Jewish study. This was in the early ‘90s, around the time when I recall hearing about a challenge that Barry Shrage made to the lay leaders at the General Assembly of the North American Federations. Shrage was president of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston and a major figure in the Jewish communal world. In essence, he said to these lay leaders: “You’re very involved, and you want to build Jewish communities and Jewish continuity, and that’s wonderful. But you gotta go learn!” His throwing down the gauntlet was one of several catalysts that led to a lot of Jewish communal investment in adult Jewish learning in the ‘90s and early 2000s. I was part of that wave. Ultimately, I went to the Jewish Theological Seminary for a Ph.D. in Jewish education. And it was during that time of study when the spark ignited and I realized that I wanted to be a rabbi. I was approaching 40 when that first entered my consciousness.

How did you find your way to Hebrew Union College?

LG: When I was finishing my doctorate, I was in this really wonderful position of being offered several different jobs. I could have become the head of one of the Ramah camps, I could have worked at a foundation, and I could have stayed at JTS, where I had a very rich experience and received an education for which I am very very grateful. But I got a call one day from Rabbi Aaron Panken z”l, who was then the Dean of the New York Campus at Hebrew Union College, saying “We are hiring for a tenure-track position in Jewish Education, are you interested?” And the minute I walked into the New York campus – you know, you come into this gallery of contemporary Jewish art, with lots of light, whereas the art on the walls at the time at JTS was ancient manuscripts, beautiful texts, but I just felt such a difference in orientation, and that was really intriguing to me.

The ensuing job interview resulted in you joining the Hebrew Union College faculty in 2000, as an Assistant Professor of Education. How did you get from there to becoming Director of the Rabbinical program?

LG: During my first decade, I focused on teaching and working with Jo Kay, then Director of HUC’s New York School of Education, to build out the program. I also continued my scholarship on adult learning and the place of Israel in American Jewish life. There were a number of us who started around the same time – all women: Andrea Weiss, Alyssa Gray, Wendy Zierler, Sharon Koren, and myself. Over time we had a major impact on the whole culture of the school. Andrea Weiss and I became very close colleagues because we started teaching a class together on teaching Bible to adults, which we taught together for more than 20 years. After I was promoted to Full Professor, Andrea began nudging me, saying, “You should become a rabbi.” I realized “if not now, when,” so I began that process in 2014 while still maintaining a full-time teaching load. Those years were delightful. I loved learning from my colleagues, and the students were so welcoming and supportive. It was a beautiful and fulfilling time. I was ordained in 2017, and that fall Dean David Adelson invited me out to coffee and he said, “We’re doing some reorganization. Would you want to be the director of the rabbinical school?” It was a gift from heaven, really.

What approaches did you bring to the role of director as part of that reorganization?

LG: Andrea Weiss was appointed provost at the same time as I became program director. One of our first big tasks was to engage in some major work on our curriculum. For the first time, we created a set of desired learning outcomes for rabbinic education and began to shift to an outcomes-based orientation to teaching and learning. I also worked with Rabbi Nancy Wiener and others to redesign the Professional Development side of the New York curriculum. That work laid the groundwork for the more recent curriculum redesign team led by my colleagues Dvora Weisberg and Joe Skloot.

We had already been thinking about our curriculum for the last several years when Covid struck.
In response, we came to the difficult decision that we could not send our students to Jerusalem. At that point, Provost Weiss appointed me to be Coordinator of Special Seminar Projects and my first task was to chair a team to design an online program for these first-year students. I also ended up running it, while still serving as director of the New York rabbinical program. Since these students did not get to spend a year in Israel, we created a special summer semester for them in 2022 that I also designed and led. My role as Coordinator of Special Seminary Projects also included setting up the College’s Seminary Hebrew Program and being quite involved in the early stages of the development of what would become the rabbinical school’s Virtual Pathway.

The students who were in their first year when Covid hit were ordained this past May. I was deeply honored to serve as the ordination speaker in New York for this very special group of students. Being able to share words of blessing to them as they were going out into the field to become the rabbis and cantors that they hope to be, was truly a high point in my career.

What changes have you made in your time at Hebrew Union College as the institution was making a broader effort to prepare clergy students to become leaders in the communities they go on to serve, in addition to achieving mastery of Jewish text and ritual?

LG: In 2006-2007, we received a grant from the Mandel Foundation to create a fellowship in Jewish leadership development for rabbinical students. The program focused on Jewish Peoplehood , and the best ways to help our students cultivate and craft a vision for Jewish life at its best. One component was that the Mandel Fellows would do the masters in Jewish education, so it was a combined initiative in New York and Los Angeles. Professor Sara Lee was the director of the Fellowship, and I served as core faculty in New York. We ended up working together for nine years, and that partnership was another incredible highlight of my time here. After four cohorts of fellows, the project was broadened to include all our students who participated in two different initiatives. First, we held two different retreat-based seminars; our second year students would go to Boston, and third year students went to the San Francisco Bay Area, where they would meet with visionary leaders of Jewish organizations, and engage in deep reflection about their own visions for Jewish life.

The second component of the initiative was the creation of small reflection groups, where students would meet five or six times over the year with faculty facilitators to explore core questions like the meaning of God, of prayer, Jewish peoplehood, and their relationship to Israel. These questions focused on what it means to be a Jew in our time and how to wrestle with some of these big issues. That work laid the foundation for me to think about rabbinic education for the future, and that’s what I helped to bring to the conversations about our curriculum. One of the central questions that guides my work is how to create rich Jewish content through ritual, prayers, learning, social action, and just about every aspect of life. And how do we do that in a way that people feel welcome and included can find deep meaning in those connections. Finding that mix is really what we need to do out in the world.

What has been your approach to working with students, and what do you hope they will take away from your work and into their careers?

LG: I’ve been blessed to teach courses where I can engage students in deep conversations that get to the heart of the kinds of rabbis they hope to be. For example, the course I co-taught with Rabbi Nancy Wiener, called Self and System, examines the fundamentals of pastoral care and counseling. It includes a deep focus on developing active listening skills and becoming a self-reflective practitioner. It also explores how to integrate the wisdom of Jewish tradition into conversation with the principles of family systems and pastoral care.

I also co-taught a course with Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein (‘06) called Developing Your Clergy Voice. The course was designed as third-year students’ first formal introduction to grappling with questions around their core values not just as students, but as they form their professional identities as future clergy: what happens when my values are in conflict with one another? What if I find that my values conflict with an institution where I’m working as an intern or doing my field work? How do I manage all of that as I craft a vision for my rabbinate? My message to students is to build that vision by drawing on our rich Jewish textual tradition, broadly understood, from ancient wisdom to contemporary thought.

What do you say to prospective students who are considering Hebrew Union College? Based on your experiences here, why should a student make this place the next step in their journey?

LG: I tell them that I’m very excited about our new curriculum with our deep focus on integrating the practical, the spiritual, and the intellectual, and how those three dimensions of what it means to become a rabbi or a cantor are essential components of our educational vision. I also note that the small classes, relationships with faculty, and – for all the challenges it brings – our commitment to a year of study in Israel, and wrestling with those core questions of what it means to be, for the most part, a North American Jew in relation to Israel, without any predetermination, but to really immerse yourself in that and to be exposed to the breadth and depth of Jewish people – and peoplehood. We’ve had a long-standing relationship with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee through a program called JDC Entwine that I’ve been involved with, which gives our students opportunities to take trips to Jewish communities around the world. We also have a JDC fellowship where, during their year in Israel and their first two years back stateside, students do peoplehood-oriented projects. All of those are really important dimensions of what we offer our students. We know that they’re going to be primarily serving Reform and progressive congregations, and we want them to have an appreciation and understanding for the broader Jewish world as well.

As you remain connected to Hebrew Union College in retirement, what’s coming up for you?

LG: Doing more adult education is the short answer. My last book was The Year of Mourning: A Jewish Journey, and I have already been doing some work this past year with a group of mourners through Central Synagogue’s online group The Neighborhood. At my own synagogue, I am leading a wise aging group, and I did a text study class for older adults. I trained as a facilitator for a program called Death over Dinner. I am going back to my original vision for my rabbinate around aging and end of life. Whether I am going to do that locally primarily within my own community, or more broadly, I haven’t figured that out yet. I am giving myself time and space to sit with that for a while.