Growing up in a Reform-meets-atheist household, where my H&H bagel-slicing skills were deemed more important than learning my Torah portion for a bat mitzvah I didn’t even want, I gleaned most of my knowledge of Jewish faith and tradition not in temple, but in front of the television. The first TV rabbi I remember seeing appeared – like so many good things – in *Sex and the City*. I watched, rapt, as Charlotte York attempted to convert to Judaism out of love for her bald, bullish, very Jewish boyfriend Harry Goldenblatt. Only to have her local rabbi reject her three times (which is apparently a real thing?) before grudgingly inviting her over for Shabbos dinner with his family.
By season one of *And Just Like That* two decades later, Charlotte York-Goldenblatt had become a full-on Jewish mother, with Hari Nef as her family’s rabbi. Quite an upgrade! Watching Nef – a Jewish actress who first broke out playing a Weimar Germany-era trans woman on *Transparent* – perform a joyful, extremely chic “they mitzvah” for Charlotte’s nonbinary child Rock felt like the ultimate sign that we, as a faith, had evolved past staid, *Fiddler on the Roof*-coded depictions of Jewish spiritual leaders onscreen and into a more vibes-based rabbinical era.
There have, of course, been a few hotties along the way: Mandy Patinkin as a dripping wet yeshiva student in *Yentl*; Ben Stiller as Rabbi Jake Schram in 2000’s *Keeping the Faith*. But now, a few years after Kathryn Hahn played the beautiful, good-hearted, fuckboy-dating Rabbi Raquel on *Transparent* (inspiring me to don a modest dress and a tallit one Halloween), we have Adam Brody starring as a rabbi on the new Netflix rom-com series *Nobody Wants This*. Seeing *The OC’s* Seth Cohen – one of television’s first truly infatuation-worthy, non-assimilated Nice Jewish Boys – take on perhaps the most exalted role in the Jewish spiritual world makes me feel a) quite old and b) glad to see the rabbi enter cool, down-to-earth, romantic-lead territory.
Given that I am, as mentioned, hardly an expert on anything related to Jewish liturgy (I eat pork! I’ve been known to blog on Shabbat! I have upwards of a dozen tattoos, many of which I am actively denying the existence of to my extended family!), I turned to a higher authority to help me determine if the concept of a sexy rabbi – on TV or on the real-life bimah – passed the kosher test, or if it was just as based in fantasy as the whole hot priest thing.
“What’s interesting about the history of Judaism is that it’s not afraid of sex,” says Diane Offenberg-Rose, a Jewish Universalist Rabbi and cantor who serves the Los Angeles region. “Obviously, in the ultra-Orthodox world, there are rules that everyone’s supposed to follow, but in general, if you were a great rabbi, you had a wife and a whole bunch of children; you were having sex, and there were even texts about having good sex and your duty to your wife, so it was never taboo. I know people fall in love with the ‘hot minister’ idea, but there’s no reason to think that your Jewish clergy member might not also be good in bed.”
With the arrival of Brody’s role in *Nobody Wants This*, maybe we’re finally getting away from the notion of a TV or film rabbi needing to be any one thing. Brody can be sexy; Nef’s Rabbi Jen can be impeccably dressed; Rabbi Raquel (whom Offenberg-Rose points to as her favourite onscreen rabbi because “she showed that all clergy are people, even though there’s a pressure to look like you have all the answers”) can be romantically tortured; *You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah’s* Rabbi Rebecca can be goofy; and none of those individual representations have to bear the weight of perfectly representing an entire segment of the Jewish faith.
After all, there are all different kinds of rabbis in real life – ones who marry LGBTQ+ couples, teach Torah using sneakers, and protest Israel’s war in Gaza – so why shouldn’t that diversity be reflected on screen?
