#  A Question of Membership 

 



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***Sherry Chayat Roshi, who identifies as both Jewish and as a Buddhist leader, asks Rabbi Sheldon Ezring if she and her family can become members at Syracuse’s historic Temple Concord.***



 

For Sherry Chayat, born into a Jewish family and now a leader of a Buddhist community, this sense of “being both” was never an issue. Within the Zen Buddhist community, she is known as Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi. When it was time for Chayat’s son to have his bar mitzvah, she and her husband scheduled a meeting with the rabbi of the local Reform synagogue to ask if their family could become members.

How might the rabbi respond? Does it matter that she is a religious leader in another tradition? What criteria might he use to decide? What does it mean to “be both”?

The complete, updated case is included in the volume [*Pluralism in Practice*](https://orbisbooks.com/products/9781626985483).