When I founded the Boca Raton Theological Seminary in 1988, I knew two things: one, that I wanted to provide a venue for the training of rabbis within a particularly progressive branch of Judaism that for too long had remained ill served by our nation’s established rabbinical colleges and, two, that I was allergic to dogs.
Both are still true today. In fact, they’re even truer than they were back then. My commitment to training religious leaders in Reform-Progressive Trans-Diasporatic Neo-Revisionalist Judaism is, if anything, even stronger than when I began. And I’m even more allergic to dogs than ever.
When we began the Seminary there were maybe one or two dogs around, and all I had to worry about was sneezing and itchy, tearing eyes and a runny nose. I tried controlling that with antihistamines, but if you’ve ever taken one you know what happens: after about two hours they knock you out so that you can’t keep your eyes open. One cannot exactly study (let alone teach) Torah and Talmud if one is asleep at one’s desk.
From there I moved to the so-called nondrowsy allergy pills (Allegra, Zyrtec, Claritin), and things were more or less under control. But then the dog training program really took off. Instead of one or two dogs here and there on this day or that, suddenly there were six or seven, everywhere, all the time. I began to experience a certain inability to breathe. My lungs felt slightly congested and produced a somewhat comical wheezing sound (not unlike that of a Balkan musical instrument built around a goat’s bladder) if, God forbid, I tried to exhale completely.
Rabbi Paul, founder of the Boca Raton Theological Seminary, with Allegro
Now there are ten or more dogs on-site, day in and day out, and it seems I’ve been blessed with a mild form of allergic asthma. At least that’s what the medical technician called it after administering to me the methacholine challenge, where you go to the hospital (in an outpatient procedure) and inhale a series of gases with increasing concentrations of something in them (I don’t know what, maybe essence of dog) and then exhale into some kind of measuring device. With this diagnosis came a prescription for a twice-daily powdered inhalant (Advair) and an emergency inhaler of albuterol, just in case.
A lot of you may now be wondering why I stay when I’m in such physical discomfort. Why, with all my inhalers and allergy pills and boxes of Kleenex and watery eyes, do I remain at this institution?
I used to ask myself the same thing, all the time. I also used to ask, Who needs a bunch of dogs at a religious seminary? How is this whole enterprise appropriate for a place like this?
When I would discuss this dilemma with friends, they would say, “But look at the monks of New Skete! They raise German shepherds and it works out great for them!” And so they do. But they are an order of Catholic celibates living in a cloistered retreat in upstate New York. They run a monastery, where it’s traditional to have some secular activity (whether it’s bottling brandy or making preserves and jellies or, yes, training dogs) as part of their routine.
We run a school, where students come for religious instruction and to be certified as rabbis. We charge tuition for this service, which means that our students are, so to speak, our customers. They’re paying for, and they deserve, our full attention. And we’re not in some remote mountain hideaway in the Adirondacks, either. We’re in Boca Raton, surrounded by golf courses and yacht clubs. The monks can raise dogs because they live apart—they are, as the saying goes, in the world but not of it. We’re both in it and of it up to our eyeballs.
And so, between the sneezing and the wheezing and the itching of the eyes, I found myself wondering why, if there are dozens of seminaries and hundreds (if not thousands) of dog training schools around the country, did the two have to be brought together here?
Then, one day, I was teaching a course called God: Past, Present, and Future. And, as fate would have it, I opened the class by asking what the students thought God’s love was. They all started to ponder the question, except Ms. Echo Silverstein, whose hand immediately shot up and who didn’t wait to be called on to answer. “A dog’s love is the same as God’s love,” she said. “That’s why ‘dog’ is ‘god’ spelled backwards.”
Well, naturally, I thought this was about the most jejune and ridiculous—and impious—thing I had ever heard. And so did the other students. A great shout of derision went up and I thought we were going to have a small riot on our hands.
But then a strange and very touching thing happened. One student, a Mr. Kyle Greenblatt, grudgingly admitted that Ms. Silverstein had a point. Mr. Greenblatt then went on to recount a story about the dog of his childhood years. And, one by one, everyone else shared their dog stories, too. By the end of the class we had spent ninety minutes not mentioning God once, but speaking, over and over, about love.
I must admit that I came away from that session deeply moved. In fact I would say that I was inspired. The similarity between what we hope for from God, and what we get without question from dogs, is too striking to be ignored. Isn’t God’s love that which makes us feel less alone and a little less afraid? And can we not say the same about the devotion of dogs? Doesn’t God love us no matter what? And can we not say the same about dogs?
In the end, I had to agree. Echo was absolutely right. A dog’s love is the same as God’s love. In fact I would even go so far as to say that a dog’s love teaches us something we don’t always learn from God.
A dog teaches us how to be loved.
Dogs are able to do this because they sneak past our defenses and under all our walls of distraction, self-centeredness, sophistication, or what-have-you. They completely ignore our KEEP OUT signs and then, once they get in, they hit us with a tsunami of love. We like to think that dogs need us, but the truth is that we need them. They are there to share the good times and to comfort us through the bad. They’ll offer up their cold wet noses on a hot summer day and share their warm bodies on a cold winter’s night. They take us out of ourselves. They draw our attention to the here and now. They show us what it means to be patient, alert, focused, calm, nuts, vigilant, brave, kind, and curious.
All of which is to say, dogs make us better human beings—something of which I’m sure God would heartily approve. And so if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for my shot.
— Rabbi Paul
Boca Raton, Florida