It was love at first sight for Rabbi Michael Joseph and his wife, Debbie, when they came to Gainesville 21 years ago so Joseph could interview for a position as Temple Shir Shalom’s first full-time rabbi.

The Shir Shalom board was down to its final review of candidates, and Joseph had made the cut. They had been invited to Gainesville, and search committee members picked them up at the airport and took them around to meet various people before the Josephs were taken to Shir Shalom. They were smitten.

“We drove down that driveway into the backyard and saw those trees and the Spanish moss,” Joseph said. “I certainly felt it, and Debbie did too. This has got to be it. Let’s make this happen. So, from the beginning, Shir Shalom felt like the right place for us.”

Temple Shir Shalom on NW 8^th Avenue is in one of Gainesville’s tree-city communities. Two decades ago, it looked little different from any other building in the residential neighborhood. Over the decades, it has grown and improved inside and out, and Gainesville’s Reform Synagogue is a standout on the street.

Joseph will be retiring at the end of May, and the decision wasn’t easy for him. He has loved his time at Shir Shalom, especially its members.

“The congregation been very kind and understanding of me and my family,” Joseph said. “I have been allowed, encouraged, nurtured to grow here as a rabbi and to be myself here. I have felt very much accepted as who I am.

“This is my place. My other stops in the rabbinate were generally very happy and successful, but there’s a different feeling here: I could be who I was, and no pretending was necessary. It’s just a natural feeling for me that this was the place.”

So, why is he leaving if everything is so terrific? His reasons are two-fold.

“I knew I didn’t want to die at my desk and knew that, at some time, I was going to retire,” he said.

Then Joseph became a grandfather.

His 33-year-old son, Ben, and his wife, Cara Chayet, had their first child, Estelle Jane Joseph, on Feb. 15, 2023, and had their second daughter, June Phoebe Joseph, this year on Feb.3

His daughter Edie, 35, and her wife, Michelle Lewin, hope to have a child soon.

All the family was in New York while Joseph and his wife were in Gainesville. With grandchildren part of the picture, distance mattered, and something needed to change. Joseph submitted his letter of resignation.

Debbie has already taken up residence in South Orange, New Jersey, a quick train ride from Manhattan and all its delights, including the grandchildren. Joseph will follow at the end of May.

Temple Shir Shalom is honoring its departing rabbi at a March 30 event celebrating its 40^th anniversary. In 1984, a few local families founded what became Gainesville’s Reform Judaism synagogue, espousing reform values of welcome, inclusion and Jewish education. Shir Shalom did not have a building, or even a rabbi, until 1988 when Bernie Zeldin, a Gainesville newcomer, became the semi-official “lay rabbi” because of his Jewish learning and his experience with young congregations around the country.

In 1989, Temple Shir Shalom acquired the building that is still its home and, 10 years later, brought in Rabbi Earl Jordan on a part-time basis. When Jordan retired in 2004, temple leaders decided it was time for a full-time rabbi, and that’s when Joseph entered the picture.

Joseph’s route to the Reform rabbinate wasn’t direct. He graduated from Yale University in 1980 with a Near Eastern Languages and Literature degree. He moved to Boston then because “most of my friends were moving there and because I wanted to be a chef.”

In Boston, while working as a chef, Joseph found, “if you’re halfway smart and come in sober every morning, you can move up the ladder very quickly.” 

But after moving to San Francisco, he realized that although he liked being a chef, he didn’t like it enough to make a career of it. And that’s when he began to think of being a rabbi.

Joseph said he grew up in a committed Reform Jewish household, and in the end, being a rabbi “made a lot of sense.”

He enrolled in Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where the first year of studies is spent in Israel, essentially learning Hebrew. That’s where he met Debbie. He was ordained as a rabbi in 1989.

He made a few rabbinical stops along the way before finding his place at Shir Shalom in Gainesville. As he mulled over the possibility of his future retirement, he began to give some thought to the kind of legacy he wanted to leave the congregation. Then, in early 2020, COVID-19 hit and, in a way, it decided things for him.  

“Suddenly, there was no time to think,” he said. “We all had to figure out on the fly how to retain or rebuild a community without personal connection. And we had never done that before. I had never been on a Zoom call, there was no prescription, no user manual. Kind of every person for themselves. It was nerve-wracking but also very exciting,” Joseph said.

“[I] felt I was lucky because technology didn’t frighten me. For someone my age, I’m pretty good with all that. That wasn’t the obstacle. It was figuring out how to use it. 

Today, under Joseph, Shir Shalom still makes use of the tools used during COVID-19.

“The funny thing is I am going to remember Covid as a kind of golden age because it was calling for everything I had … It was a job we had to do, and it was clearly very important to people and it was a very alive feeling,” he said  

Joseph is leaving with mixed feelings. He will miss his Shir Shalom family and especially the congregation’s general fondness for learning.

“Even though not everyone is directly associated with the University of Florida, we are in an environment where people understand and appreciate learning,” he said. “They like to learn, and they know how to learn. There is a base level of understanding that learning a little more about anything is a good thing.”

That’s one of the things Shir Shalom’s past president, Marcia Storch, likes about Joseph.

“I believe he is a scholar who has taught us a lot of things over the years he has been here,” he said.

Storch also highlights Joseph’s hobby as a photographer and his habit of sending out notecards with his photos to congregants regularly. Joseph did the naming ceremony for her grandson, who is about to turn nine, “and he sends him a birthday card with one of his photos every year.

“It’s nice to be remembered, and that’s something he does. The rabbi remembers people in good times and bad times,” Storch said.