Sandra Lawson didn’t expect to perform a public benediction at her local pub.
But when her friend Jay asked her for a blessing earlier this year, she stood with him in the middle of the room in a Philadelphia drinking establishment and put her rabbinical school training into action.
“Avraham, Isaac and Jacob, please bless Jay on his journey,” she said, placing her hand on his shoulder. “Come back and have a beer with me.”
For Lawson, a bar is a natural place to create a Jewish ceremony. As a rabbi in training who herself is breaking barriers, Lawson is eager to take Jewish practice outside the bounds of the synagogue.
Lawson, 45, lives at the intersection of several communities. As an African American lesbian who converted to Judaism, eats vegan and is now studying to be a rabbi at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Lawson believes American Jews need to rethink how their community looks and where it should congregate.
“Redefining or helping people understand what the Jewish community looks like today is something I want to do,” she said. “In the U.S., people can deal with a female rabbi, a queer rabbi,” she continued. But black, too? “When you put those identities together, it’s too much to handle.”
Lawson grew up in a non-Jewish military family and wasn’t raised religious. Her first exposure to Judaism came in an Old Testament course at St. Leo University in Florida while she was serving in the Army as a police officer. Following military service, Lawson became a personal trainer in Atlanta, where one of her clients was Joshua Lesser, a Reconstructionist rabbi and local activist for racial justice. She began attending services at his Congregation Beth Haverim, a synagogue for the LGBT community, and converted in 2004.
She decided to become a rabbi after representing the Jewish community at an LGBT memorial service for Coretta Scott King, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife. The experience made her realize that being an African American Jew could allow her to strengthen connections among communities. She’s on track to graduate from rabbinical school in 2018.
She says she wants to get to a point where “when I Google ‘rabbi,’ I see someone other than a bearded white guy.”
Lawson has encountered challenges. At one synagogue, she was standing in a prayer shawl and kippah with a friend when a congregant approached her friend and asked him if she was Jewish.
“Every community has their own idea of who is a Jew and what does a Jew look like,” she said. “If you don’t fit that framework, they don’t think you’re Jewish.”
Diane Tobin, founder of Be’chol Lashon, a San Francisco organization that advocates for Jews of color, says that in many cases, white Jews address race crudely because they lack the language skills to talk sensitively about it. Lawson, she says, “is the embodiment of a younger generation of Jews who have intersecting identities.”
Lawson wants to expand the Jewish conversation in part by taking it outside its traditional setting. She would rather lead services in a park, or address the concerns of Jews and non-Jews in inner cities, than be a full-time pulpit rabbi. Every month she runs a Friday night service at Arnold’s Way, a vegan cafe and health store near Philadelphia, which she begins with a song she wrote based on a verse from Psalms.
Lawson also uses social media and live video feeds to spread Jewish content. On Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, traditionally the days when the Torah is read, she will put out a stream of video content on Snapchat featuring Torah study interspersed with humorous images.
“The model of the synagogue, where you have to pay large dues, pay to come to High Holidays, is not a model I want to duplicate,” she said.
“We live in a different world now. If you’re going to wait for people to come to your synagogue, your JCC, you’ll be waiting a long time.”