From “Never Setting Foot in a Synagogue Again” to 19 Years on the Bima: A Profile of Rabbi Howard Goldsmith

Rabbi Howard Goldsmith likes to tell this story: Fresh off his bar mitzvah, he told his grandmother he was never setting foot in a synagogue again. She looked at him and said: "You're going to be a rabbi."

Today, Goldsmith is the rabbi of Congregation Emanu-El of Westchester - mailing address Rye, actual location Harrison, "on the service road to 287" - where he has served for 16 years. His grandmother, it turns out, was on to something.

Goldsmith grew up in Chappaqua, attending Temple Beth-El of Northern Westchester. His childhood Judaism centered on synagogue and family, but he never went to Jewish summer camp or regional youth events. At Cornell, where he studied business, Judaism stayed mostly in the periphery.

The turning point came senior year, when he joined the first-ever cohort of Birthright Israel trips in January 2000 - mostly, he admits, because it was free. What he found instead was transformative: for the first time, being Jewish felt bigger than his own family and sanctuary. Months of travel through Europe and Israel followed, including a text-study program that reframed Torah figures not as saints but as flawed, relatable humans.

Back in New York, Goldsmith took a consulting job, negotiating from day one to leave by 5 p.m. Fridays and return Saturday nights. Over a few years of showing up for services and slowly deepening his involvement, he had the realization that reshaped his career: "I can make my hobby my job."

Mentors Who Pointed the Way

Two mentors shaped his decision to apply to rabbinical school. Rabbi David Thomas '98 warned him to be sure he wanted to be a rabbi, not just be involved in Jewish life. Rabbi Aaron Panken, z"l, told him to first work in a synagogue and learn Hebrew. Goldsmith spent a year working 50 hours a week as a consultant while taking evening ulpan classes and teaching fifth grade at Central Synagogue - enough, he jokes, to scrape in through Hebrew Union College's entrance exam.

The mentor who left the deepest mark, though, was David Posner, z"l, senior rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in New York City, where Goldsmith became the congregation's first-ever rabbinic intern. Posner mentored in two registers at once. Some of it was explicit - direct instruction, "this is how we do it," delivered with the confidence of decades of experience. Just as much came from simply watching him lead.

One lesson took real time to land. Temple Emanu-El's classical aesthetic - robes, organ, a hidden choir, Elizabethan English - initially grated against the informal, guitar-driven Reform Judaism Goldsmith grew up with. He spent months, he says, quietly bristling. Then, sitting on the bima one Shabbat, it clicked: generations of worshippers had found real, deep meaning in that formality. "If they found meaning in it, I could too."

He also recalls Posner breaking down in tears looking out at a packed Rosh Hashanah sanctuary. Asked why, Posner said: "I have named, or married, or buried family members of every person in here." For Goldsmith, it crystallized the job itself: "This is a service job… it's not about us."

And Posner had a catchphrase that stuck: "You do it." Whenever Goldsmith showed up with what he calls a "harebrained idea," Posner would smirk, cock his head, point at him, and say those three words. As an intern, that meant Posner handing him the resources and political cover to launch the congregation's first junior congregation experience - hiring a song leader and running a guitar-and-song service that had never been done there before. As assistant rabbi, it meant Posner backing him to introduce a monthly contemporary family service, to lead Emanu-El's first-ever congregational trip to Israel, and to start the congregation's first 20s-and-30s group. Posner didn't just permit these projects; he cleared the way for them, then stepped back and let Goldsmith build the support, gather the resources, and make them happen himself.

After three years as assistant rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, Emanu-El of Westchester had an opening. Sixteen years later, he's still there.

The Mentee Becomes the Mentor

Mentoring rabbinic interns has become the throughline of Goldsmith's own rabbinate - arguably as central to how he defines the job as leading services or officiating lifecycle events. He's helped raise more than $600,000 to permanently endow the Offit-Sekulow Memorial Internship at his congregation, insulating it from budget cuts so the program can't quietly disappear in a leaner year.

His method borrows directly from what he learned watching Posner: give people real responsibility, let them struggle inside it, and be there when they do. Interns officiate funerals, co-lead b'nai mitzvah, sit in on wedding meetings, and deliver sermons. "I give them space to build the muscles they need as a rabbi," he says, "and the protection they need to fail." And, just as important, the support to get back up afterward.

It isn't only trial by fire. Goldsmith holds a standing one-hour mentorship meeting with his interns every week to actually talk through what's coming up and answer questions. He describes rabbis as falling somewhere on a spectrum between serving Torah and serving people, and he's candid that he lands closer to the people end, using what he calls "3,000 years of religious technologies" in service of his congregants' lives. He tries to model that ethos for his interns, but he's equally intentional about not imposing it. His real goal, he says, is to give them room to figure out where they fall on that spectrum themselves, rather than simply replicating him.

He also passes along something less tangible than technique: the value of a peer network. Goldsmith still leans on a small group of Hebrew Union College-ordained rabbis in Westchester and Fairfield who've met together for years - weekly during COVID, quarterly now - for exactly the kind of support a solo pulpit rabbi can't generate alone. He tells his interns the same thing explicitly: build relationships with colleagues and keep them. Nobody has to figure everything out by themselves.

Building a Congregation

Under Goldsmith, the congregation has grown from roughly 330 families a decade ago to about 440 today. He introduced a second-day Rosh Hashanah nature walk ending in tashlich on the Long Island Sound, instituted, he says, because "who wants to come back to temple on a third day in a row?!"

He's deliberate about the congregation's boundaries with the wider community: nearly everything is open to non-members - a weekly canasta and mahjong game, a volunteer-run English-language program for local immigrants, a jointly sponsored BBYO chapter - with membership required mainly for religious school, lifecycle officiation, and High Holy Day services. He's built discounted memberships for young families and helped raise $1.5 million for a scholarship fund, while holding a firm line that dues are adjusted only for genuine financial hardship. He frames it as a distinctly Jewish obligation to communal support, in contrast to what he calls an "American Christian mindset" that treats religious giving as purely voluntary.

A fourth-year placement in Israel left Goldsmith with an irreducible sense of the country's complexity - something, he insists, only living there can teach. That complexity surfaces in his work regularly, especially since October 7. An Israeli flag flies outside his synagogue on a heavily trafficked road. When a longtime congregant asked him to take it down, Goldsmith held his ground: "I refuse to cede the flag to one political group or another."

He's married to Rabbi Jennifer Goldsmith '07, whom he met at Hebrew Union College - "a classic HUC love story" - now Vice President for Education and Visitor Services at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Rabbi Goldsmith is also, in a Hebrew Union College twist, teaching the rabbinic education class to second year students this coming year.

Goldsmith is candid about what keeps him grounded through the harder parts of the job. His approach, one he actively teaches his interns: "Take the work seriously, and don't take yourself too seriously."

"It's really important to take the work seriously," he says, "because we're serving a tradition that's 3,000 years old, and we have a chance to make a real impact on people's lives. It would be really dangerous to let that go to our heads."