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By FRANCES BISHOFF
q Rappahannock Newt Staff Writer
WOODVILLE — Some might view her as radical, others as an individual who shakes up the status quo. However, she is perceived, Carla Theodore is most definitely a person who has been breaking down society’s barriers all of her life.
Unusual achievements appear to be normal for Ms. Theodore and most recently Carla Theodore, at 69 years of age, became Rabbi Theodore as the culmination of one of the more exceptional achievements of her life.
Rabbi Theodore, or Rabbi Carla as she would rather be called, has just returned to her mountain home in Woodville after a sevenyear study program in New York City and Israel at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where, in May, she was ordained as a rabbi.
Rabbi Theodore took the first steps toward her goal in 1985, when she began studying at the seminary. At that point, she said, she was not positive about where she was going with her studies. “My family for at least three generations had had little knowledge of Jewish practices,” she said. “The idea had been in my mind in a romantic way, but it was a romantic notion based on total ignorance.”
Rabbi Theodore had gravitated toward the most liberal seminaries, thinking they would be her best opportunity for acceptance. Turned down by several, she ended up in the end being accepted by the most conservative seminary. “I had been told I was not a good candidate,” said Rabbi Theodore. “I didn’t know Hebrew, had no real knowledge of Jewish practice, nor do I have a Jewish background really. I couldn’t imagine that they would take me.”
“The rabbi who interviewed me at the Jewish Theological Seminary was the first to ask me what I had done with my life, and when I told him, he appeared to be impressed. He said that I should give it a try and go before the interviewing committee,” she recalled.
The upshot was that she was accepted and subsequently spent the next seven years at the seminary, with the exception of a year she spent studying in Israel.
After seven years of study, Rabbi Theodore said that she feels she learned a lot about one narrow stream of her religion. “Judaism is a huge umbrella and I could never learn it all, ” she said.
“A rabbi said to me once that Judaism is a civilization,” said Rabbi Theodore. “It would be impossible to learn all there is to know.”
Rabbi Theodore moved to Rappahannock with her three daughters in 1970 at which time she started the Nethers Community School at her Woodville home. The Nethers school had evolved out of her desire to begin a small intentional community, “people living together with a shared intention,” as she explained it.
“Prior to the commune movement of the sixties,” said Rabbi Theodore, “there were Utopian communities!. It was from that tradition that our community emerged.”
While living what some would describe a
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