TORONTO — Last month, Rabbi Lori Cohen became the first female rabbi and likely the first non-Orthodox rabbi to teach at the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto.
From left, TanenbaumCHAT students Mira Blumenthal, Danielle Arje and
Shira Strauss joined Rabbi Lori Cohen to help build a house for a needy
family through Habitat for Humanity.
Her hiring does not reflect a change in policy at the school, but rather its existing policy of “seeking out the most inspirational teachers regardless of denomination,” said director of education Paul Shaviv.
Rabbi Cohen, 50, was a teacher long before she became a rabbi. After earning her B.Ed. from the University of Toronto in 1986, and her special education certification from York University in 1987, she worked as a special education teacher in Scarborough and then York Region for 10 years.
She now balances her half-time position at TanenbaumCHAT’s Wallenberg (Wilmington Avenue) campus, where she teaches grades 10 and 11 Tanach, with part-time duties as spiritual leader of Temple Shalom, a Reform congregation in Waterloo, Ont. She also teaches Torah and Talmud once a week to residents at Baycrest.
From 2001 until earlier this year, she served as associate rabbi at Temple Sinai Congregation of Toronto.
A native of Toronto who studied religion and philosophy at the University of Toronto as an undergraduate, Rabbi Cohen followed her mother’s footsteps into the teaching profession after having done “a lot of volunteer work with kids” when she was growing up.
Her route to rabbinical school was somewhat more unusual. The rabbi, who converted to Judaism in her late 20s, spent six months on an Israeli kibbutz after she received her BA – the beginning of her journey to Judaism.
Later, she founded Or Hadash, a synagogue in Newmarket, and served as a lay leader there. She found she enjoyed studying, running services and leading the community, and was inspired to apply for rabbinical studies at Hebrew Union College.
A single mother at the time, she was accepted into the program and moved with her three sons – now 19, 21 and 26 – to begin her studies in Israel for a year, with four subsequent years at HUC’s Cincinnati campus. While there, she also served as principal of Mercaz Conservative High School, a supplementary school for teenagers, from 1997 to 1998. She was ordained in 2000, and received an MA in Hebrew Letters from HUC in 1998.
With her current mix of work, Rabbi Cohen feels “very balanced.” In the classroom, she wants to make Tanach relevant to her students’ lives and encourages them to “ask more questions, not just regurgitate answers.
“I want them to be creative in solving the challenges the Torah poses for us,” she said. All her classes start with a blessing for the study of Torah.
On a strictly academic note, Rabbi Cohen said that she wants students to try to identify their learning styles. “If it’s important for them to take notes, they should do that [even] while they’re having a discussion.”
Outside of the classroom, the rabbi continues to be involved in interfaith work with Muslim and Christian colleagues and their communities. Earlier this month, she helped organize a “Women of Faith Build” for Habitat for Humanity through the Canadian Centre for Diversity.
Although most of her students at TanenbaumCHAT do not meet the minimum age requirements to participate in such projects, Rabbi Cohen took three Grade 12 students with her to help build a home for a needy family. She wanted them to experience women coming together from different backgrounds – and not incidentally, different generations – to work for “a common good.”
A lesson from the teacher: “The ability to ask questions is more important to me than answers, because I think there are so many things in life that we don’t have the answers to. The ability to see something from many different perspectives is important.”
