Rabbi Jacob Adler Worth a mensch-ion

LITTLE ROCK — SELF

PORTRAIT Date and place of birth: April 4, 1953, Providence, R.I. My obsession is to get crocuses to bloom from fall to spring without any gap in the winter.

The chief tenet of my faith is to be aware of the presence of God.

A talent I covet: being able to remember where I put my glasses All-time favorite movie: The Third Man My greatest fear used to be that I would live my whole lifewithout having children.

My favorite historical figure may be Roger Williams, who was a religious seeker and a Baptist when Baptists were the liberals of the religious world.

He was one of the people who came up with the phrase "the wall of separation between church and state." My pet peeve about society is not enough trains.

If Moses visited Temple Shalom, he'd say: "We were told we'd spread out to the ends of the earth. I didn't know I'd find you here." A word to sum me up: manysidedFAYETTEVILLE - Not long after Jacob Adler's great-great-grandfather turned 105, he awoke one morning and, as he did always, visited the synagogue for morning prayers. Only this morning, he made a point of touching all his friends and begging, "If I've ever hurt you, please forgive me."

He returned home, where he lived with his daughter-in-law, embraced her and said, "When you live with someone a long time, sometimes you say things that are hurtful that you wished you hadn't said. If I did that to you, please forgive me."

Then he lay down, as he did always, only he never got up.

In the present context, the story illustrates three pillars of Adler's expectations and beliefs. One is long life - several of the rabbi'sline have lived to see 90. Another is atonement or restitution, which happens to be the subject of his professional magnum opus, Urgings of Conscience. The last is fidelity - specifically, to Judaism, and the Jewish community.

"It's something to aspire to," Adler says.

At dusk today, Jews will begin observing Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, an ascetic holy day that chiefly involves fasting and spending time in services or prayer.

About 60 Northwest Arkansas Jewish families had expected to gather for Yom Kippur services at the new 6,000-square-foot Temple Shalom, but it isn't ready. Built using donated materials and on a shoestring budget, construction is taking longer than expected. Thegrand opening is now set for Dec. 12, the first night of Hanukkah, the commemoration of the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.

Adler has been markedly removed from the project. He was not in the vanguard of the temple movement when, in 2004, convert Miriam Ella Alford bequeathed the congregation $500,000 for seed money (although he presided over her bat mitzvah). He is not on the design committee, and he has only consulted on matters concerning his office or Judaic propriety. Little more than a year ago, he and his new bride, Hayya Knopf, adopted two babies from Vietnam - Luu and Lily - and at 56, he is starting his family.

When asked about the move out of theUniversity of Arkansas' Hillel House, he says, "It's just a different phase of life, like when you graduate from college and go on to the next thing."

If Hillel House is student housing, Temple Shalom is a family's first home. There's an immediate sense of having arrived, he says, but it will take time "to develop, oh, the patina that comes with use, and it will be exciting and new, but it won't have the memories and echoes of a place we've been using for a long time."

Still, "you don't necessarily want to go back to it." 1,001 JOKES

Many in the congregation won't know what they're getting when the doors open this fall. Some aren't quite sure what they've got in Adler, for that matter.

"Jacob somehow is our rabbi," says congregant Judith Levine, a wry endorsement as much directed at the diverse congregation as at Adler's nontraditional route to the rabbinate.

Adler admits that there has been a growth curve since his ordination three years ago, although he has been ministering to the congregation for two decades. In fact, it seems as if in every step of Adler's life, he has had to rediscover how profoundly different he is, and it's something he has grown to embrace.

As his oldest friend, Rabbi Alan Mittleman of Allentown, Pa., puts it - "it was very clear even though we didn't have the word for it [in primary school] that Jacob was a genius."

At about 18 months, he told a visiting group of his mother's friends: "C'mon girls. Let's go for a walk."

At age 5, he penned his first musical composition, which his brother, Harry Adler, saved and had framed. Today, Jacob Adler plays mandolin with local banjoist Clarke Buehling.

The son of a secondgeneration hardware store owner, Adler didn't take to the construction trades or sports but picked up Yiddish from speaking with his grandmother. As president of his junior high school Latin club, Adler gave impromptu lectures in Ciceronian Latin dressed in a toga, Mittlemanrecalls.

In high school, he studied mathematics under the tutelage of the department chairman because even the most advanced classes were tedious. Asked how his older brother was different from he and his sister, Harry Adler says, "The quicker answer is how is he similar. He was born with 10 fingers and 10 toes like us."

Harry Adler and Mittleman remember a jester beloved by his peers - Adler once set out to compile a book of 1,001 jokes, and did - but Adler didn't see himself as funny.

"It took me more time to get comfortable socially. I think it's just the way I came into the world. I'm much more comfortable with books and ideas and thoughts," he says. "And being religiously oriented, it kind of takesyou out of this world. I just seemed to be somewhere else."

So when, as a freshman at Harvard, he began examining the superficiality of his beliefs, he abandoned religion. He became, he says, "agnostic." He entered what he considers the greatest subcategory of his current flock - "culturally Jewish" - and this continued through his studies and his move to Arkansas.

"I managed to live pretty comfortably [as an agnostic] for quite a while, like 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' except it was myself I was not asking aboutand not telling about."

A NATURAL FIT

He came to the UA in 1984 and earned a tenure-track position in philosophy the next year. He wanted eventually to return to New England, but department chairman Lynne Spellman says Adler made an effort to fit in. He bought a house on Johnson Street where he lives today and threw great parties and made a conscious effort to win friends. He joined the struggling but cohesive Jewish community.

A few years into it, a visiting rabbi canceled on thecongregation, and no one but Adler could read from the Torah scrolls fluently. He was not without a healthy fear of blasphemy, and a nonbeliever chanting Scripture in a sacred ceremony felt wrong. On the other hand, he was the only one who could redeem the service for his friends.

Providence presented him with even odds. He chose to read the scrolls, and it led him down a very committed course indeed.

"I needed to be in a place where there weren't many Jews in order to really reflect upon it," he says. "I noticed when I was saying certainprayers like the 'Mi Sheberach,' I'd be overcome with certain emotions, even start to cry, and I'd have to pause and collect myself before I could go on."

In the following decade he became a lay leader, performing services, holding adult study, conducting bat and bar mitzvahs. One night on Block Street he was confronted by a gangly, earthy Arkansan who asked if he was Jewish. After pausing to consider his intent, Adler said, "Well, yes." The man asked if he could read biblical Hebrew, if he could teach it.

Adler firmly expected never to hear from him again, but he gave him his phone number and a suggested study text. Within a few days Ariel Ramhayil called back and said, "'Well, I got some people, and I got them books, and we're all ready to start stedyin'.' I remember he said 'stedyin'.'"

Ramhayil's group from the Assembly of Yahweh met regularly for several years, and today he is preparing to convert to Judaism. Adler says the whole experience, from startling encounter to years of study, "was one of the milestones on my path to becoming a rabbi."

In 1998, the university granted him leave every other year to attend the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia.

Even to his professors there, it was clear Adler was as concerned with finding a mate as he was ordination, and Hayya Knopf was a nice match. A physical therapist, she had, like him, never married. She was also amenable to his strict dietary code - only kosher meat, no shellfish, no meat-dairy combinations. More importantly, she was assertive enough to ask him for the first date.

"I saw him from across the [synagogue], and he was wearing a pink shirt, and I thought he looked so beautiful."

They formed a study partnership - he for the purpose of study, and she for him. About the time she was convinced that he was more interested in the Book of the Ba'al Shem Tov than in her, he disabused her of that notion.

She remembers that, before they married, she heard him argue with his family for the inclusion and reconciliation of an estranged relative, and "I knew then that in the world we would be good," she says.

And their love relationship is still growing. "We keep getting closer, that's what I would say is true. He listens so deeply."

The couple have bonded over their sudden family, and neither act their ages. He lets his children direct him in their play, and he performs the characters in voice or action they wish to conjure. His energy doesn't flag. He appreciates those moments when his children concentrate or register surprise for something new in large part because he is capable of great surprise and concentration himself.

"There's nothing cynical about him," says Levine."He's still very much an admirer of the human spirit."

TEMPLE

Imagine one church for all of Fayetteville's Christians - that's how Adler defines his challenge.

"My conception of my role of rabbi was to help Jewish people be Jewish in whatever way that they wanted to be Jewish."

Now, that liberalism has received tacit endorsement by the very holy space he will inhabit. The congregation of Temple Shalom have said they want a home that is openly welcoming of not different practices alone but different religions. One of the great goals is to foster interfaith understanding through events, classes and a library full of ecumenical texts.

The general contractor, Fadil Bayyari, is a native Palestinian. The architects, Episcopalians, imagined a space as diverse as all of this, as diverse as Fayetteville, as disarming as a meeting between Jew and Muslim.

"It was designed around the many moments in the life of the congregation," said architect Bret Park.

One of those moments is sundown services, so the angled roof of the sanctuary includes west-facing clerestory windows that welcome the waning sunlight down on the bimah, a "prelude to the sacred time that's about to start," Park said.

One of the early debates within the congregation itself was whether the kitchen would be kosher - a feat that would require two different sets of utensils. Only one other family besides Adler's currently adheres to kosher law, but a kosher kitchen would also accommodate Muslim dietary laws.

It's exactly the kind of strict orthodoxy Levine might have pooh-poohed in the past, "But I thought, 'It's not OK that our kitchen's not kosher,' and I was very surprised at my reaction. It's not my tradition, it's [Adler's], but somewhere along the way I've listened."

Adler's leadership depends on this - listening to his quieter direction, gleaning his accrued knowledge - because he is not the kind of fiery, martial preacher native to these parts.

Construction supervisor and founding congregant Jeremy Hess has no doubt Adler's services will fill up the new space, but it will be the sum of his learning and wisdom, he says, more than his oratory.

It's really only the beginning of a long relationship, and one that Adler's wife believes will grow richer with age.

Back in Providence, R.I., Adler's Hardware turns 90 this year. The store his grandfather founded has survived the big-box blitz the way family-owned businesses do - expanding the bounds of customer service. It's now in Harry Adler's hands, and he's holding tight to the very best traditions of his practice.

Temple Shalom should expect his big brother will do the same.