Sandra Lawson is a former military police officer turned personal trainer who recently converted to Judaism as is hoping to be ordained Rabbi soon. If ordained, Lawson will become the first black lesbian rabbi.
Religious News Service reports that Lawson just finished her fourth year at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College outside Philadelphia with the help of an online GoFundMe campaign.
She plans to marry her girlfriend and spend the fall semester in Israel. If all goes according to plan, she will celebrate her ordination in 2018.
“Sandra,” explained Josh Lesser, the rabbi who presided at her conversion, ”is an ‘all-in’ kind of person.”
When Lawson, now 45, told him that she wanted to be a Jew 11 years ago, he said he didn’t know she would wind up in rabbinical school, but that “some kind of leadership would emerge from this.”
Lawson will be a free-spirited rabbi who takes the Jewish imperative for tikkun olam (“healing the world,” in Hebrew) seriously, her friends and fans say. No one — including Lawson herself, who earned a master’s degree in sociology while a personal trainer — is quite sure whether she will lead a congregation, pursue chaplaincy, lend herself to a progressive cause or focus on teaching. But just by being herself, they say, she will expand people’s ideas of what a Jewish leader looks like.
Her sexual orientation, Lawson said, has not thrown up obstacles in her path toward Judaism or the clergy. But race comes up in her Jewish circles in a way that being gay doesn’t. There are no solid figures on the number of black Jews in the U.S., but it is by all accounts relatively small.
No one has been purposefully mean or rejecting to Lawson, but too many of her co-religionists ask for her conversion story first off, she said, before they get to know her as a person or a Jew. Not long ago, a stranger saw her in a store, noticed her yarmulke and asked her if she was Jewish. She said she was and asked him the same question.
“He looked shocked,” Lawson said of the man who turned out to be Jewish. “Like I was not allowed to ask him what he had just asked me.”
And though race relations may not become the centerpiece of her rabbinate, it will shape her career, she said.
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