Ari Hendin was raised non-Jewish and worked as a psychologist in private practice. Her spiritual life has been an eventful search, a series of unexpected twists and turns that nonetheless conclude with perfect logic at RRC. As a very young child, Hendin attended Methodist church. When her parents divorced, her mother took her into the Episcopal church. Later, as a graduate student training in psychology, Hendin found atheism to be a good match for the very pragmatic orientation of the profession at the time. "I heard about Marx's idea of religion as the opiate of the masses and I thought, 'That's right!'"
With an M.A. and a Ph.D. in counseling psychology and program evaluation, a postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatric research and additional training in marriage and family therapy, Hendin worked for two decades as a psychologist in private practice and taught at the university level. Yet at some point during her graduate career, sensing "something missing" from her personal life, Hendin found herself on the doorstep of the campus Hillel of the University of Texas in Austin. The rabbi there admitted her to an introductory class, where the other students were spouses-to-be, learning about the religion they were about to convert to.
Hendin had felt something was missing from her professional life, as well. "One area that didn't jibe- which has only recently been addressed in psychology-was the issue of spirituality and morality." This was especially limiting, she says, when it was a moral or spiritual issue that had brought people to therapy. "One situation I recall was with a family whose 17-year-old son had been tragically killed in a car accident. Part of what they were struggling with was their faith in God. Not being able to address that with people felt like a huge gap."
When the Judaism class Hendin was taking reached its session about death and dying, she knew the religion was right for her. "It was the one religion I saw that didn't try to whitewash death."
By the time she converted in 1978 at a natural Texas spring, she already was thinking of becoming a rabbi. When her husband received a work assignment in Philadelphia, friends told Hendin that her rabbinical training was meant to be-and that the Reconstructionist movement was where she belonged.
Now, as she adds rabbinical study to the M.A. in Jewish studies she earned recently at Gratz College, she looks forward to fulfilling her RRC concentration in Jewish education. "Rabbis and other teachers who are key figures in the community can be pivotal. I want to be a catalyst for people to be turned on to Judaism, to find a way to connect."
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