A LOOK AHEAD / A mainstream synagogue will install an openly gay man as its new spiritual leader this week. ‘He’s exactly what clergy should be,’ the congregation president says of . . . : A Rabbi Who’s Breaking Ground in Tarzana

When Temple Judea in Tarzana installs Donald Goor as senior rabbi this week, the Reform congregation will become the country’s largest mainstream synagogue to have an openly gay man as its spiritual leader.

The liberal Reform branch of Judaism dropped barriers to ordaining gay and lesbian rabbis seven years ago, but only a few congregations have picked gay clergy for assistant or senior pulpit posts, according to estimates.

None of those synagogues are as big as Temple Judea--900 families and growing--which also boasts one of the largest Jewish religious education programs in the nation with more than 1,000 students.

By all accounts, Goor was an easy choice as senior rabbi for Temple Judea, where he has been an associate rabbi for 10 years.

“He’s exactly what clergy should be--sensitive to older congregants and involved with the youth,” said temple President Michael Rudman, a certified public accountant. “He is not a one-dimensional rabbi.”

Most Temple Judea members “knew him as a person and a rabbi before they knew him as a gay person,” said Ellen Franklin Silver of Agoura Hills. She headed a committee that never looked beyond the synagogue walls for a successor to Rabbi Akiva Annes.

Only two or three people, out of about 350 people in focus groups involved in the selection, expressed displeasure at the choice, Rudman and Silver said. More than a year before Annes retired, Goor was chosen as the future senior rabbi by a unanimous voice vote of the congregation.

“I’m a rabbi who happens to be gay,” said Goor, 39, “but the congregation and I have been able to build a relationship where it isn’t the primary issue.”

At the same time, the rabbi said he doesn’t avoid gay issues. “I’m comfortable discussing homosexuality; there’s nothing that’s hidden,” said Goor, who has lived with the same companion for 12 years.

When Reform rabbis hold their national convention in Anaheim next year, Goor said, he will be among delegates urging colleagues to approve same-sex, wedding-like ceremonies for Jewish gay and lesbian couples--a controversial issue at last year’s meeting.

“Temple Judea should be commended for looking beyond prejudice and stereotypes to keeping an outstanding rabbi,” said Rabbi Janet Marder, regional director of Reform Judaism’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations. “He’s a very, very gifted rabbi with strong social-justice concerns and Torah knowledge who happens to be gay.”

Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman of Cincinnati, president of the four-campus Hebrew Union College, and New York City Rabbi Joel Goor, father of the new senior rabbi, will participate in Goor’s installation Friday night.

Saturday night, Evan Kent, the temple’s new cantor, will be featured in a concert. And Sunday morning, a five-foot-long tallit, or prayer shawl, sewn and embroidered by synagogue members, will be dedicated.

Rabbis attending the installation will include Denise Eger, who leads the predominantly gay Congregation Kol Ami in West Hollywood--one of three Southern California reform temples serving the gay and lesbian community. “I’d say there are 15 to 20 gay rabbis in Southern California now, mostly in the Reform branch,” said Eger, who came out as a lesbian 10 years ago.

Many gay rabbis in Southern California serve in campus, social agency or other non-synagogue positions, Eger said. The handful of gay rabbis serving temples are assistant rabbis or are the lone rabbi at a small congregation.

Orthodox and other traditional Jewish leaders say that homosexual activity violates Jewish law, thus ruling out any accommodation in synagogue life.

In the centrist Conservative wing of Judaism, however, some rabbis have argued for a more sympathetic approach to gay and lesbian Jews--notably Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, which formed a support group five years ago for families of gays and lesbians.

One dissenter to the acceptance of gay behavior in Jewish religious life is writer and radio talk-show host Dennis Prager, a conservative Jewish analyst.

“I would have intellectual respect for the [gay] movement to equate homosexual relations with heterosexual relations if that movement took a different position on bisexual behavior--because bisexuals have a choice,” Prager said. “That the homosexual movement supports bisexual behavior . . . means that their position is not at all based on the argument that homosexuals have no choice.

“Rather, it is an attempt to undo the 3,000-year-old Jewish battle to make heterosexual, monogamous love the human ideal.”

Responding to Prager’s remarks, Rabbi Jerry Danzig, executive director of Valley Beth Shalom, said that human makeup is so complex “that I would not be so presumptuous to say even bisexual people are choosing at any one moment.”

Goor said the only real issue is this: “Is there potential for holiness, love and committed relationships between two people of the same sex? Clearly, there are attempts in Reform and Conservative Judaism to recognize that they too are created in God’s image.

“In Jewish tradition, we live in dialogue in each generation between the ancient text and our lives,” Goor said. “The text itself is never a clear, black-and-white statement.”

Goor said he is convinced that the majority of Reform rabbis are leaning toward approval of same-sex ceremonies for gay couples, and he has performed such ceremonies as an associate rabbi at Temple Judea. Those rites have been away from the temple--but only because no one requested them at the synagogue, he said.

“The policy of this synagogue has always been complete freedom for the rabbis to perform whatever ceremonies they choose,” he said.

More significant than his rabbinical freedom, however, is providing recognition at life-cycle events, “sacred moments” from birth to death, within one’s own religious community, he said.

“A same-sex ceremony could be categorized as a new ritual,” Goor said. “So could, for instance, a ceremony that we do with someone who has lost a child” through miscarriage.

In his Rosh Hoshana and Yom Kippur sermons, Goor made no references to sexual orientations. In the first, Goor spoke of revitalizing worship, adult education and becoming a more caring congregation--standard subjects for pulpit exhortation. His Yom Kippur sermon Saturday urged members to fight times of despair with faith in God, in the ultimate goodness in others and in “the best within ourselves.”

He cautioned that faith does not mean that a believer can be hopeful at every moment and in every situation. “Faith does mean that when we struggle we can find perspective, we can look beyond the moment and see the opportunities for hope.”