To celebrate his tenure, Beth El is planning a weekend of festivities beginning May 30, after which Associate Rabbi Steven Schwartz will take over. But first comes Passover, which Beth El will celebrate with two services tomorrow, at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.
As Loeb reflected this week on the holiday, freedom and retirement, the phone calls and messages arriving in his book-lined office at Beth El never ceased. "It's a stressful life when you've got a synagogue of 1,700 families, and an awful lot of very urgent things happen," he said. There are eulogies to write, the bereaved to comfort, births, weddings and other milestones.
"I'm certainly not a slave," he continued, "nor does becoming retired make me a free man. ... But I do know there were parts of my own abilities, things I could do that I think would be a great privilege to do now, that I was unable to do before."
He hopes to use his time to teach and explore volunteer work at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Baltimore, offering encouragement and support "to people who have given parts of their life up for all of us," he said.
"I never served in the Army. It seems to me I owe it to give something back to our country," he said.
Reading books and traveling are also on his list: "I'll be able to do that without having to worry about a holiday or a wedding or a bar mitzvah," he said.
After three decades of spiritual challenge and change in the community, Loeb said, he finds "much to be encouraged by."
There are more people studying Judaism than ever before, he believes - more rabbinical schools, more students and adults in Judaic studies. "Spirituality is a very serious matter for a lot more people than ever before," he said.
There are also more opportunities for young people to live and study abroad, he said, where they can "begin to take a measure of the things that unite the human family. To have a universalistic view of humanity is still the most wonderful kind of antidote to fanaticism and racism."
He also sees a Jewish movement that must embrace change. "The forms of Judaism of the past generation are slowly fading. That's because that generation is leaving us. New forms will emerge." He leaves content with that, too.
But he says he does worry about larger issues that affect society as a whole: alienation, conflict and poverty; how we use our freedom, or fail to use it, to address our common problems.
