Elizabeth Oldfield: Hello and welcome to The Sacred, a podcast from the think tank Theos, shared in partnership with Comment magazine. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and I wonder if you’ve ever felt like the odd one out. Like a bit of a fish out of water, like aspects of your identity or your sense of self are confusing people’s categories, like you just don’t really fit in. I felt that at various times in my life. I felt it recently, honestly, when I went to Aspen, Colorado, to take part in the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is an amazing place where thinkers gather from all over the world—AI tech founders and billionaires and world leaders. And I was there from my little commune in Peckham, wondering what I had to offer. But I met someone there who experiences that sense of being slightly out of place, not occasionally, like me and maybe you, but for her whole life.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl is the senior rabbi of New York’s Central Synagogue, one of the biggest synagogues in the USA. But she’s not necessarily who some people picture when they think of a rabbi.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I think of, like, having this evangelical Christian minister aunt who really was trying to convert me, and my Buddhist mother who never did convert to Judaism, and my Jewish father, and all the extended family—that was all of it. I was like, I’m a spiritual mutt. You would think it might be very confusing, but I actually was… grounded. And this is the gift of my parents. They’re like, no, no, you’re 100 percent American. You’re 100 percent Korean. You’re 100 percent Jewish. You get to own all those identities. You don’t have to say I’m half anything. These are all yours.
Elizabeth Oldfield: In speaking to Rabbi Angela, I had the space to reflect with her about the different ways we can take the raw material of our lives, the raw material of other people’s perceptions, and make for ourselves a steady sense of self that’s able to have something to offer to the world. I really hope you enjoy listening. There’s some reflections from me at the end, as usual.
Rabbi Buchdahl, I would love to ask you, what is sacred to you? And you can take that question in whatever direction you like.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I mean, I think that there are many things that are sacred, but I think I’d love to talk about the idea, as a rabbi, of how something becomes sacred. Because, you know, we think about time as sacred, and relationships can be sacred, even objects can be sacred. But a lot of times people have the misconception that sacredness comes from on high, maybe from a religious figure who, you know, blesses something, or somehow it’s God-ordained as sacred.
And, you know, in Hebrew and in Jewish tradition, holiness, this root of kadosh, which is a word that is used for many different things in our tradition—Kiddush is making a sanctifying, a sacred occasion with wine. Kaddish is a prayer we say for the dead. It’s sort of how we sacralise our dead and memory. But that word, it literally just means to set apart. So the very simple aspect of making something sacred is just to set it apart and make it different.
So we’re actually commanded in the Jewish tradition and in the Hebrew Bible to make the Sabbath day holy. How do you make a day holy? You set it apart. If you are actually changing your practices and not doing the things you normally do and not being on your phone and spending time with your family and not using your car or your screens, your day actually feels sacred and holy. If you don’t do it, then it’s just… and it’s not sacred.
And there’s the word for marriage in Judaism, kiddushin—that same root of holiness. And the idea is you can take a relationship and make it set apart, and then it will become sacred. And people do that by deciding that… when I talk to a wedding couple, I say, are you saving and reserving some emotional part of yourself just for this relationship, that sets it apart from all other relationships? Are you? There’s certain physical intimacies you share only with perhaps a spouse. And that also makes it sacred. So the sacredness of your wedding doesn’t come from a rabbi officiating it. It comes from the fact that you make these promises and you set this relationship apart. And it’s not a one-time thing. You have to keep doing it. You have to continue to set it apart.
So I guess the power of sacredness is that it’s in our hands. And it’s as easy and as hard as just… setting something apart from every day, whether it’s your time or a relationship. Or even my mother-in-law has a tablecloth she uses only for the holiday of Passover. It’s embroidered with little spring flowers and linen, and it was given to her by her mother-in-law. And because she only uses it once a year, it’s a sacred tablecloth, because she sets it apart only for that. And we know that’s when we get to see that tablecloth. So just even the idea that objects can become sacred because we set them apart. I think that we don’t realise how much we can imbue things with holiness that way.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. I have a friend called Vanessa Zoltan who talks about, we make things sacred by the kind of attention that we pay them.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: There we go.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Turn our attention in that kind of Simone Weil way.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: You’re right. It’s not something coming from outside.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It’s a relationship.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: It is a relationship. And not having to be the same as everything else.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So I got interested in this question through the work of an anthropologist called Scott Atran, who wrote a book called Talking to the Enemy. And he was basically an anthropologist of conflict, and he talked about sacred values as essentially non-instrumental values, the things that we cleave to. And you can tell they’re non-instrumental because if someone offers you money to give them up, you would be less likely to compromise, because you would feel insulted. And he talks about in the kind of—in the Middle East conflict, land becomes sacred. This is not about, just, we can pay people off and it will be fine. There’s something much more symbolic. There’s something in deep memory. There’s a lot of stuff about identity.
So one of the ways I think about sacred values is principles, ideas that we’ve tried to live by. We’ve tried to stake our claim on them. We might not be willing to die for them, but we know when they feel compromised, because we get that ick reaction. The thing about sacred values is they’re very often just below the consciousness. We don’t really know, often, until they’re transgressed. So I’m not asking you to give a nice, clean, tidy answer, but what bubbles up as maybe principles or values that you’ve tried to orient your life around?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I always, I really start with a very deep… principle that I actually think people are generally born good and want to do the right thing when given the opportunity. So that means it’s like, when engaging in a conversation, or maybe even more so in a debate or an argument, that I’m starting with the premise of being curious why someone might think really differently than I do. That’s not just because they’re a terrible person. Because I’m coming with the premise, and this sort of sacred value, that people actually are generally good.
That is not a primal belief that everyone shares. Some people think people are actually born sinful and everything has to be kind of working around getting them to do the right thing. I actually think I come at it from a very different perspective. That doesn’t mean that people don’t stray for all kinds of reasons, and we can become selfish and fearful, and we can act out of those other things, and deluded. Absolutely. But I do think that’s a sacred value.
I think actually speaking from a place of authenticity, matching my words with my deeds, is a very sacred value for me. I think that continuing to embrace hope in spite of very sort of despairing times—I think it’s very fashionable to be cynical. And I also think that it’s very easy to despair. Yeah. And I think that is a cheap way out. And so I honestly think that hope is oftentimes the harder muscle to exercise. But I think actually leadership requires me to find that spot.
Elizabeth Oldfield: On the “people are inherently good” thing, how much—because I was thinking, I’m a Christian, I’m thinking, okay, how does that map on? And there’s definitely lots about original sin and a sense of kind of, if you’re Calvinist, it’s like total depravity. I think—I don’t know if this is Christian theology or just post-hoc rationalised instinct—but my sense is that humans are formable, that we’re always becoming, right? That we are made for love and that we are loved, but that we can, we’re sort of naturally neither good nor bad, right? That depending on how we are formed, depending on what care we receive, depending on what we pay attention to, we’ll form our souls. How much do you think your hunch that people are trying to orient towards the good is from Jewish theology, and how much is it from intuition?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I think it’s a bit of both, but I would say that, you know, there is a blessing that we say that’s part of our morning liturgy that says we thank God: the soul that you’ve given me is a pure one. Meaning that we actually have the opposite theology, that we’re actually all born pure, not born in sin with original sin. However. Everything in life makes us want to stray. So we’re born good.
And interestingly, the word for repentance in Hebrew, teshuva, literally means return. Because the idea of, when you’ve strayed, repentance is just, or atonement, is actually returning to the original good soul that you were born with. We all can go back to that. So I think that the Jewish theology definitely posits that we start from that good place. But there are millions of things—and the other thing you would say is that it also says, though, that we are all born with, um, in Hebrew, they’re called a yetzer tov and a yetzer ra, and that is a good inclination and an evil inclination. Every single person is born with both of them. And we might think of them almost as like those, the little angel and devil on your shoulder, that are your conscience and your id, or whatever.
And actually your bad inclination is not even evil. It’s more like urges—like ambition, lust, you know, your own self-worth and confidence. Many of those things, in the right measure, are actually really important for building and making families and pursuing things. And we wouldn’t do what we do as humans without that urge. It’s just about knowing how to control those urges. And so I actually think that there’s an important aspect of our entire lives that is about regulating those things.
And I don’t think that our tradition says that people are either inherently all good or all bad. What we are, we’re born pure. And then we layer all these experiences and things that happened to us along the way, and maybe genetics and whatever else. And the work of our lives is constantly, actually, in some ways, controlling our yetzer hara, our kind of our evil inclination, and continuing to choose.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Beautiful. I want to ask you some possibly slightly left-field questions. You have a big public profile in the US, and I always like to go digging behind it.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Oh, okay.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Tell me, when do you feel most alive?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Oh, my gosh. I think I feel most alive when I am singing with other people. And I’m very lucky that I get to do that on a weekly basis. Yeah. I am in the flow when I get to lead services. People say, like, oh, but you have to work on Shabbat, on the Sabbath, because I’m leading services. And I was like, oh, that is not work. That is like living.
And I do love music and I love singing, but it’s not the same as singing with eight hundred people, a thousand people, which I get to do every Friday night. And it is this collective energy. I actually think that my job as a prayer leader is as much an energy worker as a prayer leader. And I am harnessing energy, moving it, and that is an incredibly electrifying experience. And I actually think that that is maybe the closest I could describe what it feels like to kind of feel godliness in a space.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow. Yeah. So what’s interesting is the word that’s coming to mind is shamanistic. I don’t know why. I have not yet interviewed a shaman. I’m looking for one.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yeah, and I don’t think of myself that way. But maybe there’s a little—when I talk about energy work, maybe that’s a part of it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: But maybe it’s all gesturing to the same thing. There’s something when we’re together in our bodies, in worship in particular, I think, or at least oriented towards something beyond us.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yes.
Elizabeth Oldfield: That does. We reach for language about how powerful and profound it can feel.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I mean, I think that maybe the best word for it that we use is awe. And it’s a collective effervescence, which Durkheim, you know, used. But that Dacher Keltner also talks about, like, awe being collective effervescence. And I think that there’s a sense that we are moving together with shared attention. When we start to sing together, we’re actually breathing together. We know that. So there is something that’s happening. When I say energy, there is something actually scientific that we haven’t fully understood how to measure, but I know it’s happening. And everyone who’s in that room feels it.
So it is—and I think that that is the power of prayer, but collective prayer in particular. We are not a tradition, as Jews, who generally sit on a mountaintop solo and pray. We have that. We’re generally not worshipping that way. We really need to be in community. In fact, we’re mandated to have a minyan of ten people in order to even do some of our prayers. So there’s sort of essentially a mandate that you have to be in community to do prayer.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So, like, the opposite of an individualised spirituality.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yes, it is the opposite.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Do you think it’s possible to be Jewish and not be gathering with other Jews to pray?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Well, not in a complete way. You know, for example, the prayer for our… memorial prayer for our dead, which we do at every service—you’re actually not supposed to, you’re not, you have to have a minyan to say it. And the idea is our mourners should never be by themselves. And that’s deep and important. But even the call to worship doesn’t happen. The Bar’chu doesn’t happen unless you’ve got a minyan also. So it is not that you can never pray individually. In fact, many Jews pray every morning by themselves. But there are—it’s an incomplete experience without your community to do some of these prayers. You can’t do them all without them.
Elizabeth Oldfield: We’re going to come back to that. But I want to ask you possibly a tender question, which is, what are you afraid of?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Oh, I’m afraid of how easy it is to hate right now. How easy it is to hate people who think differently than we do, and how that hate so quickly turns into violence. And I think the Jewish community is feeling this acutely right now. And I have been… I’ve been more afraid of where this is going, and kind of the feeling that you can’t stop this thing, that it’s an emotion. Yeah. And it’s been frightening.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What three words would you like people to be able to use about you in your funeral eulogy?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Oh, that’s a great question.
Elizabeth Oldfield: You can take a moment. It’s intense. We don’t do small talk on this podcast.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Wow.
Authentic.
Joyful.
Generous.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Beautiful. I’d love to hear about the big ideas that were in the air in your childhood. Could you say a little bit about particularly those kind of zero to ten years? What was really formative in your life?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I think questions about identity were integral to me from the very beginning, because I did not have a simple identity. I was born in Seoul to a Korean Buddhist mother. My father is a Jewish American who came because of army service and ended up meeting my mother. And so immediately from my birth, I was already, you know, a mixed, a biracial child living in Korea, where citizenship is traced through your father. So I wasn’t a Korean citizen in the country of my birth, with my Korean mother. So I didn’t feel like I was fully Korean, even though this was my homeland, it was my native tongue, and I have this Korean mother.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Do you mind me interjecting? There’s a bit in your book about there being particular stigma, I guess, around those kind of marriages. Could you say a bit more?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yeah. In many ways, there was more stigma to being a biracial Korean than to being a foreigner, even, because… part because so many interracial unions, and children of interracial unions, were born out of a practice of having—actually stationed next to army bases, American GI bases, would be essentially prostitution halls that were populated by the government by poor, uneducated, rural Korean women who were essentially enlisted in to be prostitutes for American soldiers. So you can imagine that the union, the children that came out of these unions, were a shame for the country. They were embarrassed by it, even though they had essentially organised it.
And in the beginning, this began transnational adoption. They actually wanted to rid themselves of these children in that country. So they started shipping them out for adoption, these poor children. There was continuous stigma for many, many decades, from the Korean War on. I would say that they have mandatory army service, for example, in Korea. I don’t think it was till 2010 that they allowed biracial men to serve in the army in Korea, even though they were born there, living there. Just to give you a sense of how much this has been continuous.
So my parents, while they, you know, managed to cross these boundaries for love, I don’t know that they trusted that the society was ready to embrace children like me and my sister. And so I’m sure that precipitated my parents leaving when I was five, like right before I would start kindergarten.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Right. How many memories do you have of that?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I have a, like, you know that vibe of, like, warmth, but not a lot of, like, specific memories.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yes.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I have, like—I have an internal sense of, like, warmth when I think about being in Korea. I am certain that that comes from the fact that I was surrounded by family. My grandmother lived with me when I was young. We had immediate family, like all my aunties and uncles and tons of cousins all around, and we would meet together regularly and go out for picnics. And I do have a few pictures in my mind of spending time with my grandmother, of, like, you know, sitting with my father at a little low table every morning for breakfast, where he’d have his American breakfast of toast, which my mom thought was very strange. And I think that I continue to see that as a, you know, a birthplace, a homeland. But it hasn’t always loved me back in the same way as I love it.
Yeah. So you’re asking about the larger issues, though. I would say that—so you’ve got, that’s my start. Then I moved to America, in which kids are like, oh, so where are you from? And I say I’m from Korea. And but then as soon as I come back to Korea in second grade, they’re like, no, no, no, you’re American. And I was like, am I? Am I American now? Because I always felt like I was a hyphenated American and not fully American.
Yeah. And then, of course, being from the minute we arrived in Tacoma. My father was already a third-generation Jew in Tacoma, which is kind of unusual. It’s a small Jewish community, about three hundred families. But we had roots there. And it was clear, my parents said, we are going to be a Jewish family. And so I started going to synagogue. But there was no family that looked like mine, with my Korean mother and the biracial kids and immigrants to boot, at the synagogue. And my rabbi was incredibly welcoming, and the community was welcoming. And I had immediate family there, my grandmother and cousins and aunts and uncles. So I felt a sense of both belonging and otherness at the same time. So these questions came up all the time.
And then, of course, my mother started bringing her Korean siblings to America after we arrived. And when she did that, we started to have this much bigger Korean community. And one of my aunts became a born-again Christian, and then she decided to become a minister. And so she actually had her own Korean church. So I think of, like, having this evangelical Christian minister aunt who really was trying to convert me for my soul, and my Buddhist mother who never did convert to Judaism, and my Jewish father, and all the extended family—that was all of it. I was like, I’m a spiritual mutt. That was all. These were some of the themes.
And I think what this did for me—you would think it might be very confusing, but I actually was pretty grounded. And this is the gift of my parents. They’re like, no, no, you’re 100 percent American. You’re 100 percent Korean. You’re 100 percent Jewish. You get to own all those identities. You don’t have to say I’m half anything. These are all yours. And that gave me a sense of groundedness and rootedness even amidst all of this. And I feel that that was a tremendous gift.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. I wanted to talk about your aunt, because I’m a Christian. I feel the tension of a kind of irreconcilably missionary faith, right? It’s one of the last things Jesus says, like, go into the world and make disciples. And dear Jewish friends, dear friends from other traditions, dear atheist friends—that the way, like, what is, how do we do, like, what does it mean? How do you live that? And we can look throughout history to see the ways the church has not always threaded the needle wisdom-wise.
So it might sound too direct. But one of the things I’m always going to do is learn, like, having had your aunt trying to convert you and talking about hellfire and your eternal soul, and not really, I think, respecting your Judaism—as not respecting Judaism, as far as I can read it from the pages of the book. What would you say to Christians who do feel this sense of wanting to share their faith, but not knowing—what would it mean to do it lovingly? Or would you say, actually, when someone’s got their strong faith, just do not, is inherently disrespectful? So it’s a big question.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Oh, it is. And I, you know, even as a young child, when my aunt was telling me, I want you to accept Jesus because I want to save you, I understood that as an expression of her love and her deep belief. And it was at times scary. And there was a small part of me that’s like, what if she’s right?
Elizabeth Oldfield: The stakes are very high, right? It’s a lot for a child to process.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Because, you know, burning in hell forever is frightening. But I think even as a relatively young child—and this I think is feeling rooted in who I was—I could understand, she really cares about me and loves me. This is why she’s telling me this. And I don’t have to. I think she’ll still love me, which she did when I didn’t convert.
And I guess there’s a part of me that—what I would say to someone who has a deep belief is both that I think there’s nothing wrong with sharing why you believe something really deeply, why you would want to share that with people you love. And then to have the humility to understand that maybe you don’t have all the truth that there is, that there might be other possible truths. Yeah, that’s—I think that there has to be some humility any person of faith has to have. And I think the fact that I grew up with so many traditions is, I deeply believe that no religion has the monopoly on truth or on salvation.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Thank you. I want to hear more about your mom. I slightly fell in love with her through the pages of your book. She sounds like—
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: She’s the hero of my book, for sure.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It’s like a force of nature. Refused to have an arranged marriage, first daughter to go to university, did this brave thing of marrying an American Jewish man.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Especially with the stigma attached to it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. But then felt, understandably, I think, the… Am I at home in this Jewish community if I’m not going to convert? Am I an American? I’d love to hear about what her approach was, because it feels so central to your work.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: My mother was—is—like the strongest person I know, and such a force. And, you know, she’s like, she doesn’t even clear five feet tall anymore. Now she’s like a hundred pounds. She’s this tiny dynamite, and she still is. She’s eighty-three.
And, you know, I think what grounded her in many ways is a resilience and strength that she gained from being really a survivor of so much. And it meant that when coming to America, when people questioned her, in part because she was a foreigner, because she spoke with a thick accent, people often treated her either as invisible or as not intelligent. And I watched my mother navigate this. I, as a child, would feel angry watching the way people would talk to her. Or sometimes they would turn away from her and talk to me as a child. Will you tell your mother this? And I would say, my mother speaks English, thank you. And I would get angry about this.
And I watched that my mother never lost her own dignity. She approached this a little bit like, isn’t it too bad that they can’t see past their own prejudices. So I think that this was a helpful lesson for me in terms of understanding, when people also didn’t accept some parts of my identity or treated me in ways that I thought were less than respectful, to not let that get inside, not to internalise the prejudices of others. And so that, I think, was deeply—it’s one of the greatest lessons she taught me. And there are times where I live up to it, but, yeah, but there are other ways.
And then, but also, I think that she approached life with a sense of joy and curiosity and a deep sense of agency. She never once talked of herself as a victim of fill-in-the-blank of the many things that people did to her. Because she’s sort of like, I don’t have to take that on. That’s not my identity. And I can actually, if I’m having these issues as a Korean woman, I’m going to create a whole organisation that’s going to take care of this.
And, you know, when she felt like an outsider, one of the first things she did was bring her sisters, and then teach ESL, English as a Second Language. And so then she welcomed hundreds of immigrants who were more strange than her. And you know what? When she did that, she was transformed into the American, into the welcomer and the host. And so I think she understood that, if this is the way I feel, I can do something about this. And that was kind of the strength with which she went through the world, and the way that she took control over her destiny, in a sense. And that’s been a lesson for me.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And you link it to a particular piece of Jewish thought, Jewish scripture, about what to do when we’re the stranger and how to think about strangers. Could you say more?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yes. So the way I structure my book is, it is a series of relatively short narrative chapters that are like a memoir, like a traditional memoir. But each one I have, each chapter has an accompanying devar Torah, or nugget of Jewish wisdom, centred around a Hebrew word or Hebrew concept. And in this chapter, in which I talk about what it was like to move to Tacoma and how hard it was for my family, but for my mother in particular, I then link it with the Jewish concept of hachnasat orchim, which is welcoming of guests, this hospitality that is really deep in our tradition, and in many Middle Eastern cultures in particular as well.
And I watched—there’s a story of the biblical patriarch Abraham. And he has been called to leave his home and his birthplace and leave everything behind and to go to a place he does not know, where he becomes a stranger. And in this particular chapter, he circumcises himself at age ninety-nine, the first Hebrew. But he is famously, like, wanting to always greet strangers. So there’s a story that comes from the rabbis that says, on this particular day that he circumcised himself, and he’s ninety-nine, that God made the day oppressively hot so that in a tent that maybe looks something like this, he would rest instead of standing at the foot of his tent to welcome strangers.
And I thought to myself, this defies explication. Why would Abraham be so desperate to welcome people? And then I thought of it in the context of my mother’s life, and I realised, oh my gosh, he’s not just doing this for the guests. He is doing this because he understands that he is transforming himself in the process. That when he welcomes those people that are even more stranger than him, that don’t have even a place to drink a cup of water, that he is less the stranger in this place where he has just now physically marked himself as a stranger.
And that helped me understand my mother’s kind of literal obsession—not obsession, that makes it sound like it’s a disease, but I mean, drive—to welcome others. And that’s been part of her life’s work. And so I think, again, that points to also her agency. Like, I don’t have to just be the victim and say, I’m the alien, I’m the immigrant, I’m the stranger. Let that be the impetus for our more generous hearts.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. I love the way our wisdom traditions can give us these, can start with these universal human experiences of feeling like an outsider or feeling like a stranger, and help us—give us something to do with them.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Give us something to do with them.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And it really—the way you talked about it—is, we will all feel like strangers, we will all feel like outsiders. You perhaps had, you know, experiences that made that slightly more likely, but at least those particular texts you talked about—you know, at one point in the rabbinic teaching, Abraham is with God and says to God, I’m going to leave you now to go greet a stranger. And he goes, like, sure. The ethic of hospitality is so strong, both because it is a good, but also that it’s good for us. When we feel like a stranger, when we actively go, okay, who is a stranger that I can welcome? We take back some agency, right? We make ourselves at home. And it’s beautiful.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: And there are other strategies once you feel like a stranger that some tribes have used, which include… if I feel like a stranger, I’m going to build a higher wall, and I’m going to make sure that it’s us and them. And I’m going to bring cohesion by making them more the enemy. That is another strategy. I think it’s actually a very deeply divisive strategy. And we see it being played out in all kinds of places, including in America right now. But I think religious faith traditions actually really push us to our better selves and to say, yes, you feel like the stranger.
Elizabeth Oldfield: They can do.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: They can. They can. I think it’s partly how you interpret it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: You’re right. And you could probably find justification in the Bible for the other method as well.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: But I think that that is, it calls us to our higher nature and to open our tent in a different way, rather than just to say, no, we’re going to build the walls higher.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. I’d love to hear about your Judaism, the early years of coming to claim this faith for yourself—maybe particularly start with music, because it’s really key for you.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I was. Music is my native spiritual language. And I think that’s not unusual. I think if you find any three-year-old child, they’re dancing through the world with a musical soundtrack in their head. And oftentimes you can hear them, like, you know, I’m playing in the field and I’m going to eat some ice cream. I have videos of my children just sort of singing their way through life. At some point, they are socialised to be embarrassed by that. And for some reason, I was grateful my parents never did. So I am still to this day singing to God wherever I go.
But I think that there is something about music that bypasses something that’s primarily intellectual and goes to something that’s deeply embodied. And if you hear music, it’s hard not to move. Something primal about what music does to our souls, and what it does to the energy between people when we make music together.
So the music that was early in my life—I started playing piano when I was five, and played another instrument later. But I think that, like, kind of organised singing was never super inspiring in the beginning. I had kind of music class where we learn to sing, like, “Fifty Nifty United States,” which is like—these were like mnemonic devices. It wasn’t like making music for the joy of music. And then in my synagogue, we did not have a music leader because we couldn’t afford a cantor, which is a person who leads the music. So we had this kind of hired non-Jewish professional choir that sang, but it didn’t mean anything to them. So it didn’t feel the same.
It wasn’t until I was about eight years old, and this kind of young woman, with, like, a breath of fresh air, like, flew into Tacoma and said, I’m going to start a kids’ choir. And she was young and she had a guitar and she was energetic. And she started singing these songs which sounded like the music I recognised, meaning, like, kind of folk music, rock music. And suddenly I was singing to God on the swing set and singing her songs that she was teaching. And she had us come up onto the pulpit and lead services for the whole community as, like, a ten-year-old or whatever at that point. And I remember thinking to myself, oh, I have found my voice in this community. There is something happening here. And so music became my immediate kind of point of connection.
And about three years after she arrived in Tacoma, she disappeared as mysteriously as she had arrived. And I was bereft, and I was sort of like, the soul of the congregation is gone. Where’s the music? And I kept begging my religious school teacher, we need a new music teacher. She’s like, we’re in Tacoma. They don’t grow on trees. We can’t just find another one. She said—and after a couple of years of my complaints, she just tapped me on the shoulder and said, you’re going to be the music teacher. You’re fourteen years old. You’re musical. Go learn how to play guitar. When I send you to this Jewish camp, you learn as much music as you can.
And so it was—that was a turning point for me. It made me realise that I could create the kind of Judaism that made me so excited to connect, and that gave voice to something that was both connected to Jewish memory and some sense of rootedness, but also that was very hopeful and future-forward-looking, that made me feel connected to other people, made me feel connected to God or something bigger than myself. It’s hard to explain. It just was kind of enchanting.
And I’m sure it is a direct line from that to why I became a cantor, in addition to being a rabbi—the person who leads the music and kind of the worship—because it is just still, to this day, core to my soul. When I switched from being the cantor to being the rabbi at my synagogue, which was not an easy transition for me, I remember that for a while it was almost—it felt like almost like a cheat that it was, if I wanted people to feel or understand how I was feeling, the easiest way I could do that was to sing, or to sing it and to create something musical, and then they would get it. And I remember at one point someone says, you’ve got to, you’ve got to rely on words. You’ve got to do this with your words too. And I think that it doesn’t mean that I give up one, but I supplement, and they can do different things. But it’s still my native language.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. You write in the book about being this delightfully earnest child, like making your sisters say the Shema and reading all these books about Jewish faith and wanting to grow close to God.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I want to do it right.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And quite early having this dream of wanting to be a rabbi. But this phrase comes up again and again: not a real Jew. Could you say more about that? Because I think people outside your world might not really understand.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yeah. Oh, yeah. You sound like my therapist. We’ve been talking about all the ways that, like… So unlike Korean citizenship, which is traced through your father—and if you don’t have a Korean father, you’re not a Korean citizen—in Judaism, your Jewish identity, for at least the last thousand-plus years, has been a matrilineal identity. Meaning if you have a Jewish mother, you are automatically Jewish. Now, you can also become a Jew through conversion, which is a process of learning and then of also having a group of three rabbis and having a thing, anyway.
Now, I would like to just add, like, a little historical footnote, that in the time of the Bible, if you read the Bible there, the identity was actually patrilineal, meaning, like, it was about your father. So at some point it changed in Jewish tradition. I say this just to say that, like, I don’t know exactly why this has been the, you know, why do we now make this all about maternal?
But the Reform movement, which is the most liberal branch of Judaism, in 1978 actually passed a ruling that said, you know what? There was a time a long time ago where we did this patrilineally, and we no longer distinguish between mothers and fathers as raisers of children. So if you have a Jewish father or a Jewish mother, and you’re raised as a Jew, we consider you Jewish without having to do a conversion. Meaning, like, it just is.
I was very lucky that essentially this rule changed when I came to America. So I had this Jewish father, not a Jewish mother, but I was in a community that said, that makes you Jewish. So I grew up in this nice bubble, Tacoma, Washington, in a Reform synagogue in which I was seen as fully a Jew and unquestionably Jewish.
The first time I ventured outside the Reform movement, went to Israel, met with Jews who were Orthodox, come from a different movement—they said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The Reform movement doesn’t get to change this distinction. This is old Jewish law, which it is true. It was. And they said, if you don’t have a Jewish mother, you are not a Jew.
Now, they did say to me—the first time I was confronted with this was when I was sixteen years old, on my first trip to Israel. A few Orthodox Jews explained this to me. And I don’t think they meant it to be hurtful or personal. They just, for them, it was like, this is just the law. Like, you’re outside the legal definition. And so they said, sort of, I think they thought helpfully, but you can convert.
But I have to say, part of this is like a kind of a stubborn adolescent identity crisis that set off for me. A part of me was like, convert? That means that, like, you’re basically asking me to say that, like, I haven’t been Jewish up to my whole time. That’s all I’ve ever been. And somehow that seemed to negate the Jewish tradition that I had been. And something about that didn’t sit right with me.
But I was not settled in my Jewish identity. There were real questions of, are they right? And let’s not also forget that, while… I was a Reform Jew from Tacoma with a non-Jewish mother. So there was plenty about Judaism that I didn’t practise in the home that more traditional Jews did. There was plenty that I didn’t know about Judaism. And there was a way that my life was intermixed with society, that, like, a more traditional Jew might live in a holy Jewish community and go to a Jewish school and listen only to Jewish music. And suddenly I looked at their life and I said, oh, my gosh, maybe that’s what it is to be a Jew. And I’m doing all these other things. Maybe I’m not actually authentically Jewish.
So it set off an existential identity crisis that was acute for the next five or six years of my adolescence into college, and was not easily resolved. Uncomfortable as it was, there is a part of me that felt like that was essential to my becoming the Jew and the rabbi that I am today.
Elizabeth Oldfield: You did eventually convert. Tell me more. Was it surprising to you?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yes. So after I had what I would call a sort of rock-bottom moment that I describe in the book, which I won’t go into now unless you want to delve into it, I was actually ready to leave the Jewish community. I got to a point where it wasn’t even that I wanted to leave. I just thought to myself, maybe I’ll just stop being a Jew, because it’s so hard. And because I feel like I’m being rejected by the community in so many different ways. And it was so deeply painful for me.
And my mother, in her wisdom, was listening to me. I was calling her long distance from Israel at this point, saying, I don’t have a Jewish face. I don’t have a Jewish name. I could stop being a Jew. Nobody would even know or care. And my mother said, is that really possible? And there was such wisdom in that question, because it wasn’t an affirmation. It was a question. And it forced me to understand and realise that, no, actually, it’s as core to me as being Korean or Angela or just who I am. And it’s not something I could just take off, even if other people don’t accept it as who I am.
And for some reason, that moment was clarifying. And it put an end to, in some ways, kind of the most acute questions that I had been carrying with me for many years. And I wanted to do something to affirm that. And it sounds like part of what I did was, I understood conversion—that connotation, in a kind of Christian Western sense, means a kind of a turn of some extreme kind. But giyur, which is the word we use for someone becoming a Jew in Judaism, it connotes the fact that you are recognising the Jewish soul that’s always been in you, right? When we—
Elizabeth Oldfield: More like an Islamic—
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It’s like revert.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yes, and exactly. A return, right, to something that’s always who you’ve been. When a rabbi explained that to me, suddenly I was like, oh, it’s not a concession to do a giyur. It’s actually an affirmation of who I’ve always been. And I called it a reaffirmation ceremony instead of using the word conversion. But I did a traditional giyur, which means having a rabbinic court of three rabbis and dipping in a ritual bath called a mikvah. So I really did have a halachic conversion that I did at age twenty-one.
And I thought of it as a way to actually affirm and choose Judaism at this point. And there is a way that any modern Jew in America or UK or many places today, actively deciding to be a Jew, is a choice. Like, we’re all a Jew by choice. In some ways we could decide we have nothing to do with the tradition. So I think there was something about that. I just, it felt important to me, and I didn’t do it for everybody else. And frankly, I’ve learned that there are people who will still not accept that as strong enough, because it wasn’t three rabbis that are Orthodox. So there are some Orthodox Jews who won’t accept that conversion, but I wasn’t doing it for them. I was doing it really for me. And I found it very—like all good ritual, it was transformative when I did it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Yeah. You’ve had all these moments where you are right on the cusp of things changing, right? I’m really enjoying the wind and the wildness.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Getting a rain bath.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. We’re in nature. We do a podcast in the mountains. You know, stigma and biracial relationships in Korea; when you move to the States, you know, interracial marriages was what had only just stopped being illegal in some states.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: That’s right. Right. The year before my parents were married.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Madness. Crazy. The change about the patrilineal descent, and then female rabbis, right?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Right. Like, the first female rabbi was ordained a month before I was born, in 1972.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: So I wouldn’t even know, when I was born in South Korea, what a change that would make in my life. But it meant that there wasn’t the day of my life that I had to live in which it was impossible to be a woman and be a rabbi.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Which was for two thousand years before that.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. So I’m going to say something that I am going to say carefully, and the joy of having control over the edit—take it out—which is that… got lots of friends who are women priests. They’re priests who happen to be women. And my sense is that for the first generation that came through, it was so bruising.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yes.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Right. There’s still parts of the Church of England that don’t accept their ministry. We’ve just seen the Southern Baptists. There’s many women from that generation that I respect very deeply. But I would say there is a chipping—there was probably a necessary chippiness. Right. And sometimes, if I’m honest, a bitterness about having had to fight, claw their way into the ministry that they thought God gave them.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yes.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Right. And these things are formative for us, right? And I really don’t mean that as disrespect on any of those amazing priests. But you have also, on multiple fronts—because you are half Korean and your mom’s not Jewish, because there’s a lot, there’s people from the outside who don’t look at you and assume that you’re Jewish. And there’s people in the Jewish community who don’t look at you and assume that you’re Jewish. And yet you’re the rabbi of the largest synagogue in New York. You’re perhaps one of the most visible rabbis in the US now. And my sense from you is that you’re not chippy. Is that a word that translates?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yeah, it’s so good, yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What’s been the soul work, I guess, for constantly fighting for a sense of self when everyone else is trying to triangulate your identity, and you’re confusing everyone—and pushing you further into a spiritual life and steadiness and maybe into God, rather than in different directions.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Well, I want to first pay debt to the women who I really think paved the way first for me, because while I do feel like there were boundaries I had to break, I’m standing on the shoulders of the first generation of female rabbis who did some of the very, very hard work.
And, you know, there’s a way that, especially in my youth, I was both naive and a little oblivious in, I think, maybe a good way, to the massive amounts of sexism and racism and other kinds of things that were coming at me all the time. Like, when people would say all kinds of things that now would be labelled as microaggressions or straight-up aggression, I was sort of like, ah, isn’t it too bad these old men still talk like this. It was a little bit my mother. That’s their problem. And so I let a lot roll off me. That’s good and bad.
On the one hand, I didn’t get burnt out by fighting every one of those fights. I just sort of let those go. And I think my attitude was sort of like, instead of worrying about changing everyone’s mind, I’m just going to do what I need to do. And, you know, in some ways I kind of feel like, I’m just going to be, you know, a really educated Jew. That was my first job. Then I was like, then I’m just going to be a really good rabbi. And then, you know, and that’s just going to have to be how I do this. I can’t fight those fights.
I think the downside of that is there’s a certain way in which you let a lot of things go. And so it doesn’t always change. Like, I think that I make change just by my existence. And now that I’m on the front of a pulpit, it changes it for the next generation, who are much more sensitised to be alert to these kinds of, you know—
Elizabeth Oldfield: Misunderstandings.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Misunderstandings and aggressions and outright, you know, sexism and other things that still exist to this day, of course. And they are trained much more, I feel like, a younger generation, to name it, to call it out. And I applaud them for it. And it’s also burning them out. And it’s really, really hard.
So I think that there is—it is partly just a temperamental thing that I’m kind of probably too much giving the benefit of the doubt. I don’t take offence very easily. I don’t hold grudges. It’s just not worth my energy. It’s not where I want to put my energy. It means that I choose the battles I’m going to do.
And I will say, if I’m being honest, yes, there has been a part of me that’s had to be a bit of a fighter. And if I would say that, you know, if you want to psychoanalyse me, as my therapist has done—you know, she said, she’s like, you’re in this tug-of-war game, Angela, where someone says to you, pulls and says, you’re not a Jew, and you’re sixteen years old. And you say, oh, yeah, I’m going to become a rabbi.
Elizabeth Oldfield: You’re going to be the most Jewish Jew there is.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I’m going to be the most Jewish Jew. Exactly. I’m going to lean in. And then they say, well, you know, you can’t really be a rabbi. And then I’ll say, oh, yeah, I’m going to lead a giant synagogue in New York. And she said, you know, Angela, you’re strong. And so you can pull really hard and you win. And she said, but it does come with a price.
And so I wouldn’t say that I don’t, haven’t paid some price for this. And there’s been times where it’s been very exhausting. And I think I do feel, and this has been both a drive as well as sometimes my burden, of proving myself, of having to prove myself. And that’s probably why I feel like I’ve had to work twice as hard, because I kind of have to come in twice as prepared. I have to learn twice as much. I didn’t come in with the same background. I didn’t come in with the family, some of the family knowledge. And I didn’t have the Jewish geography, as we say, all the things that kind of the networks.
And yet I’ve also found people along the way who have been more than just kind, who have been my champions, who’ve been my angels along the way. And I just, I want to say that I haven’t done this by myself. And those people, including my family, my loved ones, and some incredible mentors along the way, they’ve actually buoyed me. And so I feel great joy and gratitude in the work.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Do I need to say—this is an entirely trivial point—I love how Americans say “buoy.”
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: How do you say it?
Elizabeth Oldfield: We call it a “boy.”
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Oh, boy.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Things on a harbour are a “boy,” and so you “boy” someone up. And the word “buoy,” it sounds like “phooey,” just like very cute.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: So glad to know that.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. So I think we have listeners from radically different perspectives and life experiences, but I think one of the questions we might be able to guess—but I’m not sure everyone listening will be like, I fully understand exactly what a rabbi does. So I’d love you to read just this paragraph from your book, and then maybe say more about day to day. What is your vocation? What’s a rabbi trying to do?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl:
And while I quickly learned that a rabbi’s real routine was not going to match my romantic ideal of sitting all day long with ancient texts and talking about God and the meaning of life, I found the actual work even more compelling. Drawing people’s attention to the ways life is wondrous, pushing against complacency. Opening avenues to a little more awe, and building and maintaining a real, unwavering community.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Beautiful.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Thank you.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So how do you think of your vocation today?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I mean, I think a simple way I have said it recently is, I’m in the awe business. And what that means is I both am helping people understand and appreciate and draw attention to the wondrousness of their lives. And some of that is through ritual moments, like a birth, and like marking births or marking marriages or marking a coming of age with a bar mitzvah. These are the life cycles that I think most clergy will do in whatever tradition you’re in. But we are in that business of helping draw attention to these awesome moments that sometimes could go bypassed by us if we don’t actually take a moment and actually ritualise what it is. So I think that that’s deeply important.
But I also think that, like, a lot of awe and wonder comes in much more everyday things. So a prayer practice, which we do regularly, is about drawing attention to the fact that there can be holiness, as we say, in very ordinary things. Just the daily miracles of getting up and walking and being able to put something in your mouth, and, like, the sun rising. These things that we no longer see as miraculous but are part of it.
And part of it is the awe. Awe is not always joyful. It can also be fearful. The awe of death and our mortality. And it is helping people grapple with our mortality, which is the inevitable end for every single one of us, and in many ways is an orienting principle for thinking about meaning and purpose in our lives.
That’s a rabbi’s job, is to kind of draw us back to those big-picture questions, because we can get very caught up in the sort of self-centred, you know, narcissism of just, you know, our daily lives, the kind of the most base politics of the moment. And it also is about taking kind of the long picture of history, the long game of what we’re in it for. And if our lives are completely—are mortal, and we should not shy away from that fact, because I think it actually pushes us to live more strongly.
In some ways, the thing that helps us understand immortality is attaching ourselves and our life’s work to something which is bigger than ourselves that will outlast us. And that is also, I think, part of what a rabbi does, is help us understand we are part of an epic story of a larger people that has a mission and a purpose and values. And when you can contribute to that, then you are contributing to something that is eternal, that will outlast you.
So these are all part of what I do. That’s a very big picture. I mean, I’m also dealing with budgets and, as you heard, like, bedbugs, and, like, you know, and some very mundane things. But I have also come to learn that even the mundane things of, like, negotiating our health care for our staff—these are actually very values-driven decisions. You know, these are the way we spend our money or allocate our time. These are values that are in lived life. So I want to make the running of my synagogue authentically aligned with what we say we want the world to look like. So that is also part of my job leading. Not every synagogue is the same, but my synagogue is a big institution with 150 full-time staff. So we’re actually looking at much bigger strategic questions of how we want to model what communal living looks like.
Elizabeth Oldfield: The various points in the book made me laugh, but one was when you got an invitation to the White House of President Obama to do the Hanukkah blessing. And you said, I don’t want to go. They just want me because I’m the first female Korean rabbi.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Right.
Elizabeth Oldfield: How—
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I’ve been tokenised enough.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. How do you navigate that? Because it is like we’re constantly working with these mental shorthands about people. I didn’t know your work before I saw you on the programme. And I realised that everyone in America knows who you are. But that’s sort of what—when you first encounter the two-dimensional public profile of someone, that’s what it was, right? How do you kind of use that particularity for good, and also cope with the fact it’s really annoying?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yeah, it’s obviously been a double-edged sword in my life. Like, no one wants to feel like they’re tokenised. No one wants to feel their identity is, you know, the sum of a couple—
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yes, exactly.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Also, if it’s like ticking the boxes of, like, oh, she’s the Korean rabbi. And although I’m very proud of being a Korean rabbi, or that, you know, interfaith, you know, product of interfaith marriage—but I’m proud of that too. And I recognise that leaning into that is in one of the ways that I change the perception of some of these stereotypes that people have. And so I take that responsibility seriously.
When I was younger and relatively unknown rabbi, I would get asked for things that I shouldn’t have been asked for, because they were like, oh, well, look, she’s a Korean rabbi. And so her face will look good with all the other rabbis that all look like white men. And I knew in some ways I was only being asked because of that. And a part of me wanted to say, I’m not going to be used in that way. But another part of me says, but if I don’t do it, then it doesn’t change the narrative at all. And so I would usually end up saying yes, but I had reservations and I had conflict about it.
And when it came to this, there was some part of me that, like—I don’t think it was a fair humility, where I sort of, like, oh, but I’m only being asked because of this. It’s not because of who I really am. My husband was sort of like, are you kidding me? He was like, that’s exactly why you have to go.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Like, and you did go.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: And I did go, and it was actually one of the most amazing, you know, moments of my life, honestly. So, shame on me.
But I use this to teach this principle in Judaism of anava, of humility. And we often think of humility as almost like a making smaller, a diminishment, a self-abasement even sometimes. That’s not the way that our tradition thinks of anava, of humility. It’s actually like taking up your appropriate space. And sometimes that actually is taking up more. In some ways, when I would say, no, no, no, I can’t possibly, I couldn’t possibly, it’s in some ways making it as much about me as anything. And it means that, like, you’re not actually taking up the space you need to for this moment, for rabbis, for women, for people of, Jews of colour, for, like, everything that I’m in some ways a part of and representing. And so I did go.
And I think for women leaders in particular—and I’m sure you know what this is like—to often, I’ve often been like the only woman in the room, because I was, I still am, only one of a very few number of female rabbis leading large communities. So when they want to kind of get the, like, oh, the figurehead rabbis of different places, I’m often still the only woman in the room. And I think to myself, I have to be there. And it doesn’t change until we still kind of show up. And then hopefully we’ll be judged for what we offer, not for our tokenism. But we have to be in the room or we’re not even heard. So, yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield: One of the real roles of the rabbi, as it says in that quote, is to hold a community together. And you’ve gestured to the wider division in the world. There’s also division within the Jewish community, perhaps in the last two, two, three years. And even this morning, I know New York is feeling quite heated. Mamdani—the, how, who said that wrong? Mamdani.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Mamdani, that’s right.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Mamdani, and the continuing impacts of October 7th and everything that’s come after. What are you learning about… Sometimes I feel like people are losing hope that it’s possible to hold together across these divides, to keep treating each other as humans across the divide, that the other guys are so wrong that we shouldn’t be appeasing them anymore. You don’t have that luxury. You have to try and hold a community together. Give us some of what you’ve learned.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: What I’m learning is, when people actually have genuine face-to-face encounters, it’s really hard when you know someone, serve with them in some way, when you pray with them, when you sing with them—you can still completely disagree. It’s very hard to demonise someone when you know them that way.
And I think part of the reason we are in the situation we’re in, where we are so deeply polarised in America, in the Jewish community also—it’s not just the algorithms and the echo chambers of the media that we’re listening to. All of these things contribute terribly. But it’s also the physical spaces where people would come in community and actually bump up against the friction of being with people who think differently than them. The discomfort that can come from that, and that kind of the atrophy of that muscle of knowing what it feels like to be able to disagree civilly with someone and to talk to them. It’s become such an issue.
So I lead this very diverse community, ideologically diverse, politically diverse, diverse on their views on Israel. It’s really quite wide spectrum. I actually think it’s one of my most sacred responsibilities to hold a community like this together. Because when we do, when we are in there and we are, you know, as I said, like, when we come together on Shabbat and we pray and we transcend our political differences, when we then, like, serve meals to the people that are homeless in our neighbourhood, which we do three days a week—we serve two hundred meals and people are coming together and doing that. So they could walk, we need to walk out of that room and say, like, I don’t like who you voted for. But they’re not going to say, and you’re an evil person.
Because what started to happen right now is, we’re in an environment in which people who are on different sides of the political aisle no longer just disagree. They actually think the other side is immoral, evil, and an existential threat to them. And when you think that, then there’s absolutely no way you could even tolerate being in the same room with them.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Or you can’t tolerate disagreement.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: No, you are threatening my existence.
We are in a time where I think in particular the Jewish community—I think rightly, because there has been such rising antisemitism and violent attacks against Jews, and my synagogue has not been immune from different kinds of targeting that we’ve had in different ways—we are feeling fear. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t feel… There is true danger and things to worry about. But when we act out of that fear only and don’t temper it with a sense of really, like, bridge-building connection, and counter the kind of the counter-examples of the ways that people are also standing with us and doing well—I think that when we act out of that, we actually can isolate ourselves even more.
And so I use all the tools in the Jewish spiritual toolbox to transcend, which does mean, like, yes, it’s not a simple or manipulative thing to say, when we sing together, we are transcending in some way. We are doing something that helps us remind ourselves of our humanity and our connection with each other. When we do, as I say, we do a lot of service of others. People who are coming back from being incarcerated. We have many, many programmes. We work with a lot of asylum and immigrant folks who come through New York. And when we are doing that work together, we are transcending kind of our differences and reminding ourselves that there are actually things that we actually agree upon, these higher values and morals that we’re working towards.
And I actually think that I’m sure that would be true of our interfaith partners as well. Like, when we have an Episcopal priest speaking at my synagogue tonight for Pride Shabbat, and she is amazing—we probably don’t agree on everything, or on Israel, perhaps. But the fact is we actually agree about a lot of things, and we need to continue to draw ourselves into those higher values of, like, we want to help retain the dignity of every human being. We can agree on that. And we need to continue to take it one step higher and remind ourselves of that, and connect on that, and act on that. And it’s not that those differences necessarily go away, but we can live together and we can stop demonising each other. We need to do more of that.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I often—we share a lot of scriptures in common, obviously—and I think a lot about how often the Bible says, do not be afraid. And I often sit with that and think, it’s not saying do not be afraid because everything’s going to be okay, right? It’s saying do not be afraid because fear messes you up.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yes.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Like, when you act out of fear. And we know this from fight or flight, like, all of the neurobiology is now there to backfill that wisdom from two thousand, four thousand years ago—that when we are in fear, everyone looks like an enemy. We are not creative. We are not collaborative. We cannot have empathy. We can’t actually build a better future.
And so a big responsibility in this time, I think, is to steady ourselves. You talk about one of the jobs of a rabbi is to be a non-anxious presence. We have to show up for your—that must be, like, you presumably some days you burn out and exhausted, and you don’t want everyone projecting onto you and critiquing you and treating you like something between a mother and God.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: How do you know my life?
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yes. How do you steady yourself?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Yeah. So I will be honest that, like, the last few years have been a test for me too, because it’s not that I see what’s happening in the world and I don’t at times feel that fear and anxiety.
You know, I have a number of tools, and I do find that both sort of mindfulness practices of meditation, which I have done much more regularly in the last few years, but also, you know, I find that I have to be in nature. There is something deeply kind of clarifying, and it’s like an eternity clock when I’m kind of in nature, which sort of helps give perspective on the kind of things that we’re in.
And I also, I find that, like, you know, the difference between kind of an optimism, which is sort of like a mindset, which doesn’t necessarily mean you have to do anything—hope is actually, it requires action in some way. And I find that, like, while I know I can’t solve sometimes the biggest problems, and many of us can’t—even if you do some small act that moves, that changes one person’s mind, that actually, that moves the needle for even, like, in the smallest way. Part of it is about making—if you change one life, that’s as if you’ve changed a world. That’s our tradition’s view. So that’s not nothing. But also it changes us, because it actually—that agency is deeply important for our ability to continue to hope. And I think that’s important.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, I could talk to you all day, but thank you so much for being a guest.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Thank you.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Well, the first thing to say is that Angela is a much bigger deal in the US than I realised when I invited her. I came across her work. I thought we had some real resonances in terms of themes that we’re interested in. And then when I was in the US interviewing her, every single person had heard of her. She’s a really very, very influential voice, not just in the Jewish community in America, but more widely. And that sense of the responsibility you carry, both as a faith leader and as a public voice, really struck me again.
I actually haven’t interviewed that many faith leaders, but I increasingly feel, frankly, deep respect for people who take on that mantle. I think for many generations, right, religious leaders—you automatically respected, you looked up to, we called them Father or Rabbi or whatever. It was a big deal to have them over for tea. And then, as with lots of institutions and positions of authority in society, it’s really swung the other way. And I think there’s a bit in me also that can feel a bit sceptical, a bit suspicious, of people who are religious leaders.
But when I meet them, when I spend time with them up close, often what I see is people who have, for very little money, in the face of relentless criticism—because everyone likes to tell them what they’re doing wrong—sought to be a blessing. Sought to root themselves in wisdom. Sought to work on their inner life, right, so that they are, as Angela talks about, a non-anxious presence. People who can sit with the dying—sorry, it’s making me cry—who can sit with the grieving, who can do the work Angela talked about, feeling like an energy worker.
She’s a cantor, a worship leader, as well as a rabbi. That what she is doing when she’s leading worship services is, she’s seeking to help a group of people attune to each other, yes, attune to God, and go through ritual in ways that leads them to awe. Don’t we all want that? Isn’t that a beautiful thing, for people to self-sacrificially want to lead the rest of us into awe and into wisdom, and to remind us what matters, to stop us getting distracted by trivialities and remind us how we want to live? And so I’m just left with gratitude for religious leaders, gratitude for all of those seeking to do ministry and to serve others in whatever context you are in. I think it is still worthy of respect.
And the second thing I’m left with is this theme that’s run through Angela’s life. Her book is called Heart of a Stranger, and she talks about the origin of the word Hebrew in the Hebrew Bible to mean someone who crosses over. Someone who is able to cross boundaries and cross borders. And I sometimes talk about my work as being a border stalker—that there is a sense in which I want to not be stuck in a box, and I want to belong to a tradition and a tribe. I want deep roots into my faith and my sense of belonging and my identity. And I want to be able to go across. I want to be able to listen. I want to be able to travel. I want to be curious and open to those who are not like me.
And I see that so strongly in Angela. She’s had to be that. She’s had to be that because when you are a biracial child growing up in Korea in the shadow of the Korean War, there was huge shame and stigma around that, mainly because lots of the biracial children were born out of sometimes forced prostitution for American soldiers. It was not an easy thing to be born into the home and the family—the loving marriage, actually, of her parents that she was born into in Korea.
And then when she moved back to America and joined the synagogue that her father’s family had been part of for generations, she didn’t look like what people expected a Jewish child to look like. People didn’t perceive her as Jewish because she was half Korean. Her mother has never converted to Judaism. And I think that has real knock-on effects for who sees her Judaism as legitimate. And she talked about therefore converting as part of her path to wanting to be a rabbi. And of course, female rabbis are still a reasonably recent thing.
I was reading a bit in the book of Ecclesiastes today—very existential, ancient, sacred text. And it talked about the same things happen to the foolish and the wise, right? We are handed circumstances in life. We are handed struggles. There is so much we cannot control. And many of us experience deep injustice—sometimes around identity, sometimes around class, sometimes just poverty, sometimes. All manner of ways we know the world can be cruel and not feel like home and not offer us a sense of belonging.
And I’m interested in, what do we do with that? What kind of people do we become when we are handed circumstances that we can’t control? And I just loved listening to Angela talk about how she’d processed that, how she’d learned to root herself in her—in God, actually, in her sense of self, in her faith, in her family. Because she knew she was loved, because she knew she was welcome, she was able to do that, and now provides this incredible voice for Jewish Americans of all kinds, for other, some other Americans, and particularly, I think, for Jewish Americans who don’t feel like they quite fit the standard categories. She does it with grace and wisdom and humour, and I was really, really glad to have got to meet her and listen to her.
This episode was recorded live at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and you can go check out lots of the other content from the Aspen Ideas Festival.
