“This is where I want to be; this is where I was meant to be… [This] is the life I want. A life of teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah. A life of observing the mitzvot more rigorously. A life of listening and studying and understanding better. A life as a full member of my community who can undertake all the mitzvot. A life as a Jew” (Photos: One Click Studio, personal archives)

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udge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination will no doubt draw attention once again to the high court’s religious makeup. If he’s confirmed, Kavanaugh would become the nine-member court’s sixth Catholic, alongside three Jews — notable for a predominantly Protestant country.

The only thing more eclectic would be the nomination of someone who’s spent time in both religious categories — someone like Rick Haselton. Formerly chief judge of the Oregon Court of Appeals, Haselton began life as a Catholic, but is now a prominent member of Portland’s growing frum community. He retired from the bench in 2015, so he’s not in the running for a seat — except, perhaps, at Portland’s rapidly growing Congregation Kesser Israel, which is now so packed it’s hard to find a place to sit on Shabbos morning.

But were he to join the high court, Haselton would find one familiar face: his former Yale Law School classmate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The two were good friends, and from similar backgrounds, both having been raised in modest circumstances by hardworking single mothers. They studied for exams together and partnered for trial court practice, but sharply parted ways on baseball, with Haselton rooting for the Boston Red Sox and South Bronx native Sotomayor a diehard Yankees fan.

Rick was born and raised in Albany, Oregon, a farming and mill town 70 miles south of Portland with a population then of 6,000 (it’s now eight times that size). He and his older sister Diane shared an idyllic childhood in the all-American town, a place where kids roamed free on their bikes and summers were spent picking berries and beans. They had a devoutly Catholic upbringing, with Rick even serving as an altar boy. Their grandmother fervently wished that Rick would enter the priesthood, but he was deterred by his interest in eventually marrying — and one other minor disqualification.

“I had a deep core belief in G-d, but the part about the religion’s founder never made any sense to me,” he recalls.

There were only a few Jewish families in Albany and Judaism wasn’t remotely on his radar, yet Rick remembers a few minor but consequential episodes that stuck with him. “For example, when Dodgers pitching ace Sandy Koufax didn’t play on Yom Kippur, I took note, and it kind of hooked me. I was a voracious reader during high school, and for some reason I chose to read contemporary historical novels about Israel, which affected me. And during the Six Day War, a Portland radio station gave updates every half hour, which it introduced by playing ‘Hava Nagilah.’ So there I was, a Catholic kid sitting in rural Oregon, listening to what I recognized as Israeli music.”

He would find more fateful connections when after high school he went off to prestigious Stanford University: Within his first few hours there he met Jeff Druckman and Erica Goldman, who were to become his lifelong friends and, ultimately, the catalysts for both his embrace of Yiddishkeit and his marriage. In his freshman year he enrolled in an Introduction to Judaism course, and found himself the only non-Jewish student attending. After earning his bachelor’s in political science, Rick applied to Oregon’s three law schools and, on a whim, to Harvard and Yale too.

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hen Yale accepted him, it was off to New Haven, Connecticut, where he had his first exposure to an ethnic mix of Italians, African-Americans, and Poles — a far cry from the rural Pacific Northwest. And on a campus where many students came from the families of America’s social and business elites, Rick got his first peek into “old money” Ivy League culture.

Yale’s academic preeminence brought Rick into contact with the American legal community’s best and brightest: storied teachers like Guido Calabresi and Grant Gilmore, and classmates like future Harvard Law dean Martha Minow and prominent Yale Law professor Stephen Carter. One of Rick’s faculty advisors was Professor Robert Bork —a decade before the famously bruising 1987 Senate confirmation battle that sent his Supreme Court nomination down to stinging defeat, coining the verb “borking” to mean unfairly torpedoing a nominee for public office through an organized campaign of vilification. Rick still smarts at the hyper-partisan savaging of his mentor.

“Even though his politics were not necessarily my politics,” the judge explains, “I liked him very, very much. He was incredibly bright and cared about his students. He was a very good man, and when his wife had a difficult illness, the care he gave her was incredibly impressive. If you want to vote against someone on policy grounds, fine, do it. But the treatment he was subjected to during his confirmation process was inexcusable.”

He contrasts the vetting of Robert Bork, who passed away in 2012, with that of his old friend Justice Sotomayor: “The person we saw during her confirmation process was who she is: tough and funny, very devoted to her family, full of passion and intelligence. Those people who felt that as a Latina woman she was an affirmative action choice for the Court just don’t get it. I’m very careful about how I use the term ‘brilliant’ — Professor Bork was one such person, my contracts professor Grant Gilmore was another, and Sonia is in that same ballpark.”

Dreaming Jewish After finishing law school, Rick toyed with beginning his career in Washington, D.C., but Oregon drew him back home. He clerked for Judge Alfred Goodwin on the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, then went into private practice in Portland, eventually becoming a litigation partner in one firm, specializing in complex civil cases and appeals.

Rick also developed a keen interest in pro bono work. While at Yale, he volunteered to represent inmates at the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, picking up a client of no small renown — G. Gordon Liddy, one of the infamous “White House Plumbers” during Watergate, who sued unsuccessfully to overturn his conviction on grounds of inadequate counsel.

Rick continued pro bono representation after returning to Portland, seeing it as a legacy from his own mother, Shirley, who had always given of her time and talents to help non-college-bound students. He often took on religious freedom cases, as when he defended Native American inmates’ rights to have a sweat lodge on prison grounds.

Rick also handled pro bono litigations on behalf of Jewish prisoners’ rights. The American Jewish Committee once called him about an inmate in Salem, Oregon, named George Gilbert, said to be slowly starving himself. Gilbert, a totally nonobservant Jewish New Yorker with alleged mob connections, had adopted kashrus as his one inviolable religious practice, owing perhaps to having an uncle who owned a kosher deli.

While on the lam evading attempted manslaughter and child endangerment charges, Gilbert subsisted on a kosher diet of sardines and the like. He was eventually apprehended six states away, and sentenced to state prison at Salem, where Jewish inmates dubbed their congregation “Beth Jericho,” a mischievous biblical allusion to the high prison walls. Once incarcerated, Gilbert refused to eat anything besides Saltines and kosher-certified peanut butter; he lost 90 pounds and had to be hospitalized in the prison infirmary. Rick sued the state, which settled by agreeing to give Gilbert a kosher airline meal for dinner and a potato for breakfast and lunch — properly wrapped for heating, of course.

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hen Salem’s Jewish inmates sued for a kosher Pesach Seder, Rick worked with the governor’s legal counsel, a Jewish woman, to persuade the prison’s warden to accommodate them. Ever the perfectly passive-aggressive public servant, the warden added the proviso that everyone would be served the same meal that night.

“So you can imagine,” Rick continues, “how the white supremacists and the black Muslims in prison there reacted to being served what they called ‘Jew food,’ like matzah balls and all the rest. There was essentially a riot in the mess hall.”

Rick’s old Stanford friends Jeff Druckman and Erica Goldman, who in the interim had gotten married and become religiously observant, also moved to Portland, where they reconnected with him. Indeed, Rick’s frequent meals at their home gave him his first taste of Jewish life. But when Rick joined Jeff and Erica for a meal in Succos 1987, along with Emily Simon, a well-known Oregon criminal defense attorney originally from back East, it would have lasting repercussions. Rick remembers the dinner-table exchange with the diminutive, fast-talking Emily like this:

“So, Rick, are you married?”

“No.”

“Have you ever thought of becoming Jewish?”

“Yes, actually, off and on for most of the last 20 years.”

“Rick, have I got the woman for you…”

That woman was Sura Rubenstein, religion editor for the state’s leading newspaper, the Oregonian. A vivacious Portland native and University of Chicago graduate in Germanic language and literature, Sura had filled the vacant position of “church editor” at the paper, although she requested that her job title be changed, noting that “church news by Rubenstein” didn’t quite have the right ring.

Before long, a courtship blossomed between Sura and Rick, who was then undergoing a conversion process with the cross-denominational Oregon Board of Rabbis. Then came the first of three eventual weddings: first Emily Simon officiated at a civil service, then, the following year, the second, presided over by a clergyman friend at their Reconstructionist congregation.

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n 1994 Governor Barbara Roberts appointed Haselton — who, at age 40, had 14 years in private practice, but no prior judicial experience — to a seat on the Oregon Court of Appeals, the state’s main appellate tribunal, which hears each year over 2,000 appeals from rulings by trial courts across the state. In the state judicial hierarchy, the Court of Appeals stands one level below Oregon’s court of last resort, the Supreme Court. The capstone to Rick’s judicial career came in 2012, when he became the Court’s chief judge.

Judge Haselton says each day he served on the bench was a blessing.  He says he “looked forward to coming to ‘work,’ not infrequently singing on the commute or as I entered chambers. Every day has been a dream, a lifelong dream, of serving Oregon and her people — realized anew.”

Tying the Knot — Again The year Rick Haselton first became Judge Haselton was also an auspicious one for Portland’s frum community: That’s when the local Orthodox shul, Kesser Israel, received a grant from Torah Umesorah to hire what may have been its first rabbi in its entire century-plus history. The little congregation on Meade Street in the old Jewish neighborhood in downtown Portland at that time rested entirely on the shoulders of four dedicated Jews — Morris Engelson, Isaac Frankel, Allen Levin and Michael Rosenberg — who kept things alive, but just barely. Although they usually managed to eke out a minyan on Shabbos morning, it was only at times like Simchas Torah and Purim that the shul showed any real signs of vibrancy.

As Rick tells it, Michael Rosenberg had learned that Torah Umesorah was providing funding for a rabbi in the small Jewish community of Eugene, Oregon, 110 miles south of Portland. He called up Rabbi Chaim Nosson (Nate) Segal, the organization’s director of community development, whose efforts have led to an Orthodox renaissance in communities across the United States, and said, “Eugene?! Portland!” Rabbi Segal ended up placing in Kesser Israel’s pulpit his own brother-in-law, Rabbi Leonard Oppenheimer, who, Rick adds, “is not only a great guy, but also a lawyer, electrical engineer, and a world-class chazzan to boot.”

Rick’s friends Jeff and Erica had joined Kesser, and eventually, Rick and Sura, who still belonged simultaneously to a Reconstructionist havurah and a Conservative congregation, followed them, becoming part of a very small but tight-knit group who lived in Portland’s newer Jewish section but walked nearly eight miles round-trip every Shabbos to and from the shul in the old neighborhood. Eventually, Rick underwent a two-year-long process of reconverting under the auspices of the Seattle Beis Din.

When it was over, one of the members of the beis din said to him, “Well, you know, you’ve got to get married.”

Rick replied innocently, “I am married.”

But the dayan persisted, “No, no. You’ve got to get married, and the sooner, the better.”

And so, Rick and Rabbi Oppenheimer drove straight back from Seattle and got to work on Wedding Number Three. Sura recalls being at the Portland JCC on that lazy July afternoon when Rick showed up and said, “How would you like to get married again?”

On short notice, a small crowd of the couple’s friends and fellow congregants assembled for a chuppah and wedding reception at the old shul building.

“It was built back in 1913,” Sura says. “There was no air conditioning, and this was one of the hottest days of the year, so everyone was shvitzing. The chuppah was held in the backyard, amid weeds and discarded toys and such, with one of the canopy’s poles being held by a guy in shorts. Let’s just say it was all very heimish.”

When the educational needs of Rabbi Oppenheimer’s children dictated a move to New York, Rabbi Kenneth and Aviel Brodkin came to town. Under their inspired leadership, Kesser relocated to the newer Jewish area, where it has burgeoned to the point of necessitating a $1.5 million expansion campaign, and the Maayan HaTorah day school, which now has over 100 students, was founded.

Another vital engine of communal growth has been the Portland Kollel, led by Rabbi Tzvi Fischer. Although humble in size, it’s an ever-percolating hub of community education and outreach to unaffiliated Portlanders, and serves as the base of operations for a very active NCSY chapter headed by the dynamic team of Meira Spivak and Rabbi Doovie and Aviva Jacoby. Rick and Sura proudly share that one past president of that chapter was their  own daughter, Malia, who is now serving her country as a captain in the United States Marine Corps.

Rick identifies the prime, albeit unheralded, mover in all of this as being Torah Umesorah’s Rabbi Segal, and also lauds Rabbi Avrohom David, who heads the Seattle Kollel, as a great supporter of Portland’s growth.

How Are We So Lucky?

In 2015, Judge Haselton marked 22 years on the court, making him, at the time, the longest-serving judge in the court’s history (although, he notes, he has since been surpassed by another judge, a father of ten children, many of them adopted from China, “so he’s probably going to need to go full tilt for a while”). After authoring some 1,000 opinions and assisting with 10,000 more, it was time to leave the bench — and without regrets, save one.

“I’ve done everything one can hope to do in the legal profession all the way up taking part in a case before the United States Supreme Court,” he reflects. “My only regret is not having stood at the podium to argue that case before the Court.”

But for Judge Haselton, retirement has simply meant having the newfound time to pursue broader vistas of intellectual and communal achievement. For one thing, his senior status enables him to continue hearing cases on a reduced schedule.

He’s also embarked on the quintessential Jewish journey known as Daf Yomi, in a daily shiur given by the rosh kollel, Rabbi Fischer, whom he calls “just an extraordinary man, both in terms of his personal qualities and as a teacher. The material we’re now covering in Daf Yomi seems especially arcane, yet Rabbi Fischer has the ability to move through it with both the horizontal drive we need to keep pace, while still providing the vertical depth and substance. He is the best teacher I’ve ever encountered anywhere.”

Of Rabbi Fischer, a Mir Yerushalayim alumnus who did shimush in halachah with Rav Yaakov Blau of the Eidah Hachareidis, Judge Haselton says “it’s like having Willie Mays play for your minor league team — except he keeps playing for it for ten years, and you wonder, ‘How did we get this lucky?’ ”

The judge’s background positions him well for helping to build bridges between the Orthodox community and the Jewish world at large. His first post in Jewish communal leadership was serving as president of Kesser Israel for two terms. Just recently, he was invited to join the board of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, and he’ll be its first clearly Orthodox member in many years, perhaps ever. And that, Judge Haselton observes, “is due to the contacts Rabbi Fischer and Rabbi Brodkin have forged with the broader community.”

In a speech this past July, the local federation president highlighted two major communal accomplishments of the past year: First, construction of a community mikveh, with the federation taking a leading role in the project, under the supervision of the Kollel and Rabbi Brodkin. And second, an initiative to save the Maayan HaTorah day school, which had been housed for several years in a local Conservative congregation but had received notice that it had to be out by the beginning of the coming school year. Amid this crisis, the Federation leadership lined up non-frum donors to underwrite a lease, with an option to buy, on another location for the school.

“These things,” Judge Haselton insists, “are a real credit to Rabbis Fischer and Brodkin and the Federation leadership.”

Although he is quick to attribute the community’s success to others, his own energy, wisdom and devotion have surely been vital too. Those are attributes that come through clearly in this excerpt from an essay Rick Haselton wrote for the Seattle Beis Din as part of his conversion process, later published in the Kesser Israel newsletter:

“This is where I want to be; this is where I was meant to be… [This] is the life I want. A life of teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah. A life of observing the mitzvot more rigorously. A life of listening and studying and understanding better. A life as a full member of my community who can undertake all the mitzvot.

“A life as a Jew.”

Haselton on Judges and Judging

I believe, by and large, in judicial restraint, and if someone were to ask me which current United States Supreme Court justice I find to be admirable as a judge and whose style would fit most closely with mine, it would be either Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Elena Kagan. They both seem to be people who, although principled, have the ability to work with their colleagues without staking out ideological and polarizing positions. I think that’s how judges should be, that we should not approach things ideologically. That sounds so clich?d, but it really doesn’t have to be.

To my mind, the judicial ideal is to approach cases without preconceived or predetermined views and work our way through them. I recently came across a wonderful quote from the legendary Justice Benjamin Cardozo in his book entitled The Nature of the Judicial Process:”[The judge] is not a knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.”

That so captures what our proper role is 

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 722)