No two hours are the same

‘No two hours are the same’:

Vita Fellig (Feb. 3, 2025 / JNS)

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.

At 6:00am 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.”

“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.”