Rabbi Zoe: Seders in Synagogues, kitchens and prison

“I was like a sponge,” Zak recalls; before long she was asked to lead services at WJC when the rabbi went on vacation. After her father’s death, she learned to lead kaddish services; later, she became expert at weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, and through inner experience learned all elements of Jewish practices and ritual.

“I never lived in Woodstock; I have a large home in Rosendale where I’d have the best seders, with 50 or so at the table,” she said. “And then I realized about five years ago that I needed to work on my foundations…and so I started rabbinical studies at the Academy of Jewish Religions in Yonkers.”

Through her studies, and afterwards, Zak maintained her involvement at WJC. But then a job opening was referred to her. She went to Catskill.

“I felt called by the people there,” she says of how her life’s since changed. “There was a different level of intentionality…When I arrived, I noted how everyone took garbage bags, or the table linens with them after an event. And that was because they didn’t have garbage service; they washed and ironed all their own tablecloths.”

Rabbi Zak introduced her special ways, and enthusiasm, to what had become a dwindled congregation. And now it has grown to at least one Shabbat service a month, plus major holiday observances. And she’s found that she’s now feeling something almost maternal about her involvement; everything that gets done, now, is building towards something else. It’s a continuum that’s hers to help direct, albeit all in tandem with a community that invited her in to lead.

“I continue to have very strong relationships in Woodstock, mind you,” she added. “After all, I was there 23 years; I’ve married many people and had the honor to bury others. I’m deeply connected…”

Zak chooses her words carefully as she delineates differences between Woodstock and Catskill, and the other communities she works with regularly. Having her own temple has changed things utterly.

Then the subject of Passover returns. She’s prepping for a big one at Temple Israel next week, to which she expects a number of her old Woodstock friends to come…along with that Baptist minister she just sang with and a number of other musicians.

And she’s also leading the Seder at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women downstate, something she’s done for several years now…always humbled by dealing with a celebration of liberation in a prison (this year she is introducing a lock and key to the seder plate). She’ll be leading Seders at a yoga ashram, a Columbia County senior home, and several private affairs. Plus one in this small kitchen…for family, alone.

How do the rituals, the seders, change year to year?

She speaks about how a kid can hear the same book time after time without tiring.

“There’s always something different,” Rabbi Zak replies. “Inside us; on the outside.”

She plays the music she’s just written, and performed, to make a certain statement made during the Exodus reverberate more truly within her. As with all she plays, it shimmers and stays within the ear, and heart, long after we’ve left the song itself.

Somehow, everything Rabbi Zoe B. Zak is doing, for music and spirit, for money and not, has woven into a single cloth. And she radiates peacefulness, happiness, in rare ways.

“I taught music and now I teach the prayerbook,” she says. “I guess I’m still playing for the postman.”