Word: rabbis
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...personalities. And on her new reality show--about her attempt to get yet another show, a cable cooking series, on the air--we meet several. There's the imperious diva, legendary for throwing tantrums and firing employees. There's the woman on a "spiritual journey," who asks a cabalistic rabbi to analyze the faces of applicants for a producing job. There's the coddled Hollywood loony (see previous sentence). There's the insecure self-doubter, the self-described "genius" and the cake-baking hausfrau...
Elaine Weiss sits to her rabbi's left, her back straight, knees primly together, a look of concentration on her face. There is a full house this Sabbath evening at Temple Israel in New Rochelle, N.Y., and Weiss's proud family is in the third pew. In minutes she will be called to the Torah to chant from the sixth chapter of the Book of Numbers, her rite of passage into full Jewish adulthood. One is tempted to say, "Today Elaine Weiss is a woman," except that she has been one a while: she is 62. Nearby sit five other...
Late Bat Mitzvahs were the remedy. At first they took place outside the normal congregational context. "It was, talk to a rabbi, rent a hall, have your own experience," says Grant. But gradually, congregational rabbis realized that adult Bat Mitzvah classes drew spiritually curious baby boomers and--as it turned out--were a kind of synagogue superglue. They increased morale, turned a cadre of highly motivated women into fully equipped leaders and eventually attracted men who had somehow forgone Bar Mitzvah in their youth...
...trend helped fuel liberal Judaism's escape from a somewhat arid buy-Israel-bonds communalism into greater ritual and spiritual engagement. A case in point was Reform Judaism's 1999 public recommitment to the use of Hebrew in its services: "You've learned how to pray in Hebrew," says Rabbi Sue Ann Wasserman of Reform's Union of American Hebrew Congregations. "Why shouldn't you use it?" The women's group Hadassah periodically celebrates the ascendant rite with mass Bat Mitzvahs of as many as 122 women...
...Hebrew. Feeling "empty" at mostly Hebrew services, she gravitated to Reform Judaism, whose prayer book provides English translations. A son was Bar Mitzvahed at Temple Israel and two daughters Bat Mitzvahed. But something was still wrong. One day Weiss visited the grave of a grandfather who had been a rabbi. She could not read the Hebrew on his headstone...