I CLOSE-UP

Tilling
The
Garden

Temple Beth El's new rabbi, Daniel Polish, welcomes
the challenge of bringing the congregation
back from a year of controversy

ELIZABETH KAPLAN

T

Staff Writer

o Rabbi Daniel Polish, the sanctu-
ary looks like a garden.
"I love it here," he says, tracing
his hand around the sanctuary at
Temple Beth El.
Windows are the walls in this room.
They reach from the floor to the ceiling, mak-
ing for an easy view of the trees, their leaves
clinging to the last colors of autumn.
It also has been a season of changes at
Temple Beth El.
Rabbi Polish, 46, came to the temple in
August, after Rabbi Dannel Schwartz's con-
troversial departure.
It is a controversy Rabbi Polish doesn't
care to discuss. He says he hasn't felt any
turmoil and he doesn't dwell on past pro-
blems. He's concentrating on Thmple Beth
El's future.
First, he has to meet everybody.
"The only litmus test I have for myself
as a rabbi is that I try to be the kind of rab-
bi I'd want to have," he says.
"A rabbi should be good at administer-
ing. He must be a visionary and someone
able to implement those visions. He has to
be good at education and at preaching.
"He's also got to be there if someone has
a personal crisis, and that means a lot of
time and energy..But it's what people are en-
titled to.
"And that's why I want to meet people,

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24

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1988

to be there for people who are in the hospital
or who need me at a funeral. That's more im-
portant to me than writing great sermons."
There are at least as many books in Rab-
bi Polish's office as there are Beth El con-
gregants for him to meet. Literally hundreds
of volumes fill the shelves. Ricked in bet-
ween are little treasures from his life, like
one of his favorites: a sculpture made by
Ethiopian Jews.
"I unpacked them myself," he says of his
books, which cover everything from Israel to
the Holocaust to Jewish mysticism to Reform
Judaism.
It's not the kind of material Rabbi
Polish's relatives might have been reading.
One ancestor was the second-generation
disciple of the Baal Shem Thy.
It's not the kind of reading the rabbi
might have been doing years ago.

R

abbi Polish is a man who, by his
own definition, started as a
rationalist.
"At first, I tried to grasp my
Judaism intellectually," he says. "I
read a lot of (Will) Herberg and Mordechai
Kaplan and that was interesting, important
and challenging. But ultimately, it was not
completely satisfying. I was still filled with
a sort of hunger."
He started out in Evanston, Ill., the son

