Rabbi Elissa Sachs-Kohen has been serving the community at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation faithfully for nearly 21 years and has been on the pulpit for 26 years in total.
But as she enters a new chapter in life, Sachs-Kohen has decided to leave the congregation and become a life coach, where she can provide more personalized assistance to people.
“I’m certified as a life coach, and I’m going to start a practice that’s going to be open to anyone who wants some guidance infused with both life coaching practices and spiritual underpinnings from my 26 years of being a congregational rabbi. I’m also going to focus in that practice on other clergy, Reform rabbis, cantors, other clergy of other denominations, even interfaith work,” Sachs-Kohen said.
Sachs-Kohen said she has enjoyed her decades of service to the congregation and the projects she was able to be a part of, but she added that it was time to take a more focused approach to her work of helping people.
Being a congregational rabbi comes with strict demands on time and attention, especially at Baltimore Hebrew, one of the larger synagogues in the area.
“My time as a pulpit rabbi, as a congregational rabbi, has been incredibly rich, and I’ve reached a moment in my life when I want to be a little bit more focused,” Sachs-Kohen said. “Being a congregational rabbi means really running in a building all the time, going from carrying an adult ed class to writing a sermon. And I want to do a few less things more intensively.”
Sachs-Kohen said that she will take her experience as a congregational rabbi to inform her work as a life coach.
She said that there’s a connection between Jewish practice, tradition and the daily realities of life in today’s world.
“I think I’ve also just learned a lot of Judaism in my practice that speaks to people’s everyday lives, and that when I’m able to share some of that deep wisdom with people, it comes as a revelation, because it’s in many ways different from or complementary to the wisdom that we learn in our society,” Sachs-Kohen said.
As she looks back on her time at Baltimore Hebrew, Sachs-Kohen said she’s glad to have been able to spend so many years at such a wonderful congregation.
The rabbi praised the spirit of compassion at the congregation along with its commitment to social justice as a central part of Jewish practice.
She added that despite the congregation being nearly 200 years old, it was willing to take risks and try new things, with one example being the Rosh Hashanah Under the Stars event.
“It is so open, not rigid, welcoming and embracing of the larger Jewish community, not just in Baltimore, but we have drawn people from Pennsylvania, from D.C., from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to that service over the years. And just the idea that we are able to give a real Rosh Hashanah service experience in a way that people don’t otherwise find in Jewish communal life has been really powerful,” Sachs-Kohen said.
Sachs-Kohen won’t leave her position until the end of June, but the congregation held a ceremony for her on May 10.
Sachs-Kohen said that the farewell celebration was everything she could’ve asked for, as it was held in the Bernstein Garden, a space on the synagogue grounds that she spent several years working on.
She said the congregation commissioned a statue, which was not of her, to be placed in the garden to honor her work.
“It was just beautiful, bringing together some of the threads of the work that I’ve been doing, the sense of community and the sense of the sacredness and the outdoors, and the beauty of planting something and seeing it grow and become something that you couldn’t even imagine when you planted it,” Sachs-Kohen said.
Sachs-Kohen said there are a great deal of opportunities open to both the new rabbi who succeeds her and the congregation.
“I hope that she’s not filling my shoes. I hope that she’s standing in her own shoes and bringing her own passions and her own creativity. And Baltimore Hebrew hasn’t had a new rabbi, a brand-new rabbi, in decades, and so I think it’s going to be really an exciting time for the congregation to benefit from,” Sachs-Kohen said.
As for what she hopes the congregation takes away from her two decades of service, Sachs-Kohen kept it simple.
“I hope they remember me. [I hope they] remember all the many aspects of my service to them for the last 21 years,” Sachs-Kohen said.
