Rabbi Michal Woll had been a bioengineer and a physical therapist. Yet she knew she was on her way to something else.
Rabbinical school represented a third career for Rabbi Michal Woll, who looks barely old enough to be pursuing a second. First, she was an MIT-trained biomedical engineer. "I was a shy kid who was great at math and science," she explains. "I am definitely an idea person. And that intuitive side of me, combined with the math and science ability, drew me toward engineering-creating solutions to problems."
Yet Woll was an unusual techie. Two years after finishing her master's of science, working in a job designing external dressings for burn wounds, she wasn't just creating treatments and collecting data about their efficacy. Often, she was out in the field working with patients, alongside nurses and physical therapists. For her, the people side and the technical side went hand in hand, and moving on to a career in physical therapy was a natural.
She didn't think about becoming a rabbi until she was in her 30s. In the fall of 1995, as she was just beginning her program of study for physical therapy, she was asked to serve as hazzan, or cantor, for the High Holidays at her small Flagstaff, AZ, synagogue. By the end of the Rosh Hashanah evening service, members were asking why she was a therapist and not a cantor. Woll spent the next six years exploring the answer to that question.
While pursuing her masters in physical therapy, she dedicated much of her free time to the Jewish community and Jewish learning. By this time, her second career leap, to the rabbinate, also was built into her way of thinking. "If you needed a therapist to help a patient figure out how to get out of bed, I was good," she remembers of her work in acute care in a large medical center. "And if you needed someone to work with a person who couldn't figure out why they should get out of bed, I was the one willing to work with them. I would meet the chaplains coming out of a patient's room and feel a little jealous."
After a stint as a fulltime therapist, she was ready to pursue her Jewish and spiritual interests. She served as the first marketing and outreach director for the Jewish retreat center Elat Chayyim and then moved to Philadelphia, where she began a program in Clinical Pastoral Education and took courses at Gratz College. In spring 2001, while completing an assignment for a liturgy class, she opened a volume of Talmud for the first time. "I looked at the page of Berachot and thought to myself, 'I need to know what this says!'" She called RRC's dean of admissions that day.
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