Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: The Heart of a Stranger

In this episode of Capital for Good, we speak with Angela Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue in New York City and the first woman to lead that congregation in its 185-year history. Born in Korea to a Jewish American father and a Korean Buddhist mother, Buchdahl is the first Asian American to be ordained as a cantor or rabbi in North America. She is also well known for her innovations in leading worship, reaching millions across 100 countries via livestream and cable broadcast. Her New York Times best-selling memoir, Heart of a Stranger, roots her unlikely story and experience as an outsider and boundary crosser in both ancient Jewish traditions and in the universal longing for belonging.

Heart of a Stranger, Buchdahl explains, is both a particular and shared narrative. She tells us that, as a child, she often felt she was an outsider: Korean in America, American when she returned to Korea, and an unusual mixed-race family in the Jewish community. She connects this experience to her family's — starting with her mother who was born in Japan, where her family had been displaced, before returning to Korea and eventually immigrating to the United States — and to ancient Jewish narratives, from the biblical story of Abraham, a stranger in a foreign land, to millennia as diaspora outsiders around the world. Buchdahl also speaks of crossing boundaries to find home. "Home is where your people are," her mother told her, and then demonstrated how welcoming others (as an ESL teacher in Tacoma, Washington and a founder of an organization to assist new immigrants to the US — in Buchdahl's words, a "serial welcomer") could be transformative for everyone, creating community in the place of strangeness. This too, Buchdahl reminds us — the act of welcoming, with compassion and empathy — has roots in Abrahamic and other spiritual traditions and can be a powerful antidote to the isolation and polarization dividing us today.

Agency and intentionality are central themes of the book, and of our conversation. We discuss what this means in the Jewish context — Buchdahl's decision and acts to define her own identity and path –— and its more universal applications: the spiritual imperative we all have to be boundary crossers. For Buchdahl, much of her early calling and connection to faith came through music, what she calls "my natural spiritual language." We explore how music has shaped her identity, her roles as cantor and rabbi, and the way she leads the congregatio