A Cultural Evolution

While female rabbis have become more normalized in recent decades, when Caryn Aviv wanted to be one in the 1990s, the Jewish community wasn’t ready for an openly queer female rabbi.

Though Caryn had come out to her family, if she wanted to become a rabbi, she would need to remain in the closet. 

“That seems antithetical to the character-building integrity you need to be a rabbi,” she says.

So, she went to graduate school instead, earned a Ph.D. in sociology, and began teaching Jewish studies and culture at the University of Denver and later at CU Boulder. 

Caryn says her feelings of isolation and fear for the Jewish LGBTQ+ community led to her first book project, “Queer Jews” in 2002, which was about being queer and Jewish and not wanting to split those identities. “It’s really about wanting to transform the Jewish community from within so we could fully show up as ourselves and be welcomed,” she says. 

Since then, the Jewish world has evolved. Caryn says being queer is currently not a big deal in many progressive, liberal Jewish spaces, and it’s changing within the Orthodox world as well. “That’s the product of many thousands of people forming a movement and changing the culture,” she attests.

This evolution led Caryn back to becoming a rabbi, especially after she discovered she loved teaching, but not the politics of university life. In 2013, she started working at Judaism Your Way, an independent Colorado organization focused on providing inclusive, accessible, and meaningful Jewish experiences, and she applied to rabbinical school shortly after. 

To Caryn, being a rabbi means walking people through life transitions and helping them come to terms with their spirituality. “I get to help people soften and relax their tightness around Judaism as an ancestral tradition,” she says. “I know that what I do has an influence on what Judaism will look like in the future, and I get to be part of something larger and deeply sacred.”

Caryn also noted a common character trait in many Jews she met: what she calls “a hot mess of anxiety.” In a talk at the Boulder Jewish Community Center, she told the crowd they were not alone. She also released her latest book, “Unlearning Jewish Anxiety: How to Live with More Joy and Less Suffering,” describing Jewish anxiety as learned behavior from a history of society’s anti-Jewish contempt, persecution, and targeting.

Caryn says she feels a crossover in being a woman, being gay, and also being a Jew. “If you walk around as who you are, and your identity is hated by people in the community, that affects your sense of safety in the world. The constant fear is exhausting.”

When an anti-LGBTQ+-motivated mass shooting occurred at Club Q in Colorado Springs in 2022, Caryn felt the distress from queer communities. More recently, there was a Boulder hate crime attack in 2025, when a man targeted a demonstration advocating for Israeli hostages at the Pearl Street Mall. Caryn personally knew several people who were injured. “Violence is a manifestation of contempt and disgust and hatred, and it’s meant to terrorize us,” she says. 

As fear manifests into anxiety, it can often lead to unhealthy distraction habits, from obsessive doom-scrolling of news events to overeating or shopping. In her book, Caryn writes that people can choose either to let anxiety run their lives or to take a path she calls “kindfulness,” which involves taking small self-care actions and recognizing the good around them. She says it becomes easier with practice.

Caryn hopes to provide keys to managing Jewish anxiety through her book and a safe space through her organization, Judaism Your Way, which offers opportunities for non-judgmental, modern Jewish engagement for people regardless of background, identity, or level of observance. They offer in-person events in Denver as well as online events open to anyone, anywhere.

“We can’t change the contempt people have in the world. But we can change how we respond,” she states. “Would you rather doomscroll bad news or go marvel at the beauty of a daffodil? I’m gonna choose the daffodil.”

Caryn’s book “Unlearning Jewish Anxiety: How to Live with More Joy and Less Suffering” is out now. In-person and online events can be found at judaismyourway.org.