Few synagogues would appreciate their rabbi turning up most days, as I did, in scuffed-up L.L. Bean boots, wrinkled khakis and one of five outlet-bought sweaters. But no one in my Waterville, ME, congregation seemed to care, even if an older person sometimes greeted me with “That sweater again?” when I walked into their home for a visit. In Waterville, where I continue to lead Congregation Beth Israel along with the Center for Small Town Jewish Life at Colby College, what matters most is that we are present.
In my early days in Waterville, I felt in my work both a deep holiness and a sense of uncertainty. I often thought, “This work is sacred, but is it sustainable?” How could a dying congregation in a declining post-industrial town come back to life? Over the next decade, we would come to find out.
Waterville’s Jewish leaders and Colby College’s administration came to a common conclusion: Creative collaboration and critical mass were the essential ingredients in achieving a vital vision.
With time, planning and strategic investment, the unthinkable became slowly believable. Waterville enjoyed a renaissance, with a downtown so full and bustling it became a constant challenge to find a parking spot even in midweek. Hundreds of people—from the farms of Albion to the stately homes of Waterville’s professional class on Mayflower Hill and the crowded houses in Waterville’s poorer South End—now crowd into an arts center with a giant incandescent sign with the word “ARTS” that illuminates a recently dark, half-abandoned Main Street. If you walk from the top of Main Street at Levine’s Park, named after the storied department store, to its end at the Old Waterville Post Office, you’re greeted with the smells of multiple kitchens: from the chic table at Waterville’s new boutique hotel to the family-owned and now constantly overcrowded Greek bistro.
About a mile north of Main Street’s last restaurant, Beth Israel now stands, looking beautiful after a major fundraising campaign to prepare our home for another century of Jewish life. In addition to our Friday night potlucks and services, our Saturday morning traditional services are sustained by congregants of all ages and buoyed by a cadre of Torah readers, most in their 20s. And in the basement, we built a mikvah that has ushered in dozens of Jews by choice. It’s fed by fresh lake ice from Western Maine that comes from the land of one of our first converts.
Up at Colby College, our synagogue and our campus Hillel and Jewish Studies department have built a collaboration that serves as the foundation of the Center for Small Town Jewish Life, which leveraged Waterville’s success to spearhead a renaissance of Jewish life and learning throughout Maine and small towns nationwide.
Rabbi Rachel Isaacs
This past fall, the center brought together 250 people, 90 of whom were college students from seven campuses throughout Maine, to sing, create and learn together. In addition to convening members of almost every synagogue and Jewish institution in the state (plus some who are unaffiliated), we built upon Waterville’s long multicultural history to bring the Muslim and Jewish communities into prayer together. Our powerful Shabbat service built to an emotional apex when a local Iraqi immigrant scholar joined an Israeli-American Mainer and one of our college students to lead, in Arabic, Hebrew and English, the Prayer of the Mothers for Life and Peace. In the aftermath of October 7, this moment left many of us breathless. These types of connections were probably forged and sustained because of the intimacy and creativity that small town Jewish life demands.
How did we get here? Not through miracles but through new leadership and the will to craft a new narrative about Waterville’s future, its Jewish community included. We saw what the Jewish community could be in addition to what it was and had been. Person by person and program by program, we began laying a framework for an educated and invested Jewish community in rural Maine. We took advantage of the evolving and myriad resources around us: a Hillel, a historic building, local Protestant clergy invested in being good allies, a radical group of awesome nuns in the next town, a collaborative group of rabbis around the state, and also a supportive local college and transformative philanthropists.
Waterville’s Jewish leaders and Colby College’s administration came to common conclusions at the same time: Creative collaboration and critical mass were the two interrelated, essential ingredients in achieving a vital vision. The Jewish community achieved critical mass by bridging town-gown divides between Colby and the local synagogue, and then finding common ground to convene Jewish communities across the state for the kind of programming that leads to cultural dynamism and numerical growth. Colby also helped build a Waterville prosperous enough to accommodate the growth the college needed to reach a sustainable size. In both cases, our institutions were revived because we connected them to other institutions that shared the same goals.
Most crucially and counter-culturally, we knew that our convening and building needed to be (mostly) in person. When colleges around the country spent years on zoom during the pandemic, Colby took advantage of its small size, isolation and creative leadership to bring students back safely to campus in the fall of 2020. The college secured the loyalty of hundreds of families through its creative commitment to providing the best learning environment possible for its students, and applications to the college hit record highs. Even through the height of the pandemic, Beth Israel and the Center for Small Town Jewish Life retained our commitment to in-person gatherings.
None of this was cheap. It required lots of capital, both social and financial. Both at Beth Israel Congregation and at the center, we needed to spend social capital in order to take major risks. Some of our elder congregants were wary of our synagogue’s ambitions to build a mikvah in our basement. They harbored doubts about the cost, the potential damage to the building, and the dollars we raised that might otherwise be allocated to other needs. However, my wife and I had built strong relationships with those elders—they could let us know that they weren’t on board without sacrificing their relationship to the synagogue. Those kinds of relationships take time, care, and professionals willing to stay in small town communities for the long haul—all of which require financial investments.
Especially at the beginning of a revitalization process—and even long after—outside funding is needed to ignite the engine of change enough to convince the local population that dreaming more expansively is a reasonable challenge. While in some cases (especially if endowments are built) small town initiatives can come to be self-sustaining, in most cases, investment from major cities will always be necessary.
Caring for people will never be an efficient investment, at least not at first. I did not enter the rabbinate to make such an investment but, rather, to teach Torah to those on the margins of Jewish life. The truth is, at first blush, working with small communities does not seem like a worthwhile investment. When quantitative data is the primary or exclusive metric of Jewish success, it rarely makes sense to devote significant resources into small, scattered pockets of largely economically vulnerable Jews. Both by measures of attendance and dollars raised, it will always make more sense to invest in large cities with significant population density. If we only focus on those cities, however, we leave behind the one in eight American Jews who live outside of major metropolitan areas. In aggregate, small-town Jewish communities add up. Serving them poses unique challenges, but if we focus only on startup costs or immediate return on investment, we ignore the cost of leaving small-town Jews behind and lose the massive payout of serving them.
The largest reward in my life has been the support, love and guidance I came to receive from my congregants. If you had told Mel and me when we arrived that we would stay in Waterville for decades, we would never have believed it. But we did, and our youngest daughter, Hadas, would come to be named not only after my great-aunt Esther but also after a congregant I adored and admired. Both women fought tenaciously to keep their commitments to the Jewish tradition alive, even when it took energy that they really didn’t have to give. I don’t know if my daughters will stay in small-town Maine long term, but they will always carry their Beth Israel family with them—examples of strength and determination that will hold them through a turbulent Jewish future.
Rabbi Rachel Isaacs is founder and executive director of the Center for Small Town Jewish Life at Colby College, where she serves as the Dorothy “Bibby” Levine Alfond Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies. She is also the rabbi at Beth Israel Congregation.