The Ordination of Rabbi David Evan Markus

Temple Beth-El of City Island is proud to announce the smicha (ordination) of our very own Rabbi David Evan Markus in the lineage of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Rabbi Shohama Wiener and the Vaad (Academic Leadership) of ALEPH, the Alliance for Jewish Renewal.

On Sunday, January 11, a large number of the TBE family assembled to watch the live webstream of this spiritual event. We met in the synagogue community room at 4:45pm and got ready for the live webcast that started at 5:00pm — our time.  A variety of foods and snacks were brought for the pot luck “dinner” we enjoyed during and after the ceremony. (That was something we could do that those in the actual audience could not.)

Some community members were unable to join us at the synagogue, so they watched the livestream from home. It was quite a spectacular affair to witness Rabbi David offer words of personal Torah and lay back into the hands of his teachers for special blessings.

David writes to us:

It takes a village to raise a rabbi.  While in a literal sense my ordination comes from ALEPH, the seminary of Jewish Renewal, in the truest sense my ordination comes through Temple Beth-El of City Island, through you.

This community is where I learned to lead a service, shed pretense, rejoice and mourn.  Here I led my first community Passover seder, named my first baby, honored my first bar mitzvah, solemnized my first marriage, wrote my first prayerbook, led my first spiritual direction group, taught, laughed, loved and lost.  My seminary taught me rabbinics, but you helped teach me how to be a rabbi.

Tradition teaches that how we live here on earth shapes the supernal realms: “as below, so above.”  I feel that way about my smicha (ordination): it comes from above because it first comes from you. I will be grateful forever to this Shul by the Sea, the village that raised a rabbi.

May this ordination be a blessing for all of us.