Sandra Lawson: First Black Openly-Lesbian To Be Ordained Rabbi

Sandra Lawson just finished her fourth
year at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical
College outside Philadelphia with the
help of an online GoFundMe campaign
Sandra Lawson is a former military
police officer turned personal trainer
who recently converted to Judaism as is
hoping to be ordained Rabbi soon.
If ordained , Lawson will become the
first black lesbian rabbi.
Religious News Service reports that
Lawson just finished her fourth year at
the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
outside Philadelphia with the help of an
online GoFundMe campaign.
She plans to marry her girlfriend and
spend the fall semester in Israel. If all
goes according to plan, she will celebrate
her ordination in 2018.
“Sandra,” explained Josh Lesser, the
rabbi who presided at her conversion,
”is an ‘all-in’ kind of person.”
When Lawson, now 45, told him that she
wanted to be a Jew 11 years ago, he said
he didn’t know she would wind up in
rabbinical school, but that “some kind of
leadership would emerge from this.”
Lawson will be a free-spirited rabbi who
takes the Jewish imperative for tikkun
olam (“healing the world,” in Hebrew)
seriously, her friends and fans say. No
one — including Lawson herself, who
earned a master’s degree in sociology
while a personal trainer — is quite sure
whether she will lead a congregation,
pursue chaplaincy, lend herself to a
progressive cause or focus on teaching.
But just by being herself, they say, she
will expand people’s ideas of what a
Jewish leader looks like.
Her sexual orientation, Lawson said, has
not thrown up obstacles in her path
toward Judaism or the clergy. But race
comes up in her Jewish circles in a way
that being gay doesn’t. There are no solid
figures on the number of black Jews in
the U.S., but it is by all accounts
relatively small.
No one has been purposefully mean or
rejecting to Lawson, but too many of her
co-religionists ask for her conversion
story first off, she said, before they get to
know her as a person or a Jew. Not long
ago, a stranger saw her in a store,
noticed her yarmulke and asked her if
she was Jewish. She said she was and
asked him the same question.
“He looked shocked,” Lawson said of the
man who turned out to be Jewish. “Like I
was not allowed to ask him what he had
just asked me.”
And though race relations may not
become the centerpiece of her rabbinate,
it will shape her career, she said.
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