From reverend to rabbi: a post Oct 7 journey

For Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Brooklyn, the Hamas attack changed her life in a unique way. It led Levy-Lyons to quit her role as spiritual leader of the First Unitarian Congregational Society after a dozen successful years there. She’s now focusing on studying to become a rabbi.

Levy-Lyons is Jewish, something she discovered only in her 20s, when a cousin let the family secret slip. It was something her parents had worked hard to deny. Her father had changed the family’s last name. Her family lived as so many do, as American atheists.

Leaving Unitarianism is a big step; her adult life has been bound to Unitarianism since she was ordained a minister in 2007. Levy-Lyons met her husband, Jeff Lyons, when she was interning in her first pulpit, and he was on that congregation’s board. They bonded over their shared Jewish heritage, which neither, at the time, was involved with. It was when they married, also in 2007, that she reclaimed her family’s original and unmistakably Jewish last name: Levy.

Levy-Lyons is soft-spoken in person. But on the pulpit at the Brooklyn Heights congregation, when she gave well-written sermons that doubled as social commentary (I attended a few), she was a powerful figure.

Many rabbis have struggled with how to navigate the strong — at times conflicting — views of their congregants about the war in Gaza. But for Levy-Lyons, it has been a life-changing crisis.

After the war began, members of her left-leaning Unitarian congregation pressed her to issue a statement condemning Israel without qualification for the deaths in Gaza caused by its war against Hamas.

She just couldn’t do it, she said in an interview. As a Jew, she sees the war in a more nuanced way than many of her congregants, she said. She also found herself suddenly feeling isolated from the progressive left, of which she has long counted herself a part.