“This Leap of Faith is Worthwhile”: LGBTQ+ Trailblazer Rabbi Eric Weiss on Expanding Conceptions of Jewish Spiritual Leadership

As Hebrew Union College continues its work to reinvent clergy formation and educate dynamic leaders who will reinvigorate Jewish tradition for a more vibrant future, the institution is also looking back - drawing lessons and inspiration from the experience of one of its alumni: Rabbi Eric Weiss '89, a groundbreaking advocate for LGBTQ+ inclusion in rabbinical education and Reform Judaism more broadly.

"I was born and raised in the Reform movement," says Weiss, who is now Executive Director Emeritus of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center in San Francisco. Given his upbringing in Los Angeles, where his father taught religious school and synagogue was an integral part of family life, Weiss saw Hebrew Union College as a natural step after his undergraduate education at the University of California at Santa Cruz. When he was accepted at Hebrew Union College's Los Angeles campus at the end of the 1970s, Weiss recalls, "I was so excited to enter into rabbinical school, and Hebrew Union College in particular."

Even with that excitement, however, Weiss felt that he was not yet ready. "I realized that, were I to go to rabbinical school at the age I was then, I would be ordained before I was 30 years old. I was petrified that somebody would ask me important life questions and that I would have no life experience to answer with any authenticity." As a result, he asked for and received a deferment to get some of that life learning. Weiss moved to San Francisco, an experience that formed the rest of his life and work.

For an openly gay man in his 20s, Weiss remembers, life in San Francisco during the era between the 1969 Stonewall uprising and the first reported cases of AIDS in the U.S. in 1981 "was spectacular. It was enriching, it was growthful, it was fun, it was intellectually stimulating, it was spiritually stimulating, it was a holistic developmental time," he recalls. The men from different backgrounds and generations Weiss encountered in San Francisco were not only reimagining their lives but also building new political and societal paradigms. "This was the era when civic engagement became extraordinarily powerful, when the LGBTQI+ community came forward with tremendous civic force. It was to become a force that other communities emulated."

During those years, Weiss was also beginning to chart a path toward his eventual rabbinate, working as a paralegal, while also attending San Francisco's predominantly gay Congregation Sha'ar Zahav, and teaching religious school with his sister at the city's Congregation Sherith Israel. At the same time, he began volunteering at a gay community hospice, where he would experience the emergence of HIV as a public health, cultural, and spiritual crisis. "Volunteering was reinvigorating a desire, an interest, a yearning in me," Weiss says. "Going back to Hebrew Union College came to me in a natural evolutionary way."

When Weiss entered Hebrew Union College in 1983, he did so as an openly gay man, feeling "unencumbered" because of a reserve of "internalized confidence" he built during his years in San Francisco. Weiss recalls that he was pleased to find in Jerusalem and Los Angeles that his peers and professors at Hebrew Union College "were mostly benign and mostly supportive," and his experiences with them were "marked by an overall ease and fun." At the same time, he "also remained attuned to the subtleties involved in assimilating into a culture that was not gay-affirmative. It made me lonely," he says.

Weiss recalls moments that were awkward and downright painful. He remembers a time when a prominent rabbi visiting the campus delivered a talk on what the Reform movement could learn about the gay community by understanding "transvestites." In general, he says, "there were lots of conversations about gay and lesbian synagogues, where people would ask, 'Why do they need to have a synagogue?' But at the same time, there was really no conversation about 'How do we welcome them into our pulpit.'" Weiss has also written about a moment when a prominent member of the campus community, speaking about officiating at same-sex weddings, remarked: "I am glad I have never been asked so that I haven't ever had to say no."

"These were conversations of diminishment, alienation, and a very real refusal to understand the ways in which Reform Judaism needed to change, and in fact was changing by the demand of the broader community, from the inside," Weiss says. These experiences made him realize that, when he entered Hebrew Union College, "I went in completely truthful, and I assumed the institution was truthful, too. Over time, however, I realized that I entered truthfully into an institution that wasn't telling the truth."

Ordained in 1989, Weiss says he entered into a Jewish landscape where he saw, "in the rabbinic trenches, that truthfulness was a crucial aspect of building an authentic rabbinate." Weiss says he "placed this understanding as the compass" of his rabbinate. As the longtime leader of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center, he helped to build the Jewish Healing movement and focused on the spiritual truths that emerge from this terrain. "Everyone comes to their last breath, gets sick, and folds grief into their life. These universal human experiences naturally stimulate spiritual reflection and yearn for a communal response. So rabbis need to know how to guide people."

During his time serving on the boards of Jewish communal institutions like the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), and in his relationship with Hebrew Union College - in particular through the College's 2024 Listening Circle process - Weiss
says he felt that it was important not just to candidly assess the Reform Movement's progress on LGBTQ+ inclusion, but also to look at how clergy formation should define Jewish leadership broadly to encourage rabbinical students of all kinds who may want to do work beyond the temple setting.

"Reform Judaism in the United States is more expansive than synagogue affiliation or a legacy institution," Weiss says. He adds that, from his experience as a HUC-CCAR mentor he has seen that for the Reform movement to be resilient and grow, it's essential that educators not only recognize "the strengths a student comes with, and their worldview," but also "help them fashion their raw material into an authentic rabbinate to serve the Reform movement throughout the culture."

By continuing to broaden conceptions about the role of clergy in diverse Jewish communities, Weiss says, Hebrew Union College will succeed in delivering an essential message to those considering rabbinical school - the same message he says he would communicate to his younger self: "this leap of faith is worthwhile."