Rabbi's new sportoffers cold, comfort

Fridays in fall are unusually busy for Liza Stern.

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

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

The 50-year-old Newton resident sees nothing strange about going from slapping pucks to leading prayers. 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. "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 began ice skating about five years ago, when she brought one of her five children to a birthday party at a rink in Newton. After hobbling around on her rented skates, clutching at the rails of the rink, she vowed to 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 dressed in hockey gear entering the rink. She looked at them 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."

So entranced that today she's a regular on the Blue Crush, winners of the 2004 New England Women's Hockey League Championship.

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 tall, 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. "We're colored shirts to one another on the ice. That's all. 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."

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."

In addition to games Friday mornings, Blue Crush practices twice a week. Its members range in age from 38 to 58, and among them are a pediatric neuropsychologist, a car saleswoman, a stay-at-home mom, a lawyer, a postal worker, and an investment banker.

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 knee pads. 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.

Sam Petuchowski says that Stern's being the temple's first hockey-playing rabbi "is perfectly consistent with her character."

Petuchowski, whose son was bar mitzvahed by Stern last year, said he admires "her campaign to teach us what being adult Jews is all about. . . . She's a very driven, spiritual leader."

Another Eitz Chayim member, Heidi Urich of Cambridge, 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. "She can talk about the decision to repaint her house as part of a high-holiday sermon and make it relevant. This year's talk had to do with taking the plunge to remove the old aluminum siding and not knowing what lay beneath."

Stern talks about her team's championship victory in the no-check league -- 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," she says. "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."

Stern's jersey number is 18, which represents chai, the Hebrew word for life.

"What other number would a rabbi have?" she said.

For information about the New England Women's Hockey League, visit www.newhl.com.