The rabbi favors pads and a big stick

Fridays in the fall are unusually busy for Liza Stern.

In the evenings, she wields words of wisdom, welcoming the Sabbath as rabbi of Temple Eitz Chayim in Cambridge.

In the mornings, she wields a stick, fending off foes as right wing for a champion hockey team in Concord.

Stern sees nothing strange about going from leading prayers to slapping pucks. In fact, she thinks it makes perfect sense.

"It's rare for me now to teach, or give a sermon, where in some way, I'm not referencing hockey," said Stern, who was interim rabbi at Lexington's Temple Isaiah in the late 1990s.

"There we are all on the ice, trying to move in the same direction. It ends up being a metaphor for what we're trying to accomplish as a congregation. Even if you can't actually see that which is supporting you, you have faith that it's there."

Stern, 50, began ice skating about five years ago, when she brought one of her five children to an ice-skating birthday party. After hobbling around on her rented skates, clutching at the rails of the rink, she told herself, "I can do this."

For the first year, she skated every day, either alone or with friends, and after a year, she described herself as afflicted with "adult-onset skating addiction."

One afternoon, as she was lacing up her skates, Stern saw a group of young women entering the rink in complete hockey regalia. She looked at them, she said, and thought, "Wow. That's really cool!"

"I'd gotten to a point in my life where I started hearing a little voice saying, 'You can do that' or 'I'd like to try that,' " Stern said. "I began asking around about women's hockey [and] eventually someone knew of a team called Mothers on Edge. I became completely entranced by the idea."

For quite a while, Stern felt more comfortable keeping her identity as a rabbi from most of her teammates and her hockey life under wraps from her congregation. Eventually, however, she broke her silence.

"In the locker room before last season's championship game," Stern said, "Sonya Keene, our captain, came to me and said, 'Liza, will you offer a prayer?' There we were, all suited up in our shoulder pads and kneepads. Everyone bowed their heads and I, on behalf of us, said a spontaneous, heartfelt prayer," part of it in Hebrew.

"It was a funny moment. I felt totally outed right there in the locker room. If anyone hadn't known beforehand, certainly they learned at that moment that I was a rabbi. But by then, nearly three years later, it was OK."

It's apparently OK with her congregation as well, which is 100 families and growing.

One Eitz Chayim member, Heidi Urich of Cambridge, even joined the Blue Crush at Stern's urging. "Liza is very inspirational on many fronts," Urich said, explaining how Stern enriches her sermons with anecdotes from everyday life.

Today Stern is a regular on the Blue Crush, which practices and plays at the Valley Sports Arena in West Concord. The team is this year's champion of the New England Women's Hockey League.

Her decision to join the team stunned her husband and fellow rabbi, Keith Stern, who presides at Temple Beth Avodah in Newton. "It's not like she . . . came from a hockey or even skating background," Stern said. "But Liza is so sure of herself and her decisions. I think I just said, 'Don't get hurt.' "

At 5-feet-3-inches, Stern attributes her hockey success to tenacity more than talent, sheepishly recalling a training clinic she took the summer before last at the Laura Stamm Ice Hockey Drill & Power Skating Camp.

"It was a humiliating experience. Not only was it coed, the mean age of the group was 18," she recalled. "The people my age were waiting on the bleachers for their kids."

Stern said one of the chief challenges of team playing wasn't physical but psychological: allowing herself to be aggressive.

"It took me a while to understand that someone is plowing into me just to get to the puck first," she said. "I'm aware that there's some instinct that I have a tiny microsecond of the accommodating female 'Oh, you go first,' but I've gotten better."

Not that Stern can completely suppress her rabbinical reflexes.

She recalls learning the hard way about "locker-room etiquette" when she approached a teammate whose husband had suffered a heart attack.

"I remember she looked at me like, 'Why are you asking about that? You don't know me. We just play hockey together.'

"I wasn't used to that, especially as a rabbi, where you kind of have permission to ask anybody anything about their lives," Stern said.

Since then she has come to relish relating to other women purely as teammates.

"We don't need to know about each other's kids or about each other's husbands," she said. "We're there to play hockey with the understanding that the link is our team."

Blue Crush members range in age from 38 to 58, and among them are a pediatric neuropsychologist, a car saleswoman, a stay-at-home mother, a lawyer, a postal worker, and an investment banker.

Stern talks about her team's championship victory over opponents who in some cases were young enough to be their daughters in equally down-to-earth terms.

"I was very aware in that championship game they were better than us," said Stern. "But we had something that they didn't have; it was as if we brought to our playing everything that we were besides ice hockey players. . . . We've all had babies. We get what it means to reach down inside of you and find stuff you didn't know you had.

"The game went into sudden death, and we won. It was like this sacred force."