Rab­bi Marc Katz spoke with Rab­bi Angela Buch­dahl about her ground­break­ing new mem­oir, Heart of a Stranger: An Unlike­ly Rab­bi’s Sto­ry of Faith, Iden­ti­ty, and Belong­ing. The rab­bis spoke about the process of writ­ing the book, Buch­dahl’s jour­ney to the rab­binate, and the sto­ries and con­nec­tion that have come from the book being out in the world.

Marc Katz: Let’s start with the obvi­ous ques­tion. Why did you write the book?

Angela Buch­dahl: I wrote the book because I want­ed to share the wis­dom and tra­di­tion of Judaism in an acces­si­ble way to both Jews and non-Jews alike. While I nev­er saw my own per­son­al sto­ry rep­re­sent­ed in lit­er­a­ture when I was a kid grow­ing up, I did see my sto­ry in the Torah. The Torah speaks to deep truths about the human expe­ri­ence, espe­cial­ly on rela­tion­ships and fam­i­ly dynam­ics. It is the ori­gin sto­ry of what it is to be a stranger, to be an Ivri, some­one who is a bound­ary cross­er. In the Torah’s teach­ings I could see myself, and it made me feel a lit­tle less alone, like I was part of this big, epic sto­ry. I want­ed oth­er peo­ple to find their way into this sto­ry too. So I pitched my book to the woman who became my agent and she said, ​“That’s nice, Angela, but I don’t think you’re gonna be able to sell that book. Maybe you could sell it to a Jew­ish press but if you want a main­stream pub­lish­er, that’s gonna be very hard to sell.”

MK: So that’s where the idea of writ­ing a mem­oir came from?

AB: Exact­ly. What I was envi­sion­ing was writ­ing a book on Jew­ish spir­i­tu­al wis­dom. Heart of a Stranger is some­thing very dif­fer­ent. My agent told me: ​“You’ve got this unlike­ly sto­ry. Why don’t you write a mem­oir, and then you can weave the spir­i­tu­al teach­ings in.” When I start­ed actu­al­ly writ­ing it, it took a month or two to fig­ure out the cur­rent form. At first, I had chap­ters with med­i­ta­tions after­ward, a very dif­fer­ent voice. Then I made them more ser­mon­ic and made sure that they were the­mat­i­cal­ly linked to the mem­oir mate­r­i­al. It took a while to set­tle in on this form.

MK: I found it very art­ful, the way that you were able to pick a theme out of some ele­ment of your life — whether it was meet­ing your hus­band Jacob or fig­ur­ing out that you loved music — and then find that right Jew­ish teach­ing to pair with it. How was it for you try­ing to pick out which ele­ment of your sto­ry would match with the right ser­mon­ic message?

AB: Well, you can prob­a­bly relate to this as a rab­bi. Some­times you have an idea of what you want to say and you look for it in the text, and some­times you open up the text and it speaks to you. Half of the ser­mons in the book, which are thir­ty-one in total, were repur­posed from things I’d already writ­ten. So, I took some of my favorite themes from High Hol­i­day Ser­mons, as well as from my set of week­ly Med­i­ta­tions that I wrote for five years through­out the pan­dem­ic. I then tried to find the chap­ter where it matched. I had some­thing writ­ten on hachnasat orchim (wel­com­ing the guest), and real­ized it made sense to do it with the Jacob chap­ter. And some­times, for maybe the oth­er half of them, I thought to myself, here’s where I could do a teach­ing on X, and it kind of came out of that. In Judaism there’s the Torah por­tion, and then there’s the Haf­tarah, which is the more ser­mon­ic bits that are less nar­ra­tive, but they’re the­mat­i­cal­ly linked. Some­times you can obvi­ous­ly tell why our tra­di­tion picked a Haf­tarah that goes with the Torah por­tion, and some­times you’re like, ​“What’s the con­nec­tion here?” It was not a sci­en­tif­ic process. More art than science.

MK: Let’s talk about your title. There’s two pieces to your title that I want to talk about. First, I want to talk about your actu­al title, ​“Heart of a Stranger.” Tell me about that. Where did it come from? Why did you choose that as the title of your book?

AB: I had many dif­fer­ent titles for this book. Orig­i­nal­ly, I was call­ing it Bound­ary Crossers. My agent sug­gest­ed it should be Soul of a Stranger. I had talked about that theme a lot. It came out of the orig­i­nal intro­duc­tion in which I talked about the sto­ry of Abra­ham and Sarah, one of the first sto­ries that spoke such truth to me about not just my life, but about what it means to fol­low a call­ing of some kind to find your truest home; what it is to leave what is famil­iar and to go to some­place that’s very uncer­tain where you’re a stranger. That sto­ry is kind of the main thrust of the book. Soul of a Stranger was the work­ing title for three and a half years. Nefesh Hager (soul of a stranger) is obvi­ous­ly not orig­i­nal to me; it’s from the Torah. But when it came time to actu­al­ly decide on the title, my edi­tor said ​“We’re not sold on soul. Soul is so reli­gious.” And I said, ​“You know this is the mem­oir of a rab­bi, right?” but they replied ​“I think it might be off-putting for some peo­ple. Why don’t you make it heart?” At the end of the day, what I’ve come to real­ize is that I’ve always had the heart of a stranger. Ulti­mate­ly, I have found a sense of home and belong­ing in all these dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties and at the core of that feel­ing is love. So, I think there is a lot about heart in the book and I end­ed up feel­ing like it was absolute­ly the right title. 

MK: Tell me about the ​“unlike­ly Rab­bi” line in your sub­ti­tle. On the one hand, your sto­ry is very unlike­ly. You come from such a diverse back­ground and your sto­ry shows that you could have gone in many dif­fer­ent direc­tions oth­er than end­ing up being a rab­bi. On the oth­er hand, at this point, I think one in sev­en Jews is a Jew of col­or. So, you might be the first one to write a mem­oir about this, but you’re cer­tain­ly not alone in hav­ing a diverse journey. 

AB: Grow­ing up as a kid in the 70s only 8% of chil­dren of inter­faith mar­riage even iden­ti­fied as Jews at all. I was the ben­e­fi­cia­ry of Rab­bi Alexan­der Schindler’s out­reach ser­mon and his deci­sion on patri­lin­eal descent in 1978, which was soon after I arrived in Amer­i­ca. Of my gen­er­a­tion, it was even unusu­al that I saw myself as Jew­ish at all. I’m a Kore­an immi­grant who has a Bud­dhist moth­er who did not con­vert. There were many pieces of this that made it unlike­ly, espe­cial­ly in the time. You are absolute­ly right that now, it’s much less of an unlike­ly sto­ry. Now, we can make a minyan of not just of Jews of col­or, but maybe even Asian-iden­ti­fied rab­bis. That’s fan­tas­tic, I grew up most of my life feel­ing like the rab­binate was not a path that was in any way obvi­ous to me.

MK: What do you hope peo­ple get out of this book and do you have an intend­ed audience?

AB: My intend­ed audi­ence is every­one. I do not think this is only for a spe­cif­ic age or only a book for women. I think that this book is not only for Jews. I don’t even think it’s for peo­ple who are nec­es­sar­i­ly reli­gious. One of the things that’s been inter­est­ing to me already, now doing this book tour and also start­ing to get notes from peo­ple who’ve read the book, is hear­ing from men and women, from Jews, con­verts, Jews of col­or, but also Jews with two Jew­ish par­ents, and the Catholic moth­er of my pub­li­cist who are all say­ing that the book res­onat­ed for one rea­son or anoth­er; from what it feels like some­times to be an out­sider, to seek­ing out mean­ing and pur­pose, good­ness and kind­ness in the world at a time when it feels like there’s a lot of polar­iza­tion and hate. 

Some­one who is my age said, ​“Wow, just being a woman and hear­ing your jour­ney as a female pro­fes­sion­al try­ing to break the stained glass ceil­ing meant a lot.” The book address­es chal­lenges that women face who are try­ing to do some­thing that has­n’t been done by women before. There’s also a lot in there around what it is to be a rab­bi in this moment of fight­ing anti­semitism and deal­ing with the com­plex­i­ty of Israel. I also think there are Kore­ans who are read­ing this book, and there’s some­thing about what it is to be an Asian per­son in Amer­i­ca and the ques­tions of iden­ti­ty for any­one who’s mixed race. So I think there’s mul­ti­ple themes that are con­nect­ed by all the dif­fer­ent ways that human beings car­ry com­plex iden­ti­ties and the feel­ing that you don’t fit neat­ly in one place or another.

MK: Your book feels like a breath of fresh air. I would say the hot Jew­ish books over the past few years have pri­mar­i­ly been about Israel and anti­semitism, and your book final­ly is a hot Jew­ish book that is not about Israel and anti­semitism, even if some of those themes appear through­out the book.

AB: Right. I actu­al­ly did­n’t have any of that when I sold it because all those chap­ters, Coleyville, Octo­ber 7th, and beyond had­n’t hap­pened to me. They had­n’t hap­pened to us. And they weren’t a focal point of the book, but of course, you can’t have a rab­bi’s mem­oir with­out grap­pling with those kinds of sem­i­nal events for our peo­ple, and what they mean.

MK: I’m curi­ous, what would you change about the book if you wrote it today? I imag­ine that you wrote large chunks of the book before the real polit­i­cal heat about Israel start­ed in the past few months. Would you change any­thing about the book know­ing what our cli­mate would be like at this moment?

AB: I real­ly hope that this book is a lit­tle bit more time­less than that. Even the Octo­ber 7th chap­ter was not so much about the after­math, but about that par­tic­u­lar moment in time and my first vis­it to Israel right after.There’s no way that I could keep the book up-to-date with all the ways that our com­mu­ni­ty has respond­ed. I’m fine with the fact that I kind of kept it to that moment. 

MK: What’s your favorite chapter?

AB: It’s like ask­ing your favorite child, but if I have to choose I might say that I think my last chap­ter is my favorite chap­ter. I called that chap­ter home­com­ing. On the one hand, it was a home­com­ing because it was com­ing home to my birth­place, Korea, with my daugh­ter and my moth­er. But in some ways, what it real­ly was empha­siz­ing was that my true home is Amer­i­ca. At the end of the chap­ter, I’m say­ing Kad­dish at the gravesite of my grandparents.This Amer­i­can Jew­ish rab­bi is say­ing this Jew­ish prayer in Ara­ma­ic for my Kore­an grand­moth­er. That sto­ry would­n’t even be pos­si­ble if I had­n’t left my orig­i­nal home. 

It’s not just that I begin and end the book in Korea. The sto­ry is res­o­nant of Abraham’s sto­ry, that you have to leave your birth­place to find your truest home in some way, and that place, for me, is Amer­i­ca. I could­n’t be who I am today if I had stayed in Korea. I had to leave. 

I real­ized this when I wrote it but the first chap­ter of the book is actu­al­ly about my moth­er’s spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and starts on a moun­tain. In my last chap­ter, I’m at the Bud­dhist tem­ple with my mom and my daugh­ter, and we’re at a moun­tain. Also my last chap­ter is a ser­mon on the idea of pardes, the idea of an orchard. My par­ents plant­ed an orchard for their fifti­eth anniver­sary, and we came out and we all saw it. And then I expli­cate the idea of the way we decon­struct text as the acronym of PARDES explains, expli­cat­ing each lay­er of mean­ing. It’s inter­est­ing, because in the first chap­ter the park­ing lot at Mount Rainier is called Par­adise, and I talk a lit­tle bit about how that moun­tain was sort of par­adise. It’s sub­tle, and I bet most peo­ple will miss some of those ways that the first and last chap­ters book­end­ed each other.