It’s been 10 years since Rabbi Joel Simonds founded the Jewish Center for Justice,  based in what was then University Synagogue but is now the Resnick Family campus of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Was it social justice or did something else attract him to the rabbinate? “Social justice was an aspect,” he said, “but I think it was a sense of Jewish community, a sense of connection to Israel and, really, a calling to serve. Plus a desire to learn.”

He grew up in a small Jewish community in Lancaster, in northern Los Angeles county, the hundreds of Jews a tiny fraction of the city’s 170,000 residents.  “When I started to connect with the larger Jewish community,” he said, “through Jewish summer camps, through larger Jewish youth affiliations in my teens – I didn’t realize a Jewish life could be more than the smallness in which I grew up.” The teenaged, small-town boy had only one goal ¬ the only one he knew. “I said, ‘Oh, I want to be a rabbi’ because that was my only sense of what my desire for Judaism was.”

After graduating from U.C. Santa Barbara, Simonds expanded his vistas to examine life as an adult Jew: Jewish life, Jewish communal life and Jewish religious life. “In my younger years,” he admitted, “I didn’t know there was a difference.” 

As he grew a little older, he thought, “’Okay, can I have a rich Jewish life without pursuing the rabbinate? Or can I work in the Jewish community without having to pursue the rabbinate?’ After looking at that for a little bit, I realized, ‘wait a second, I am feeling a sense of calling to learn, as a rabbi.’”

What ultimately led him to the rabbinate “was finally understanding the difference between working in the Jewish community, living in the Jewish community, then becoming a rabbi. But I had to do that first. What ultimately led to becoming a rabbi was wanting to learn the tradition through the eyes of the rabbinate, then wanting to work in and serve the Jewish community through a rabbinic lens.”  

His childhood rabbi was “instrumental in showing me care, love and a deep appreciation for Jewish life. … Then as I grew older, I was really surrounded by various rabbis, from congregational to communal, from those who were justice-oriented to those who were other-oriented. Once I saw the totality, I was able to pursue my own path.”

That path was decided in his early 20s, when he was in Washington, D.C., working in the Jewish community, “pursuing justice.” He thought, “‘Okay, now that I am working in the Jewish community, now that I am living in the Jewish community and pursuing justice … but I wanted more. I had to do that to go to the rabbinate.”

He wanted to do it “not just as a Jewish communal professional, but I wanted to do it through the lens of religiosity, that I wanted to be involved in justice, and involved in lifecycle, and involved in the pursuit of the betterment of the Jewish people.”

In Washington, he worked for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, “and some other justice-oriented stuff.”  During rabbinical school, justice was a major cause, and so was Zionism. After rabbinical school at Hebrew Union College, he came to University Synagogue, “where my time was incredible.”

As a rabbi, he said he feels that from a religious standpoint, justice is “really is how I read the text. It’s how I connect to Torah, how I read Torah, from looking at Jewish history, to looking at Jewish tradition, to looking at the Jewish community to looking at our text. It’s a pursuit at being God’s partners, making things a little better for each generation.”

It is, he continued “about expanding not detracting. How ever we look at that – expanding opportunities, expanding rights, and then I really look at the Jewish experience here in America. It has been one that our ancestors only could have dreamed of. I really do look around and say Jeremiah and Isaiah were only able to scream at the gates of the city center and of the city walls.” But “as a free Jew in America in the 21st century,” Rabbi Simonds can do “what they only dreamed. So I should do that. That is really how I look at justice.”

He also had “a strong connection to Zionism, and a strong connection to the people, the state. This idea is part and parcel of Judaism. Unfortunately, we are living in a time where there are larger forces that try and say ‘if you are a pursuer of justice, you cannot be a lover of Israel.’ My whole belief is quite the opposite. I would say the idea of the state of Israel is the pursuit of justice. Justice for the Jewish people who never were able to live free and just for thousands of years. We can wrestle with right-wing and left-wing governments,” he said, and “right-wing and left-wing policies.”

Fast Takes with Rabbi Simonds

Jewish Journal: Your favorite vacation destination?

Rabbi Simonds: Maui and Jerusalem.

J.J.: Best book you have read?

R.S.: I am feeling nostalgic – “Exodus.”

J.J.: Your favorite Shabbat moment?

R.S.: The first Shabbat I spent with my sons (now 12 and 14) in Jerusalem.