Rona Shapiro

When I think about Berkeley Hillel, a whole collection of images comes back at once.

I think about the building.

I think about the light coming through it.

I think about sitting on the deck.

I think about Shabbat dinners and Passovers with rooms full of people.

I think about meetings in my office, in the boardroom, and in the chapel.

But when I first arrived at Berkeley Hillel in 1990, we weren't actually working inside that building.

We were working out of trailers.

I had just been ordained as a rabbi.

Hillel was my first job out of rabbinical school, and I came to Berkeley initially as the rabbi before later becoming the director.

The building was in the middle of a major renovation that would turn it into the Reutlinger Center.

So there we were.

Two trailers parked in front of the building.

That was Berkeley Hillel.

There were maybe four or five of us working inside each trailer.

And there was one computer.

This was 1990, so that probably doesn't sound quite as absurd for the time as it does now, but it still made getting work done interesting.

I remember having to go home to write sermons for the holidays because there was simply no way I could sit in a crowded trailer with everyone around me and concentrate enough to write.

The person who was director during my first year couldn't quite understand why I couldn't just sit there and do it.

But that was life at Hillel then.

We improvised.

There were two nearby cafés—Cafe Roma on one side and International Cafe down the street—and we jokingly treated them almost like additional Hillel offices.

The trailers were the official offices.

The cafés were essentially our east and west wings.

It was a strange way to start a career.

But looking back, there is something wonderfully fitting about it.

Hillel has never really been about a building.

Of course the building matters. I still remember the light coming through it decades later.

But the community existed even when the building wasn't available to us.

Students still needed somewhere to go.

There were still holidays to celebrate.

There were still programs to plan, classes to teach, conversations to have, money to raise, and relationships to build.

So we did it wherever we could.

In the trailers.

In the cafés.

On campus.

Wherever the students were.

That first job also taught me almost everything about how an organization actually functions.

Rabbinical school taught me how to be a rabbi.

Berkeley Hillel taught me how to make things happen.

I learned how to plan programs.

I learned marketing.

I learned how to read a budget.

I learned how to write grants.

I learned how to raise money.

I learned how to teach within a real community.

And I learned something important about leadership: students can't do everything, and staff can't do everything.

It has to be a partnership.

Students come in with enormous amounts of energy and ideas.

The job of a leader isn't always to tell them what to do.

Sometimes it's to help channel that energy into something meaningful.

Sometimes you have an idea and find a way to plant the seed so that students can make it their own.

Those are lessons I carried into the rest of my rabbinate.

I sometimes feel bad for rabbis who go directly from rabbinical school into synagogue life without having an experience like Hillel first.

There are so many practical things you have to learn about creating community that nobody can really teach you in a classroom.

I learned them at Berkeley.

And I learned them while working out of a trailer.

There's something funny about looking back now, during Berkeley Hillel's centennial, and remembering that moment.

An institution can celebrate one hundred years and have beautiful buildings, generations of alumni, and an enormous history.

But there was also a time when Berkeley Hillel was a handful of us crowded into two trailers with one computer, trying to figure out where we could find enough quiet to write a sermon.

And somehow, the work still happened.

The community was still there.

Maybe that's what I remember most.

The building could be under construction.

The offices could temporarily disappear.

But Hillel kept going.