When Steven Leder was 14, he got into some trouble with the law. Rather than send him to reform school, his parents sent him to a Reform Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin.
"It was a remarkable place," Leder said. "It was like a kibbutz program — you build your own tents, grow your own garden, run your own services. All the counselors were really cool guitar-playing hippies from the ’60s. I thought I died and went to heaven."
And then there were the rabbis from Chicago. "I looked at these guys and I said when I grow up, I’m going to be like them."
In fact, Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s camps in Malibu attracted Leder to the assistant rabbi position there 16 years ago, when he was fresh out of rabbinic school.
On June 1, Leder will be consecrated as the senior rabbi at the city’s oldest synagogue, when Rabbi Harvey Fields becomes rabbi emeritus after 21 years of service to Wilshire Boulevard Temple.
Leder, 43, speaks with a friendly intensity, his calming blue eyes framed by the rectangular lenses of hip, black glasses. In his tenure as the No. 2 rabbi, Leder has already done much to win the respect and affection of the members, both old and young. He is a brilliant preacher and teacher and a charismatic leader.
Leder said he doesn’t plan to make any sweeping, immediate changes.
"I don’t think the temple is broken," he said. "I am very proud of what we are and what we do and how we do it. But I also want to grow and help the institution grow. There are certain values I hold very dearly that I think we need to do a better job of holding — learning, tikkun olam [repairing the world] and how well and how creatively we communicate with people."
Leder is credited with having brought in hundreds of young families. Many of those joined in the last six years, attracted to the state-of-the-art Audrey and Sydney Irmas Campus in West Los Angeles, with its preschool, day school, religious school and adult and teen programming.
"Now my challenge is a retention challenge: How do we take these people who came in the door to have a narrow need met and turn them into good citizens of the temple for life?" he asked.
One way he hopes to do that is by continuing to make one of the city’s largest congregations, with 2,600 families, feel intimate through neighborhood-based programs and careful attention to the milestones in members’ lives.
Trained as a journalist in college, Leder is president of the board of The Jewish Journal and author of "The Extraordinary Nature of Ordinary Things" (Behrman House, 1999) and "More Money Than God: Living a Rich Life Without Losing Your Soul," due out this fall from Bonus Books.
Leder inherited a strong work ethic from his father, who owned a scrap metal business in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Minneapolis and went to work every day in steel-toed work boots and a jumpsuit that said "Len." Every Sunday, from the age of 5, Leder was responsible for scrubbing the bathrooms at the yard.
"I used to resent my father, but now I realize that I have only been able to be successful because of that work ethic," Leder said.
He tries to maintain a healthy perspective on his role as rabbi of one of the city’s most prestigious religious institutions.
"I have always tried to take the public and symbolic exemplar role of rabbi seriously on one hand and to dismiss it entirely with the other," he said. "I think what people respond to even more than symbolic exemplar is a human being who is accessible and responsive."
