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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: Working on campus, the students were facing really big existential questions and just personal questions and were asking themselves, like what values and priorities they want to have in their lives as adults. They were living alone, many of them for the first time, and really making those big decisions about what type of Jews they wanted to be, how seriously they wanted to take Judaism, and what that would mean for them as emerging adults.

Whereas once you decide to join your local Orthodox shul, you’ve probably at least provisionally answered those questions already. And so I have not encountered, since leaving campus, that same degree of openness to really exploring big, big questions of identity and commitment and communal affiliation and all of those things.

Sarah: My mom was born and raised Catholic. She became Jewish when she got married. She actually converted twice, Reform and Conservative to appease the family dynamics, but there was a pain moment for me that came in college where, having only looked at my interfaith-ness as a source of strength and complexity and this superpower, like, it was challenged in college and looked down upon by, you know, more traditional elements that I encountered for the first time when I went to the East Coast.

But I think that that started to kick off what becomes the theme both personally and professionally in my life in terms of like, oh, you’re not going to make space for me? I will carve out that space for myself.

Yehuda: It seems to me that one key element of being human – and therefore, being Jewish – is to imagine ourselves as living within what are known as “spheres of belonging.” We are each individuals, worlds unto ourselves; immediately surrounding us are those closest to us – family, dear friends, trusted colleagues and confidantes; then our expanding world – perhaps our neighbors, members of our communities and networks; further out, to fellow citizens, stakeholders in issues we care about, members of our people or our faith; and gradually out to the whole world, where I think we are morally obligated to see even total strangers as part of our universe of belonging.

There are different obligations and responsibilities to each of these spheres, and usually we understand our most powerful obligations to lie closest to the inner circle. Very few moral philosophers would argue that our obligations are equal to our families and to strangers. And especially since the Holocaust, many Jews have become deeply skeptical of the very possibility that we would belong to universal communities without belonging, in some way, to particular communities.

Marshall Ganz, a senior lecturer at the Kennedy School at Harvard, argues that public narrative and organizing requires telling a threefold story: the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now. The order matters! If I can’t engage the self, my capacity to build out from that powerful core of identity is diminished.

One of the most challenging elements for religion today is the way that our modern identities revolve around the individual, in the idea of self-actualization, in the assumption that we have the autonomy to shape our own choices and worlds without need of others. In theory, spheres of belonging can expand our horizons, they should enable us to see beyond ourselves, and they can make us humble in the recognition that we are dependent on one another.

In practice, the focus on the center of the sphere – on the self – the more everyone else becomes simply a transactional “other.” It is no surprise that in this age of connectivity, when we think that we are connected to anyone and everyone, we are experiencing a global crisis of loneliness. Parasocial relationships can’t hold a candle to real human relationships, which can be rooted in kinship, proximity to others, real shared connections, and in lived communities. Individualism without belonging creates chaos in contrast to the structure of community, which is a system that helps us think beyond ourselves.

How then do leaders lead in this environment? In our first episode of this series, we explored the inner lives of rabbis, including why they choose this profession, the challenges that come with intersecting their personal and professional lives, and how they manage these complicated jobs that seem to demand of them an ever-evolving skillset. In our second episode, we talked about rabbis as creators and curators of community, with all that complexity that brings, and with an emphasis on the intimate work of relationship that powers every great community.

For today, I want to use the metaphor of the spheres to expand out further into the horizon of rabbinic responsibilities, from the self, to the community, and to the wider world. And I want us to notice how one of the key roles of jewish leaders today, and especially rabbis, is to reestablish the balance that those spheres of belonging can offer to all of us. Rabbis who can toggle effectively between their responsibilities to us and others, to insiders and outsiders, to local and global commitments, offer us a model as we try to live meaningful lives in this individualistic era.

Sarah Bassin started us off with a haunting opening comment: “I will carve out that space for myself.” With her awareness of self, she knew what she wanted and pursued it in Jewish life. Not all Jews, or those who want to be Jews, for that matter, have the courage and the fortitude to face obstacles to their inclusion to the community and insist on their presence. Many people today would look at those obstacles and feel alienated, or simply decide that it isn’t worth the effort.

And then for Sarah to become a rabbi, of all things, is the decision by someone who was being gate-kept to become a gatekeeper herself, or maybe a gate transformer. She not only found the courage to define and shape her own belonging, she took the reins to create space for people who didn’t feel able to carve out that space for themselves.

How do rabbis navigate support for those on the inside of Jewish life, create space for others, and build relationships for the Jewish people outside the Jewish community? I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, and this is 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.

One of the key ways in which North American Jewish life organized itself in its 20th century heyday was through the system of denominational belonging. Kind of like the idea imagined in the Torah of a single collective entity, the Jewish people, or the Israelites, that was made up of different tribes, who had different identities, different sites of encampments, and ultimately different territorial allocations in the land of Israel, the structure of denominations allowed Diaspora Jews in modernity to affiliate into powerful subgroups that believed and behaved quite differently while retaining an overarching belonging to “the Jewish people.” The idea of denominations can be freeing. Each of us can have our team, and our teams can enact really different ideas of being Jewish, but it can also invite a sense of competition, an implicit hierarchy of the choices involved that separate us from one another.

Sarah: There was a moment also in rabbinic school where I kind of likened the metaphor of the Jewish community to the Orthodox being the center of an atom, right? Like the nucleus of an atom and that the Reform movement, those kind of flittering on the end, we were the electrons. And I remember some of my classmates were slightly offended by that notion, because of the centrality that it puts orthodoxy in.

But if you think about it, like what makes the molecules, like those atoms, turn into a different form? Like what they are out in the world is because of what those electrons do in their interaction with each other. I think that there are so many people dedicated to keeping that nucleus and holding it and passing it down and transmitting it and like the clarity of those boundaries, that frees me up to just walk where I’m walking.

Yehuda: What I find powerful about Sarah’s metaphor is that it echoes with the truth that many of Judaism’s most powerful ideas and its intellectual tradition were in fact held by small groups of people. An elite class of sages over the generations served as this kind of nucleus which allowed Jews to dive in and out of Jewish life but for Jewish tradition to continue and to evolve and to grow.

But I am skeptical of making a particular denomination, in Sarah’s argument, Orthodoxy, the center of the Jewish people’s ongoing story. In general, many Jews today increasingly doubt the importance of strong denominational loyalties, and many, I think myself included, would also resent the idea that one denomination holds a monopoly to the implied sense of authenticity imagined in this scenario.

Maybe a better physics metaphor for the moment is that the environment today in North American Judaism is more like what happens when you heat a gas, causing all the various atoms to move around faster, sometimes crashing into each other and sometimes just spinning off in different directions. Denominations have far less power to bind people and communities together than they once did.

I think the more accurate picture of North American Judaism, especially on the coasts, is that powerful synagogues and other Jewish institutions create connectivity among Jews despite a denominational label rather than because of one. Which is not to say that denominations can’t or don’t matter; it is just that many rabbis are experiencing a new world order, where people are affiliating or just participating in Jewish life based on what is on offer, rather than based on some pre-existing loyalty to a particular tribe.

Consider David’s understanding of his Orthodox community:

David: I would say there are people who attend an Orthodox synagogue because they are Orthodox Jews, and there are people who attend an Orthodox synagogue for pragmatic reasons. They, like, make use of an Orthodox community, even though in their personal worldview and their personal practice, even, they are Orthodox Jews. I just think a synagogue should really be proud of serving as a resource to all of those kinds of people, for all of those kinds of needs.

Yehuda: Sometimes a denominational label helps people seeking a synagogue—those with strong loyalties, or for whom the shortcut of a denomination helps them clarify their own choice. But sometimes, the blurring of lines helps welcome in those who don’t feel that they fit into boxes, or who might be migrating from the denomination of their upbringing to a different denomination.

Some of the most interesting data in the Pew Study of American Jews was about these kinds of shifts. For instance, those who leave Orthodoxy are far more likely to land in the “nones” — those without any denominational identity, whereas those who leave the more liberal denominations are much more fluid in their migration across the denominational map.

The pressure on the denominational system puts rabbis in a complicated place: they are often trained in denominational systems and wind up in denominationally-based career tracks. Their synagogues have auspicious reputations connected to their denominational histories and identities. And at the same time, a growing percentage of North American Jews are seeking spirituality and community as “free agents” rather than as loyalists to those denominations.

Wilshire Boulevard temple in Los Angeles actually left the Union for Reform Judaism in 2011, and embarked on a new journey to shape their community autonomously. Wilshire Boulevard Temple is massive, and Joel Nickerson sees opportunity and necessity in being able to cater to a wide set of needs without denominational constraints.

Joel: There’s a real benefit for us to be able to kind of play in the larger sandbox and to create a community that can pick and choose from various elements of the tradition that I still think to its core is a liberal progressive reform synagogue in many ways, but is also free from a label. So I’m uncertain about the future of denominations for at least North American Jews.

If I think about the people who join my synagogue right now, they’ll say, I grew up Conservative, I grew up Reform. That’s not how they’re defining themselves now or why they chose to be a part of Wilshire Boulevard Temple. They’re here because of the Jewish experiences that it can provide for their family, the value system, the people. That’s what’s guiding them. It’s not necessarily denominational.

Felicia: I think there was a time that the ideological anchors of each of the movements served a very strong purpose in people electing to be in one place or another. And I think the institutions of American Judaism really were built around the movements and so people’s experience of their Judaism was really lived within the movements.

Yehuda: We mentioned this in the last episode: Felicia Sol’s congregation, B’nai Jeshrun, similarly opted out of the Conservative movement to allow for the congregations customs to better reflect the needs and interests of the community, and perhaps also to free up the rabbis to operate as independent maran d’atra, the traditional term for the rabbinic leader of a community, more than they could tied to the rules and regulations of the movement. Most famously, B’nai Jeshurun clergy decided to officiate weddings for interfaith couples, seeking to affirm the value of encouraging families to build Jewish lives together over the longstanding halakhic and attitudinal norm in traditional communities opposing such a practice.

Felicia: As time has gone on, I think the institutions of the movement are less powerful and even the youth movements are not as strong as they used to be. And people are really living like a local Jewish life, and because affiliation is not what’s driving people’s Jewish life in the same way, they have everything available to them and all the creativity that lives out in Jewish spaces, organizations, prayer that are not always dependent upon a synagogue that belongs to movement
And I think in this space that we’re living in, people are choosing based on what’s powerful to them and what moves them and where they feel most aligned which may not have anything to do with movements.

Joel: I think what it does open up is that it draws people to have to make decisions less on the label and more on the content, and I think that’s a good thing, and if the labels and the denominations can work to figure out what that content driving motivator can be for the next generation, great, but, if they’re not able to, or if an individual synagogue can’t do that, then I think people are going to be judging where they go based on the accessibility, the relevance, and the warmth and joy of that community. So that’s what I’d rather focus on than necessarily the label or the denomination.

And then I’d rather than raise the bar when someone goes to another town to say, oh, I’m having trouble finding a place that is relevant enough or is warm enough. That would be a great thing for us to be, compared to.

Yehuda: For some people listening to this, what the rabbis are describing about denominations may sound uncomfortable. They are describing their decisions to shift from the “national agenda” to the hyperlocal, focusing on the needs of their particular communities and providing an ideological framework that serves them. That’s very different from the organized normativity that was common in North American Judaism for over a century, and it might lead to the critique that are dividing ourselves now and again more than ever, and to a reality that even ideologically similar synagogues have little in common.
As an alternative reading, I suggest that what the rabbis are doing is exercising leadership based on understanding the realities of North American Jews and Judaism and letting go of older models that may not fully capture that story. A major reason why Jews belonged so commonly to synagogues and denominations is that in the last century, Jews had to belong so as to not be considered strange atheists among their neighbors. America was a far more religious country then, and only weirdos were unchurched (or un-synagogued.) Denominations provided an easy organizing system for a lot of people who needed to belong to something, and gave them an accessible map of what to expect in each of the options.

But today, Jews don’t need to belong. There is no social pressure from Gentiles for Jews to go to synagogue, and like many other Americans and Canadians of other faiths, they simply don’t. With the exception of a small minority that is passionate about the nuanced differences between liberal congregations, a growing number of Jews will seek community and spirituality as free market consumers.

Jewish identity is entropic—it increasingly lacks order. Smart rabbis are adapting their orientation towards belonging, away from matching up people to a fixed set of commitments, and towards tinkering with their structures to meet the moment (and the people.)

There’s probably no better place to witness these shifts than in how rabbis meet Jews who are connected closely to or partnered with non-Jews —non-Jews who will thus be participating in Jewish life on the regular. At Hartman we’ve been doing some work on the idea of “Jewish adjacents,” the people connected to Jews and Jewish community and who are themselves not Jewish, and we’ve been asking: what are their responsibilities to our norms when they seek to participate in Jewish life, and what are our ethical obligations to them as players in Jewish life?
How do they add to the richness of our community and how do we make space for their involvement without compromising our commitment to a unified identity?

Sarah: All of the interesting stuff happens in the borderlands, like all of the interesting stuff in our communities happens from those moments where you’re somewhere between the inside and the outside, and you have that perspective to see the forest through the trees. A nostalgia that the Jewish community has for that time of complete and pure identity and borders is a nostalgia for a time that never was. It’s totally imagined. We’ve always been in this place of cultural negotiation and integration and enrichment, diversification. We’ve never put all of our eggs in one basket as a community. And I think that that’s our strength. And that is the rabbinic tradition that I see my responsibility to.

Ari: Not only Jews find meaningful living through Judaism, and there are many people in our congregation who are finding meaning and community. It was an anxiety to think, well, what does that mean for our halakhic practice? But Judaism itself, halakha, articulates boundaries and porousness. There’s nothing that’s forbidden about a non-Jew learning Torah. There’s nothing forbidden about a non Jew sitting in a prayer service. There’s something that would be inappropriate about a non Jew saying at the Torah, asher bachar banu mikol ha’amim, who chose us from all other peoples. It’s incoherent.

And so the, but I also don’t have a lot of non-Jews saying, Hey, that’s the thing I want to do. Or if they were to say that, I would say, that’s really interesting. Let’s explore that more because maybe you want to be Jewish. But what we strive for is welcoming people for who they are and not having expectations of them becoming like us or like Jewish any more than they want to be.

Yehuda: I hope you hear the creative dance that Ari is performing here, and that Felicia talked about earlier, to acknowledge the seriousness of a commitment to halakha and other forms of normative thinking that require of us to take boundaries seriously, and at the same time an effort to enable a productive porousness that keeps more people in than it leaks them out. This is one of the greater missions of rabbinic work: the curation and definition of peoplehood through listening to the needs both of individuals and the greater Jewish people.

Conversion is another testing-ground for the question of inclusion, because it affirms the importance of a ritual that signifies boundary crossing, while making boundary crossing and the transformation of an identity possible. Today’s Jewish community is a mess around conversion: there are more people who want to convert to Judaism than we have capacity to convert, and that’s in a community that is angsty about the total number of Jews that we have.

Meanwhile, although converts are cherished in the rabbinic tradition for the sacrifices and the commitments they make, and even though we are obligated in Jewish law and ethics to treat converts with kindness, converts oftentimes experience hostility from born Jews.

Conversion is also a lingering source of controversy between the denominations, because an individual converting through one denomination lane may or may not acquire universal status among other Jews. As the denominations shrink or evolve, what happens to this story?

Carey Brown coordinates the Jewish information class at temple Sholom, which is a Jewish learning class for perspective converts.

Carey: I say, you’re converting to the Jewish people. I say, your conversion might not be recognized by all parts of the Jewish people, but I want you to think of yourself as converting, not to Temple Shalom, not to Reform Judaism, that you’re, you’re taking on this identity of the whole, and sometimes that means hard conversations about what does it mean to join a people that doesn’t recognize me or to join a people where there are some parts of the community that are not in line with my values, and to be able to kind of hold that complexity is okay.

Yehuda: Carey is signaling something wildly interesting and important here. In some ways, the retreat of the denominational model among liberal Jews, which in turn places a greater centrality on particular rabbis or particular synagogues as the anchor of belonging or conversion, reflects a kind of reversion to the mean of Jewish history.

Before we had denominations, Judaism was hyperlocal. A Jew traveling from one place to another had to rely on the beneficence of strangers and perhaps on the reputation of the community from which she came to ensure that she would be treated as a Jew in good standing. Ironically, maybe, the weakening of denominational bonds strengthens the importance of individual rabbis and their unique leadership.

Most of the non-Jews who rabbis interact with are just non-Jews. They are not on the path to becoming Jews. Even that distinction that divides the world between Jews and non-Jews is so funny: we are a speck in the world’s population, yet that distinction between Jews and non-Jews shapes how many of us see the world. As rabbis move to the outer rings of the spheres of belonging and the spheres of obligation, they have important roles in the local and national circles in serving as liaisons to other faith and ethnic communities, in building bridges, and in civic functions on behalf of the Jewish community.

Ari: I sometimes struggle with, how much time should I be spending building relationships outside of the Jewish community as a representative? Every time I’ve had the opportunity to do so, and to do so intentionally, it brings so many blessings. But there is so much work to do within.

Sarah: There is no downside to it. And when I first started this work, that was not at all the attitude of the Jewish community. In fact, my mentor who was appointed through the rabbinic body, the first thing he sat me down to say when I was either deciding or about to take the job with new ground was don’t do it; you’re never going to get hired in the mainstream Jewish community again.

And this wasn’t coming from a place of anger, like, he was looking out for me from his own experience of the past 30 years of seeing how toxic this space is, and, frankly, the way that the Jewish community would treat this work. And the worry that I have is that we’re walking into all of our relationships with that suspicion, I don’t think that’s good for those relationships and I don’t think it’s good for us, because if I have a theory of anti Semitism, it’s not that we’re going to eradicate it. The best we’re going to be able to do is to clamp it down. And the only way we’re gonna clamp it down is by reinforcing our relationships with the people who are in the center.

Felicia: B’nai Jeshurun has a long standing relationship with the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, which is our partner church that we actually worshipped in for almost 25 years after our ceiling had fallen in, in our sanctuary. So there is a long, long term relationship with the communities, as well as with the pastor, and then I think people see also the support of each community from the other community manifest in the relationship of the leaders.

Sarah: For Newgrounds, this joint Muslim and Jewish partnership in Los Angeles, it was my first role coming out of rabbinic school. It was designed to transform the conversation from what other people saw as inherently and irreparably dysfunctional between the Jewish and Muslim communities and to look at as a source of potential strength not in, you know, a naive kind of way, but seeing how destructive relations were on the ground in the United States between these communities. I had the sense that it could be something beautiful rather than destructive, and that’s what I wanted to invest in.

Yehuda: Interfaith work is always delicate; but it has also gotten a lot harder after October 7 with the breakdown of allyship in many quarters of liberal Jewish life.

Felicia: In this past year, since October 7th, we received, unlike many of my rabbinic colleagues who have not felt that way. supported by their interfaith partners. We received a significant amount of support from the Reverend K Karpen and Reverend Lea Matthews. They showed up at services, they showed up on processing Zooms with the community, they came to learning sessions. We had an evening just a couple of weeks ago of conversation around the issues of Israel/Palestine and the war, and it was a hard evening, but I think it speaks to the commitment, both personally and communally, that what we’ve done together in being in this relationship. It also means we can move through hard things together.

Sarah: I think a lot, in this post October 7th world that we’re seeing in terms of people’s disappointment at the responses of their interfaith partners is because those relationships were thinner than they had realized or imagined.

The most profound interaction I had was a text message that I got from, I would call her a friend, but she was a friend borderline acquaintance, a week or 10 days after October 7th, she reached out and she said, how are you? And I needed that text so much that instead of texting her back, I called her. And when I called her, she said, I need to see your face. Before I even turned on the camera. My eyes were filling with tears. I didn’t say a word. And she looked at me and she said, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for what happened. It was atrocious. It was awful. And I’m sorry for all the people who can’t say I’m sorry. This is a woman who is profoundly committed to Palestinian justice. That kind of tribal retreat that I was starting to feel this questioning of my lifelong work—she, she fixed it. Like her question, that is all that I needed.

Yehuda: I found both Sarah and Felicia’s bullish comments about interfaith work right now to be optimistic and exciting. I would like to be equally optimistic. I’m pretty worried though. I’ve seen a lot of erosion in local communities that thought their bonds were tighter than they proved to be. I think Sarah is right that those relationships were probably thinner than was assumed.

I’ve argued that one missing piece for a long time was that we Jews were hesitant about how to talk about peoplehood and our loyalties to other Jews in ways that wouldn’t sound weird to our neighbors. It can be difficult for other communities to understand that we feel the same grief and kinship when a tragedy occurs in a Jewish community in North America or halfway around the world. This important piece of our Jewishness needs to be explained to our neighbors as an essential part of what we think it means to be Jewish, and not taken for granted.

I get that a lot of people feel beleaguered and abandoned and might be inclined to stop investing in this work. But whether it is for altruistic or self-interested reasons, Diaspora Jews need good relationships with our neighbors. Rabbis are both the obvious representatives of Judaism to other faiths and of actual, everyday Jews trying to connect with their neighbors, and in many cases, rabbis cannot afford to stop doing this kind of work, given their local relationships and footprints.

I think the courage of those willing to learn from what failed in interfaith contexts after October 7 and to invest in building back those relationships is inspiring, and I hope that the Jews who are mostly just looking inward right now come to see this work as essential to building Jewish peoplehood itself.

So now: If rabbis are the glue in Jewish communal life; if their professional lives can productively wed their own Jewish passions and needs together with a noble professional identity; if rabbis can spend their time working both in the center and at the margins, as bridge-builders and as gatekeepers; if this position of Jewish leadership is as truly complex as we’ve seen so far—why are so many fewer people choosing this line of work than in the past?

There’s a lot of data on the pipeline problem, wherein the retirement rate is outpacing the training rate in the liberal denominations and at the traditional liberal seminaries. Some of this has to do with the decline in the denominations themselves and their flagship institutions, no doubt, but Felicia thinks it may reflect a deeper spiritual question.

Felicia: At least in liberal spaces, that actually calling isn’t at the center. And if it were more at the center, people might touch that more deeply. But that wasn’t language that was used certainly when I was growing up. Belief, you know, no one spoke about God. Calling was a Christian term. And I think that sense of calling and obligation is really compelling if you feel it. But if you don’t live in a universe where that is a possibility, then you don’t imagine you have one.

Yehuda: There are other, more prosaic concerns. Rabbinic work is assumed too often to take only one shape, the traditional rabbi in the pulpit. It was also for a long time assumed to be old and male; today, the field is increasingly dominated by women, which brings its own biases about the work. Maybe part of the problem is that this field, laden with possibilities, is always laden with assumptions that are periodically reinforced by the field itself.

Sarah: There was a very clear bias at the point at which I entered HUC, to the point where the advice that I was getting from people for my interview was, don’t say that you don’t want to go into a pulpit. That’s going to affect your chances of getting it. Right? Like, it was, it was so in the air that there was this bias. Once I got to HUC, again, like that theme of, I’m gonna carve out space for myself and what I want, I remember going to the rabbinic school dean and being like, I don’t want to serve in a pulpit. Give me a different internship. Like, give me a different experience. And she said, one year. You’re going to do one year in Victorville, California. Fine. I did my one year. And she’s like, tell me how you feel after that. I did one year. I was like, please don’t make me go back. And then, and then she helped find the appropriate internships for me that cultivated the skill set that I wanted.

And I was quite lucky that at HUC Los Angeles was Reuven Firestone, who is this renowned academic and lived practitioner of Muslim-Jewish relations in the world that I basically forced myself under his wing to help cultivate the possibility of a career.

Yehuda: I’m relieved that Sarah was able to fight past those biases to become a rabbi. It’s sad to think of the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t take up that fight against whatever invisible obstacle was being placed in their way. There are plenty of other hypotheses about the failing rabbinic pipeline, some more coherent than others. For instance, people talk about the jobs being hard, but people still become hard working teachers and lawyers and doctors. The training can be expensive, but the pulpit system in Conservative and Reform congregations is well-compensated.

The rabbinic pipeline crisis is mirrored in other liberal, American religious communities, and that’s probably a clue. Unfortunately, it is also mirrored in a decline in general in interest in public service jobs.

I argued in an article in our Sources journal that the Jewish community has aided this problem along by reducing the culture of prestige that is expected of rabbis. This irritated quite a few rabbis who prefer the kind of empathic, social work orientation of the rabbi who works with the people, rather than an individual “set above,” but I think we need both kinds of rabbis, and that multiple profiles of thriving rabbis could significantly enrich the pipeline. Most of all, I’m just worried, looking at rabbis today, and the nobility of their work, looking back at two thousand years of rabbis in Jewish history, and looking forward towards this uncertain future. I want us to ask: How do we care for the next generation of Jewish leaders? How do we inspire them, what do they need from us?

Felicia: I think for sure we need to invest in that next generation. I do think there is a scaffolding of creating some magic, and I think because if you don’t create a community that’s alive and feels that it has, I mean, I think we’re trying to create a community of calling, not just rabbis with a calling, that that is incumbent upon the Jewish people writ at large and in small or large synagogues, no matter where you are, I want the Jewish people to feel like they have a calling. And if that’s alive in the synagogue, I would hope that our youth feel that that’s not just about being a rabbi, but it’s about anything.

Sarah: I tend to bring excitement about the potential for what is. And you know, I don’t know that the Judaism that we’re going to experience in 50 or 100 years is going to be recognizable to our parents or even to us, but that doesn’t actually scare me. I am here to serve people who want to associate with this people. I am not here to serve some abstract concepts.

Ari: I sometimes wonder if generations from now, people are going to look back at us and say we did it right, or maybe we did it wrong. We can’t know. But what gives me comfort is that was also true for all the generations that came before us. All the people who were charged with holding this tradition and imagining its future. And we’re still here. We’ve inherited that blessing of generations with all of its beauty and all of its challenges. And now it’s ours to figure out what to do now. And so the weight of that on our shoulders, it doesn’t feel like a burden in some ways. It feels like a blessing.

Yehuda: Here’s what I learned in my six hours interviewing the rabbis and in the dozens of hours writing and preparing this podcast and reflecting on all these conversations:

I learned that a lot of great rabbis feel the tug of needing to do a lot of different jobs all at the same time, and like all of us struggle with some parts of the job more than others. I decided to be more sympathetic to the weird navigations rabbis have to make in aligning their personal and professional Jewish lives when they need to, and the boundaries they have to erect between those lives when that’s the better choice for them and their families.

I learned that rabbis today feel the immense pressure of Jewish history on their shoulders as they face what feel like unprecedented challenges in the nature of Jewish identity, belonging, and community; and I’ve seen firsthand the rise of those pressures after October 7, as their communities depend on them for wisdom and as new people are showing up every day seeking to be included for the first time in a long time. I’ve come to better understand what Donniel Hartman has called the “autoimmune disease” that many congregations seem to possess, which is that they turn on the very rabbis that they need in order to grow in change, and I’ve gained a better appreciation of the kind of ledges that our most audacious rabbis are living on as they try to genuinely lead our people through this complicated moment. Thanks for being with me on this journey.

And now I have two requests I want to make of all of you. First, love your rabbis. Smile at them when they are giving sermons, make sure they have plenty of time built into their schedules for them to study Torah or to find other sources of spiritual and intellectual enrichment, and give them real sabbaticals to go deep and to refresh. Support them in their contract negotiations. Give their families space when they need it, and hospitality the rest of the time. Acknowledge to them that you know all of the invisible work that they do, and be compassionate when that invisible work gets in the way of some of the scheduled work. Help them by finding other lay and professional leaders so that they can focus on their rabbinic superpowers.

And, help the Jewish people by finding more great people to become rabbis. Throughout this series I’ve clarified my own thinking on the necessity of rabbinic work in spite of the ecosystemic challenges in this field. It’s not that I’m going to become a rabbi now, but that I feel more strongly than ever the pressure that should sit on the shoulders of all of us in Jewish leadership to invest in and grow it. I’m hoping that some of you out there will start thinking of the best and brightest that you know of the next generation of Jews and use what we talked about here to encourage them to commit their lives and their careers to the future of our people. I asked these rabbis what they would say to a young person about their career choice. I’ll let them have the last word.

Carey: I think to be a rabbi is really an amazing privilege.

Felicia: I would say the best decision ever I made was to become a rabbi.

Joel: This is the type of job and career that every single day reminds me of how small I am, how important I am, and how both broken and beautiful the world is.

David: It’s a way to live a life of the mind while also being rooted in community. And so, all of the most scintillating, inspiring, sublime ideas that you may have encountered in a Beit Midrash, or in a Sefer, or emerged from a Chavruta, those ideas are relevant and necessary and they get to impact people’s lives.

Sarah Bassin: It can look like a thousand different things. But the thing I so appreciate about it is that it has given me a grounding of knowing who I am in the world, of giving me not only a starting point for myself, but also a community that holds me accountable to who I want to be. That has been the gift, to be able to walk through the world and never let go of that rope.

Carey: You just get to encounter people at their most open moments of life and sometimes that means showing them away, teaching them something, sometimes it just means being present and just being someone constant for them. Be real and share of yourself as a rabbi.

Felicia: Every day I get to touch people and I get to ask questions and I get to wrestle and that’s my work. And the world is a deeply broken place and I get to spend my life in trying to search for some sense of purpose in the mess. And to engage with people in a conversation and to build a community that gives people support and also makes them accountable, I hope, in some form. And so, what a gift. I get to learn with people, people quote my Torah, they come back to me and said, you have this influence on me, like, not because I’m so important, but just because I’m in it.

Ari: When the work is getting invited into the most joyous moments of their life and being asked to help shape it and frame it and to elevate it so that it is not just joyous, but it’s also holy. When I’m invited into the hardest moments of people’s lives, and I get to be someone’s rock for a moment, and to walk away from some really difficult moments and know that I was able to help, it’s a beautiful job. It’s a great life. It’s hard. But what an opportunity, what a blessing to get to write a line of the story of the Jewish people.

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].

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