New York-based Rabbi Angela Buchdahl is the first East Asian American to be ordained as a rabbi. Born in 1972 in Seoul, South Korea, as a young child, Buchdahl immigrated to Washington state with her family, returning to her father’s Tacoma roots. She attended the synagogue her grandparents helped to found, and, alongside her mother’s work in the burgeoning Korean community in Tacoma, grew up with feet in both worlds. Buchdahl sat down with the Northwest Asian Weekly’s Carolyn Bick to talk about her path and process of becoming a rabbi, and how her identities support one another.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
NWAW: Tell me about your background and childhood. I read a little bit about your background, and saw that you were raised Jewish. What did that look like in practice for your family?
I was born in South Korea. My dad ended up in Seoul, because of (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) ROTC and was in the service. [He] met my mom, got married, I was born [in Seoul], and lived there ’til I was almost 5. And then we came right back to Tacoma, because that was where my father’s Jewish family had been since the early 1900s.
We had deep roots in Tacoma. I was already the third generation, maybe the 18th Warnick—that’s my maiden name—to attend Stadium High School. My entire generation of cousins went there, my dad and all his siblings went there, and then his father and other cousins went there as well. So, I had this very deep sense of being very rooted in Tacoma when I moved there, even as in some ways I felt like I looked very different than everyone in the Jewish community because of my, you know, Asian face and my mixed race, mixed faith family.
I moved in the mid-1970s, just when the most liberal branch of Judaism, Reform Judaism, changed its attitude towards interfaith families. And the rabbi who was the president of the movement at the time, Alex Schindler, gave a big outreach sermon, basically saying, we should reach out to families like mine, not reject them. And so I was lucky that I came right at a time when synagogues were embracing families like mine. As much as my mother was not Jewish and an immigrant at the age of 35 and had a thick Korean accent, the synagogue was a welcoming place for all of us, including her.
So that made a big difference.
I immediately started going to Sunday school, and got involved in the synagogue and became involved in the youth group and president of my youth group and teaching music in the religious school—all of those things, I was very engaged. It was like a real home base for me.
In addition, at the same time, the Korean community in Tacoma, Seattle, Federal Way was growing significantly. My mother helped bring over several of her sisters and my cousins from Korea, and they basically stayed in our home until they settled into their own house. The Korean community was growing rapidly.
My mother became an ESL teacher. In her first decades as a teacher, she was teaching primarily Korean students English, but over the years, it became Cambodian, Vietnamese students, and then Russian students. So she was teaching ESL to whatever next immigrant population was coming.
My mother also never really stopped being an ambassador for Korea in America. In addition to founding the Korean language program in the public schools—which was actually the very first Korean language program in a public school in all of America; it was at Baker Middle School—she taught Korean and helped get the Korean SAT test many decades ago.
In addition to that, she was deeply involved in the Korean Women’s Association (KWA), which was started kind of as a social club, but is now, I think, the second largest social service organization in Washington state. She was president of KWA many, many, many times. While she was a teacher and loved being a teacher for 30 years, her other second love was definitely building KWA. And it was quite a model for me to watch that.
So I had this very thick, rich Korean background in America with cousins, family, a Korean kind of social network, and Korean restaurants and grocery stores and bath houses that we frequented regularly. So I had a lot of that. And frankly, there was a lot more Korean culture to imbibe and absorb than there was Jewish culture in Tacoma.
But the Jewish community was very tight-knit and I had a lot of family there, too. So I felt very lucky that I felt like I had a rooted, rich, and thick kind of identity that came from both worlds that I was able to maintain as I moved here.
My Korean language became very spotty, but we traveled back to Korea many times while I was a kid for summer breaks. My mom was from a family of seven. So even though she brought a couple sisters over, she still had a bunch of siblings in Korea with a lot of cousins. So I spent a lot of time in Korea.
On the Jewish side, I traveled to Israel when I was 16. I also have a first cousin who made Aliyah, or became a citizen of Israel, and he had four kids. So I spent a good amount of time there.
I think I spent a lot of my childhood navigating what it meant to be Jewish and Korean, and also what it meant to be Korean and Jewish and American. All of these kinds of hyphenated identities, that at different times made claims on me, sometimes felt like they were in conflict with each other.
NWAW: Were there ways in which your family wove Buddhism into Judaism?
Yes, for sure, although I think I would have a harder time articulating exactly what they were. My mother frequently shared her sort of spiritual, religious, and cultural background through folktales.
She was a really very gifted storyteller. My sister and I would beg her for a Korean folktale every night, and she would tell us lots and lots of stories. So that is a good conveyor of a lot of values, learning a lot about Confucian and shamanistic Korean things, like filial piety and kind of the sense of spirituality that could reside in mountains and stones, and tigers that talk and all of that stuff. It was a kind of beautiful, fantastical way that I learned a lot of my mother’s spirituality.
My mother had a regular yoga-slash-movement and meditation practice that she did, which now is totally cool and normal. When I was a kid, I didn’t know anybody who did that and it was very weird and strange. But that was also very spiritual—my mother’s prayer was meditation, in many ways. She would go down to the basement and just meditate for an hour or two. She swore by it. I tried at different times to try meditating, when I was younger. I just didn’t have the patience for it, but I now do yoga and meditation myself.
When I went to college, I was a religious studies major and I took my first class on Buddhism and (I was) learning about how love is detachment and what suffering is, and all of these kinds of Buddhist concepts, it was like a light bulb went off. I was like, “Oh, that’s my mother.” I didn’t realize that these are Buddhist teachings and that was just conveyed through her world outlook, more so than I could say (that) she said, this is a Buddhist teaching.
There’s no question that her Buddhism infuses the way that I am a Jew and a rabbi and a human being, but I’m not sure that at different points, I could kind of understand and separate out what parts were the Buddhism and what part was just my mother and what’s Korean. But I think there’s no question that it had a very strong influence on me spiritually.
Eventually, a Buddhist temple was built in Tacoma much, much later than when we first arrived. By the time I got married, the Buddhist temple existed and we did a Korean marriage bowing ceremony at the Buddhist temple the weekend of my wedding and dressed in traditional Korean hanbok … and had food and went out to a Korean restaurant. So, [my Korean heritage has] always been a part of it. It’s been a little bit less like specifically Buddhist and more Korean and spiritual.
NWAW: So, I was curious then, because you mentioned you had a really rich tapestry of your Korean community and your Jewish community interwoven, and so I was curious how you were treated by your Jewish peers and your Korean peers. Were you made to feel included, or were you made to feel sort of strangely straddling two different things that just weren’t meshing in other people’s minds?
You know, it’s more that second one, I would say, meaning I both felt a sense of belonging with anybody that I became really close with. With my own Korean family or with my own close Jewish friends or community, I did feel a real sense of belonging. They were very separate, though, I would say.
It was that my worlds (never) came together. And I say that even with my family. We would have a lot of big meals and time with my Korean side of the family, and we also had Passover and Thanksgiving with the Jewish side of the family, but very rarely would both sides of the family come together. There were cultural and language barriers that just made it a little awkward.
So, yes, my Korean family showed up for my bat mitzvah, but aside from my wedding and a few handful of occasions, they wouldn’t all mix together. It was like two separate worlds that we bounced between.
When I left the comfort of people who really knew me, I was kind of an outsider because I’m biracial, because I’m not Christian, and the vast majority of Koreans in America identify with the Korean church. One of my aunts became a Korean minister and had her own Korean church and was evangelical in her beliefs. I felt like an outsider in the Korean community, because I didn’t share their religion, and because there was a good amount of stigma, especially in Korea, about biracial kids. Once I left my little, known bubble, I didn’t always feel comfortable in the wider Korean community.
And then on the Jewish side, same thing. Like, if I went to a (B’nai B’rith Youth Organization) BBYO convention or to a Jewish camp, initial responses people would give me is, “You can’t be Jewish. How are you Jewish?”
We’re talking about the 1980s, when it was really unusual to see … Jews of color in Jewish spaces. It really, really was a completely Ashkenazi normative space that I was always in. And so people somehow felt like it was totally cool to question it all the time and to say, “That’s funny, you don’t look Jewish.” And that was just understood that that was the way I was seen.
I am lucky that my parents raised me to feel comfortable in my skin and to feel like [I] get to pick the best of both worlds. That was kind of the attitude, and not to feel apologetic for it. But there were times it was very painful and hurtful, but I also felt enough belonging, obviously, that I have stayed connected to both.
NWAW: I found it very cool that you attended the synagogue that your great-grandparents helped found. How did you feel about it, at the time, and what does that mean for you now?
Being in the synagogue in Tacoma, it was really—I felt the specialness of feeling deep roots in a place. You talk about yichus—I love that I looked up on the wall of the synagogue and I saw my grandfather at age 20 in a … basketball uniform. It really made me feel like, “I belong here. I have roots here. I have a history here.” And I loved going to the same high school that my father went to and my grandfather went to. That felt really special. So it wasn’t just about the synagogue itself, but it was the sense of a rich history. I love feeling like you’re connected to something bigger, like a bigger story, and that I’m in that story. And so that was really very powerful.
It was (also) just practically very nice that everybody knew my family. Everybody knew my grandmother and I had lots of first cousins. When a Warnick had a bar or bat mitzvah, the sanctuary was filled. There was this real feeling that we were an established family in the community. … It made me feel very comfortable and secure, in some way, and special.
NWAW: It sounds like the feeling stuck with you and kind of forms a really important part or root in your practice and identity.
I think that is why I was able to sustain all the questioning I got when I left the community because I felt like I had a strong foundation. That makes sense.
NWAW: When did you first feel pulled to become involved in Jewish life in a professional way? Was this feeling always there, or did it grow over time?
I think it grew. I liked being at synagogue (when I was a kid). I liked religious questions.
I was very curious about that. I was the kind of kid that prayed to God on my own as a little kid and got my sister to pray with me. I was an unusually spiritual, “in dialogue with God,” kind of kid.
I recognize that that’s kind of unusual. Maybe it’s not unusual for kids, but most kids get it beaten out of them or get ashamed about it in some way. And I was just encouraged by that.
I would say that that was sort of the seed of it. I think my hometown rabbi, Richard Rosenthal, of blessed memory said, “Why don’t you think about being a rabbi?” around my bat mitzvah, which I thought was ridiculous, at the time. But then when I went to Israel when I was 16, I met a few more rabbis on that trip and loved Jewish like traditional text learning, which I was learning for the first time, really, in that way. And it was like a light bulb went off.
In some ways, it was a slow buildup, but by the time I got to that (trip), I was sort of thinking, “Wow, this is a job that people do where they get to just think about these questions and learn text all day long.” And I was like, “This is what I wanna do.” I had already for a couple of years by then become the Jewish music teacher at my Sunday school, and I’d gone to Jewish camp already for two summers and learned a lot of Jewish music and been leading services. So it’s not like it was completely out of nowhere, by the time I was 16, but 16 is pretty young.
Once I decided I wanna be a rabbi, I never seriously considered doing anything else with my life, even though there were times when I had some serious Jewish identity crises about my own authenticity as a Jew and whether or not I’d ever belong, but I never actually considered doing anything else with my life.
NWAW: Can you actually talk to me a little bit about that? I didn’t realize that you’d gone through these periods of crisis.
It sort of set off the crisis because it was the first time that I had met Jews—not just outside of the Tacoma area, but Jews who were much more halakhically observant. In their definition, they didn’t accept patrilineality. I didn’t have a Jewish mother, and therefore I was not halakhically Jewish. It was as simple as that. And then on top of that, not only did I have a non-Jewish mother, but I had a cultural reform Jewish father who wasn’t super-Jewishly knowledgeable nor super-observant.
Friday nights, maybe we lit candles, but a lot of times, I was playing in the marching band at the football games or doing whatever else. My life was full of a lot of things that were outside of the Jewish world, because I was in a non-Jewish world. My boyfriend at the time in high school was not Jewish, and all these things.
I was seeing people on my Israel trip … where there was nothing in their life that wasn’t Jewish. Their friends were all Jewish. Their school was Jewish. They lived in Jewish times in America. Their hobbies were knitting, crocheting kippot. And I was like, “Oh my gosh, wow, that’s really Jewish.”
It made me not just feel like there was an external Judaism (whose definition I wasn’t sure) I was meeting, but, internally, I questioned. They were also fluent in Hebrew and went to day school and were so knowledgeable, and I kind of felt like, “Wait a minute, I don’t know Hebrew. I can only decode it. And I don’t know all of these observances and I don’t know all these texts and I don’t live on Jewish time in the same way.”
It started to make me think, “Maybe actually I’m not really Jewish.”
I would say that these were questions I was really deeply immersed in and troubled by for the next five or six years through college and ultimately two more trips back to Israel. It was an existential identity crisis, in a sense, about where I fit in Jewishly.
Ultimately, by the time I was 21, I got through it. I ended up doing what I would call a reaffirmation giyur ceremony, which was I dipped in a mikveh with a beit din of three rabbis.
And it was a halakha conversion, although I didn’t call it conversion because I was like, “I’ve been Jewish my whole life, so I’m not converting to Judaism.” I called it a reaffirmation of my Judaism. And it felt important to do it as kind of a culmination of kind of going through this process, which I wouldn’t say answered every question, but for some reason, I came out on the other side and I felt security in a way, and I wanted to ritualize that journey.
NWAW: What does your personal practice look like? How do you weave your Korean heritage into it?
Now my family is more Shabbat observant. I am living much more on a Jewish calendar. My kids all went to a Jewish day school, so they became the Jews that I was very envious of, in some ways, when I was a kid—where there’s such a richness of Jewish life.
Our family has a different kind of literacy and engagement and authenticity. So I don’t think (my children) have the same kinds of questions, although they probably have different ones.
I probably have more challenges to feel like I’m connected to the Korean community, which I’ve just started to really actively pursue more in the last five years. I’ve gotten myself connected to the Korean American Community Foundation. My kids grew up hearing Korean folktales, also eating Korean food, and we have made a couple of trips to Korea as a family. That has helped their sense of connection to Korea.
Of course, my mother is a force in their life and teaches them in all sorts of subtle and not subtle ways about Korean values and everything else. I have a regular meditation practice now and yoga practice that I do. I don’t know that I see them as specifically Buddhist. I think of them as actually more universally spiritual, but I’m sure that I’m influenced by my mother in doing them.
NWAW: Is there anything else that you want to mention about being a Jew of Korean descent or a Korean Jew, whichever you would prefer? Because it’s the interesting question of “What do you use?” That’s really a central question in many of these interviews that I’m doing.
I think what’s interesting is the Korean part is obvious when someone meets me just because it’s on my face. The Jewish part is less obvious, right? I’ve spent a lot of my life kind of navigating between these two identities.
One of the things that kind of have come to understand much more is that I don’t have to separate them out. It’s not like that when one rises, the other one has to go down. There’s a way that they just speak to each other.
And a lot of times, the way I’ve known what is so Jewish about me is because I can see it against the contrast of what’s Korean and vice versa. There’s a lot of similarity. There are a lot of values that Koreans and Jews share.
If I go really very general about how much we value education or how much we have this sense of reverence for people who are older than us, and for traditions and those things—those things my parents both feel very strongly about, and we’re very unified in the house (about them, too). And then there are a lot of little things that are different in the way that they play out and the particularity of it. Sometimes, you can take those things for granted if you don’t have something, a foil that helps you understand what makes it different.
And so, in a sense, they both informed each other my whole life. I feel grateful for the mix that I am—and the fact is, it is what I am.
I hope all of us can be comfortable with how we end up, because it is what makes us each uniquely who we are.