Rabbi Will Berkovitz worked as a journalist for a number of years after graduating from St. Thomas in 1991.
But when he was sent to Guatemala to write a story, Berkovitz realized he wanted to do something completely different with his life.
“I was finding far more meaning digging toilets than writing about it,” he said. “I started to think I would like to be a rabbi … I started exploring Judaism and went to have a conversation with one of the local rabbis.”
Berkovitz, who is originally from St. Louis Park, said he was raised in the Reform movement of Judaism, but it wasn’t until after his trip to Guatemala that he started exploring his faith in earnest. He also was interested in social justice and service work for a long time, and he saw being a rabbi as a way to connect service and spirituality. He said the Jewish faith is rooted in the idea of serving others.
“Remember the stranger, the widow and the orphan is a resonant theme from Exodus,” he said. “Every Jewish holiday has an aspect of taking care of the poor.”
Berkovitz is now the vice president of partnerships and the rabbi-in-residence for Repair the World, an organization that encourages service work in Jewish communities. He said one of the initial factors that led to his involvement in social justice was his service trip to Jamaica as a St. Thomas student.
“That trip profoundly shaped the direction of my life,” Berkovitz said.
He went on more trips in subsequent years. Berkovitz was in Berlin when the wall came down and in the Middle East during the Gulf War. He has done service work everywhere from Brazil to Jordan and spent extended amounts of time studying in England and Israel.
Berkovitz said his experiences doing service work abroad have helped shape his perceptions of the world and allowed him to better understand the viewpoints of the “other.”
“If you go to El Salvador and are sitting there having a meal, some family members aren’t there because they went north of the border to the U.S. to get jobs to support their families,” he said. “When you come back and engage in the immigration debate, you put a face to that issue.”
He said seeing how other people live “brings awareness and a call to action.”
“It makes life more complicated than most people prefer,” he added.
Experiences as a St. Thomas student
Berkovitz said his time at St. Thomas profoundly impacted his life, and it was where he initially learned to welcome the “other.”
“In many ways, one thing St. Thomas showed me was, ‘How do you welcome the stranger?’” he said. “Even though I was the only Jewish person on [the St. Thomas service trips], and maybe the only Jewish person at St. Thomas, I was not pressured to be someone I wasn’t, and I met some of my closest friends there.”
Berkovitz said one of his mentors at St. Thomas was communication and journalism professor Tom Connery. Berkovitz took a literary journalism course from Connery and also worked on independent study projects with him. Connery described Berkovitz as a naturally curious, talented student who has a big heart to go along with a very smart brain.
“He had interest in writing, but also a great desire to serve,” Connery said.
Connery said one summer, Berkovitz lived in a trailer on the range in the North Woods as part of a student research project.
“His purpose was gathering information about the timber industry in a literary journalism way,” Connery said. “He has always been aware of people in need and the environment was always a major issue with him.”
Connery said he initially thought Berkovitz would end up working for a specialty publication in a job that combined his interests and writing talents. And right after graduation, Berkovitz did work for a number of magazines in his current hometown of Seattle. But now Connery said he thinks being a rabbi matches perfectly with Berkovitz’s skills.
“In the past he’s shared his homilies with me and you can see his talent as a writer in his love of words and language,” Connery said. “And becoming a rabbi is essentially knowing how to use words.”
Connery said Berkovitz is the perfect example of the COJO department’s mission to use communication to serve the common good.
“What are you going to do to repair the world?”
Berkovitz said his favorite moment on service learning trips with young adults is watching them open their eyes to the world and their role in it.
“It’s an extraordinary experience when you watch a student see the expression of God in another person’s face,” he said. “When that happens for students it’s amazing and it’s a sacred place to sit, to be a guide for somebody.”
He said students need to be open to asking questions and listening for the answers.
“We each have a gift we’ve been given,” he said. “We have to find that intersection between our greatest gift and the world’s greatest need. You need to ask yourself, ‘What are you going to do to repair the world?’”
As St. Thomas’ current rabbi-in-residence through the Jay Phillips Center, Berkovitz will give a presentation on “Sustaining the World: Spirituality and Civic Service” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 19, in the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center auditorium.
Katie Broadwell can be reached at klbroadwell@stthomas.edu.