Rabbis of LA | Rabbi Bruce Raff Can’t Stop Himself

The Sun-splashed, high-ceilinged office of Rabbi Bruce Raff befits one of the longest-serving rabbis in Los Angeles.

For the past year, he has been the Rabbi in Residence at Temple Judea, Tarzana. With a laugh, he explained, “It means I live here.”  The Culver City native says the title suggests, “You have been here so long you know everybody. I am dealing with children and grandchildren of people I worked with, studied with and learned from the last nearly 40 years.”

Three generations of the Raff family have grown up at the Tarzana Reform temple, including Tamar, Rabbi Raff’s wife.

Rabbi Raff is as busy today as he was in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The main difference, he said is that many of his current classroom students are grandchildren of the first generation of students he taught. How do today’s Temple Judea students differ from those he taught in the ‘80s? “The challenge we face is a universal one,” he said. “It has plagued generations. Look at ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ Such questions were ‘Will our children be Jewish?’ ‘How will they be Jewish?’ ‘What type of Jewish will they be?’” Raff noted that the rabbis who wrote the story of Hanukkah were dealing with the same issues: Will we be Hellenized? Will we be so insular in our Judaism that we can’t adapt to the outside world? Rabbi Raff said “One way we have dealt with that challenge is to try and find – to be able to live in modernity and at the same time to have Jewish meaning in our lives.” He commended Director of Education Rabbi Eric Rosenstein for designing creative programs that engage 21st-century students.

“You have been here so long you know everybody. I am dealing with children and grandchildren of people I worked with, studied with and learned from the last nearly 40 years.”

He said Rabbi Rosenstein has found a way to create programs that make Jewish learning fun. “He also has found a better alternative than religious school, which we call Sababa,” Raff said. “It’s a summer and winter camp program where kids come all day every day for several weeks, along with periodic programs throughout the year (for kindergarten through eighth grade), and then the kids become junior counselors.”

Raff said the program created an opportunity for kids to benefit from the best of both worlds: religious school’s  learning, and the camp and community and all of the benefits they could not get without a camp-type program. 

When two students sit next to each other and neither can chant Ashrei, it doesn’t make them friends, Raff said. Other activities do. “Swimming together, playing ball together, eating together, doing things all day together, makes kids friends,” he has found. Informality is a difference maker. Temple Judea brings in their families, with Shabbat dinners and learning opportunities for families. “It really changes the way the kids view temple, view Judaism, view themselves,” he said.

Temple Judea, Temple Ramat Zion, Valley Beth Shalom and L.A. Jewish Health (formerly the Jewish Home) received a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation to train and educate the grandparent generation. He’s currently teaching a four-session class where “we are helping older adults dealing with the challenges of changing family, changing status in life, and the legacy they leave.”  The class – 79 seniors – meets monthly.

Some of those seniors divulge long-hidden secrets. “When you sit with people, they share things they have kept inside,” Raff said. One elderly man recently confided to the rabbi that “I always have had friends, colleagues. We played golf, cards, socialized together, traveled together. Twenty-eight of us. Twenty-six have died and one man moved away. I am all alone. I don’t have anyone.”

A widow told Rabbi Raff she had been married for more than 50 years. “There is no way,” she said, “to describe the loneliness of getting into bed alone every night.” You don’t have to be a Judea member to attend Rabbi Raff’s meetings – “just be a Jew in the West Valley.”

Coming up is a class for parents, promising answers to questions your preschooler or you ask — how to do Shabbat with your nursery school child, with your religious school child, how to make it fun and meaningful. 

Rabbi Raff created a series of tips and programs for families, including for Passover.

Grandparents have this tremendous potential to influence their grandchildren, he believes. He wants to equip grandparents with the skills to create meaningful moments with their grandchildren — not just fun, but meaningful. Before coming to Temple Judea, Rabbi Raff taught public school, at Hollywood Temple Beth El, then at Ner Tamid in Palos Verdes for seven years before leaping into the Valley.

At Temple Judea’s previous facility, if you turned left you were at Rabbi Raff’s office, and if you turned right, you got to the former Senior Rabbi Akiva Annes’ office.  “I have dealt with everything that is going on in the lives of families” – and then the rabbi paused – “until it came to those moments that have the greatest potential for connection to holiness.

“When the goldfish died,” Raff said, “I got the child.  Or when we got rid of diapers, I got the child. But around those lifecycle moments that have the greatest possibility for connection to Judaism and holiness, they turn the other direction.”

But Rabbi Raff has no intention of retiring.  

“The joy of being able to share Judaism – whether they are two or 12 or 25 or 55! It makes me want to come back to work every day.”

Fast Takes with Rabbi Raff

Jewish Journal: What is your favorite moment of the week?

Rabbi Raff: Doing Shabbat blessings with my grandchildren, teaching them to love Judaism and take it seriously.

J.J.: Best place you have traveled outside of Israel?

Rabbi Raff:  Going to Shanghai, China, because my mother was born and grew up there. I have been to numerous beautiful places, but to be able to go home is incredibly meaningful.

J.J.  Outside of Jewish life, what is the best book you have read?

Rabbi Raff: My favorite book of all time is indicative of the challenges we face and the irony of life, “Catcher in the Rye.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article said that Temple Judea received a grant from the Jewish Federation. In fact, the grant was from the Jewish Community Foundation and has been corrected in the text.