American football players have the Super Bowl. The actors have the Oscar. And the rabbis have Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
It is a time of great pressure for the clergy, who preach to pews full of faithful who only come once a year. All eyes are on the rabbis, waiting for a perfect sermon that will keep the congregation inspired, interested—and awake.
That’s why rabbis across the US have been known to turn to an unusual source of support: a former New York advertising executive.
Over the past eight years, Michele Lowe has emerged, to her surprise, as a resource for dozens of rabbis. Through word-of-mouth recommendations, his contact information has been passed from synagogue to synagogue by clerics struggling with their sermons.
“I call myself the ‘Jew on the bench,’” Lowe said. “I come in and say, ‘Here I am, and what do you want me to think about in the next 12 months?’”
This year, he edited 33 sermons for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
When Lowe received a call from Rabbi Mara Nathan at Temple Beth-El in San Antonio, Texas, they talked about adding a contemporary spark to sermons. The answer you came up with?
Barbie. Nathan planned to combine lessons from the movie “Barbie” with those from Rabbi Hillel, the Babylonian theologian born in 110 BC, in a sermon about embracing imperfection.
Lowe, 65, rose to prominence in the 1980s for producing famous commercials for things like condiments and cat litter. She left advertising to become a playwright, gaining unusual momentum when her first play, “The Smell of the Kill,” was produced on Broadway in 2002.
He focused his critical gaze on sermons from an early age, when he tolerated soporific speeches in his family’s synagogue. But it wasn’t until 2015, when he watched a young rabbi struggle during a service, nervously playing with her loose hair at a temple in Scarsdale, New York, that she decided to do something about it.
Lowe offered the woman advice he learned writing advertising copy (“it has to have some drama”) as well as theatrical technique (“keep eye contact”). And put her hair up in a ponytail.
The following year, he had three more rabbi clients. This year, he juggled 16. “It’s very meaningful to me to do this work,” said Lowe, whose clients almost all lead Reform congregations. “Rabbis try so hard and have so much at stake.”
Lowe instructs his clients, mostly women, to write three different introductions to their sermons, in different tones, from which they select the winner. He spends the months leading up to the holidays in Zoom sessions and shared Google documents, and charges $400 for an hour of consulting.
A key to a captivating sermon is making it personal, he said. He tells the rabbis, “You have the Torah, you have a call to action, it sounds great. But something is missing—you are not here,” she said.
Dara Frimmer, a rabbi at Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles, was initially reluctant to share that she had sought help for a sermon. But she came to realize that turning to the community in a time of need was a deeply Jewish ideal.
“With great pride, I wrote at the bottom: ‘Thank you to Michele Lowe,’” Frimmer said.
“Rabbis have a lot at stake”.
SARAH MASLIN NIR. THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6920185, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-03 18:10:07
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