Letter from Andy and Anne Mayer

I have to write you about our personal experience with Rabbi Pearlson.

We joined Temple in 1976. Shortly after joining, we ran into a family crisis. Our son was engaged to a nice Jewish girl. The girl’s family did not want to recognize their engagement, despite the ring she wore that was given to her by our son.

We did not know what to do. We called Rabbi Pearlson. He told us to send our son and the bride to be by his office. This was done, despite that we had only belonged to Temple for just a few months.

He advised the bride to be that she had to make a choice: either our son, or her mother, who was objecting. She chose to stay with her family.

Rabbi Pearlson gave him the right advice. The girl was married to another boy, and this marriage ended up in a divorce.

Rabbi Pearlson officiated at our son’s wedding a few years later at Temple. They are still married and have given us two grandchildren.

We have many fond memories of Rabbi Pearlson. He was not only our rabbi but a teacher and family counselor.

Andy and Anne Mayer

Rabbi Jordan Pearlson Was My Rabbi

Rabbi Jordan Pearlson was my rabbi. I feel lucky and proud to be able to say so. He was a mentor to me, a teacher, and a role model. I was not of the generation of Temple Sinai members who had him as their confirmation teacher, but I still had the privilege of learning from him as he spoke from the bimah, interacted with my family, and led us in prayer.

While I was in rabbinical school, he handed me a document that he had written some years earlier. (It is not dated, but was printed on a dot-matrix machine, so we know the era!) The document is entitled “So you’re leading the service today:” and outlines instructions and pointers to leaders of morning minyan in the (now named) Rabbi Jordan Pearlson Chapel. In reading over his instructions, we gain a glimpse into his approach not only to leading prayer, but to his role as our rabbi, in general. In looking at these pointers, we can all be reminded of the goal of prayer, and our challenge as worshippers. Here are some highlights:

1. Don’t “perform.” Do pray. Lead by example rather than theatrics.

2. Don’t get between those you lead the One they pray to.
a) Every eye contact between you and them is a distraction. It is not their approval you are praying for.
b) Lower—don’t raise—your voice during joint readings. Let them feel their own strength.
c) After the Amidah, while you are waiting for others to finish, sit down.
There should be no distracting presence standing between the congregants and the ark. Body language is another way of putting yourself between them and the One they pray to.

3. Your greatest measure of success is when they are strong and you are almost invisible. Your triumph occurs when they follow you into prayer with enough intensity to pass beyond you. The less you do to put yourself in their way, the greater is your achievement. It is not the reader they come to worship.
Indeed, Rabbi Pearlson lived by these simple rules. He led by example and encouraged us to surpass him. He realised that his role as rabbi was to help us connect to God rather than to him and he did not get in the way of that. He let us feel our own strength and learn and grow from it. His humility was a measure of his wisdom.

Rabbi Pearlson ended his instructions with this note to the readers: “My pride in our team of readers is great and grows greater as their skills and sincerity rub off on those whom they lead in prayer. You are one of the great ones. Thank you for the teaching you do by the example you set. Temple could not be what it is without you.”

Jordan, Temple Sinai could not be what it is without you. You were truly one of the great ones. Thank you for the teaching you did by the example you set. It lives on in this building; it lives on in the lives of all that you touched. And it continues to be passed down through the wisdom you shared and instilled in us.

Rabbi Erin Polonsky

May His Memory Be for a Blessing

To the four generations of Temple Sinai member families who looked to him simply as their rabbi, Jordan Pearlson will be remembered for his warmth, his intellect, his wisdom and his wit. But this remarkable spiritual leader was also distinguished both nationally and internationally for his devotion to interfaith relations, and his historic meetings with Pope John Paul II.

Although he began his rabbinate with a single-minded focus on building Temple Sinai, literally from the ground up, he was also a Canadian member of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, and the only rabbi in the lectureship’s one hundred year history to give the Chancellor’s Lectures at Queen’s University’s School of Theology. In addition, he was the first rabbi appointed to chair the National Religious Advisory Committee to the CBC, and, from 1979 to 2004, wrote a religion column for the Toronto Star.

So reads a brief enumeration of some of the public accomplishments of our beloved founding rabbi. Frieda and Jacob Pearlson, hardworking immigrants from Kovno, Lithuania and Poland respectively, could hardly have envisioned the varied and illustrious career their first-born would shape as he began his schooling in Somerville, Massachusetts, forging footsteps his brothers had difficulty following. Melvin Pearlson remembers that when he was in the armed services, letters received from his older brother would send him scurrying in search of a dictionary so that he would understand what Jordan was talking about!

Jordan Pearlson attended engineering school at Tufts University with government assistance, but, since engineering firms were not hiring Jews, worked in the clothing business, at the same time studying electronics and mathematics at Boston University. A year-long bout with rheumatic fever disqualified him from being drafted, and was followed by enrollment at Northeastern University Law School, where he again distinguished himself. But shortly before being called to the bar, he developed a distaste for the law, once he discovered that a man for whom he was working was receiving unwarranted favours from one of the judges. Jacob Pearlson had instilled in his sons a rigorous moral compass. He had taught them what was right, and this was not their way.

Fortunately for us all, Rabbi Pearlson had developed a very close relationship with "his rebbe", Dudley Weinberg, who initiated the Abrams Fellowship at Hebrew College-Jewish Institute of Religion, with the stipulation that Jordan Pearlson be the first recipient. Rabbi Pearlson deliberated for three months before finally deciding to redirect his energies toward the rabbinate. He later remarked that he began his studies in Cincinnati with "a profound sense of homecoming". Years later, when asked how serving as a rabbi differed from practicing law, he responded in typical Rabbi Pearlson fashion, "I now have a client with whom I can consistently agree."

While still a student, he was instrumental in founding Temple Sinai in 1954, and oversaw its growth from fourteen families to close to 1800 before he retired in 1995. One of Temple Sinai’s first formal services was held in the nearby Asbury and West United Church, a remarkable occurrence in those years made possible by a gesture of good will from the congregation and its pastor, with whom Rabbi Pearlson had forged a warm relationship. This type of ecumenism was a hallmark of his rabbinate.

Only two years later, Temple Sinai began to build a permanent home, and over the next forty-one years, Rabbi Pearlson continued to innovate and stimulate. He was responsible for pioneering nursery programming for challenged children, creating Chevrat Torah, a weekly Shabbat treasure of our congregational family, featuring morning minyanim conducted by lay leadership, and maintaining personal relationships with at least three quarters of his vast congregation!

His preaching skills were legendary, and congregants unceasingly looked forward to the intellectual challenge and wit of his sermons, which traditionally commenced with the well-loved exhortation, "the time to stop talking is now!"

But as his congregational family, we can continue to be warmed by the light of his less widely known achievements: the numerous congregants he inspired to positions of leadership, and indeed, to careers in the clergy, because he shepherded by example; the generations of school children relaxed and at home at Temple because they were greeted by "hello, ticklebelly" as they entered or exited our building; the hundreds and hundreds of people whose lives he touched in remarkable ways, from conducting a funeral service for a family pet, to performing wedding ceremonies so personalized and warm that couples flocked to be married at Temple Sinai.

All of us, it seems, have a special memory or two of the particular way in which Rabbi Pearlson touched us or our family . . . . of a difference he made because of his wisdom or his compassion. We would like to collect some of these wonderful stories and assemble them in a permanent form so that they can be shared and treasured for posterity. To assist us in beginning this project, please leave a comment if you have a story to contribute to the remarkable legacy of our beloved Rabbi Pearlson.

May his memory be, for each of us, and for all those whom he loved, a profound blessing.

Marsha Zinberg
April, 2008