Ethan Daniel Davidson wears many hats. He’s a folk singer, an author, a philanthropist and now, after receiving ordination last month, a rabbi. As a cowboy hat aficionado, he also literally wears many hats.

“The worst thing is new cowboy hats,” Davidson told eJewishPhilanthropy. “You have to make them look old.” He calls his process of aging hats “engineered authenticity.” It involves ashes, olive oil, red wine, turmeric and chewing tobacco. Also: a blowtorch. He learned the technique from a Hollywood costume designer.

Once his hat is sufficiently distressed, his youngest son helps adorn the crown with ribbons and feathers. For his interview earlier this month, Davidson’s ensemble also included a Japanese scarf and a vintage Levi’s T-shirt with tzitzit streaming out under the hem. It’s only been a few weeks since he received semicha, rabbinical ordination, and he’s still grasping what it means to carry the title “rabbi.”

Davidson’s origin story is one out of a comic book. Superman came to Earth from his destroyed home planet Krypton, where he was adopted by Kansas farmers, and Davidson came to the Jewish world from the Weather Underground. Born in 1969 to a 17-year-old member of the Marxist militant organization that was designated as a domestic terrorist group by the FBI, he was adopted by Bill Davidson, the Michigan-based businessman and owner of the NBA’s Detroit Pistons and the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning. 

It was his adoptive mother, Lynne Saperstein, who first realized his predilection toward Torah and, he says, sought to prevent it. That’s why she pulled him out of Detroit’s Hillel Day School. (She denies this.) 

Even though she grew up in Michigan, “her family were originally kind of stereotypical, Lower East Side Jews,” Davidson told eJP. “A tougher, street family,” they valued being Jewish, but also believed “we shouldn’t be too religious.”

So his path took a detour, with him attempting to follow in his father’s footsteps. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a talent for making any kind of money,” he said on the “The Avrum Rosensweig Show.” In college, he failed economics three times. At different points, he worked for his father’s basketball team and in an arena his father owned, but eventually, he needed to escape Detroit completely, feeling as if he was always seen as only his father’s son. 

“Nothing grows under the shade of a really big tree,” he said, so he spent much of the ‘90s living in Alaska, where he penned his first songs. Then, he toured the world, releasing albums through the now-defunct Times Beach Records, which he co-owned.

“I never thought I’d come back here,” he said, about moving back to Michigan. Before his father died in 2009, he asked him to take the helm of his eponymous foun­da­tion, which has a deep focus on Jewish education, funding initiatives such as Sefaria, the Shalom Hartman Institute and the Hadar Institute. “He hasn’t been in the office in a long time. I guess mostly because he’s dead, but his name’s on the door, and we keep waiting for him to show up.”

A line can be drawn directly from Davidson’s work at the foundation, where he serves as treasurer and chair of the grants committee, and the payot now hanging down his temples. “I made a commitment to deepen my Jewish literacy, my Jewish knowledge in service of his philanthropy,” Davidson said. “If I’m going to make these decisions around Jewish identity, Jewish education, then I need to be as Jewishly educated and as traditionally literate as I can be.”

Over more than a decade and a half, he studied with leaders across the religious spectrum, including Rabbi Amichau Lau-Lavie, founder of LabShul; Lau-Lavie’s brother, Rabbi Binyamin Lau, head of the 929 Bible Project; Rabbi Asher Lopatin, the leader of Kehillat Etz Chayim; and Rabbi Benay Lappe, the rosh yeshiva at Svara, which strives to empower queer and trans people through Torah study. Davidson also studied philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary for a year in New York and released two books based on his Torah studies. Over the years, the topic of receiving semicha arose numerous times, but it was Lappe, who was based in Chicago, whose pitch landed.

“Well, I can’t come all the time to Chicago and go through some kind of program,” he remembered telling her.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “You’re already ‘doing rabbi.’ You just have to tell me if you want semicha.”

Realizing that others already looked to Davidson as a rabbi, she thought to herself, “This is exactly how Jewish leadership is meant to grow — organically,” she told eJP. “Many of the early sages whom we call ‘the rabbis’ were never actually ordained and never held the title rabbi.” 

Davidson had studied. He had a “capacity to listen deeply, to guide with compassion, to model what it looks like to be a person shaped by the Jewish tradition,” she said. He just lacked the title. 

Even his Orthodox study partners were nudging him, with Lopatin sealing the deal when he asked Davidson, “What’s wrong with you? Tell her yes!”

When the big day came, Davidson debated whom to invite. Many of the people he studied with held conflicting beliefs. “I don’t want to make them uncomfortable,” he remembered thinking. “I’m going to be getting semichah from a female rabbi and that might not be a thing for them. At the end, I was like, ‘You know what? They’ll come or they’ll won’t come.’”

They came. “Every corner of the Detroit Jewish community” came to the ceremony, Lappe recalled. “They all came to celebrate Ethan and, I think, this important moment in the life of the entire Jewish community.”

Davidson still doesn’t quite look the part of a traditional rabbi. He doesn’t fit any stereotype of a philanthropist either. As someone born to a non-Jewish mom, he knows what it’s like to be excluded, which is one of the reasons he connects with others on the fringes. He doesn’t identify by sect. “I’m just Jewish,” he said. “That’s enough trouble.”

When he received semicha, there was an acceptance not just of him, but of everything he represented, he said: a Judaism that respects women’s leadership and LGBTQ spaces for learning. Less than a week later, he was called to the Torah for an aliyah at an Orthodox synagogue. The gabai referred to him by the title rabbi, something he wasn’t sure would happen.

“I’m still processing it and letting it sink in,” Davidson said. “The fact that I had so much support from people of all different parts of the Jewish continuum really made me feel good.”

His years of studies gave him a better appreciation for his philanthropy work, he said. “If you asked me, 15 or 20 years ago, what’s important about being Jewish, I don’t think I could answer that at all back then.”

Today, he doesn’t care if Jews are religious or not, but he wants to offer them the opportunity to study through day schools and camps. “I want to make Judaism unavoidable,” he said, because through studying the Torah, Jews learn to bring light into the world.

“Through a serious engagement in enhancing our own Jewish literacy and through a Jewish practice, we learn how to be human beings,” he said. “We learn how to treat other people as human beings. Not all Jews are successful at that.”

Lau-Lavie served as the av beit din, literally the father of the court, at Davidson’s semicha ceremony. To mark the occasion, Lau-Lavie gifted the new rabbi with an earring worn by Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, his drag alter ego. The Jewish world needs creative minds like Davidson, he said. “At this time of such sorrow, existential threats and moral ruptures for our people and as growing gaps grow between people everywhere, we need all hands on deck with creative leadership to help us heal, navigate towards moral repair, bridge building, love-driven justice, pluralism and peace.”

Today, Davidson’s family is proud of his accomplishments, too, both at the foundation and as a rabbi. He even suspects that his stepmother, who works with him at the foundation, tipped off eJP about his ordination. (Ed. note: She didn’t.) Now, his mom kvells at his accomplishment, denying that she pulled him from day school. 

“We can revise history,” he said, with a laugh. “I’ll revise the history with you.”