Rabbi Aaron Alexander has served as the co-senior rabbi at Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C., since 2017 after initially joining the staff in 2015, but his path to the pulpit wasn’t one that Alexander himself ever imagined he’d take.
Alexander was born into a household that centered their Jewish identity largely around Israel, family and the Holocaust.
And while he participated in plenty of important Jewish activities, such as the March of the Living Holocaust education program in Poland, he said his religious interest didn’t peak until a variety of seemingly unrelated factors opened his eyes to the full depth of the Jewish community and Judaism.
“My religiosity didn’t really kick in until an unusual combination of factors happened upon me. One, I started going to as many Grateful Dead concerts as I possibly could as a teenager. And it was there that I think God discovered me, or I discovered that there was a deeper emotional, communal energy that existed in the world — beneath, above, betwixt everything — and I discovered that tapping into this feeling was going to be a part of my life,” Alexander said.
Alexander became further engrossed a couple of years later when he worked to build Camp Ramah Darom, a Jewish summer camp that opened in 1997.
He said the experience doing that and being in both the improvisational music community and that camp community taught him that he could find everything he was searching for through Jewish life and learning.
“And so, when I finished at the University of Florida, a rabbi counseled me out of taking a job and into picking my life up and moving to Israel and studying in yeshiva for two years, where I got the learning bug, fell in love with Talmud and Jewish law and Midrash, and realized the only way that I could truly continue doing that would be to continue in graduate school — the best option was rabbinical school in Los Angeles at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies,” Alexander said.
Alexander moved to California and studied at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, gaining rabbinic ordination in 2006 and staying at the school as associate dean and lecturer in rabbinic and Jewish law until he moved to Washington, D.C., in 2015.
That move to D.C. was inspired by the experience Alexander had at Adas Israel after being brought in by Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt, his now fellow co-senior rabbi, for a scholar in residence program. Holtzblatt and some of Alexander’s friends from the area sat down with him, and Holtzblatt told him that the congregation’s current associate rabbi was going to be retiring soon and strongly suggested to Alexander that he should consider applying for the position.
“I laughed. I had never had any interest whatsoever in working in the pulpit and I very much loved my job and my life in Los Angeles, as did my wife, Rabbi Penina Alexander. But a couple months later, we both thought … let’s just go out there and give it a visit and see what we think of the community,” Alexander said.
Now, after falling in love with the community and moving across the country, Alexander has spent years shaping and revitalizing various programs at Adas Israel, most notably within their social action work and adult education.
According to the Adas Israel website, Alexander has brought its adult education program to such a level of quality that it’s used as a model for synagogues across the country, something that Alexander says is vital to creating a strong Jewish community.
“We spend a lot of time preparing to teach, and then teaching Torah ourselves. It energizes us, and we believe growing a community of serious Jewish text learners is essential to being a vibrant religious community,” Alexander said.
There are also challenges working with such a large and diverse congregation like Adas Israel and making sure that there is content for everyone, but it’s something that Alexander welcomes and enjoys about his work.
“Our goal is to create a community in which everybody can see themselves as part of it — that their unique voice matters, and also that there will be a Torah that speaks to them, but also nudges them. This offers comfort, yes, but also challenges them in a way that will help them grow as people,” Alexander said. “It would be so much less interesting to have a myopic congregation.”
The love that Alexander holds for his congregation extends to the Greater Washington, D.C., area and all of the clergy he gets to interact with on occasion, further cementing his ties to the local community.
“I genuinely believe the D.C. area has some of the best clergy in the world and I love when I get to see my colleagues and be around them,” Alexander said.
But beyond his religious leadership, Alexander is a very down-to-earth and friendly person whose positive attitude makes it clear why he’s risen to the role of co-senior rabbi at one of the largest synagogues around, as he threw some lighthearted fun facts into the end of our conversation.
“I roast my own coffee. I’ve taught myself over the past 12 years. I’m by far the best coffee roaster in the Washington, D.C., area,” Alexander explained enthusiastically. “And whenever I have a few hours to myself or a few days to myself, with familial permission, I will go find live music, particularly in the Grateful Dead family, bluegrass, or something that at its core is improvisational. That’s just as important as all the other explicit Torah stuff,” Alexander said.
But despite Alexander’s fun words, it’s clear that the well-being and success of the Washington, D.C., Jewish community will always continue to be his guiding light.