About Rabbi David Levin

Relationships are the whole point

After thirty years in business, I left everything familiar to enter rabbinical school. As I packed to move to Israel, my father drove me to the airport. When we hugged goodbye, he said, “I am proud of you.” The fifty-year-old man in me dissolved; only the boy could hold him tighter.

That sentence didn’t teach me anything new about my father. It let me finally receive what, I think, he’d always felt. Too many of us never get that moment — we’re left carrying what we wish had been said, once it’s too late to ask for it. That’s the seed everything I do grows out of.

I’ve come to believe the fundamental core of Judaism isn’t law, or ritual, or belief. It’s the deliberate work of building and nurturing real relationships between people. Everything else I do is some version of that same work, wearing different clothes.

As a teacher, that means helping people find the ideas already inside their own tradition that let them see each other more clearly. As President of the Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia, it means keeping a room full of rabbis in genuine relationship with each other, not just in proximity. On the board of the Jewish Community Relations Council, it’s the same work pushed further out, into the harder relationships between communities that don’t yet trust one another. As a chaplain, it’s the most stripped-down version of all: sitting with someone in a hospital room, with nothing to offer but presence.

The Ethical Legacy Will, and its parent organization, the Jewish Relationships Initiative, are where all of this comes together most directly. They exist to help people say, in their own voice and while there’s still time, what they actually mean to the people they love — instead of waiting for an airport goodbye to say it by accident.

I keep a line above my email signature that says as much as I know how to say it plainly: God’s miracle is not in the thunder and lightning, but in people sheltering others from the storm. I don’t think that’s a metaphor. I think it’s the actual job.

I was ordained in 2013, after thirty years in business first taught me what people actually need from each other. I’m a Fellow with Rabbis Without Borders, and a member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Ohalah, and the National Association of Jewish Chaplains. I live in the Philadelphia suburbs with my wife, Naomi.