As a teenager, Rabbi Gary Pokras wanted nothing to do with religion. He begrudgingly accompanied his parents to High Holidays services at the shul, but skipped other Friday nights.

Pokras said he felt like an outsider growing up Jewish in a small town in Connecticut.

“I started to rebel against [religious life] pretty hard,” Pokras said. “I read about the Crusades, I read about the Holocaust, and I came to the conclusion at that time that religion was … bad, that it caused war and death and separation and division. And I didn’t want to be part of that.”

The Rockville resident joked that God must have a “really demented sense of humor” considering that Pokras is a rabbi at Temple Beth Ami, the community he’s served for the past decade.

Before ascending the bimah, Pokras was a professional guitarist playing rock, jazz and classical music.

He lived in Dallas, working toward a master’s degree in guitar, where a series of questions changed his career trajectory. In an apartment complex larger than his entire hometown, Pokras’ neighbor came over with a fresh apple pie to welcome him to the neighborhood.

“‘What’s your name?’ ‘Where are you from?’” he recalled the neighbor asking. “The third question caught me totally off guard. … ‘What church do you go to?’”

“I don’t go to church — I’m Jewish,” Pokras replied to a completely stunned, apologetic new neighbor.

When she said she was sorry, Pokras said, “That’s OK; I’m not.”

This exchange marked a major turning point for him.

“I took tremendous pride in being intellectually honest with myself, and that forced me to ask, ‘Why did I say that? Is this actually important to me? Is this part of who I am, after all?’” Pokras said. “And that’s when I started exploring.”

In Dallas, he applied for a job as a substitute teacher at the nearby large Reform synagogue.

“If I’m a sub, I don’t have to be there every week, I don’t have to do lesson plans, … I just show up and see what happens,” Pokras said. “So I started doing that, and I was pretty good at it.”

Then, the eighth grade teacher left and Pokras was hired to fill that role. But his new students were less than enthusiastic to attend religious school.

“The eighth graders did not want to be there,” Pokras recalled. “The eighth graders were me as a teenager. … So I started arguing with them because I couldn’t get their attention to do the curriculum.”

He would give the class the topic and fire away. “I figured my job was to convince [my students] that maybe there was another way to look at things than the way they were looking at it,” Pokras said. “To my utter surprise, as time went on, I started to argue from the standpoint of growing conviction, and eventually, that’s what led me to really do that deep dive, where I discovered all this wonderful, delicious Jewish stuff that led me to the rabbinate.”

He was ordained in 1999 and began his rabbinic career as the “No. 2 rabbi” at a Buffalo, New York, synagogue.

“That was really like a training ground [where I] learned some of the basics of what it’s like because rabbinical school does not prepare you to be a rabbi,” Pokras said. “They teach us all the rabbinical stuff that they can, but the reality is that until you’re in it, you can’t understand.”

He then became the rabbi of a small congregation in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, for the next nine years.

“I really loved, loved, loved being there,” he said. “It was a wonderful community.”

Pokras received a message from the Buffalo synagogue asking him to be their senior rabbi, a role he took on for five years.
Some theological and philosophical differences between himself and the congregation pushed Pokras to seek a different job opportunity. Now, he said he’s found his home at Temple Beth Ami in Rockville.

From their first visit, Pokras and his wife were hooked.

“We both felt like we hadn’t just spent the day in an interview,” Pokras said. “We both felt like we had just spent the day with longtime friends that we just happened to have met that day, and that’s the way it’s been.”

Pokras is proud of a number of achievements since he began as TBA’s rabbi in July 2016, namely working to destigmatize mental health, implementing a “virtual tefillah” and supplementing his sermons with visuals behind him.

“Sermons are no longer regular sermons, the way I give them,” he said.

Rather than congregants hunching over prayer books, Pokras began projecting the text on screens at the front of the sanctuary, notably before the pandemic: “It allows us to customize every service.”

“It’s the same liturgy, but the way that we frame it and present it changes the way we experience it, and so that gives us a whole other layer of approach,” he said.

Pokras said he enjoys working with the TBA team and lay leadership. One of the highlights of his week is leading Torah study with about 50 congregants.

“I love being a teacher,” Pokras said. “‘Rabbi’ means ‘my teacher,’ so it’s a really important part of my rabbinate and it’s one of my strengths.”

zbell@midatlanticmedia.com