Subject: Essay: The Skiing Rabbi

As a youth, I fantasized becoming a professional athlete. By the time I reached high school, my aptitudes and skills were such that it was clear that I could become many things. However, being a professional athlete seemed beyond my wildest dreams.

I lived in upstate New York and dabbled in ice hockey. The key turning point in my sports career occured in college when I was unable to make the varsity hockey team. I was heart broken. My fraternity brothers were about to go on a skiing trip. They invited me along. I declined saying, "I'm a hockey player - not a skier."

In a response that can only be appreciated in light of fraternity house 'sensitivity', my dear brothers said, "not any more you ain't."

Taking those words of 'comfort' to heart, I went skiing that day. That was the beginning of a love affair with the sport of skiing which has never abated. Time passed. By the late 1970's I felt a need to share my skiing abilities and my love for the sport with others. I took a ski instructors course with the Professional Ski Instructors of America and realized my childhood fantasy, to be a professional athlete. I had no trouble finding ski areas whose schools were looking for mature adults to teach skiing part-time on weekends and holidays.

Actually, teaching is one of the major roles of a rabbi so to teach skiing came as a natural extension of both my rabbinate and my skiing. If you were to ask, what might be an appropriate name for a ski area where a rabbi works, the most logical answer might be "Temple Mountain". Whether by coincidence, fate, or subconscious choice, Temple Mountain in Peterborough, New Hampshire is the name of the ski area, where I've already spent five seasons on their part-time staff.

It has been very gratifying. Originally, I didn't advertise that I am a rabbi, but neither did I make a secret of it. Most ski instructors are part-timers with other careers. However, I don't ever recall the other instructors running into the kinds of situations that being a rabbi has created.

For example, one morning a bus group of Saudis found their way to Temple Mountain. The ski school director who does know I'm a rabbi said to me cautiously, "We're a little short on staff today, but if you'd rather not work with this group that's okay." "No," I replied. "It doesn't bother me at all."

The class was rather routine, except that the students' English was a little weak. Teaching them allowed me to empathize with the Austrian instructors who taught me back in the 1960's, when their entire English vocabulary was limited to "bend zee knees" and " do like zis". My experience with the Saudis was not particularly funny or unusual, but it did make me aware that my rabbinic career could not be completely isolated from the my skiing.

By contrast, there have been several classes specifically assigned to me either because I am a rabbi or because of certain skills associated with my rabbinical training.

For example, one morning, I looked down the list of people signed up for skiing lessons and noticed the name of a rabbinic colleague. I normally had a group to teach at that hour, but under the circumstances, I asked the director if I could teach the class in which my colleague had enrolled. By dint of luck, business happened to be slow that day, and not only did the director let me take the class, but it turned out my colleague was the only student in it. My colleague's reaction was one of surprise when he said, "I knew you skied here, but I didn't know you worked here!" We had a very pleasant hour.

He was a more experienced colleague and I took advantage of the hour to pick his brains on some rabbinic problems I was experiencing with my congregation. The trips up the chairlift were quite different from the more normal rides where the instructor might be explaining to the student about the signs, the skier's safety code or the things that we were going to work on during the downhill trip.

On another occasion, the director of the ski school said to me, "I don't usually mix children, teenagers and adults in the same class - but I think you're the best choice to teach this group." I asked, "Why?" He said, "because the father is translating what I am saying to him into Hebrew for the rest of the family." I took the class. It was quite an adventure. Conversational Hebrew was never my forte. Reading and the study of the classical texts are. The family was rather surprised when the director announced to them that their instructor spoke Hebrew. It was a particularly difficult lesson for me to teach for three reasons. 1) The age span. People of different ages learn at different speeds and with different approaches. 2) The imagery that I use to teach skiing is not germain to Israeli culture. 3) The Hebrew of "to ski" (la-a-sot ski) and other skiing vocabulary are not in the Biblical literature nor for that matter in the classical Jewish texts! At the end of the hour, I was physically exhausted due to the disparity in ages. In addition, I was mentally exhausted from trying to remember vocabulary or adapt the Hebrew vocabulary that I already had to the specific situations.

Usually at the end of a lesson, I distribute my ski instructor's business card to the class. It's good advertising both for me and for Temple Mountain. At the end of this class, I gave this family my rabbinic business card instead!

Beyond the issue of which classes I don't teach and which classes I do teach, is the reaction of congregants when they either see me at Temple Mountain or hear that their rabbi teaches skiing. Temple Mountain is within 25 miles of the congregations that I have served and tends to attract families. Included among those families are members of my own community. This caused a problem for at least one family. Ski instructors are not known by title plus last name. It is a purely first name relationship, even with the tiniest tiny-tots. Children would see me one day as Josh, the ski instructor, and the next day as Rabbi Segal, their clergyman. Actually, the kids seem to cope rather well with my dual identity. If anything, it made me a "more real" person in their eyes. However, one parent had trouble and commented that her child said, "Josh sure is a good skier" and she quickly corrected him saying, "you mean Rabbi Segal!"

Some of the older members of the congregation are a bit uncomfortable about it. They remember the old days when the term "ski instructor" was a synonym for a "ski bum" and felt my activity was unbecoming of a rabbi. Today, PSIA (The Professional Ski Instructors of America) and similar organizations in other countries have worked hard to give the ski instructor a truly professional image and have succeeded to a great extent. Most of the congregants who do meet me at the mountain tend to be the younger ones who don't have the old notions of ski instructors and they are happy to see a familiar face.

I've now accepted that the rabbi and the skier are not mutually exclusive entities. With that in mind, I advertised in the bulletin of my synagogue that what we needed were new innovative programs in adult education. Since Temple Mountain has a quadruple chair, I suggested that we could have an evening class on the mountain, limited of course to me and three students. On the way up the hill, we could study a subject of Jewish interest and on the way down, we could enjoy the mountain, the air and possibly even teach them about skiing. I'm sad to report that as of this writing, I've had no takers, but -- maybe next winter.

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