As a college student on the pre-med track in the 1990s, Rabbi Aderet Drucker didn’t realize that women could be ordained as rabbis.
She was involved with her campus Hillel at the University of California, Los Angeles, and admired the rabbi for hosting Shabbat dinners, offering advice and teaching students.
“I had this internal dialogue: ‘What a cool job this is,’” Drucker said. “Quietly, I told myself, ‘You can’t do it; you’re not a man,’ so I basically kept that to myself for the remainder of college [and] continued my pre-med studies.”
After college and an international backpacking trip, Drucker was focused on the MCAT exam and applying to medical school. And that’s when she vocalized for the first time that she felt something was missing: “I love math; I love science; but there’s more that I want to do, spiritually. … I said, ‘I think I want to look into being a rabbi.’”
Drucker has since realized that dream — not as a pediatrician, but by facilitating events with young Jewish adults in the DMV region and helping them connect to Judaism through the Den Collective since 2018. “I love what I do,” she said.
The Den seeks to build intentional Jewish community with young adults in the area with a focus on one-to-one rabbinic relationships, intimate gatherings for deep learning and ritual and leadership development, according to the website.
The Bethesda resident is also a certified Jewish mindfulness meditation teacher. Her love for Judaism stemmed from her Los Angeles upbringing, raised by Hebrew-speaking Israeli parents. “I am the product of [both] Sephardic and Ashkenazi heritage,” Drucker said.
She grew up going to public school and Hebrew school, then attended the Los Angeles Hebrew High School program. Drucker described a “vibrant” Jewish home life that instilled in her a love of Jewish living.
“I can remember on Fridays after school, coming home and putting my key in the door, and I knew when I opened the door, I was going to feel Shabbat — I could smell [the food] in the kitchen,” she said. “I grew up with really sweet memories of Jewish celebrations at home with my family.”
Drucker spent summers at Camp Alonim at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute Campus and worked there for many years.
As a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Drucker was selected to participate in The Gladstein Fellowship in Entrepreneurial Rabbinic Leadership. “The way that it manifested for most of us was to go into the pulpit,” she said.
Drucker was ordained in 2012 and became a solo pulpit rabbi for a Bay Area congregation. After leading that shul for several years, Drucker’s family relocated to the East Coast, and the University of Maryland Hillel contacted her about a new campus rabbi position.
“It was an amazing experience,” she said of working at Maryland Hillel. “I was one of seven rabbis on campus, and I was the only non-male, non-Orthodox rabbi.”
Because of this demographic makeup, Drucker served the Conservative, Reform and LGBTQ+ Jewish student groups of UMD.
“It was during that time when what we now call the Den [Collective] was launched, and I was invited to be on the advisory council that year,” Drucker recalled. “The founding director at the time and I were in touch, and I would bring him on campus to teach my students.”
A year and a half later, the Den grew and received funding for a three-year strategic grant to bring on another rabbi, and the founding director asked Drucker to join in 2018. The team launched the Den’s website in the summer of 2019.
“The Den’s model has always been this ground-up, person-centric community building model,” Drucker said, citing training from JOIN for Justice, a network dedicated to training, supporting and connecting Jewish organizers.
Many of the Den’s gatherings and events stemmed from one-on-one conversations with community members or small-group Shabbat dinners. “I had a bunch of coffee chats my first summer at the Den, and after 50, there was a theme around challah baking and Torah study,” Drucker said.
So, that’s what she hosted. “After a month, I emailed a number of these people and said, ‘Would you come to my house? We bake challah, and while the challah is in the oven, we’ll do some learning.’”
Eight people joined the first challah bake and learn, an event that grew so large over time that Drucker began hosting them in the kitchen of the neighboring Congregation Beth El of Montgomery County.
As the Den’s executive director and community rabbi, she oversees classes, learning circles and gatherings for DMV-area adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s, led by her, trained Den community members and staff.
“I love working with this demographic so much because they’re opting into these spaces when a lot of their peers aren’t,” Drucker said. “There are a lot of ways they can be spending their time, but they are seeking a relationship with a rabbi. They want access to pastoral care and support and mentorship, and that’s incredible.”
“I’ve been here almost seven and a half years now; it is one of the most positive communal experiences,” Drucker said. “The people here are incredibly thoughtful and kind.”
Drucker added that if she asks a member of the Den to meet with her at night, they usually ask her, “Aren’t you putting your kids to bed at that time? Are you sure?”
“Over and over, I’m just moved by people’s graciousness,” she said. “They’re so grateful our team is offering this, so it makes it a real pleasure to work with them.”
Though Drucker never expected to be doing this type of work — “Going from pulpit work to campus work to this social entrepreneurial space, I would have never planned that trajectory” — she said she followed her heart.
