Rabbi Candice Levy — a full-time lecturer at American Jewish University’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies — knew early on where she would land. As a high schooler at YULA and a student at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, Levy knew she wanted to work in a classroom. 

She could not have imagined herself as a rabbi, she said, partly because she comes from “a very traditional French Moroccan family.”

But the classroom felt like home. “I love learning,” she told The Journal. “That’s it. I teach because I love learning.” For Levy, the best part of being a teacher is “to walk into a classroom ready to teach a text I know forward and backward. I have written about it. I have researched it. Then a student has a look that asks, ‘What about this?’ And I think ‘Oh, my gosh. I never thought about that.’ Then I rediscover the text. Every time I teach it, I rediscover the text through new eyes.”

Levy remained in New York a few years after she graduated. At one point, she was going to practice law, but discovered she loved studying law more than practicing. “When I came back here, there was a part of me that said, ‘Oh, rabbinical school, that’s great.’ I walked into Rabbi Cheryl Peretz’s office [at American Jewish University]. I told her ‘I’m not really a Conservative Jew, and I don’t really want to be a rabbi, but I want to learn, and there’s learning to be done here.’ I don’t know why. I always say she had such hakaras ha tov [gratitude].” She insisted she was not trying to become a rabbi. At that time, when Levy thought of rabbis, it evoked images of Maimonides, Moshe Feinstein. But she had no idea what motivated Rabbi Peretz to say, “Sure, we have room for you.Somebody else, Levy thought, might have said “‘What are you doing here?’’’

Looking back, after knowing Rabbi Peretz for many years, she suspects Peretz “could have seen something I wasn’t ready — or able — to see.”

Ordained less than two years ago at American Jewish University’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, the teacher is now known as Dr. Levy, as in PhD.

She spent two years learning at Ziegler – before earning her PhD in Near Eastern Studies at UCLA. Later, she logged nine years at Hebrew Union College, teaching future Reform rabbis. Eventually Levy realized she was doing more than just teaching. “I wasn’t teaching biology. I was teaching something that informed my life, that informed every part of who I was.”

She wondered if part of the reason she avoided deciding on the rabbinate was because “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what to make of it myself. I didn’t know what my parents, my family, my larger community, would make of it. “As you grow into adulthood, into your own person, then you learn – okay, I didn’t necessarily start out to be a rabbi, but I kind of am functioning in that way.

“It was a gradual building,” she said

Levy flashed back to a possible turning-point pre-rabbinic moment. “At HUC, a student had come to me, and I found myself speaking to her. I said ‘I am not a rabbi.’ She said something like ‘you are my rabbi.’” The signs seemed to be pointing her in one direction. “I went back to Ziegler where I spoke to Rabbis Bradley Artson and Peretz. They were, like, ‘Finally. We have been waiting for this for 20 years.’ When I went back, it actually had been 20 years since I started.” It wasn’t a breeze. “There was a year when I was teaching at Hebrew Union College, and then I had to side hustle as a rabbinical student on days I wasn’t teaching,” she said. “It was hard, but it was a beautiful transformative experience. To be in the classroom and not have to be responsible for teaching but to be able to learn, reflect and learn from my classmates. Over the course of that year, “there was something about they are the same texts. But I think the way you approach a text as an academic is different from your studying what does this text mean for me as a Jew and for Jewish community today?” One change she noticed immediately after she was ordained was a sharp change among her students when she returned to the classroom. “For a long time, I was just Dr. Levy,” she said. “I found people will respond to you differently as Rabbi Levy rather than Dr. Levy.”

 Explaining her circuitous journey, Levy said, “If there ever is a doubt there is a God, my life is proof not only that God exists but that God has a wicked sense of humor. All of the classes I was thrown out of or steadfastly ditched in high school and college I now teach.” She ditched because “I found myself strained. I have said all research is mesearch, I once got thrown out of class in high school because I was horrified by the story of Yiftach and his daughter.”  

Explaining her circuitous journey, Levy said, “If there ever is a doubt there is a God, my life is proof not only that God exists but that God has a wicked sense of humor.”

How did Rabbi Levy’s parents respond “when finally I decided to go back to get my ordination?  When I told my parents, my dad said ‘This is what you started when you were five, and it’s finally come to be.’

“My parents understood. I am the oldest of four girls — I went to synagogue with my dad always — first to Magen David when it was on Melrose. I was the lone girl staying up studying all night with the men. My father understood I loved it. As a Levi, I would see him washing the hands of the Kohanim. I sat with my dad until it became ‘You’re too old to do that.’ Our family, our home was oriented around the rhythm of Jewish life. It was not separate. The schools I went to were oriented differently, primarily Ashkenazi. It has been a circuitous road.”

Fast Takes with Rabbi Levy

Jewish Journal: What is your favorite childhood memory?

Rabbi Levy: Shabbat at my grandparents’ home because it was a three-generation affair. It was just gorgeous.

J.J.: What is your most important unfulfilled goal?

R.L.: There’s always more to learn

J.J.: If you could gain a superpower, what would it be?

R.L.: Time travel, or the ability to move between this world and the next, to revisit those we have lost and those who shaped our tradition whom I never got to know.

As originally posted by Jewish Journal: https://jewishjournal.com/community/rabbis-of-la/379967/rabbi-candice-levy-chose-the-classroom-over-the-bima/