Remembering my teacher: Rabbi Dr. Andrea weiss

My teacher died this week, and the older I get— and the deeper I get into the part of my adulthood where the titles and roles that I have both chosen and  earned feel more authentic to me, the more I realize what a profound and disorienting thing it is to lose a teacher. 

Rabbi Weiss taught me many things— at the top of the notebook page on the first day of the first class I ever took with her (Bible 1: Literary Artistry of the Bible) , I wrote: 

August 31, 2010: 

“How do we know what we know?”

And then below that: “What makes a poem, a poem?”

I found that notebook this week. 

Those two questions, still at the top of the page, in my own handwriting, from fifteen years ago.

Andrea loved the Bible. She loved teaching Torah. She loved poetry and metaphor, and more than anything, she loved the Book of Psalms. She loved words, and God and the Jewish people, and those of us fortunate to sit at her feet and learn, encountered a teacher who wanted to show us how we could bring all of those things together and become real rabbis ourselves. 

She made us read Ted Kooser’s work “The Poetry Home Repair Manual”, and she made us bring packages of highlighters with at least 4 different colors to class as well as a copy of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (the most recent complete scholarly edition of the Hebrew Bible, based on the Leningrad Codex). She wanted to give us tools— because once you mastered technique, that was where the real potential for holiness and transcendence came. 

As someone who also loves metaphor, and loved words and writing: being in her presence that first year on campus at HUC in NY left me in awe. The tools she taught us weren’t easy: her command of biblical Hebrew– coupled with her command of the fullness of the Hebrew bible itself intimidated me. To mix metaphors a bit (something she would have noted with carefully worded curiosity if she were editing this)--- she taught us how to play the notes. Then she taught us some of the classics. And her hope was that each of us would find our way to becoming composers of new songs or improvisers ourselves. 

And so tonight, in her memory- I want to teach you one of the ways that she taught me to understand the significance of poetry and metaphor in our most sacred text. This tool, itself, is a metaphor: a way that I have come to look at the world, and tried to answer that question at the top of my notebook so many years ago: how do we know what we know? 

Take a metaphor. Any metaphor. 

God as Rock. God as Shepherd. You choose. 

Now picture a venn diagram. One circle: God. The other: Shepherd. 

That little place where the two circles overlap: that’s where the “associated commonplaces” live— another way of saying- what do they have in common? 

What do we know about God?What do we know about Shepherds? 

That place of shared knowing and common meaning is what opens us up to the “interpretive possibilities” that live in Torah. 

The idea of “interpretive possibilities” is an invitation: to look at the text, or our circumstances, or the world around us, and try to understand what it all means. 

She believed that technique was the doorway to transcendence. You had to learn the notes before you could improvise. You had to know the rules before you could find the holiness hiding inside them.

During my time as her student, The Torah: A Women’s Commentary (of which she was one of the editors) had come out just a couple of years earlier; it was a heady time of reckoning and hard conversations around gender at the college. Sensationalist headlines in the Jewish press always made mention of how there were more female rabbinical students than male (all of this still a few years before we began grappling with broader understandings of gender altogether). I can see now what a unique time in the life of the college it was. 

When I picture my teacher, Rabbi Dr. Andrea Weiss, I picture her sitting next to Rabbi Dr. Carole Balin, a professor of Jewish history. Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zierler, a professor of Hebrew and modern Jewish literature. Dr. Sharon Koren, a professor of parshanut, medieval Jewish history and mysticism. Dr. Alyssa Gray, professor of halacha and Talmud. Dr. Adrienne Leveen, also a professor of Bible. I was thirty years old, sitting at the feet of some of the most brilliant Jewish women in the world. I didn't fully know what I was receiving. I know now.

It would be impossible to enumerate how much I learned from this cadre of women. The sheer amount of expertise and technical knowledge shared between them of Jewish history, text and tradition is staggering. But more than anything, and here, Rabbi Weiss made herself exceptional: from her, and from all of them- I began to see what it would mean to be a teacher of Torah and a keeper of this tradition, while being my fullest self: a daughter, sister, friend, wife, and mother. 

As so many of her students have commented, she mothered the way she rabbi’ed, the way she taught: fully, and with great intention, and strongly held beliefs about how to do it. Somehow, even as she commuted twice a week between her home in Philadelphia and NY,  with two young children, she managed to mother her students in ways that illuminated her unique gifts. From her extensive comments on our assignments, to a casual email- she was a woman of many words. Each touch point with her students was treated as an opportunity for connection. (She would have hated that sentence. Passive voice.)

I wrote to her after a personal loss during my 4th year of school to let her know I would miss class the next day. In her response to me she wrote: 

“There are three Voices poems in this week’s parashah that might be meaningful to you, on pages 449-450 of the Torah: A Women’s Commentary. I also recommend Psalm 126, which I always turn to in moments of darkness”

Psalm 126 begins: 

שִׁ֗יר הַֽמַּ֫עֲל֥וֹת בְּשׁ֣וּב יְ֭הֹוָה אֶת־שִׁיבַ֣ת צִיּ֑וֹן הָ֝יִ֗ינוּ כְּחֹלְמִֽים׃

A song of ascents.

When GOD restores the fortunes of Zion

—we see it as in a dream—

And then, just a few verses later: 

הַזֹּרְעִ֥ים בְּדִמְעָ֗ה בְּרִנָּ֥ה יִקְצֹֽרוּ׃

They who sow in tears

shall reap with songs of joy.

Another time, years after my ordination, once I was here at Hevreh, she was the rabbi I turned to in a time of discernment about my rabbinate. I wrote to her a couple of months after our conversation to let her know where I had landed, and her response, again, was so “her”:

Dear Jodie,

Thanks for the update. It sounds like the right decision… Here’s a quote from Values & Voices Letter 36 from a Hindu scholar that speaks to your situation: “As we navigate through turbulence, we must remember that our society can emerge stronger out of the darkness. We must recognize that we are in this together, and that the betterment of all requires more than safeguarding our own self-interests. I am strengthened by my faith’s eternal optimism that our spiritual journey is ongoing, as is our work bettering American democracy together.” That is to say, growth and learning can come from these trying months; in many ways, you will emerge a stronger person and a more experienced rabbi. My favorite part of that letter, in fact one of my favorite quotes from all 100 letters, is: “What can we do to create light together?” That too is fitting for you. Go out and create light in partnership with your congregation. Our world needs more light.

Warmly,

Andrea

In the days since her death, I have looked at those two pieces of text; ones that she shared with me personally. In missing my teacher, I want so badly to find the meaning in these words, generously shared. 

First, the words of the psalmist: 

Those who sow in tears, will reap in joy. 

Second, the words of the Hindu scholar– (her favorite quote of all from an incredible project she did in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, American Values, Religious Voices: 100 Days. 100 Letters)

“What can we do to create light together?”

What are the associated commonplaces between the idea that those who sow in tears will reap in joy, and those who would ask the question, “what can we do to create light together?”

The voice of the psalmist is the voice of exile — a people far from home, dreaming of return. 

The voice of the Hindu scholar is the voice of this moment — a country far from itself, dreaming of the same.

And so perhaps- picturing that Venn diagram, the associated common place is actually a shared theological conviction: rupture is not the end of all possibility. “All” is so rarely lost; whether that “all” is joy, community, or light. Out of tears can come joy.  Out of darkness, there can be light.  Both texts  stand at the same crossroads: a broken moment that demands a choice between despair and renewed collective responsibility.

The interpretive possibilities— what Rabbi Weiss would then say “so— what does that mean? What do you do with that?” are then up to us. 

Rabbi Dr. Andrea Weiss’ death is a rupture; a tear. A gash. A wound. The metaphor stands. The associated common place is clear: her absence in this world leaves a painful mark. 

Rabbi Weiss’ death comes at a time in our world, where the darkness threatens to envelop us. I don’t need to enumerate the many things that threaten our humanity at this precarious moment in the world. She died on Purim— the 14th of Adar; a holiday centered around the Book of Esther; a book of the Hebrew bible which famously contains no mention of God at all. The Book of Esther has no mention of God, and yet salvation comes anyway. through human courage, voice, action.

There are some who say that dying on Purim is a sign of extreme righteousness. But perhaps, her death nudges us to see within ourselves the capacity to be a voice for light, and joy, and righteousness; to see an opening, and a deep need in our world, for more voices of truth and meaning. 

I want to end with a text that I taught six years ago, on the Shabbat of May 11, 2018, following the death of my teacher, Rabbi Aaron Panken: 

[i]t was taught in a baraita: When a Torah scholar dies, everyone is his relative. The Gemara asks: Does it enter your mind that everyone is his relative? Rather, say: Everyone is considered to be like his relative, in the sense that everyone rends his garment in anguish over him, and everyone bares his shoulder over him in mourning, and everyone eats the mourner’s meal over him in the public square as mourners do. The death of a Torah scholar is a personal loss for every Jew. 

The death of a Torah scholar is a personal loss for every Jew. 

The death of Rabbi Dr.Andrea Weiss is a personal loss for every Jew, those who knew her and loved her, those who teach her Torah, and those who have learned from those who teach her Torah. 

I am grateful to have been her student. 

I am grateful for the many tools she gave me to become a teacher as well. 

I am grateful for this community, who loves Torah, and who has allowed me the honor tonight of bringing this loss into the heart of our Shabbat, so that you might know who, and what has been lost. 

She always turned to Psalm 126 in moments of darkness. 

Tonight, I turn to it in her memory.

Hazor'im b'dimah — b'rinah yiktzoru. Those who sow in tears shall reap in songs of joy.

May her memory be a blessing, and may her teaching continue to bear fruit in each of us.

Shabbat shalom.