The first Asian American rabbi knows what it’s like to be a stranger, which is largely why she advocates for empathy and communal connection.
Born in Seoul in 1972 to a Korean Buddhist mother and Jewish American father, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl found herself straddling two worlds. She and her family moved to Tacoma, Washington, when she was 5 years old.
“I was born in South Korea and left my first home to a place I did not know. And there was a part of me that spent a lot of my life feeling like I didn’t always know where home was,” Buchdahl said at a recent event in Washington, D.C.
She is now the senior rabbi at Central Synagogue in New York City, which serves more than 3,200 families. Buchdahl discussed her memoir, “Heart of a Stranger,” and her “unlikely” journey to the rabbinate at Washington Hebrew Congregation on March 8.
She penned the book “because [she] didn’t look like your typical American Jew,” she said, adding that the title is a reference to the biblical mandate to “welcome the stranger.”
“I wrote this book to invite us to embrace that heart of a stranger and use it to increase our level of empathy for others who also feel that way, to increase our compassion, to increase our resilience, our creativity, all these things that our Jewish tradition has taught us to do over the last several thousand years,” Buchdahl told Washington Jewish Week.
She drew parallels between the story of the Exodus and her own.
“Our experience as strangers is not just from Egypt. It goes all the way back to the first Hebrews, Abraham and Sarah, who are called to leave their homeland and birthplace and go to a place they do not know,” Buchdahl said at the event. “Abraham and Sarah had to be strangers in a strange land in order to become ivrim, [boundary-crossers] … It has been our origin story.”
Like many multiracial people, growing up, Buchdahl didn’t feel that she was fully American. But other children in Korea no longer considered her Korean when she visited. She found a home at her small-town Reform synagogue in Tacoma despite that — like many Jewish spaces in the 1980s — the community was predominantly white.
“My family didn’t look like any other family in the synagogue, so I felt a little like an outsider in the Jewish community,” Buchdahl said.
Peers often questioned her Jewishness when she was younger, remarking, “You don’t look Jewish,” or even, “You’re not a real Jew.” Traditional Jewish law defines a person’s Jewish status through matrilineal descent, and Buchdahl’s mother was not Jewish.
“When you are asked all those questions all the time … it’s exhausting, and it actually does wear away your sense of belonging,” Buchdahl said in an interview. “You can assert and feel your Jewishness, but you can’t be a Jew alone. You really need a community to be a Jew with.”
She knew that pursuing the rabbinate wouldn’t be easy as a mixed-race woman who lacked a strictly observant Jewish upbringing.
At the March 8 talk, Buchdahl discussed women in the rabbinate — “It was nothing short of a revolution when women became rabbis” — grappling with her Jewish identity amid naysayers, balancing professional and family life, and fostering community.
She served as the senior cantor of Central Synagogue for eight years, continuing her love of singing and playing guitar. Then, the senior rabbi at the time announced his retirement, and Buchdahl saw her chance.
When she asked for the rabbi’s thoughts about her stepping up as senior rabbi, he replied, “Angela, you’re such a good mother. How are you going to do this job with your kids?”
That question is rarely, if ever, posed to men, Buchdahl said. Again, she was made to feel “other,” this time as a woman. As the first female senior rabbi in the congregation’s 185-year history, Buchdahl changed Central Synagogue’s family leave policy to make family leave the same length for both male and female clergy: 12 weeks.
When times got difficult for the trailblazing leader who was simultaneously raising three kids, Buchdahl felt the pressure to succeed.
“I cannot quit because if I quit in my second or third year as senior rabbi, no woman will ever get this job again,” she said at the event.
Buchdahl regularly speaks at synagogues and with Jewish organizations, and often shares her story with national news outlets. Her story has unexpectedly resonated with others.
“I wanted to write this book so that a larger group of Jews who often feel this is not their tradition somehow, or they’re outside it, could feel that this is their inheritance too,” Buchdahl said. “But what has surprised me, especially as I’ve done a number of talks now all over the place, is how much this is the Jewish story for even people who were not Jews of color, who aren’t people who converted or had one non-Jewish parent, or all those things that might be the obvious reasons someone might feel like a stranger in the Jewish community.”
This experience taught her that people have complex identities and may feel like they don’t fully belong for a myriad of reasons.
“There are all sorts of ways that society and our Jewish community tells people they’re not enough,” Buchdahl said. “‘They don’t observe enough,’ ‘they don’t know enough Hebrew,’ ‘they’re not a ‘good Jew.’’ And I wanted to challenge some of those presumptions and make an invitation for all to feel like there’s the opportunity for belonging for all of us.”
She added that readers outside of the Jewish community have also been able to relate to “Heart of a Stranger.” It was at a Buddhist meditation retreat in Korea where Buchdahl found herself explaining Judaism to a group of people who had never met a Jewish person. She had returned to her birthplace to celebrate her mother’s 80th birthday.
“Sometimes you have to leave your first home to end up where you’re meant to be,” Buchdahl said. “You have to leave what feels familiar and certain, which will help you find your truest sense of home.”
