Rabbi Caryn Broitman is a wonderful mix of seeming contradictions. She is spirited yet self-contained, outspoken but soft-spoken, a calm bundle of energy. So it is fittingly ironic that Ms. Broitman, at her most vital in the role of rabbi for the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, is about to take a break.

Or so it might appear. But in fact, the aim of Rabbi Broitman’s upcoming sabbatical is not to take a break from her identity as rabbi; it is to further embrace it.

“It’s a common thing for congregational rabbis to have sabbaticals,” explains Ms. Broitman. “Rabbis are teachers. When you are teaching, you need to fill the well, so to speak. The congregation has the expectation that the rabbi will do something to deepen his or her ability to be the spiritual leader of the community. Sabbatical comes from the Torah, from the Hebrew word for Sabbath. In the Torah, the land itself gets a Sabbath every seven years. That is the best way to guarantee a good harvest the other years.”

This is the rabbi’s seventh year at the Hebrew Center. It is time for her Sabbath.

There is no doctrinal expectation of what a rabbi does on sabbatical, as long as the goal of this time away is to help them be better rabbis when they return. Some of her colleagues have used sabbaticals for meditation retreats in nature, but that’s not the direction Rabbi Broitman is going. “My family is renting an apartment in Jerusalem,” she says.

“Being in Jerusalem for five months, being in a Hebrew-speaking environment, just the whole cultural and religious experience of living in Israel is a very great opportunity for me. And in addition, I’ll be taking classes there (at Hebrew University and the Hartman Institute) from some of the world’s greatest teachers on Judaism. I’m not going with a particular academic goal . . . I just want to live a really full Jewish life. In Judaism, there’s so much to learn, there’s never a point where you reach a place and you can stop. I feel incredibly grateful and blessed to be in a congregation who values the kind of rabbi I want to be, so I don’t take for granted that so many people are supportive of what I’m doing.”

This will not be her first trip to Israel, or even her longest one. Having grown up in the Boston area, Ms. Broitman matriculated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, and after working in a congregation there for five years, she went to Israel for a year when her husband, Rabbi Brian Walt, took his own sabbatical to the holy land. While there, she got a fellowship at Hebrew University.

“That was a really important time for me as a rabbi, because living in that kind of intensive Jewish environment, there’s a depth of Jewish thinking and knowledge you get that is very hard to get in any other place. I want to be the rabbi who is always learning, who has something of substance to offer all the time, and to do that, I have to take real time for my own lifelong Jewish education. I’m optimistic that it’s going to be just as important this time.”

Although she loves Israel, the rabbi is also clearheaded in her critique of it. “I’m not happy the way in Israel, so-called church and state are fused. The government hands over issues to a particular orthodox sector, so it ends up being less pluralistic than I would like, so you end up with issues like ‘women can’t have prayer circles at the Wailing Wall.’ There are lots of Israelis and aspects of Israeli society working toward a more pluralistic interpretation of the religious issues.” (The rabbi herself, like the Hebrew Center, follows Reconstructionism, a modern, progressive movement within Judaism, considered heretical by the Orthodoxy.)

She will leave for Jerusalem on Dec. 30, returning to the Island at the end of May. With her will be her 12-year-old daughter, Galya, and her husband. “Galya speaks some Hebrew so it will be a challenge for her, but she’s excited,” says the rabbi. Rabbi Walt has been writing and speaking on human-rights issues, which he will continue during the time in Jerusalem. Their son Ben is already in Israel, where he has been living for the past two years; he will be marrying an Israeli woman near the end of the rabbi’s time there.

With the help of modern technology, Rabbi Broitman will stay in touch with her congregation. “We’re installing video conferencing stuff over the next few months in the new Harriet Freedberg Learning Center. I will be connecting with the Hebrew School, with the board, a couple of times each over the course of the sabbatical. I’ll be letting people know what I’m doing, sharing some of what it’s like living in Israel. It will be nice with the kids (in Hebrew School), to be able to share photos and impressions about what it’s like to live in Israel.”

How will the congregation manage without a rabbi for five months? The same way they did for more than 60 years before Rabbi Broitman arrived. Members of the congregation will lead services and discussions. “It makes a lot of sense in our context, because I was the first full-time rabbi, and the congregation was doing this before I came. We have so much interesting life experience collected in our congregation, and this is a great opportunity for people to learn from each other,” she says.

She has other duties besides leading services, but the structure of the synagogue ensures smooth functioning during her absence. She shares her leadership position with the president of the Hebrew Center, Tamara Hersh; they work together to guide all facets of the center, from programming to administration. “We have committees — for education, for services and holidays, for social action. I’m a part of those committees. I also do a lot of pastoral counseling. And a lot of my role is education,” she says.

Nicole Cabot, principal of the Hebrew School, will keep things moving on that front. There are about 30 students in the school, and there are also adult education classes. Ms. Cabot is likewise active on the social action committee, whose work ranges from educational (presenting the Israeli-Palestinian negotiation panel) to practical (drives for the Island Food Pantry).

Rabbi Broitman will be honored tonight in a send-off celebration at the Hebrew Center’s Hanukkah party tonight. She is excited not only about her trip, but about her eventual return, and what she can bring back with her. “Hopefully we’ll get enough excitement generated that we’ll be able to take another congregational trip to Israel. We took one two years ago. I’d like to do that again. There were only 15 people, it wasn’t a lot — but our sign-up time was during the Lebanon war, so it was amazing that we were able to get people to go while other congregations were canceling their trips.”