‘No two hours
are the same’:
20 years in,
Efrem Goldberg loves the rabbinate
The Boca Raton
Synagogue, which has grown some 150% since Goldberg took the helm, is poised to
undergo a $20 million expansion.
Vita Fellig (Feb.
3, 2025 / JNS)
At 6 a.m. every
morning, except on holidays and Shabbat, Efrem Goldberg, senior rabbi of the
Boca Raton Synagogue, dives into a 44-degree ice bath, a daily ritual that he
calls a “game-changer.”
“It’s amazing,”
he told JNS. “It’s fantastic.”
Goldberg, who
has led the Orthodox synagogue in southeastern Florida for 20 years, told JNS
that “all the research” suggests that a polar plunge of the sort he takes “is
healing, helps with inflammation and blood flow and recovery from workouts.”
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“Your strong
instinct and desire not to—helps you grow your capacity for leaving your
comfort zone and breaking out of boundaries,” he said. “It’s like starting the
day with three cups of coffee.”
Expanding his
near-freezing comfort zone is an apt metaphor for Goldberg’s two decades at the
helm of the synagogue, which has grown by about 150%—from 400 families when he
arrived in Boca in 2005 to about 1,000 today.
“Twenty years
go by very quickly,” he told JNS. “If you watch a plant grow, you don’t see it
grow, and when you’ve been part of a community’s growth, you just feel it.”
The Jewish
community now has more schools and kosher restaurants, and “the era of the
Jewish community around all of South Palm Beach is exploding,” Goldberg said.
Behind the Bima
An avid
podcaster and fixture on social media, Goldberg often posts inspirational
messages or about Jewish music that he likes. Less typically for a man of the
cloth, he is also very outspoken, including on politics and Jew-hatred.
Rabbi Efrem
Goldberg, senior rabbi of the Boca Raton Synagogue. Credit: Courtesy.
Last month,
he referred to
the liberal Jewish group J Street decrying sanctions on the International
Criminal Court in The Hague as “like standing with the French in the Dreyfus
trial or with those leveling blood libels instead of the innocent victims of
them.” He also told the
anti-Israel, progressive writer Peter Beinart that a Jewish prayer about
slanderers and enemies of God.
In December,
Goldberg spoke at Mar-a-Lago and “reflected on the miraculous nature of Trump
surviving an assassination attempt, emphasizing the role of divine protection,”
per 5TownsCentral.
“As a rule, I
don’t believe rabbis should use their pulpit or public voice to weigh in on
politics. I have never endorsed a candidate or party and try to not be partisan
in both praising, expressing gratitude towards and supporting elected leaders
on both sides who stand with Israel and the Jewish people,” he told JNS, “and
calling out and holding accountable elected leaders on both sides who act
against the interests of Israel and the Jewish people.”
“When I
comment, I try to do so judiciously, infrequently and with a goal to be
productive, not simply to be provocative or controversial,” he added.
As a “great
optimist,” Goldberg aims to be positive and share positive messages.
“However, being
positive is not to the exclusion of being a realist and confronting issues of
our day, be it external to the Jewish community or from within our community.
The mission to be positive and productive is not a contradiction to addressing
issues from loneliness and dating to fertility to mental health,” he said. “We
can positively address and impact these and other areas that affect all
communities including our Jewish ones.”
Goldberg
launched the podcast Behind the Bima in 2020. It features unscripted
discussions with his assistant rabbis and often with outside guests about
contemporary issues in the Jewish community.
“Until the
COVID-19 pandemic, our work was all offline for the local community,” he told
JNS. “The pandemic really caused us to pivot and to be able to embrace an
online community and reach out without taking away from our offline community.”
The podcast
also provides a platform for topics he wouldn’t preach from the pulpit.
“For a drasha on
Shabbat, I would never bring in politics or my personal opinion on things that
others are entitled to different opinions about,” he told JNS. “That’s
where Behind the Bima comes in, or on social media. It’s an
opportunity to weigh in on some of those topics.”
Diversity
The “backbone”
of the Boca Raton Synagogue is its diverse yet unified congregation, according
to Goldberg.
“We have people
who drive to shul on Shabbos with a less religious background,
and they could be sitting next to somebody sitting in a shtreimel,”
he told JNS. “We have Chassidim and everything in between, and we get along
because we’re one community.”
The
congregation is Orthodox “in the sense that we are unbending, unyielding in our
commitment to our masorah, our tradition, to halachah,
to the timelessness of Torah,” he said. “On the other hand, we’re
non-judgmental. We’re loving. We’re warm. We’re welcoming, and we are committed
to diversity and unity, wanting to ensure everybody feels comfortable and
engaged.”
Goldberg told
JNS that growing up in Teaneck, N.J., he never expected that he would lead a
congregation one day. “I don’t come from a background of rabbis,” he said. “My
father was a businessman. My grandparents weren’t rabbis. I don’t come from a
line of rabbis.”
Working with a
youth group at Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in Teaneck, N.J., while he was
studying at Yeshiva University inspired his community work.
“When I was at
Yeshiva University, I started working with youth teams at the shul, teaching,
learning and running programs, and it made me feel alive,” he said. “It really
made me feel like this is my purpose in life and for a long time, I thought I
would go into Jewish education.”
Goldberg
credits his wife for encouraging him to join the rabbinate.
“My wife
Yocheved deserves all the credit,” he said. “She told me, ‘You’re doing the
wrong thing. You belong in the rabbinate, not in education.’ She’s 1,000%
right.”
“I never could
have lasted in education and I think those people who do it are amazing, but it
wasn’t for me,” he said. “I love the rabbinate. I live for the rabbinate
because every day you wake up, no two days are the same.”
The job is a
“mix of entrepreneurism, creativity, vision, learning, teaching, counseling,
pastoring, life cycle, events, community organization, Israel advocacy,” he
said. “No two days, no two hours are the same, and it just has everything.”
Guiding
community members through hardships, such as illness or abuse, can be painful,
he said, but navigating community politics is the hardest part.
“There are so
many problems that we encounter that are not man-made, that are natural and we
would give anything in the world to not have them, like illnesses,” he said.
“Man-made problems can be hard to have tolerance for, and when people
manufacture problems or conflict or create politics or power struggles, that’s
some of the frustrating parts of the job.”
“It goes along
with the business of leading a community,” he said.
Looking ahead,
Goldberg told JNS that the synagogue is slated to undergo a $20 million
expansion. “Our goal is to make our campus a hub of Jewish life, Jewish living
and activism that will magnetically draw people from all over,” he said.
“My philosophy has always been that our best is yet to come, and as much as we’ve accomplished, our new campus will be a platform that can support our doing even more,” he added. “I want to be a resource for not only South Palm Beach County but the whole South Florida community.”
