Secular Pursuits

In the scene of a car wreck, an intensely focused paramedic strapped a woman to an ambulance board and checked her vital signs. Not quite herself, she looked straight at him--and asked if he could help plan her son’s bar mitzvah.

It wasn’t such a strange request, really. When he is not a volunteer emergency medical technician for the Fire Department, Douglas Krantz is rabbi for Congregation B’nai Yisrael in the same small town of Armonk, N.Y., north of New York City.

During a recent visit to Los Angeles, he met with students in a Hebrew Union College course called “The Rabbi and the Hospital.” Professor William Cutter invited Krantz to describe his dual work life to the students, partly to show how the role of religious leaders is changing.

“These are times of shrinking and expanding opportunities for clergy,” Cutter says. Many denominations have been losing members for decades, which has cut down on the need for clergy to lead congregations. At the same time, perhaps because of the change, rabbis, priests, ministers and imams are more likely to build careers that are separate from congregational life or to moonlight just for the change of pace.

Spiritual counseling for hospitals, prisons and the police force is one growing field. “Industrial chaplains” are a newer addition.

The Rev. Andre Williams just took a staff job as chaplain for Allied Automotive, a Los Angeles trucking company.

“If a driver is stressed or depressed, he can come to me and just open up,” Williams says. “I’m going to visit with one office worker’s daughter this week.” He takes care of personal problems and leaves job-related troubles to the union. Williams has had at least two jobs for many years--he is a minister at the House of Refuge Church in Los Angeles and used to work as a chaplain at UCLA and King-Drew medical centers.

“There are definitely more jobs in chaplaincy work than in congregations,” says the Rev. David Myler, a Presbyterian minister and director of the pastoral care department at UCLA Medical Center. This year, about 20 seminary students took part in his hospital training program--three times the number in his first group nine years ago.

Expanding membership in the National Assn. of Professional Chaplains also reflects the change. Open to all faiths, it has 3,300 members. Ten years ago, there were only about 1,000. Catholic and Jewish clergy have their own chaplaincy organizations, with 3,600 members in the Catholic group and about 35 members in the Jewish group, the newest of them all. It is only about 15 years old.

Some prominent clergy are far better known for their second careers. Bill Moyers is a Baptist minister who preached to President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, among other members of the First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., on the morning of the president’s second inauguration. Moyers, though, is better known as a prize-winning television journalist who has produced programs for public television about the Bible, world religions and mental health, among other subjects.

Father Ellwood Kaiser is a Catholic clergyman who lives with the Paulist priests at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Los Angeles, where he preaches. His full-time job, though, is to produce and direct feature movies. His credits include “Romero,” starring Raul Julia as Oscar Romero, the Salvadorean archbishop and social activist; and “Entertaining Angels,” with Moira Kelly as Dorothy Day, who founded Catholic Worker shelters for the homeless.

Rabbi Krantz is like none of the above. When he is a firefighter, he is part of the emergency medical team, not the chaplain on the scene. While he gives the department about 400 hours each year, he ministers to his congregation full time.

“Doug Krantz is at the outer extreme,” Cutter says.

Not even Krantz realized how unusual his life would be when he volunteered with the Fire Department 12 years ago.

“At first it was a fantasy,” he says. “I just wanted to ride the red trucks. It can be a great break in the middle of the afternoon.”

Now, the trim, athletic-looking Krantz finds it harder to tell the differences between the two jobs. Both of them can be intensely personal at times.

“It is very intimate to trample through someone’s burning house in the middle of the night,” he says. “You see the children’s pictures on the refrigerator door, a bottle of wine on the counter. Sometimes I have to stand on a bed to get to the fire.”

Both presume his undivided attention. The fire pager goes off during wedding rehearsals and staff meetings at the temple, and dinner parties at home with prominent members of the Reform Jewish movement. The only time it doesn’t interrupt things is Friday nights, when he turns it off during Shabbat services.

The town sends out about 700 fire alarms every year. Krantz answers about half of them, not always on purpose. One night he was headed to a Hanukkah celebration at the temple. He decided to ignore the pager’s blast, but the accident turned out to be right in front of the temple.

A fire call during a bar mitzvah rehearsal once cost him a member of the congregation.

“I told the family I’d have to reschedule the rehearsal,” he says. “It was a time of high tension for them, and my leaving didn’t help.” They survived the upset, but a friend complained on their behalf, then quit the temple.

Slowly, temple members got used to the once-startling sight of men in fire gear standing in the rabbi’s office. Just visiting.

“The relationships between firefighters become extraordinarily close,” Krantz says. “You learn what faith is all about, working together.” He describes putting out potentially explosive fires, where men form a circle and move toward the flame, shoulder to shoulder. “Faith is not vertical, it’s horizontal,” he says. “It’s not a series of abstractions. It’s in your everyday life.”

Four members of the congregation have joined the Fire Department volunteers lately. His family goes with him on some calls, too.

“Initially there were problems for my wife, Joan. When the pager goes off in the middle of the night, it can wake the dead,” Krantz says.

In some ways, the whole town had to adjust to Krantz’s fire chasing. Just the sight of him used to send shivers down some Armonk spines.

“My first time out to a fire,” he says, “a Catholic woman who’d been to a bar mitzvah at the temple saw me and shrieked: ‘My God, am I dying? What’s he doing here?’ ”

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In Seattle, Rabbi James Mirel spends 1,000 hours each year leading the Mazel Tones, a klezmer band he founded 20 years ago. The group plays the pop-instrumental sound developed by Eastern European Jews. Eighty percent of the band’s performances are at Jewish weddings and bar mitzvahs, including in Mirel’s own Temple B’nai Torah in Mercer Island, outside Seattle.

Music is a way of attracting the partygoers to his first love, Mirel says.

“I run into people who don’t belong to a congregation, and I say, ‘Come to our temple.’ They can relate to me more easily as a musician than a rabbi. There isn’t the same intimidation factor.”

Islamic imams, Muslim prayer leaders, are more likely than most American clergy to hold two careers. They are elected to their position by the congregation, and, while it is a full-time job, not every community can afford to pay a salary.

Saadiq Saafir is the owner of the Golden Needle, a small department store in South Los Angeles, but he is also the prayer leader for the Majid Ibaadillah in the Crenshaw District.

“We are a very low-income community,” he says of his mosque, which has 300 members. “There isn’t enough money to support an imam.” At the mosque, he provides religious instruction, presides at prayer services, weddings and funerals, and counsels congregation members.

For four hours each day, Saafir is at his store. He sees the work as an extension of his first commitment. In some ways the two overlap. Twice each week, he gives away free loaves of bread donated to the store by local bakeries and distributed by an interfaith religious group. And there is free, used clothing on display.

“We also try to keep down our prices on the new items,” says Saafir, a tall man with graying hair and a gentle manner.

As another way of combining his religious values and his business career, he hires people with prison records as well as new converts to Islam to work in the store.

“I wanted to establish opportunities for them,” he explains.

In the store, the one public expression of his Muslim faith is a booklet and several tapes. He wrote the booklet, “K-Day: The Day That Changed Los Angeles,” after the 1992 verdict in the police beating of Rodney King and the riots that followed. In it, Saafir points out examples of racism in America and offers business solutions, such as hiring African American contractors to do construction work in predominantly black neighborhoods.

His pamphlet quotes the Koran, but Saafir does not believe the small shop display tells his customers very much about him.

“People know who we are,” he says, “by the way we treat them, by our etiquette.”