For most of the year, Rabbi David Kasher grew up “as a regular American kid,” spending the school year with his hippie mother in Oakland. But summers were spent with his religious father in Brooklyn. “Obviously there was a stark dichotomy,” he said. “But I always was enchanted by my father’s world. I had an impulse for religion.”
That impulse has remained steady. After spending five years as an associate rabbi at IKAR, Kasher is the West Coast director of the Hadar Institute, founded by the noted Open Orthodox Rabbi Avi Weiss. Clearly, Rabbi Kasher has learned how to straddle the widest horizons of the Jewish world. Every summer, he said, he was introduced to “frumkeit, Haredi, Chassidus and however else ultra-Orthodoxy is described. It was always gnawing at me, something I wanted to go into deeper.” But Kasher didn’t really understand the content. He didn’t speak Yiddish. He didn’t know the texts. He didn’t know what was on the inside.
Just after college, his beloved father died. In his grief, Kasher looked for answers to questions he always had wondered about. Without his father’s encouraging presence, he looked at his life and posed two questions: What does all of this mean? Can I live it? Determined to find out, not long after his father’s funeral, Kasher was off to yeshiva. A quarter-century later, he says with a smile, “The rest is history.”
Entering yeshiva, he found a comfortable familiarity with frumkeit, and began immersing himself in the world of learning. But hailing from contrasting worlds, one entirely religious, the other entirely secular, he didn’t know how to orient himself. “I was always trying to find where I belonged, what I believed. The constant was the exhilaration I felt through this path.” He made the decision to enter yeshiva because he “had to figure out my own direction,” he said. “I always had been nourished by Judaism, but almost by proxy, my father doing it for me. I felt if I didn’t anchor myself soon, I would lose all contact.”
“I was always trying to find where I belonged, what I believed. The constant was the exhilaration I felt through this path.”
Rabbi Kasher was ordained by Rabbi Weiss in New York around the 2006 founding of Hadar, which defines itself as “a center that builds vibrant, egalitarian communities in North America and Israel, rooted in rigorous, nuanced Torah study, gender equality and meaningful Jewish practice.”
Kasher thanked Weiss, saying “he had been a rebbe to me. He has modeled for me what an authentic religious life looks like. His insides and his outsides match. He is living his truth. We all have different truths to live out in the world. The purpose of having a rebbe is to be someone who is living your truth.” Kasher started working in the Bay Area, teaching at day schools and then Berkeley Hillel. His friend Sara Bamberger organized Kevah, groups learning Torah in people’s homes. He became the lead teacher. Kevah, taken from Pirke Avos, means “make your Torah a fixed practice.”
By the time he hit his 30s, Kasher was thinking more deeply about what makes a dynamic, accessible Torah learning experience. “That’s the tension I always have wrestled with as an educator,” he said, “the balance between depth and accessibility.” How do you give people access to something unfamiliar to them – give them the tools and expose them to the depth of the complexity and majesty of Torah.
Hadar was established on New York’s Upper West Side as a minyan, became a beit midrash (learning center) and then a yeshiva. As Hadar grew to become a larger Jewish learning institute with many kinds of programs, Rabbi Kasher’s role is to connect people to those programs.
For Kasher, this is defined by its rigor of religious observance combined with a desire to create an egalitarian community. More than that, it is about Klal Yisroel, trying to engage everyone. In studying and practice. “I have explored all over the spectrum of Jewish life,” said the rabbi. “I feel myself constantly growing, evolving.”
Torah study and practice have been constants in the life of the rabbi. “The practices of Jewish life have been incredibly grounding for me, sort of liberating, too,” he said. “What’s unique about Hadar is the particular blend of sensibilities.”
How does Kasher categorize Hadar? While “it might be easy to place Hadar somewhere between the Orthodox and Conservative communities,” Hadar tries not to think in terms of labels. “The point is we are here to serve Klal Yisroel,” Kasher said. “We want people to have a dynamic experience of the classics of Torah and learning, the classics of prayer and mitzvot and practice.” The rabbi stresses Torah and Torah study because “I am based in one of the greatest Jewish communities in the world.”
Emphasizing Hadar’s central philosophy, “we need spaces where everybody in the community feels they can come and learn Torah.”
Face-to-face is his way to teach and to learn. “Hard to feel the whole power of Torah unless you are face-to-face,” he maintained. Most importantly, “I want so much to give people the experience I had, not just to study, but to be deep, deep — to enter inside of Torah. That’s the space I want to get people to. Hard to do that on a computer screen.”
Fast Takes with Rabbi Kasher
Jewish Journal: What was your favorite childhood experience?
Rabbi Kasher: Walking on the Coney Island Boardwalk with my father.
J.J.: Do you have many female students?
RK: Yes. The goal is to have 50-50. I want to create a space of Torah where every Jew feels comfortable. Women and men for sure — but also all kinds of other identities. I hope we are heading into a future where we will hear more of women’s voices in Torah.
J.J.: The favorite moment of your week?
RK: My Thursday Parsha class, online at noon.
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