The Board of Trustees is excited to welcome Rabbi David Castiglione to Temple Adat Shalom. Rabbi Castiglione has a diverse background and experience, but most importantly, he is an individual who really cares and is a true mensch. This can be seen by an email we received from one of Rabbi Castiglione's current congregants:

"Congratulations on obtaining a Great Rabbi and even better individual for your spiritual leader! Rabbi David is simply the best mentor for our children and has been incredibly supportive of my family in the most trying of times. We and the other families at Temple Beth El will miss him. So, feel free to change your minds before the vote! This is the best move your Temple will ever take. Good luck and best wishes."


Brief Introduction
Rabbi David Castiglione received his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and his Masters of Hebrew Letters from Hebrew Union College- Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. He was ordained in 1992.

Following ordination, Rabbi Castiglione served Temple B'nai Israel of Elmira, New York. Four years later, (and now in his 12th year) his service continued with Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In both communities, Rabbi Castiglione established many congregational firsts, including work with other faith groups and Jewish denominations.

The themes of God's oneness, social justice and covenant-both personal and communal-inform and drive all of Rabbi Castiglione's interests and initiatives. He has long been a vocal proponent of outreach, an active advocate of civil and religious rights for all individuals and an impassioned teacher of texts and traditions as windows into our lives and directives for our growth. Additionally, Rabbi Castiglione endeavors, in every encounter, to peel back the rind of pediatric conventions that have robbed generations of American Jews from truly knowing and experiencing the call, the joy and the personal fulfillment that Judaism holds.

Finding a lifetime calling within a congregation such as Adat Shalom is a rare and life time dream. As excited and honored by the opportunity ahead with our congregation as they are, Adrienne and he are also looking forward to returning to their California roots and reuniting with the majority of their family who live in the San Diego area.


Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your family?
To each of us there comes a calling to the service of God. How that service is to be fulfilled and expressed depends much upon our personal talents, gifts and inclinations. Regardless of occupation or vocation, each of us is called to meet God through our interactions with each other and through the fulfillment of God's ethical expectations.

Personally, I was raised within the traditionalist mode of Conservative Judaism, under the guidance of my mother's parents. Yet the assurance of my place in God's creation was as much supported by the strength of faith belonging to my father's family, none of whom were Jewish, as it was by the love and community of my Jewish world.

My father joined the Jewish people before marrying my mother. He is the youngest of six siblings, one of whom died in childhood. His own father died when my father was only thirteen. When my father went off to serve in the Korean War, my grandmother, of blessed memory, began a tradition that she continued throughout her life: namely to travel the country so as to stay with each of her children for three to four months at a time.

My grandmother was a woman of devout faith. And though none of her children would ever deny her the opportunity to attend any church of her choosing, she chose, nevertheless, to worship where her children worshiped. "A house of God is a house of God," she would say.

What made her statement that much more extraordinary was that each of her children followed a different denominational path. One of her children became a Salvation Army minister, one became a Pentecostal minister, one became the music director at his Episcopal church, one remained Roman Catholic, and one embraced Judaism. So taught my grandmother, "God doesn't care as much which path we take up the mountain. God only cares that we're moving up a path while encouraging others to follow theirs, too."

I grew up spending as much time it seemed, celebrating the joys of my non-Jewish family as they spent doing the same with us. Family, unconditional love and support, and the centrality of God-no matter how we worshiped God-were what were important. It has served as a life teaching that guides me to this day.

In 1983, I met my wife Adrienne and one year latter we were married. At the time she was a single mother with two very young children. Adding to the ecumenical nature of things, she had been raised in the Mormon Church. It was not my presumption that she should personally join our people as a requisite to marriage. Such a commitment is an exclusively personal decision. Distanced, however, from her childhood faith, Adrienne was open to raising our new family as Jews. By three years time, her growing affinity and connection to Judaism inspired her to embrace our covenant. We are now a family of six. Our youngest son Seth is 14, Jared is 21, Brandon is 28 and Nathan is 29. We were blessed two years ago, to welcome my mother-in-law, Shyrle Turnbull, into our home.


Can you share with us your sense of community?
A community is tended through the active relationships engendered among its leadership and laity. Trust, love and devotion, nurtured between the two, much as in a marriage, form the groundwork from which dreams are realized and vibrant generations are raised. In community dwells the presence of God. Partnering together, we encourage, care for, comfort, celebrate and grow. We take turns being the hands of God- sometimes giving, sometimes receiving, but always reaching out.

The role of the rabbi certainly includes the obligation to lead, but the goal of such leadership cannot be met through the gathering and brokerage of power or policy. Rather it is met through the empowerment of his or her congregation in matters of Jewish responsibility, celebration, learning and spiritual growth. A rabbi must teach, model and guide in such a fashion that his or her congregation continues to grow in as democratic and communally vested a way as possible. As rabbis, we carry a sacred responsibility whereby we must always maintain that we are present to serve our God through service within God's congregation, and by that service, all of God's creation.

The strength of community is built upon the diversity of which it is comprised. This is the strength acknowledged in Nitzavim as God calls each of us- old and young, chieftain and water drawer into covenant. In a midrash, based upon a passage instructing us in what to do upon entering the land, God commands us to build a pillar of stones, to plaster the pillar, and to inscribe within the plaster all the words of our covenant. The challenge was, and remains, to erect a pillar with stones, of differing weight and shape, secure enough to hold the plaster intact, so that not even a single letter of God's instruction would fall away. In so doing, God gives us an exercise in the appreciation of community and in the care we must take for allowing each of us our perfect place so as to act as counterweight, balancing one another. Only then is the covenant and blessing of Israel realized. Instructed by the above, our covenant calls us to hear each other, to allow for compromise, and to seek together the once thought unattainable goal. Part of Jewish faith encourages us to trust in the process, to celebrate the struggle and to let the bigger picture, God's picture, temper our judgments.

The work I am privileged to do is a humbling work. It is also an exciting work and it continues to be my path of personal growth and fulfillment. I am most whole in the company of my community- in our celebration, our worship, our learning, and even in our mourning. To paraphrase Martin Buber, it is within the connection, between two or more people, that rests the presence of our God. I am excited beyond words, to be invited to join the community of Temple Adat Shalom and to find and further establish that presence here with you.


What is your sense on spirituality?
All of us are spiritual beings by design. Every moment we pause, if even for the briefest second, to acknowledge some part of the world outside of our own personal selves, we exercise our gift of the spiritual. Sometimes, encounters can be as great as witnessing the miracle of birth. Sometimes they can be as subtle as tasting a flavor from the innocence and wonder of our childhood. These experiences lead us back to the inner core of who we really are. They nurture our core and teach us insights that allow us to be that more receptive to the world (i.e., God).

Like all else, proficiency in the spiritual takes practice and exercise. As Jews, we are disciplined by (mitzvot), which leads to faith, that allows us to open ourselves more readily and more often to the greater reality around us. This openness welcomes us to acknowledge that we are, after all, a small though infinitely valuable part of a much larger creation.


What is your vision?
I have been graced to experience many diverse and challenging situations and communities during my lifetime: from the struggle of near poverty to the struggle of success, from work within the secular world to work within the religious, from leading a congregation of one hundred and fifty families to serving a congregation of 1,300. Each, in its own way, has lent priceless life-changing and life-affirming lessons.

For myself, my personal convictions are firmly drawn from our prophetic principles. I engage Judaism as a way of life; Jewish experience as a joy and as a commandment. Adat Shalom is already a congregation that is vested in the spiritual pursuit of Jewish experience and calling. It is a base and a model of moral courage and example. I have met individuals from every generation of the Adat Shalom family, and know that each is valued and active. One look at the web site, or in conversation with an Adat Shalom family member, and there is no doubt that within the community, life is celebrated, nurtured, comforted, emboldened and ennobled, and that it is a place where worship and education is vibrant and eagerly pursued.

Adat Shalom, in its short lifetime, has accomplished extraordinary things-miraculous things-when one stops to think about it. With the blessing of the congregation, it will be my honor and my privilege to walk the path of service together. To build together, learn together, and share our gifts and our hopes together, and to forge between us the next great stage of Adat Shalom's legacy. I will endeavor to begin the process of our coming to know each other as soon as it is possible, and warmly invite you to share with me, via e-mail (rdc@tbeonline.org), whenever you wish, until we can do so in person-in each other's company.