Former barrister happier practicing God’s law Canadian rabbi to take helm at Beth Israel

BANGOR – The joke going around Beth Israel is that Cantor Deborah Marlowe will change her name to “Rabbi” to match the synagogue’s new spiritual leader’s – they would then be “Cantor Rabbi” and “Rabbi Cantor.”

David Cantor and his family will arrive next month to the only Conservative synagogue in northern Maine, where he is the third rabbi to serve the York Street shul in five years. Joseph Schonberger left in August 1997 for a larger congregation in Youngtown, Ohio.

For almost two years, the congregation worshipped without a full-time rabbi. Yisrael Rod Brettler was hired in 1999, but resigned abruptly last December to run a Jewish gift shop on State Street, shortly after William Small of Orono became president of Beth Israel’s board of directors.

“With a little bit of luck and God’s good graces, we were very fortunate,” Small said. “David’s a very bright, focused young man who believes a rabbi’s job is not just a job, it’s a lifestyle. He’s a young man with a great many ideas who wants to help us grow and bring in young families, yet he respects the traditions of the congregation.”

Cantor, 30, was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a capital city of 628,000 at the geographic center of North America. Winnipeg is home to 15,000 Jews, 11 synagogues, a Jewish community center and the only Jewish theater company in Canada.

The rabbi’s paternal great-grandfather, a shohet or ritual slaughterer, came to Canada in the early 1900s from Poland. He was a very religious man and brought many Jewish families to Canada.

Cantor, whose father is a lawyer, is the youngest of four children. His family was moderately religious, attending shul on the High Holidays and reciting Kiddish over challah on Friday evenings. They did not “keep kosher” (observe Jewish dietary laws) or attend services regularly. In preparation for his bar mitzvah he was required to attend Saturday services and take Hebrew lessons after school when his father would drop him off at the shul, Congregation Shaarey Zedek, on his way to work.

Twelve-year-old students preparing to become adult members of the congregation at 13 were required to attend the first section of the service or Shacharit. While his friends escaped the synagogue, Cantor stayed for the reading of the Torah and the Musaf, or final section of the service when the choir would sing.

“I believe that it was there that I first came to love the synagogue service,” he wrote in the autobiography he sent with his resume. “The reason that I would remain was to hear the cantor and choir sing.”

After his bar mitzvah, Cantor joined the youth choir and, later, the senior choir. Yet it was not a love of music or the Hebrew prayers that caused Cantor to redefine his relationship with his religion. It was falling in love with Christine, now his wife, that started Cantor on his journey to the rabbinate. Christine’s mother was a French Roman Catholic who converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and her father was an Icelandic Lutheran.

“I invited her to synagogue,” he recalled of their first date at 17. “I looked down from the choir loft and she was holding the siddur [prayer book] upside down. She came to have an affinity for the service and would sit in the sanctuary with my great-uncle Ben. … I do not know if it was the service or my uncle’s old age or a passion for Judaism, but Christine came to fall in love with the religion, and became a Jew by choice.”

After studying philosophy at the University of Manitoba, Cantor entered law school. It was an attempt to take a break from the rigorous demands of his legal studies that eventually led him down the rabbinical path. Cantor observed the Sabbath by doing no schoolwork on that day. Then, at the suggestion of his own rabbi, he began saying morning and evening prayers.

It was during Rosh Hashana in 1994 that friends noticed his unhappiness with law practice. When one asked him what he really wanted to do, Cantor, to his own surprise, replied, “be a rabbi.” Over the next year, he and Christine married, he was admitted to the bar, quit his job as a lawyer and began rabbinical school in California. After ordination, Cantor returned as an assistant rabbi to the synagogue where he’d been bar mitzvahed.

“Being a rabbi is totally different from being a lawyer,” Cantor said of the two professions. “I can help people regardless of their income. It is a tremendous privilege being a rabbi. I am included in all the important moments of a person’s life in incredible ways. It is an incredible trust and privilege to be included in someone’s most intimate moments – birth, death – it is life in an awesome way and the rabbi gets to be a guide.”

When asked why he chose Bangor, the Canada native joked that “it’s so much warmer down south.”

The rabbi also had a serious answer to the question. When he was looking for a congregation to lead, he read all the questionnaires and the answers submitted by Conservative synagogues seeking rabbis. He was looking for one that was a community, and Beth Israel was one of three. In his letters of application he did not list a single skill, but instead outlined his philosophy and vision.

“I found that most shuls didn’t pay enough attention to the philosophy of the rabbi and after he was on the job found out that he had a different philosophy,” said Cantor. “I knew if I was invited for my philosophy the congregation would find that I have the skills.”

Brettler and Small cited a difference in vision and philosophy as one of the reasons Brettler resigned.

The fact that there is no longer a day school for Bangor’s Jewish children has kept some Conservative rabbis with young families from applying for a job here, Small says. It was one of the reasons Schonberger said he was leaving after 15 years at Beth Israel. Cantor, however, said that even though his children are not yet old enough for school he does not think that attending public school is detrimental to Jewish children.

“People sometimes think that if they don’t send their kids to a day school, they won’t be religious,” the rabbi said. “Children get their religion at home. They also meet other people of other faiths so they are not so insular-looking. What attending a day school does give them is a greater fluency in Hebrew, but I went to public school and grew up to be a rabbi.”

While the synagogue is hiring Cantor, the congregation also expects to benefit from Christine Cantor’s skills. She has a master’s degree in Hebrew education and is interested in Jewish home issues, Small said. The couple have two sons, one 3 years old and the other born May 24. “As a couple, they fit a pattern that is almost going out of style,” Small observed. “There are very few such ‘rebbetzin’ around anymore. Most have their own careers and don’t see being the rabbi’s wife as a job.”

Cantor is excited about his new job and should be holding services at Beth Israel by July 7. He is looking forward to bringing his vision and philosophy to the Jewish community and is clear about how they all connect with God.

“The mitzvot, the divine commandments, is the way that we as Jews connect with God individually,” he said. “As a community it is how we deal with God if we are in a Conservative shul.”