Throughout American history, the number of blind rabbis serving in Congress has remained steady at zero. In a cluttered campaign office next to the Naturoll sushi takeout in Haworth, New Jersey, Dennis Shulman is trying to change that. Shulman, who is fifty-eight, has a snowy beard and a sunny disposition. “I’m going down to Atlantic City later today to meet with the building-trades guys, and I love them,” he said the other day, surrounded by a roomful of volunteers. “I don’t think of my life as the sacred and the profane. I just think of it as expanding my pulpit.”

Shulman grew up in a family of modest means in Worcester, Massachusetts. When he was five, he received a diagnosis of bilateral optic atrophy, a nerve disorder that gradually diminished his sight until, about a decade later, he was totally blind. Nevertheless, through high school he worked afternoons and summers at a toy factory. “I wrapped up little plastic brooms and little pans, so little girls would grow up to be housewives,” he said. “The guy who ran the factory was highly regarded at the national level, because he hired the handicapped. The only problem was that he paid minimum wage, eighty-five cents an hour, which was fine with me, but not with the thirty-five-year-old working next to me.”

Shulman graduated from Brandeis in 1972, and four years later he got a doctorate in clinical psychology from Harvard. His wife, Pam, was in medical school in New York, and eventually they set up practices in the city, hers as an obstetrician and his as a therapist to adults and couples. In 1981, they moved to New Jersey, where they raised two daughters, one of whom now works in Texas politics. “When I was in college, I thought I was going to be a rabbi when I grew up, but I had a spiritual crisis in my freshman year, when my high-school girlfriend died of leukemia,” Shulman said. “But the feeling never disappeared, and about ten or fifteen years ago I started giving lectures to psychoanalysts about Bible stories, starting with Abraham and Isaac. My friends could see before I could that I was heading back to my old ambition.” Ordained in 2003, Shulman conducts services every Saturday before a small congregation in the town of Alpine.

Even with two careers, he was restless. While teaching a course on the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, he became haunted by Heschel’s remark “To speak about God and remain silent on Vietnam is blasphemous.” “I read that and said, ‘Oh, shit, I have to run for office,’ ” Shulman recalled. “Besides, my wife was sick of me almost throwing my shoe at the television.”

Shulman, a Democrat, is running in New Jersey’s Fifth Congressional District, which includes such suburbs as Ridgewood and Tenafly, in Bergen County, and some rural communities along the Pennsylvania border. Since 2002, the incumbent has been Scott Garrett, a Republican with the most conservative voting record of any member of the House from the Northeast. “He’s a Neanderthal,” Shulman said. (Garrett declined to comment.)

Starting as an unknown in the district, Shulman won sixty-one per cent of the vote in the June primary against two candidates, Camille Abate and Roger Bacon. (“My favorite headline from the primary was ‘BLIND RABBI’S OPPONENT IS BACON,’ ” Shulman said.) Like New Jersey as a whole, the district has been leaning Democratic in recent years, but in 2006 Garrett won with fifty-five per cent of the vote. Still, the Congressional Quarterly has upgraded Shulman’s chances, changing the district’s rating from “Safe Republican” to “Republican Favored.” Yet getting attention from the New York media for a corner of New Jersey is difficult. “The people in my district know what Mike Bloomberg eats for breakfast, but they don’t know Garrett’s voting record,” Shulman said.

Shulman makes few concessions to his blindness; he uses a device that instantly translates Web sites and e-mail into Braille and audio. And he recognizes that the novelty of his candidacy helps draw attention. There has never been a rabbi in Congress, and its last blind members left office in 1941. Not long ago, Shulman received an encouraging phone call from David Paterson, the governor of New York, who is also visually impaired. “We agreed that there should be a conspiracy by the blind to take over all levels of government,” Shulman said. ♦