Set to retire in June, Rabbi Daniel G. Zemel reflects on the past 42 years as a rabbi at Temple Micah in Washington, D.C. His tenure is defined by spearheading community service efforts, translating theology into the contemporary age and passing Jewish wisdom on to the next generations.
With Temple Micah, Zemel is among the founders of Micah House, a group home for formerly unhoused women in recovery from substance use disorder. He is a board member of T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization, and serves on the international council of the New Israel Fund.
Zemel lives in Arlington with his wife and has three adult children and three grandchildren.
Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I grew up in Chicago. My earliest education was at a Hebrew day school in Chicago. My mother’s father was a rabbi; he died when I was six months old, but his widow, my grandmother, came to live in our house, so I’d say I had a very strong, nurturing Jewish life the entire time I was growing up. I think it very much informed who I am to this day, especially including the influence of the grandfather that I never knew, as one of the truly great American rabbis of the 20th century. He was the rabbi of the synagogue in which I grew up; he’s also the founder of the day school that I attended.
What inspired you to pursue the rabbinate?
I went to college at Brown University and came to major in religion, and one of the reasons I went to Brown was because of a Jewish scholar who was on the faculty there named Jacob Neusner. He was one of the great scholars of Rabbinic Judaism on this continent. I don’t think he so much encouraged anybody to be a rabbi. He himself was an ordained rabbi, but my Jewish life was simply very important to me, and so I decided to apply to rabbinical school. I ended up attending Hebrew Union College in New York.
What do you enjoy most about being a senior rabbi?
I love coming to work every day because we have fun at work. We have a great staff; I love my colleagues. We have a great workplace environment. But I enjoy the challenge of trying to create what I call a sensible American Judaism, or a community that speaks to the complexity of being alive today, [involving] social and ethical concerns that we all live with. [It’s about] helping to create an environment that’s rooted in the wisdom of the Jewish path and engaged with the confounding world that we live in. I find that an exciting intellectual challenge every single day.
Tell me about founding Micah House and how that experience reflects your Jewish values.
I helped to found Micah House way back when. The first meeting that led to Micah House was in 1989. Homelessness was rampant, as it is now, and I found that greatly disturbing going through parts of the city, anywhere. It was painful then; it’s painful now to see the wealthiest country in the world allow this tragedy in our midst, so I thought that Temple Micah could help do something. In those days, as there is today, Luther Place [Church] downtown was a very active social service presence that was doing something to engage and solve the problem of homelessness. I gathered a group of Temple Micah members. Can we do something? Can we also form a house for people that are homeless and help them on their way?
We did, and I just think it’s a total reflection of and embraces what Jewish life is all about; we’re commanded to be good citizens in the communities we live in. Micah House was kind of a no-brainer. It’s both a sense of great pride that we continue to sustain it so many years later, from 1990 to 2025, and a source of great national embarrassment because the public realm hasn’t ended homelessness.
Every year we have a Micah House Shabbat, where we have a speaker, usually what we call a “graduate of the House,” speak and share part of their life story with us. We have an annual Micah House walk-a-thon in the spring and do everything we can to keep our community engaged in support of Micah House as a wider way to teach about our obligation to always help the homeless whenever we can.
You plan to retire at the end of June. What are your goals for the next six months?
I want to pack my office and get all my books out of here. I’d like to leave [Temple] Micah as a flourishing, thriving, interesting, dynamic, animated community and leave it strong so we’ll go forth to even greater successes. My personal plans are to continue what I’m doing, to work hard being a rabbi in this Micah community.
What are you looking forward to about retirement?
I currently co-chair the board of T’ruah, the rabbinic call of human rights; my term as co-chair will continue on after my retirement. I plan to remain very active with T’ruah, which I view as a really, really important national rabbinical organization.
I also plan to spend even more time playing with my grandchildren, who are my favorite playmates, and continue doing some serious reading and some fun reading. I think I’ll try writing at some point. Mostly, I’m really looking forward to being in charge of my own time.
