By Angela Buchdahl
Pamela Dorman Books / Viking, 2025 ($32)
When Angela Buchdahl was eight years old, long before she knew she wanted to be a rabbi, she began leading nightly prayer services with her sister, Gina. They would huddle under their covers, and Angela led them in the Shema, followed by personal prayers and a harmonized and “elaborate ‘amen.’”
I can picture this nightly ritual, as it brings me back to my own young self having long, elaborate conversations with God from my bedroom in Johannesburg, South Africa. In fact, while reading Heart of a Stranger, I had the odd sensation of looking into a mirror, Rabbi Buchdahl’s words reflecting back the many ways that we have lived (unlikely?) parallel lives.
When I was eight, I also did not know I wanted to be a rabbi. Unlike Angela, I had no model of a woman rabbi, as she did at her synagogue in Tacoma, Washington. I had not even an inkling that Orthodox female rabbis were a possibility. But, like Angela, I was drawn to Jewish ritual and community, feeling a tremendous sense of belonging, even though we would ultimately both have to fight to belong.
Rabbi Buchdahl and I shared a stage at the 92nd Street Y in 2010. I had just been ordained; she had not yet become Senior Rabbi at Central Synagogue. We were brought together to tell different stories of “firsts”—both rooted in being outsiders and unlikely rabbis.
Rabbi Buchdahl is the first Asian American to be ordained as both a cantor and a rabbi, having been raised by a Korean Buddhist mother and an Ashkenazi Jewish father in Tacoma. When she told her mother she wanted to become a rabbi, her mother responded, “You have three strikes against you: You’re a woman. You are Korean. You have a non-Jewish mother. Why choose this fight?” She chose it anyway, undergoing what she calls a “reaffirmation ceremony” and becoming the first woman to serve as Senior Rabbi at Central Synagogue.
I came from a more traditional Orthodox background but had to forge my own path to the rabbinate, becoming the first Orthodox woman publicly ordained to serve in an Orthodox synagogue.
Both of us faced questions about our legitimacy and authority, creating new language for roles that didn’t yet exist, navigating naysayers and critics who said we did not belong. Both of us carry a double outsiderness. For Rabbi Buchdahl, race and gender; for me, gender and pushing boundaries within a halakhically bounded tradition. Her question was less “can a woman be a rabbi?” than “can this woman, given her racial and patrilineal-descent background, be seen as authentically Jewish?” Mine was the inverse; my Jewish status was never in question, but the title and authority structure, and acceptance that I could be a rabbi in a space where a woman had yet to do so, had to be built from scratch within a halakhic framework.
We both experienced overt and subtle misogynistic behavior. Rabbi Buchdahl recounts a moment with her predecessor, when he asked, with apparent concern, how she’d handle the job with three young kids at home—a question, she notes, no one asked her male colleagues. He warned that working mothers face a litmus test their male peers never do: who shows up at the emergency room with their child. But despite the lack of confidence that he and others on the temple board displayed, she persevered, proving her critics wrong and exceeding all expectations for her success.
I, too, was overlooked for a more senior level position after five years at my shul. I was told that I was not eligible for the promotion because my familial obligations would not allow me to be available around the clock. At the time, I was pregnant, unwell, with two toddlers at home. I felt that I had no leverage, and had to accept the gendered perception that women cannot actually have it all. (Both Rabbi Buchdahl and I read and wrote responses to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”)
Perhaps these experiences of being treated as “other” made us more empathetic, stronger rabbis. Rabbi Buchdahl’s title reflects this very notion: Heart of a Stranger, recalling the pasuk from Shemot 23:9: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart (nefesh) of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” Her message is clear. There is strength and dignity in standing apart. Rather than rejecting the parts of herself that made her feel unlike everyone around her, she has embraced them, allowing those very attributes to help her soar and become the phenomenal leader, rabbi, and role model that she is today.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s book is a tapestry of hard-won wisdom, offered as a gift to us through the lens most natural to rabbis: her Torah.
Rabbi Buchdahl has long been a friend and supporter of Yeshivat Maharat and of my journey, and my students have benefited from learning from her for years. I, too, have been inspired by her wisdom and ethics, and particularly, by her courage in telling her story, even as I write my own memoir. From her, I see how I can weave my journey through Torah, putting my own vulnerabilities on display and knowing that I am still living inside my story, not yet knowing how it ends.
