In the latest edition of his Search for Meaning podcast, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback hosts his friend of 40 years, Rabbi Ken Chasen.
The Ordination Seminar instructor at HUC-JIR’s Skirball Campus, Rabbi Chasen is also the Senior Rabbi at Leo Baeck Temple, which partners with Wise’s Center for Youth Engagement and currently hosts our Aaron Milken Center Parenting Center during construction of our transformational new facility.
Before he became a rabbi, Rabbi Chasen wrote music and edited scores for film and television. His love of music—he started playing the guitar at age 10—is intimately entwined with his love of Judaism. As a scrawny 11-year-old at Goldman Union Camp Institute in Indiana, he was first exposed to the blend of Israeli and American folk-style music that would eventually come to define the Reform Movement of the 1980s and 1990s.
“I came to camp not really knowing that my guitar had any efficacy,” Rabbi Chasen says.
Within his first four weeks at Goldman, he had talked his way into leading a lunchtime song session.
“The guitar was bigger than I was,” Rabbi Chasen says.
The two old friends riff on a variety of topics, from their shared love of music (and their band Mah Tovu), to their midwestern roots, to their sport fandoms (“Football is a secondary religious pursuit,” says the Chicago-born and Kansas City-raised Rabbi Chasen), to Rabbi Chasen’s unlikely journey from Hollywood to the rabbinate.