Part mem­oir, part ser­mon col­lec­tion, Heart of a Stranger tells the sto­ry of Rabbi/​Cantor Angela Buch­dahl. The daugh­ter of a Kore­an Bud­dhist moth­er and an Amer­i­can Jew­ish father, Buch­dahl traces the many twists and turns she took to find her way to becom­ing the Senior Rab­bi of Cen­tral Syn­a­gogue, one of the most promi­nent and inno­v­a­tive Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties in the Unit­ed States. 

Though the book charts the events of her life, it’s clear from the first pages of her work that Heart of a Stranger is no ordi­nary mem­oir. Each chap­ter is the­mat­ic. It first looks at a per­son or episode in Buchdahl’s life. These vary from ear­ly spir­i­tu­al expe­ri­ences hik­ing with her mom to Buchdahl’s child­hood encoun­ters with Jew­ish folk music to falling in love with her hus­band, Jacob, to chal­lenges she has faced run­ning her con­gre­ga­tion. Paired with each of these per­son­al reflec­tions is a ser­mon, focused around a sin­gle Hebrew word, that sums up the major theme of her anecdote. 

To take one exam­ple, Buch­dahl mov­ing­ly writes about the expe­ri­ence of giv­ing birth to her first child, Gabriel. She relates how scared she felt, know­ing the holy bur­den she car­ried to care for this baby. Par­ent­ing forced her to face her imper­fec­tion and taught her to rely on oth­ers for sup­port. This sto­ry is paired with a med­i­ta­tion on ruach, which she trans­lates as ​“wind” but lat­er teach­es can mean spir­it and breath. She tells the sto­ry of rid­ing her bike on a windy day — how easy it was when the wind was at her back, but how hard it was when she rode into it. That wind, she reminds us, is like God. We can’t see it, but we feel it. This teach­ing would be pow­er­ful enough on its own, but cou­pled with the sto­ry of her bur­geon­ing moth­er­hood, it is even more so. Although she doesn’t get too deep into the spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of hold­ing her son in the per­son­al sec­tion, the fact that this sto­ry is fol­lowed by a med­i­ta­tion on God shows that her birth expe­ri­ence was pro­found­ly spir­i­tu­al. The inclu­sion of the ser­mon allows her to cap­ture the humor and pathos of the orig­i­nal sto­ry, and then to peel back addi­tion­al lay­ers of mean­ing so that she can get philo­soph­i­cal with­out los­ing the plot.

For those who admire Buch­dahl from afar, her book answers many ques­tions. What led her to love music? What does it mean to feel like both an insid­er and out­sider in the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty? How did she end up at Cen­tral? How does she nav­i­gate pol­i­tics in a wealthy, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly diverse Upper East Side synagogue?

Per­haps the most riv­et­ing chap­ter cen­ters around an episode from 2022, when a man walked into a syn­a­gogue in Col­leyville, Texas, took the con­gre­gants hostage, and demand­ed to speak with Buch­dahl — whom he believed, in an anti­se­mit­ic delu­sion, was pow­er­ful enough to free a pris­on­er held on ter­ro­ism charges near­by. Although Buch­dahl has spo­ken of this day in inter­views and ser­mons, the book gives much more col­or to her feelings. 

Heart of a Stranger is a mov­ing por­tray­al of a sto­ried rab­binic jour­ney. The title is indeed apt. It speaks not only to how Buch­dahl car­ries her dual iden­ti­ties, mak­ing her more sen­si­tive to those who might feel like out­siders, but also to how the book lets us into her heart. Heart of a Stranger shows us the val­ues, strug­gles, yearn­ings, and Torah that guide one of Judaism’s most pow­er­ful teachers.