Interview with Rabbi Lynne Goldsmith
by Anna Grace Glaize
Rabbi Lynne Goldsmith earned her Rabbinic Ordination from Hebrew Union College. She was the rabbi of Temple Emanu-el in Dothan, Alabama from her ordination in 2007 to her retirement in 2017. Prior to becoming a rabbi, she was an accountant for 25 years. She and her husband Rob relocated to Broomfield, CO to be closer to family. Rabbi Goldsmith works part-time as the rabbi at Temple Or Hadash in Fort Collins, with the Adventure Rabbi, and is active in the Boulder Rabbinic community. Our interview with Rabbi Goldsmith was recorded on October 19 via Zoom and edited for clarity and length.
AGG: From your bio, who is the adventure rabbi?!
Rabbi Lynne: The adventure rabbi! The adventure rabbi’s name is actually Rabbi Jamie Korngold. She is based out of Boulder…Boulder’s a very outdoorsy place. A lot of great hiking, a couple of mountains...What Jamie discovered is a lot of people fell out of Judaism because they couldn’t fit into the synagogue, Hebrew school mold, and they just didn’t like it. So she offers an alternative. She doesn’t have a building, so she does most of her work outdoors, which is awesome. She has Shabbat on skis. She has Shabbat services up on top of Flagstaff Mountain, which is absolutely gorgeous.
AGG: During Covid when the only safe places are outside, she had the framework all there.
Rabbi Lynne: Oh yeah. That’s what she said, “I’m ahead of the curve!”...I’ve actually done two weddings in hiking boots, because we had to hike to the place where we were actually gonna do the wedding, and I did one in a blizzard—outside!
AGG: Did you have a favorite woman in the Bible when you were growing up?
Rabbi Lynne: No, and I’ll tell you why. There are actually two reasons. I’m a little older. I’m 70. When I started religious school, it was probably 1957, and my parents were what I would call submarine protestants. They were under the surface for most of the year and then surfaced on Christmas and Easter and then went back underground. So I didn’t get a lot of religious school. They were good at starting us out, but about six or seven weeks into it they got tired of getting up in the morning, so we stopped going to religious school. I do remember we learned about Abraham, and we learned about Jesus. I kinda thought they were brothers because every year we got Abraham and Jesus...But we never ever got anything about a woman in the Bible. The only one I can tell you about that I knew at all was Mary... She was Jesus’ mother and that’s all I knew. She was the only biblical woman—seriously—the only biblical woman that I knew of until much, much later.
AGG: Is there now a biblical woman that you feel connected to?
Rabbi Lynne: Maybe because we read the Torah on a yearly cycle and we’re in Genesis now, and we just finished the Torah portion where Abraham and Sarah (Abram and Sarai at that point) left and were heading out into the wilderness following God. I’ve always wondered about Sarah...My favorite’s when God says she’d have a baby at 90, I’m thinking I would’ve cried!.. She seems to follow Abraham. Whatever he did, she follows him. There was a midrash [rabbinic biblical interpretation] written by a woman rabbi actually, and she did a conversation between Sarah and Abraham. Abraham’s saying “We’re leaving. God told me we have to leave.” And Sarah’s saying, “What are you talking about?! I’m gonna leave all my sisters and brothers? My mother and father?” She said, “If you want me to go, I wanna talk to Him.”
AGG: Something was left out. We missed some of that response. She couldn’t have just said, “Yes.”
Rabbi Lynne: There totally was. When he left and took Isaac with him up to Mt. Moriah, did she know?! We don’t know...There’s been tons and tons and tons of midrash written about it, but we don’t know what happened. She had to have known something was up...Midrash lets you know that we’re not the first generation to have thought about this. They were thinking about this way, way back.
AGG: Is there a Bible story or passage about women that troubles you?
Rabbi Lynne: Yeah. It’s later on in the text. It’s not in the Torah. It’s the prostitute that gets thrown out of the house and beaten and raped and thrown back on the steps. That’s it. It’s the end of her life. What bothers me so much is that women were objectified back then, too, and women are still objectified today. What happened to her is still going on. That is probably what troubles me most. I like to think it’s not happening in the United States, but I’m sure it does….It hurts. It hurts to read it. Thank goodness it’s not part of the Torah so we don’t have to read it over and over again. It’s not a good story.
AGG: How do you deal with those dark stories in your sacred text?
Rabbi Lynne: It’s life. I mean, life is not all butterflies and bunnies. Dark things happen. Bad things happen to people, even very good people. And I know that sounds trite, but it’s so true. Horrible, horrible things happen to both women and men in the Bible. But it’s mostly women. Sometimes we tread it very lightly, but I think it’s there for a reason. It’s there for us to look at and to deal with the uncomfortable feelings we have when we read it. But that story in particular horrifies me every time I look at it.
AGG: As a religious leader, how do you help your community navigate those difficult stories?
Rabbi Lynne: Two ways. Number one, it’s life. The Bible doesn’t present, like, a lollipop view of life. The Bible presents life as it is. And bad, horrible things happen whether or not you blame it on God or you blame it on people. Horrible things happen. The second thing is I don’t believe the Bible was written by God. I believe that men—and I do believe it was men—wrote the Bible. Their prejudices are showing, and it’s also a product of their age. What was happening then is not happening now...There are a lot of things in the Bible that pertain only to the lives that they were living then as opposed to the lives we’re living today. There’s somewhere—and it might be in rabbinic lit—about the 70 faces of the Torah. That the Torah is written to interpret. It’s there, but our interpretation and what we do with it is what counts…People will take the Bible that they’re holding in their hands and think it’s the gospel truth, and what it is is a translation of a translation. When you’re translating—and I’ve done this, too—particularly the Torah which has no vowels, we’re guessing from context. My prejudices are going to be in my translation. I’m interpreting as I translate.
AGG: Even the phrase “gospel truth” has some trouble since we have four gospels.
Rabbi Lynne: I seriously didn’t know until I was in seminary, and we took a course on Christian scriptures, which by the way was required for us before we could be ordained, that the stories are all different! I had no idea.
AGG: You were raised protestant but became a rabbi?
Rabbi Lynne: Well, I converted in between…My parents did not bring us up particularly religiously, and the older we got the less religion we did. I think I probably dropped out of Sunday School for good when I was eight, and that was a long time ago. I was confirmed, but I was only confirmed because my best friend was being confirmed...My husband is Jewish. We got married fairly young...and we moved to Lexington, Kentucky. We’d been married, I don’t know, a couple years, and he came home from work one day, and he said, “I gotta go find some Jews! I can’t take it anymore.” So I said, “Okay.” The rabbi delivered a really good sermon that night...I loved the prayer book. I loved the emphasis on the here and now, and not, you know, heaven—be good so you can go to heaven. Be good here because you should, and this is what we need to do. I liked that. So, I went to the rabbi and said, “I need some books or something because I don’t know anything about Judaism. I mean, other than the fact you don’t celebrate Christmas, I know nothing!” He said, “Fine, I just started a conversion class.” And I said, “Well, I don’t want to convert.” And he said, “Fine!” So I joined the class, and it was six or seven months. I went every week, and he gave us a new book every week. I still have some of those books...At the end of the class, I liked that we could question things, I liked that there was no one interpretation, I liked that God was not something you could define, that He wasn’t a big guy in heaven with a long beard...A child’s idea of God is not the same as a teen’s, and it's not the same as a young adult’s, and it’s certainly not the same as a grandmother at age 70. So, I really liked all of that and resonated with it and ended up converting. The rabbi thing came later.
AGG: Are there any things you wish that modern women could take from the stories of biblical women?
Rabbi Lynne: Oh God yes! I’ll tell you what...they worked with what they had. They got done what they needed to get done. I just thought that was fantastic. The women in the Bible did so much. They have a huge role. And we don’t give them enough credit. One of my favorite stories is Tamar and Judah. In order for her to be impregnated, she had to know exactly where in her cycle she was...Or Ruth. I mean, Ruth and Naomi were both in horrible straights. They were in the worst straights you could be as a biblical woman. She did what she needed to do and look where she ended up—she’s like the great-grandmother of David.
I thought of it in terms of the #MeToo movement. Back in the late 70s and early 80s when I was working in a corporation, there was a lot of bad stuff that happened back then. We learned stuff in the ladies’ room. We learned who not to sit next to in meetings, we learned who not to get in an elevator with, who not to be too close to, and why. That was us doing what we needed to do...I’m so glad now, I love what’s happening in the #MeToo movement.
AGG: One of my favorite biblical women rediscoveries has been Bathsheba...Rediscovering basically that that is a #MeToo story, and she was responsible in large part for making Solomon the king.
Rabbi Lynne: And you talk about an untenable position. And David shouldn’t have been there—what was he doing there in a time of war! But then she turned it around. Like I said, using what you have.
Rabbi Lynne’s Recommended Reading:
Basic Judaism by Milton Steinberg
What is a Jew? by Morris Kertzer
The Dignity of Difference by Jonathan Sacks
The Gospel Without Jesus by Amy Jill-Levine