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In Rabbinic Identities/Rabbinic Crises, a special three-part series from the Identity/Crisis podcast, host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, speaks with six rabbis from Hartman’s Rabbinic Leadership Initiative. Together they explore what it means to be a rabbi: the solitary, the social, and the spiritual.

A Good Fit Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
David: I once intentionally sabotaged a job interview. I was interviewing at a congregation, which, at the time, was less progressive in the way that a girl could become a bat mitzvah at that shul. Specifically, women didn’t carry Torah scrolls, didn’t read from Torah scrolls, even in the context of a bat mitzvah.

I think if they were open to moving towards the modern wing of Modern Orthodoxy on some of those issues, I think I could have guided them in that process and worked with them in that process were it not for the fact that I was interviewing at that shul just a few months before my own daughter’s bat mitzvah. And I knew that were I to be hired at that congregation, just a few months in, we would need to figure out a way to celebrate our daughter’s bat mitzvah in the way that she had been raised to expect.

And so while I was being interviewed, it was clear to the committee interviewing me that I was coming from a more progressive Orthodox congregation that was more religiously diverse and there was some anxiety about that. And a woman on the committee interviewing me, said, but surely, you wouldn’t push any of these changes quickly. You know, you’re just open to a conversation over the long term about all of these issues.

And at that moment, I had this clear sense that the answer she wanted me to give was, oh, yeah, of course, like, I’m not pushing any agenda, I just want to guide the synagogue with lots of inputs in a process playing out over many, many months and perhaps years. But what I said instead was, well, actually, my daughter’s bat mitzvah is coming in just a few months, and if I move here, we’re going to have a very short amount of time to implement at least some of these changes so that she can celebrate her bat mitzvah in the way that we have always hoped that she would be able to celebrate it.

Ari Kaiman: There was a moment in the interview when I actually didn’t see it. My wife was there and she was standing in the back of the congregation and a child began to cry and the parent began to hustle the child out, and another congregant said, no, no, we want you to stay. We want you to be here. And that was the moment that my wife fell in love with the congregation. For me, it was just talking to people.

Yehuda: “A Good Fit,” or, expressed more painfully by someone else, “It’s not a good fit.” We all know those words from critical inflection points in our life, whether the untimely conclusion of an exciting job interview process or the heartbreaking end of a relationship. They are words that say a lot without saying much at all.

The process of discerning a good fit is complicated, as it is for most jobs and relationships, but consider the added drama when it comes to hiring a rabbi. After all, a rabbinic job is no ordinary job; a rabbi is expected to be a leader of a community that already exists, but a shaper of that very community. The community is hiring someone they expect will not just care for them, but make decisions over the years that will dictate how the congregation grows and changes. This is a complicated power dynamic: in a curious codependent that is sometimes hierarchical, and sometimes not, how do you assess over the course of a simple weekend whether it is actually going to work?

I have a good friend who owns a small business and he shared with me his wisdom once that any job candidate’s interview day is probably going to be their best day. On a rabbinic interview weekend, the rabbi is likely to wheel out their best sermon and probably their best suit, and the community is probably on their best behavior.

Even so, as David’s opening anecdote illustrated – it’s not just showing your best self, it’s also about testing the waters to make sure your expectations of one another are aligned. Ari’s story flipped the script a bit: sometimes, it is precisely the unscripted moments that help rabbis discover whether it is the right congregation for them. In both stories, I was taken by the fact that David and Ari’s discernment revolved around the consequences of the shidduch, the pairing, for their families, maybe even more than for themselves.

That’s part of the good fit, too; rabbinic jobs, like academic positions, tend to involve long-term relocations to where the jobs are. It can be hard at the outset of a career to visualize what your life is going to look like. And think about the leap of faith involved in making such a momentous decision that defines not just what your workday looks like, but what your whole family’s Jewish and personal life will consist of as well. After all, as with any enduring relationship, whether personal or professional, on the first date, or on the interview weekend, everyone is on their best behavior, but a lot has to work out, a lot of change and a lot of adaptation, for the other person or for the congregation to become to center of your life for the rest of your life. And for them, too, to feel the same way about you.

I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, and this is the episode two of Rabbinic Identities/Rabbinic Crises, a series from Identity/Crisis at the Shalom Hartman Institute that explores what it means to be a rabbi — the solitary, the social, and the spiritual.

David: Our shul in Chicago was located adjacent to the major gay neighborhood in Chicago. And there were a number of gay families and individuals who were really active members of the shul there from the beginning of my time there through to the end. And that was, you know, I had gay friends in college, but they weren’t out, at least not to me. And their friendship and seeing the really, like, passionate commitment they had to orthodoxy and to Torah and Mitzvot was really inspiring to me and challenging to me, I think, and is pushing me and has pushed me to change how I think about related issues.

Yehuda: David Wolkenfeld moved with his family to start a new position at Ohev Shalom in Washington, D.C. about a year ago. He came to Ohev after serving for a decade at Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel in Chicago, a decade in a neighborhood that significantly altered his outlook on the rabbinate and on those he was meant to serve. Most of all, though, those years imprinted on him the relationships with a particular group of people who he had to leave behind in order to meet a new community to whom he was going to have to be accountable.

David: Looking around the shul in my final weeks serving in Chicago and, you know, seeing, you know, 150 people in the shul. I knew all of their names. I knew the names of their children. I knew the parents and grandparents who had come to visit for Yamim Tovim. I had, you know, been at the funerals of many of their relatives. I had named a lot of the kids in the shul. And so it’s a huge amount of, like, institutional memory and connections, and you know, and I knew that, like, in a few weeks, it would be of very limited professional use to me to, to hold all those relationships.

And then, my first weeks in D. C., looking around the room and seeing these are strangers. We felt incredibly welcomed by the community, but these are strangers. I don’t know the parents. I don’t know the names of their kids. We don’t have any history. They don’t really have a reason to trust me, and, I knew that it would take time to build those relationships.

Yehuda: For Carey Brown, the transition to a new community brought more than the challenge of meeting new people. It required relocating from the United States to Canada, and the encounter with expressions of Jewishness (and other identities) that were deeply unfamiliar to her. Don’t let the proximity of Canada to America fool you! We are not the same, and our Jewishnesses are different too.

Carey: In Canada, reform Jews are very much the minority. Growing up in the U.S., in the Midwest, I almost didn’t know any Orthodox Jews, to be honest. The social policy of Canadian society and the government is so different than what some of the struggles are in the U.S. and it took maybe five or so years to kind of pull myself out of that American-lens. It was an adjustment. Canadian Jews are different.

I found myself, over time, really appreciating the difference and the distinction of what makes particularly Reform Canadian Jews, I really appreciate dedication to traditionalism, Yiddishkeit, Am Yisrael, but also modernity. I think some of the things that were harder to learn, or that took some adjustment, one of the big ones was actually patrilineal descent, that growing up in the Reform movement, starting my rabbinate in an assumption that someone who is descended patrilineally is a full part of the community. And Canadian Reform, kind of like the Israeli Reform movement, does take a more traditional line on that topic.

Ari: Every bar and bat mitzvah, before the bar and bat mitzvah, we put on our tallit together and I talk about the mitzvot. And I say, you know, Jewish people, we don’t think of them as a burden. They’re a blessing. They’re an embrace of love. And so I am wrapped up in our people and I’m wrapped up in our tradition and our story. And I’m getting to write this like little teeny line on the story.

Yehuda: Of course, rabbis are hardly the only individuals who have to acclimate themselves to a new community or who can struggle to figure out what they need from a community and what they have to offer in return.

Stephanie and I struggled with belonging to Jewish community early in our marriage. We got married very young and moved to a new city. We were part of the age demographic, which runs from 22 to at least 40, that generally does not belong to Jewish communal institutions, but we were observant Jews, and observant Jewish life really can’t operate in isolation. We were in transition from our Orthodox upbringings and looking for more egalitarian options, and it was really hard. You can’t simply decide to embrace a different ideology and not notice that there are all sorts of cultural and social trappings involved in communities that look different from the ones you came from and are going to feel uncomfortable.

It took relocating to D.C. for a year where a new independent minyan was sprouting up, and watching the way that a whole bunch of young people were building something that was taking care of their needs for us to realize that we had real needs of community as well, and that it was time to honor them, to take them seriously, and to find the community that could take care of us as well. That’s what we worked on when we moved back to Boston. We didn’t find a community; we founded that community.

There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging, amidst the sophistication and nuance we afford to our Jewish choices, that we human beings have basic anthropological needs for community, and that everything else is the trappings around those needs. Rabbis know this; they see it, daily, in the people they serve.

David: Most rabbinic work is behind the scenes, right? People see a drasha, they see a shiur, they see something on the bulletin, it’s like, you know, on the shul’s calendar, that the rabbi’s doing something and available for something, but the individual meetings are, like, that person knows. And then, and sometimes I have this sort of selfish feeling, oh, that was a, that seemed like it was helpful to that person. I hope they tell their friends, you know, like I hope word gets out that I was helpful to them in this moment.

Yehuda: It’s a good story when it works out. A person or a family needs something, pastoral support, a Hebrew school education for their kids, a social world, a place to say kaddish, and they know to look for the right congregation, and they know how to discern which kind of congregation is right for them, and how to show up, and how to belong.

Meanwhile for that to work you also need a congregation that can readily absorb that person or that family. This means, as Ron Wolfson has written, that everyone who works for the congregation or who volunteers there also has to exhibit a culture of welcoming. There are so many stories of individuals who get turned off right away by what they might experience as hostility or just some misunderstanding at a new community, and then their search starts again, or maybe they just give up.

And some people have no interest in even trying to join a Jewish community due to preconceived notions that there are no Jewish communities that are representative of their personal mode of Judaism. Our Jewish lives are no longer characterized by the expectation, culturally or otherwise, that we have to belong, as earlier eras of Jews experienced. Now, all of us need the serendipity of a good search for the right rabbi or the right institution, and the experience on the other end of feeling that that rabbi or that institution was searching for you too. Like the Midrash says about good pairings between loving partners, it’s a miracle that it can ever work.

Shortly after Stephanie and I started our congregation in Boston together with a few friends, in which we were solving for our needs by creating the congregation we wanted, we noticed something amazing. After the very first Shabbat that the congregation met, when 60 people unexpectedly showed up in response to a single email sent around from friends to their networks, we heard a similar refrain from a lot of different people, some version of, “I had a hard time being there because everyone else is friends with each other and I felt like an outsider.”

We were dumbfounded: none of us really knew each other, even those of us that were viewed as “insiders” because we had organized the minyan. I learned a lot from that experience. I learned that the default experience for many modern Jews is a sense of alienation. I don’t know if this is an expression of loneliness, or about fear. Maybe a little of it is a kind of unaware hubris in the belief that in order to belong you need the system to accommodate itself to you.

Rabbis are responsible for this dynamic in their institutions. For over a decade now, more and more synagogues and Hillels have been trying to break down these invisible boundaries between Jews who want community and the institutions that they see as inaccessible or inhospitable to them. If once upon a time the synagogue was the place to constitute Jewish community, now it might have to be the catalyst to create community even outside its doors. Carey Brown runs a program through Temple Sholom in Vancouver that brings together and engages young Jewish families on the East side of Vancouver, outside the walls, the real ones, and the imagined ones, of the congregation.

Carey: People really want to, they want to be able to do Jewish things, but they really want to meet other Jews. The Jewish institutions of Vancouver are all on one street, on Oak Street, in the middle of the city, but young families cannot afford to live anywhere near Oak Street. And so as people were moving further and further out, but the institutions were not as close by, we realized we really needed to bring the Jewish community out.

So we started to do pretty much monthly programs out in the community, mostly cultural, holiday-based programs as well, and it’s been remarkable. And a lot of people we know are looking for meaningful connection, and either aren’t sure where to look or how to start, or maybe have ideas about what synagogue is that are different from what we represent, so the end goal is to help them find a meaningful connection anywhere. It doesn’t have to be our shul.

Yehuda: There are a lot of reasons that many Jews take a while in their adult journeys to join a synagogue, if they do at all. Some of the issues are structural, like the perception that these communities constitute closed social circles, or the perceived cost of membership.

I think most commonly, a lot of Jews don’t quite know what they need, and can’t imagine how the rabbi or the synagogue can be of help to them. Chabad, of course, is way ahead on this, as the American Jewish denomination that best understands market capitalism, it takes its agenda to the streets and engages in good old fashioned marketing and sales.

But they’re not the only ones. I think every rabbi in the business right now is caught between the work of serving their existing population and finding ways to attract others in. Before Joel Nickerson came to Wilshire Boulevard Temple, he worked for Hillel at the University of Pennsylvania, and ran the Jewish Renaissance Project, a program dedicated to making Jewish learning relevant for students who were peripherally involved in Jewish life on campus, and who otherwise chose not to affiliate with existing programs or brick and mortar Jewish Institutions on campus.

To do this work of meeting people where they are has to originate with a commitment to Hillel’s dictum in the Mishnah, I mean Hillel the ancient sage, not Hillel the contemporary Jewish institution, that we’re meant to imitate Aaron: loving the people and bringing them closer to Torah. You can’t do the latter without a relentless commitment to the former.

But to start there means something more than just making Judaism something interesting, it requires interrogating why those on the outside are on the outside, and then doing user-centered design to engage those people in Jewish life in ways that they’re gonna find compelling.

Joel: One of the great things about the JRP, Jewish Renaissance Project, and the way in which we kind of strategized finding the students who would be great leaders and great participants in our programs was really starting with that individual. And it was almost as though every student I met with, I had to learn their Torah and I had to be able to interpret their Torah of their Jewish journey and what it is that motivated them, both secularly and Jewishly, what their B’nai Mitzvah experience was like, whether it was good or bad, if they even had one at all, what they were studying, what they cared about, what they were involved with extracurricular-ly. That became their Torah, and then my job was to figure out, okay, what’s an avenue by which they can grow Jewishly, based on their Torah.

As opposed to: this is the Torah of the institution, this is what we are providing, and you can come in and hopefully you’ll find your place within that framework. It just became a much more personalized way of entering into a relationship and investigating someone’s desires and needs and where they actually could come into the fold, and then it was about, how do you place people who have similar desires together in a cohort, and then you’re going to be able to build something really special.

Yehuda: This is a really different way of doing rabbinic work, far less about going to an office in a building where community exists, with the role of caring for those on the inside and steadily expanding the circle. Here, community is something that is maybe in the offing: first you have to create pathways for people in an unmarked terrain. That requires taking Torah from out of the community and bringing it to the people.

Carey: There has been a pretty significant path towards the synagogue, I think in a lot of ways because of our religious school. We have a very large religious school and so people, both because the program is good but also because lots of other Jewish kids are there, they want their kids to meet other Jewish kids, they sign up for the school.

I actually remember, we’ve had for a number of years a sukkah that we put at one of the community centers in East Vancouver. It’s been this annual tradition for this group that’s fantastic. And there was a group of people standing around, we’d done this for maybe three or four years, said, we just joined Temple Shalom. We just joined Temple Shalom. We just joined Temple Shalom. It was like at first, they were all a little bit embarrassed that they joined a synagogue, and then they realized that the people that they like and they’ve met through this engagement are the same people that they were already friends with, and that was really nice. We just want to help people find their place.

Yehuda: So what is the common denominator for what people are seeking in community, and what rabbis do to make community work? Several rabbis kept shifting our conversation back to the basic hard work that it takes, the tireless and sometimes unseen labor of building and sustaining belonging between people and the community, and between people in the community. It’s magical when you feel deeply part of a community, but it doesn’t happen by itself.

David: I think serving for this many, these many years has also made me internalize what had been more abstract, that like everything is about relationships, and that it doesn’t matter how brilliant the shiur is if people don’t feel that you care about them.

Carey: I do really love when you get to meet people and help them find their place in the community. Um, whether it’s just, saying like, you should come spend time with us and, you know, we want to make you feel welcome here in the building, in the community, or finding like a particular role in the community that can really be meaningful to them and also bring their talents into the community.

Joel: The culture of the community is one of intimacy, even though we’re very large and that we’re founded on relationships, and not just the relationship between the rabbi and the community. But how do I then help facilitate strategies where people feel connected to one another in a very big city?

Ari: Our membership chair a few years ago, Jamie Wender, she came to us with the idea that everyone should wear name tags. When you walk in, you get a name tag. And if you’re not a member of the congregation, there’s all kinds of name tags that describe a little bit about who you might be, like, I’m a proud grandparent, or shul shopping, or visiting the community.

And so, at every bar and bat mitzvah, we, like lots of congregations, give gifts. And the last gift that I always give is the name tag. And this thing happened when I gave the first name tag, everyone started cheering. And I, it just like, I didn’t know that was going to happen. And it happened every single time. And I, it caught me off guard the first time. Now it’s just sort of the culture of the synagogue. And the thing that I say to every kid is that the most important thing is that you count here, that we want you to be known. And we want you to know us. And knowing the name of a person is such a powerful way.

Yehuda: Look, personally, I’m not sure how I’d feel about wearing a nametag every shabbat. No disrespect, Ari! But I get it, and I love the message behind it. My favorite activity that I’ve seen in our community and elsewhere is when the rabbi or the shul president announces a period of “Name Amnesty,” where you are hereby permitted to acknowledge to that person you regularly sit next to in shul, or make small talk with at kiddush, that you don’t know their name, maybe never knew it, or maybe you just forgot it.

In my experience, the announcement of name amnesty helps people giggle a little bit when they admit to one another that they’ve been faking it for a while, and takes away all the shame and defensiveness that honestly just gets in the way of relationship building. I mean, after all, do I really have to memorize 300 people’s names? Or do I just need to feel safe and comfortable around them, with just enough familiarity to feel like our praying together and snacking together makes us part of something bigger than ourselves?

Carey reflected on how people need to be seen in order to feel part of something, while Sarah spoke about how when we create resources for people to learn about and to connect to a Judaism that feels abstract, we need to weave those big and inaccessible stories into the intimacy of that which they already understand.

Carey: When I came to Vancouver, a large part of our congregation was made up of interfaith families. I don’t know the number, maybe 20, 25%. But they’ve never been acknowledged from the Bimah. And I gave a Yom Kippur sermon that, in Boston, where I had come from, it would have been like 20 years before. But I felt like we could start to kind of have this conversation, thinking about what our contemporary Jewish community is here, and how do we embrace the Jewish people of Vancouver in a way that is meaningful and loving.

And so many people came up to me just feeling seen after that drasha, and the response made me realize, oh, you know, this was something really, really different that has never been heard here before. But to make change in a congregation is something that rabbis really do have the opportunity to do through leadership, through teaching.

Sarah: In a resource created by a colleague at HIAS for Tisha B’Av, in exactly the same way that we’re engaging right now with post October 7th poetry and liturgy, it took the lived experience of people fleeing Kabul and their loss of Kabul, and juxtapose that directly against Lamentations. You want to get Reform Jews who don’t have a deep chush and connection to Lamentations and that sense of loss from 2000 years ago for an institution that we don’t want to reestablish? You want to get people to feel something for that? Then that parallel experience from three years ago really brings that text to life and helps people feel it and feel connected to it.

Yehuda: Even as we stretch the boundaries of community to enable more people in community, we are always going to run up against boundaries. Boundaries, in one form or another, are baked into the idea of community, whether they constitute the geographic limits that define the catchment areas for different synagogues, or whether they provide the ideological framework that helps define a community’s norms and commitments, or whether they just constitute the limit of what a rabbi, employed by a particular synagogue, can offer to people outside of the building. After all, rabbis are not merely working within the confines of the synagogue; they’re also responsible for the boundaries of the institution itself. They are the gatekeepers of entry and access, and they have to manage boundaries when it comes to allocating the precious resources at their disposal, especially their time.

Carey encountered this limit when it came to enrollment for her Jewish Information Class, which was meant for people considering conversion to Judaism. Everyone who was going to participate in the class was going to be an outsider, by definition. By could the class actually accommodate everyone?

Carey: We have people reaching out to us from really far away, and it’s not that they couldn’t access Jewish learning remotely, but they just couldn’t access Jewish life living six hours away from Vancouver.
And we actually came to a decision that we, it just, we couldn’t make that commitment. We couldn’t serve them. It was one of those boundaries that we had to put up. And at the same time as well, when people come, we have other courses that are more introductory that, you know, anyone can really come to, and access.

But for the JIC, we really want people who already have some invested connection or interest in the project of the Jewish people before we really dedicate, I don’t know how many hundreds of hours a year to really being there as amorei derech in this role. So sometimes we tell people, not yet, you know, come, come for Shabbat for a year.

Yehuda: At B’nai Jeshurun in New York City, the synagogue has been defining and testing the limits of community for a long time. The senior rabbis were ordained in different seminaries and different denominations, and the synagogue is officially non-denominational, after having disaffiliated from the Conservative movement in the 1990s.

That decision is being road tested in other synagogues around the country, as part of American Judaism’s evolving past the strict parameters implied by the denominational divisions in Jewish life for the past century, which have less and less currency, increasingly, for today’s Jews.

For BJ, that decision meant that they were foregrounding its own theory of community, defined by what it saw as the needs of its members, over the idea of community as a microcosm of a larger sense of communal belonging. Even so, this choice gets regularly tested. If a community can shape its own norms, members of that community are going to want to test the limits. This was on display a few years ago when the BJ clergy confronted the question of interfaith marriages. I find this a thrilling example because it is a question of community – who gets to be part of it? – nested inside a different question of community – how do we define our norms?

Felicia: So, over a number of years, we had conversations with kids, I’m calling them kids, because they grew up in the community and then desired for us as their rabbis to marry them and were unable. The bylaws of the community said we had to follow the laws and standards of the Conservative movement, which prohibited the officiation of rabbis in intermarriages.

At some point, it didn’t feel sustainable anymore. We saw how much frustration was happening in the community, and how much pain, also, when we met with people who felt so at home in the community, and felt so deeply connected to us as rabbis, or their parents felt a lot of loss when we couldn’t officiate at their children’s weddings. It didn’t feel comfortable anymore after a while to just say, well, we’re not allowed, when we felt actually that we hadn’t really thought of the process. And we decided we had to actually wade into the issue. And actually, we called upon the Hartman Institute, to help guide us because we didn’t want it to just be an emotional reaction, but really to think through what were the deep issues that were guiding these conversations as the demographics of our community were changing.

What we really figured out was that we were more invested in, what we called at the time, like the Jewish enterprise, people wanting to build Jewish homes, than actually making a judgment about who people were marrying. And what we were seeing is that many people were coming to us wanting a Jewish ceremony and a Jewish home, but were getting kind of the stop sign when actually that’s what we want.

And so we created a commitment that we would only officiate at weddings where we felt strongly that they wanted to build a Jewish home. And we also decided that that would be true for Jewish-Jewish couples. Now very few Jewish-Jewish couples come and say, I don’t want to build a Jewish home, but we felt like it was actually a truth, that if that was what we were committed to, no matter what the couple was, that that should be the driving force around our officiation.

So we went through this whole long process. Many people had a lot of feelings about the process, and in the end, despite where people felt disappointed and where we ended on the decision, we had only one person leave the community and they actually came back. And I think it spoke to the seriousness by which we dealt with the process, both emotionally and intellectually, and that we really explored a lot of the questions that were alive and well for people.

Yehuda: The backstory in Felicia’s account is that back in 2015, we were approached by several prominent Conservative and Conservative-adjacent rabbis seeking a space, and content, to discuss and deliberate the intermarriage question. It has been an evolving issue in the Conservative movement, caught between the conservatism in Orthodox Judaism on the issue, which prohibits intermarriage strictly, and the progressivism in Reform Judaism, which has become far more accommodating in shifting the terms of Jewish identity and seeking to build a culture of radical inclusivity.

At the time, however, it was a hard conversation to have in Conservative Jewish circles, and, as an illustration of the complexity of ideological community, Hartman was a useful neutral site to constitute a Beit Midrash to study the issues at hand. After our learning together with these rabbis, BJ ultimately changed its policy as did one or two other congregations that participated, but several rabbis, however, left our learning affirmed in their practice of only officiating at intrafaith weddings, because good Torah, after all, has 70 faces.

Intermarriage has been viewed with a particular severity, as a boundary-marker in Jewish life. The issue of officiating at intermarriages, and whether interfaith families belong in Jewish community has divided more than one congregation, and I think it still threatens to divide the Conservative movement more generally.

This should be no surprise. Like I said, the testing of boundaries always tests the structure of a community. But communities are tested and pulled apart in myriad ways, and the role of the rabbi is essential both in navigating these tensions, sometimes in making definitive choices, and always in trying to make sure that communal controversies do not break a community apart.

Remember that old joke? Two feuding congregants come to the rabbi with a dispute, having exhausted their arguments with one another and finding themselves at an impasse. The first congregant passionately pleads his case; the wise rabbi strokes his beard, nodding along. When the congregant finishes, the rabbi concludes; “You’re right.” The second congregant jumps up and screams, “Rabbi! You haven’t heard my side!” And he entreats the rabbi with his side of the story, repudiating the account of his interlocutor, rebutting his claims with his evidence. Again, the rabbi nods, and strokes his beard; when the man finishes, he says, “You’re right, too.” In from the kitchen runs the rabbi’s wife, enraged, who has been listening all along. “You fool!” She shouts to her husband. “How can they both be right?” To which the rabbi responds, “You’re also right.”

As much as I love this joke, I have to tell youL if you’re a rabbi, and you think that that’s your strategy to resolve a difficult, divisive question at the next synagogue board meeting, I think you may quickly find it is no longer “the right fit.”

Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky describe leadership as “disappointing people at a rate that they can absorb.” Rabbis sometimes have to do this deliberately, making hard choices that will not satisfy everyone in their community, but even when it’s not intentional, everyone, in the context of community, will be disappointed some of the time.

Ari: We had a moment in our Yom Kippur service last year. Our spiritual music innovator, Ori Salzberg, a phenomenal educator. He, uh, he came to me a few weeks before Yom Kippur and I tasked him with the Avodah service. Like I want you to make the Avodah service as beautiful as you can make it.
And he said, I think this is going to be better with an instrument. And we don’t have a custom of having musical instruments in our sanctuary on Shabbat.

And so I went to the president and the religious life chair and the board and all of them agreed to this idea. And I called congregants, but I didn’t call enough. After that moment, there were people who came up to me immediately who were, it was the most profound moment of their prayer in their whole history at Shearith Israel. And they were quick to tell me.

But the ones, the days after, said that was the hardest moment, it broke something in me. I had to walk out. I couldn’t be in my service. And the tension of I want Avodah to be real for folks. I want Avodah to move their hearts. I want them to feel that God is present with them and that they are forgiven for all of the things that we do wrong every year. And it turns out that maybe I could have done that better, because the folks who I missed, who I might have broken something for, in that choice, it is a point of sadness within me, and I still want to elevate the experience for everyone, and the recognition that it can’t be for everyone, but that a community holds boundaries that just can’t be reconciled sometimes.

David: 10 years ago, there was a partnership minyan. A partnership minyan is sort of like a form of worship that is maybe in between Orthodoxy and conservative Judaism. Women receive aliyot and read the Torah alongside men, but only men are counted in the minyan, and a certain tefillot are only led by men. So that’s a style of worship that developed on the kind of liberal periphery of modern Orthodoxy. about 20 years ago, and a group of members of our shul have met as a partnership minyan over the past decade or more, and they have not been allowed to meet inside our synagogue. So they’ve met in people’s homes, and over the years that’s become very tiresome for them and alienating to them that they are paying membership and devoting a lot of time and money and energy on their synagogue, but they have to have their religious needs met monthly, quarterly, whatever, you know, this sort of in, in someone’s living room, which is really hard to do.

And so it came on my desk as the rabbi who was hired a few months after I came here. And there was, I would say, clear factions of people who attended this partnership minyan in the neighborhood and really wanted it to be in their shul building. And there were people who really didn’t want it to come into the building because they were worried that it would detract from the Orthodox identity of the congregation, be controversial in the broader Orthodox community, detract from communal unity or whatever it was they, you know, and that was, I think, an example of absolutely no way to satisfy everyone.

The recommendation that I then presented to the board, and ultimately I thought it was the board’s decision, not mine, was that we could rent space to this partnership minyan, as an independent entity, not as a officially sanctioned, you know, approved minyan of the synagogue, with certain stipulations that I felt would maximize the benefit and have the risks be minimized.

And I think that decision, I don’t think anyone was fully satisfied. I think some people were, you know, varying degrees of disappointed in that recommendation, and I guess it remains to be seen whether it was a wise one or not. The implementation in the coming months will really prove whether or not the recommendations were wise or not, and we’ll find out.

Ari: I dream of a future where, where there could be egalitarian, but you know, what’s sometimes called partnership minyans at Shearith Israel. I could dream of a future also where there is guitar and practice that isn’t about fulfilling the chiyuv. I would hope to have a community that could hold the boundaries really, really wide, knowing those boundaries and also like seeing that it’s not about a narrow definition of Conservative Judaism. It’s about a committed, vibrant Jewish life.

Yehuda: But even if boundaries are essential to community because they hold those of us together who abide by them in a framework that we all need, and even though sometimes those boundaries are tested, and sometimes they can’t hold everyone, I think it’s also true that community also relies on tolerating a wide amount of diversity and difference. Or, at least, interesting community does, and I think most structures of community that operate within a liberal framework do. Homogeneity is boring, and anyway, it’s not really possible in our milieu that is so defined by individual self-actualization.

So the art of stitching together community is to create something slow and collaborative, to involve a community’s diverse members in weaving the fabric of something more beautiful because of their collective involvement, and ultimately creating something more resilient and durable as a result.

Surviving as an individual in a community characterized by rich diversity can be hard, especially in today’s environment that seems to incentivize polarization and echo chambers. To do so requires a lot of empathy and patience and a willingness to see the possibility of a return amidst all the noise. For rabbis, engaging in this work on behalf of the community, to build something for the benefit of all that requires sacrifice by all, is essential. I am not sure whether it is a skill or an art. I think it might also require some good luck, or even at times, divine providence.

David: What I’ve tried to do most recently is to reflect back to the congregation that among its core characteristics as a community, one of the things that they’re most proud about is their diversity as a congregation. That there are people with really different religious backgrounds who practice Judaism in really different ways, see the world in really different ways, that’s really unusual for a 21st century Orthodox congregation to have this much diversity contained within one. And I reflect that back to them frequently to help them understand that there are going to be people who, in this congregation, who will make really different religious choices from you, and to, rather than be bothered by that or see that as something, somehow harming one’s identity, or putting one’s identity at risk, actually, no, I can be proud of the fact that I’m a part of a congregation that encompasses such a broad spectrum of religious expression.

Ari: I said to the congregation on Rosh Hashanah, there are congregations where everyone agrees and if you don’t agree with everything, you’re really not in the right congregation. And there are congregations where people agree about some things and disagree about other things, but they only talk about the things they agree about. And there are congregations where you love one another enough to like actually lean into the parts that are different and maybe hard and learn from one another because you know that the foundation of the relationship is stronger than the disagreements that challenge it.

I hope and I strive that for our community, that we’re able to achieve a vision of real pluralism one day. and what I tell people is, I say, coming into our sanctuary on Shabbat morning is when you will see the most of us gathered in a place doing a thing at a time regularly. But our sanctuary is not the only place things are happening. Your place on the Shabbat morning might be in the alternative service with the guitar and the very abbreviated Torah reading and lots of singing, or your place might be in our Torah study, learning and talking and growing in that way at the same time as all the other things are happening, or your place might be in the lobby, having l’chaim with people, which starts, you know, at such and such time. And all of those I want people to feel are viable ways to feel at-homeness. Because the person I’m always looking out for is a person who might have come and they don’t quite know where their spot is yet.

Yehuda: Our first episode ended on a note of loneliness; today, we’ve arrived at some amount of at-homeness. When it all works, both the rabbi and the congregation can see the essential nature of their interdependence—it’s a good fit. And it’s tempting to think that those two sides of the issue—on the rabbi’s side: who they are, and what quest are they on; and on the community’s side, who they are, and how does a rabbi serve them and be served by them in return—that solving on both of those ends is all that defines the work of the rabbi these days. I think a great many rabbis wish that that was it. I know a lot of them seek to be pastors, teachers, good friends, guides, everything they do, and to do it locally, to care for their people, to plant trees, and to watch them all grow.

But that’s not really the state of affairs. Atop the local sits the heaviness of our concerns as a people which can be better described as national and global. To be a rabbi today is to feel a sense of the burden of history on your shoulders, carrying Torah and the people through a liminal time, and to feel immense responsibilities to sustain our people, in private and in public, through the flow of history. Rabbis are the gatekeepers, leaders, and nurturers of our communities and our people, and we need them now more than ever. In this moment, as we all turn inward, searching for meaning and guidance, the Jewish people are looking to rabbis for leadership and answers about what our future holds.

There are also indicators in this field that the perils facing the work are mounting and making the work harder and harder, even as our need for spiritual support is increasing. Next time, on Rabbinic Identities/ Rabbinic Crises.
Thanks for listening to our show, and special thanks to our rabbis, Ari Kaiman, Carey Brown, David Wolkenfeld, Felicia Sol, Joel Nickerson, and Sarah Bassin, for sharing their stories.

Identity/Crisis is Produced by Tessa Zitter, and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Annie Beyer-Chafets and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC, with music provided by SoCalled. Transcripts of our shows are now available on our website, typically a week after an episode airs.

We’re always looking for ideas for what we should cover in future episodes, so if you have a topic you’d like to hear about, or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us at [email protected]. For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what’s unfolding right now, sign up for our newsletter in the show notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere podcasts are available. See you next week, and thanks for listening.