Sponsor an upcoming episode of Identity/Crisis! Click here to learn more.

Subscribe on all major platforms

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.

The Private and the Public Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Felicia: I was at Tufts in Boston for college and I was teaching music at Temple Shalom in Newton, Mass, and the rabbi that hired me was a camp counselor of mine, and I was discussing what I should do with my life. And I was debating between getting a master’s in Jewish education or going to rabbinical school. And most people were telling me to go to rabbinical school because you’ll get more money and more respect, which is a very un-compelling reason to go to rabbinical school. And he asked me if I believed in God. And I said, I think I’ll get a master’s in Jewish education.

David: Yeah, so look, I was 23 and I was kind of naive and maybe I should have gone the hedge fund route and, you know, set aside some hours each day to, you know, to, you know, high level commercial that I could attend. You know, in my more cynical moments, I’ve described my job as I announce pages for adults and give out lollipops to toddlers.

Felicia: I realized that I had no models of women rabbis that, people told my brother to become a rabbi, but I really, I think I had met one woman rabbi at that point.

Yehuda: Well, I didn’t go to rabbinical school, but at the pivotal moments early in my career, when I knew I wanted to know a lot more about Judaism, and when I knew I wanted to be a leader one way or another in Jewish life, I definitely thought about it. I think in my senior year of college I even had a rabbinical school application in my hands for a while before deciding that I could avoid the denominational question by getting a PhD rather than semicha.

That decision hasn’t changed the fact that plenty of people still refer to me as a rabbi, maybe because I lead an institution that teaches rabbis, and because we all have this category in our head of knowledgeable Jewish leadership that is encoded as “the rabbi.” I don’t even correct people anymore when I get introduced as a rabbi; I think it says more about Judaism than it says about me. And who knows? Maybe one day I’ll bite the bullet too and study my way to the rabbinate.

I’ve been fascinated with rabbis for a long time. In graduate school, I studied the complicated history of how Judaism became rabbinic. The conventional narrative of Jewish history is that after the destruction of the Temple, we transitioned from being a temple-based religion to one that was rooted in the home and the community, and in this retelling rabbis are imagined to play two roles: First, they are the ones that facilitate that transition, like in the story of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai’s midnight escape from a besieged Jerusalem to save Judaism and reconstitute it outside the city. The second is that they are the leaders and formers of that Judaism, as the people who maintain continuity of Jewish tradition from the Temple era, revise it to meet the needs of the newer era, and seamlessly lead our communities into the present.

Like all great historical narratives, this is a deeply flawed story. Historians today maintain that it took centuries between the time of the destruction of the Temple and the rise of the era in which rabbinic ideas – not to mention rabbis themselves – became definitive in Jewish life. Rabbis were likely marginal figures for a long time, and it should not surprise us that religions and cultures do not transform themselves overnight into new things – even, or especially, if they are processing a major trauma. In that messy stretch of time we know of a whole variety of names and categories of important Jewish communal leaders, people in the historical record listed with titles like “the head of synagogue,” or the “elders,” even “philanthropists,” and many more.

This is not to mention the fact that a wide variety of Judaisms persisted long into late antiquity and the middle Ages. It is a great myth that Judaism became rabbinic uniformly and quickly. But a better way to understand Jewish history is to notice the slow, subtle and fascinating ways in which Judaism got rabbinized over a long period of time. Maybe the most interesting tidbit in all of this history is that it seems that rabbis only became “in charge” of synagogues and communities because about a century after the Roman Empire became Christian, the new imperial law codes put Christian ecclesiastic leaders in charge of local municipalities – a structure that paved way for the elaborate structure of bishops, prelates and priests that came to define medieval Christianity. These leaders wondered what to do with the Jews, and they said – I paraphrase – where are the Jews that seem to care about the things for their people that we care about for our people? Maybe it’s those dudes in the corner arguing about handwashing. Let them be in charge of the Jews! And then fast forward some hundreds of years and rabbis are giving sermons and running synagogue board meetings.

Today, we still have many different Judaisms all around us, all of whom exhibit different relationships to classic rabbinic Judaism; we also still have different classes and categories of Jewish leadership. Even in the synagogue, there are various sites of power as it is held by the president, the board, the cantor, and the synagogue membership. But rabbis have persisted for a long time as a unique carrier of Jewish leadership for the Jewish people, even as the professional identity has been encoded differently in different Jewish civilizations, even as Jewish ideas of who our leaders are have evolved in relationship to the other religious environments in which Jews have lived.

The rabbi is such a rich image, even if the category is hard to define. The job looks so different in a tiny “shtiebel,” a one-room synagogue, than it does in cathedral-type synagogues like Holy Blossom in Toronto or Park Avenue Synagogue in New York. Rabbis work in hospitals, in classrooms, in Israeli government jobs, in hairnets inspecting food production. The activities are so vast, and the status so variable: our rabbis are carriers of Jewish tradition through scholarship and teaching; they are interpreters of the world in ways that ensure our continuity; they are gatekeepers of our communities; they are our pastors in our times of need; they are representatives of our community to governments and the public; and they are exemplars, for better or worse, of what it means to be Jewish.

But there are serious warning signs about the health of this field, or this job, or this identity – whatever we want to call it. Enrollment in liberal seminaries in North America has been declining for decades, mirroring similar trends in other non-Jewish religious denominations, but constituting a real threat to the continuity that this profession needs for the health of our institutions. The retirement rate is outpacing the training rate. Rabbis are often under assault politically and the jobs have taken on the public reputation of being unrewarding and too difficult to succeed at.

In some circles, the rabbinate has been re-coded to become a job more connected to activism and social justice than ever before – which changes the very profile of who may be drawn to the role, and the status of the role in the eyes of others. The profession is in decline, in some ways, and transforming itself in others, and it is not clear to me whether those transformations line up with the kinds of changes the field needs to make in order to survive.

I find all of this really worrying. Like probably most of you listening to this show, I’ve had my ups and downs in my relationships with rabbis over the years. You can’t really be a serious Jew without some sort of complicated feelings about rabbis. I think it’s the nature of this role which is sometimes teacher, sometimes pastor, sometimes gatekeeper; you will encounter rabbis in your moments of vulnerability and in moments of discovery, and it is likely that some of your best and worst experiences of Jewish knowledge and authenticity will route themselves through an encounter with a rabbi.

I had some pretty ambivalent feelings about rabbis until I came to work at Hartman nearly 15 years ago. When I was a kid, my parents got involved in starting a breakaway congregation from the main synagogue in our community. The ostensible prompt for this decision was that we lived far away and it was a long walk, but there was no question that a piece of it was also that they and their friends experienced a sense of alienation from a rabbi who was ideologically and dispositionally not their spiritual leader.

Our new congregation was largely lay-led and had a panel of rabbis for pastoral and educational needs, and this had a big impact on me. I learned from a young age that Jews are responsible for our own Jewish identities with rabbis as a supporting cast. I carried this lesson into my post-college Jewish life, helping to found an independent minyan which was the object of a lot of scorn and resentment from local synagogues and rabbis.

It took moving to New York and joining an actual synagogue, and leading our organization’s efforts to support rabbis in their work to more fully value the importance of rabbis in Jewish life. I’m really worried now that it’s not just that we don’t have enough rabbis, but that more generally, we are facing some of our biggest conceptual and adaptive challenges as a people, and we are neither supporting nor sustaining the very fields of leadership that could be most vital in helping us through this moment. Why are we allowing our rabbis to drown when they could be our buoys?

I think it is time to draw the curtain open that keeps us from understanding our clergy, their inner lives, their struggles, and the sheer diversity of their experiences. So I sat down with six rabbis from Hartman’s Rabbinic Leadership Initiative cohort in Jerusalem this summer, to hear their stories, to find out what being a rabbi meant to them and what it entailed, and to explore with all of you, out loud, what this business of being a rabbi is all about.

The rabbis each come from different backgrounds, they possess different strengths, they preside over unique congregations, and they do different jobs. But they are just six of many. None would claim to be “representative” of the diversity of this field. They are special, nevertheless:

David: I’m David Wolkenfeld.

Sarah: I’m Sarah Bassin.

Ari: Ari Kaiman.

Felicia: Felicia Sol.

Joel: Joel Nickerson.

Carey: My name is Carey Brown.

David: And I serve as a rabbi at Ohev Sholom Congregation in Washington, D.C.

Sarah: I am the Director of Clergy and Congregations at HIAS.

Ari: I’m a rabbi at Congregation Shearith Israel in Atlanta, Georgia.

Felicia: At B’nai Jeshurun in New York City.

Joel: At Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles.

Carey: At Temple Shalom, in Vancouver, British Columbia,.

Yehuda: And I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, and this is Rabbinic Identities / Rabbinic Crises: A Special Series from Identity/Crisis about the lives of Rabbis.

Let’s start where our rabbis’ stories start. There is no one pathway to the unique job of being a rabbi. In fact, the diversity of paths into the profession is a phenomenon that dates back to at least the Talmudic Rabbi Akiva, who stumbled into the work at age 40, and then joining a set of young scholars who were raised into the industry.

David: I was planning to return to Israel for a second year of full time yeshiva study. I did that before college for a year, like a gap year, and then I always wanted to go back.

Yehuda: Some rabbis, especially in liberal circles, come to the rabbinate because they love Judaism and someone suggests to them that they do it for a living. David Wolkenfeld came to the rabbinate through the thrilling experience of Torah learning in his yeshiva.

David: The excitement at the anticipation of going back to a Beit Midrash, going back to the yeshiva, was just such a strong, positive emotion. It suggested to me that being involved in learning and teaching was something that should be more central to my life rather than a peripheral activity.

Ari: Lots of other people, I think, knew that I would become a rabbi one day.

Yehuda: You hear this a lot actually, that some rabbis became rabbis because others saw it in them before they saw it in themselves. Ari Kaiman could identify easily the particular moment that sent him down this path.

Ari: I was a sophomore at the University of Florida. And I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I found myself praying on Rosh Hashanah. Like, God, what am I supposed to do with all of this? And there was just a moment when I didn’t doubt that God existed. And it wasn’t like God said, go be a rabbi. It was like, oh, like this, this is real. This is a real moment. And it wasn’t at that point, a question anymore. It was a knowledge that I was going to become a rabbi.

Sarah: I was somebody who knew very early. My bat mitzvah was a transformative experience for me, to the point where the crafting of my sermon of Bechukotai not only gave the sermon from memory, but I had the rabbi equip me with a Madonna mic so I could like walk through the congregation and share my profound 13 year old wisdom up and down among my family and friends. It was, it was extra.

Yehuda: You might conclude from Sarah’s story that her career looks like her bat mitzvah; in fact, she’s the only one of our rabbis in this series who doesn’t work professionally in a pulpit right now. She does her rabbinic work as the director of clergy and congregations at HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Sarah: It was this inclination that I had very early on about uniting this sense of like a moral call in the world and having a grounding and a platform through which to do that.

Yehuda: But the most common thread I heard about the choice to enter the rabbinate, what many described as the most essential element of their work and the thread that keeps them in their hard jobs, is the value of relationships, whether with mentors, or in the community where they decided to work, or with family members who shaped their religious vision and helped them visualize the rabbinate as a viable career choice. It’s interesting – “the calling” is a term that is popular in Christianity as the voice that invites someone to the cloth, to priestly or ministerial leadership. My sense is that in Christian discourse, the one who is doing “the calling” is God. I think that for many rabbis, it is actually the voices of other people, or the community itself.

Ari: I grew up in Pensacola, Florida, and when you’re growing up in a small town, you are the Jewish person that most people know. I was always the one that people asked and I loved being able to share. It was a small Jewish community, but I had this really big and vibrant Jewish family there that went back generations. And so we were at shul every week and it was our family and Shabbos were vibrant and holidays were vibrant and instead of coloring pages of Christmas trees, I would teach the class how to play dreidel.

And when we moved to the suburbs of Atlanta when I was 13, I thought, oh, it’s a big city. All of a sudden, you know, I won’t be the representative of Judaism anymore, but it turned out not to be the case. I still found myself being the one people would ask and loving the fact that I had something to share.

David Wolkenfeld: In Israel back in the yeshiva, the encounter with the kind of rampant xenophobia in contemporary Orthodoxy was not new, but this time, I guess, as a somewhat older person in the Beit Midrash, it pushed me to see what ways I could take responsibility for our community, and teaching Torah seemed like one way I could take responsibility for shifting the trajectory of the future of our religious community.

Sarah: I didn’t come from an overly traditional family. We were very active in my reform congregation growing up in terms of attending services regularly and it being built into my identity and mitzvah day and the whole nine yards. But I think the part that made it more of something I was drawn to was the background that I had that was a mixed background. My mom was born and raised Catholic. She became Jewish when she got married. Having the exposure that I had to her Catholic family and seeing different incarnations of values and expressions made me want to search for that more deeply in my own tradition or to find that parallel.

Her dad, he was the town doctor in Higginsville, Missouri, and like I would grow up with these stories of the justice work that their family represented in town, accepting pickles as payments, intentionally integrating the neighborhood pool racially in the early 1960s. And like, for whatever reason, even though that was from the non-Jewish part of my family, something translated in my brain. Maybe it was the rhetoric I was hearing in religious school, but the obvious channel for that, for me, was through the religious expression of my synagogue.

Yehuda: Becoming a rabbi, no matter the inspiration, is a loaded professional choice. It may start as a deeply personal decision, something you want to do for yourself, but it quickly becomes a vocation in which you are situated in the lives of others, and they become witnesses and shapers of your personal life too. Positions of public leadership are personally and emotionally complicated, you have to come to terms with being constantly spotlighted within your community, with all sorts of implications for your family and your public presence.

I struggle a lot with this. I like to say that I am a real-life introvert but a social media and podcast extrovert, and it has been challenging at various times in my professional life to navigate the boundaries between the private and the public – a challenge that I know I invited in by choosing this line of work.

In positions of religious leadership, this is made more complicated by the layering in of religious authority and the work of moral suasion. There’s a well known book on this phenomenon by Rabbi Jack Bloom entitled The Rabbi as Symbolic Exemplar, which probes the ways that the rabbi’s choices are ripe for the curiosity and the probing of their communities; and in the book’s argument, that’s fair play: he argues that the rabbi should be a model of moral and religious living, and that that demands a kind of separateness, and some boundaries, between the rabbi and the congregation they serve. Maybe this is better expressed by some of the many jokes that capture the image of the rabbi, expected to model excellence in a way that “others” them from their people.

Here’s Sal Litvak telling one of them:

Sal: It’s Yom Kippur. The rabbi, who’s addicted to golf, goes out and plays a few holes before services. First hole, he makes birdie. Up in heaven, Moses looks over at God and says, “You let him make a birdie? He’s playing golf on Yom Kippur?” God says, “Just watch.” Second hole: Eagle! Moses is like, “Come on!” Third hole: Hole in one! Moses is like, “God, come on, what are you doing?” God looks over at Moses and says, “Who’s he gonna tell?”

Ari: I’ve heard there are support groups for children of rabbis and clergy, and I appreciate it. It’s not anyone’s fault that children of rabbis feel a different pressure than would be appropriate. And I don’t fault any congregant for putting any pressure on my children. But, nonetheless, it happens. It feels like sometimes to be a rabbinic family, one is supposed to comport themselves in, in some way or another. I feel really blessed that I happen to have a family that also really enjoys all of this stuff. It’s not always the case.

Yehuda: When you’re a rabbi, your choices are on display for the whole community. There’s almost no way to avoid it. In observant communities, the rabbi has to live in walking distance of the shul together with everyone else, has to send their kids to the same schools as their congregants, has to be incorporated into the same social world, and shop at the same supermarkets, all the while being available to answer discreet halakhic questions of their congregations which are confessional of their intimate personal struggles, and all the while representing something elevated and lofty, living above scrutiny and suspicion.

The easy example to consider is whether you, a congregant, would feel comfortable running into your rabbi on the weekend wearing yoga pants — that means you, encountering your rabbi, in yoga pants, or you encountering your rabbi, who is wearing yoga pants. Or maybe even eating something that you weren’t sure was kosher. When you notice that your encounter with your rabbi as an actual person makes you feel uncomfortable, what do you think is going on in their mind?

It’s even more powerful to consider the internal struggles of when rabbis have to make intensely personal decisions while literally facing their congregation. When are those choices allowed to be personal, and private? When is it impossible to maintain the difference between the private and the public? Felicia is a single parent and a senior rabbi; when she became pregnant, there was nowhere to hide.

Felicia: As you know, I aged and didn’t find a partner, a husband. I had a big choice in front of me about whether to become a parent on my own. And certainly the public nature of the role was in the conversation. It felt more vulnerable. It felt like I had no models for it, in public ways. And so ultimately I think my faith helped push me through that. And I trusted my community also, and they supported me. So, you know, I told the board I got an incredible amount of support, like how courageous that was, like very beautiful things. And then I just was pregnant like everyone else on the Bimah.

And, you know, I think I had internalized a lot of like the failure of not finding a partner because the Jewish community is so focused on kind of heteronormative families and that internalized shame about that. And that I felt it was really important to say, excuse my language, like, screw that. You know, like, I can do this, and the truth is it was the best decision I ever made.

Yehuda: Rabbi Sara Mason-Barkin, of Congregation Beth Israel in Scottsdale, offers a really powerful feminist critique of the rabbi as symbolic exemplar. She argues that the whole model of the symbolic exemplar is rooted in a way of thinking about power, and the rabbinate, as fundamentally hierarchical, and that feminism has reshaped our thinking to enable us to better think of this work, and this power, as relational.

This means that not only do we not need to erect these boundaries that force the rabbi to a place of performance in public and loneliness in private; but that good rabbinic work, in real human relationships which are honest and intertwined with the lives of others, can leverage the personal behavior of a rabbi to be more effective than the old symbolic exemplar model in reshaping the norms and values of a community.

She writes: “In the relational rabbinate, the rabbi is expected to be a guide and a role model – not a symbol. The relational rabbi can enable other Jews to be comfortable with their own Jewish lives as well. When rabbis are no longer pretending to be symbols of God and the ideal Jew, congregants can realize that they, like their rabbis, are able to realistically live authentic Jewish lives. Such authenticity allows the whole community to see that the ideal Jew does have to be like God; the ideal Jew simply has to be oneself, already made in God’s image, striving for meaning in a thoughtful and purposeful way.

As in Felicia’s case:
Felicia: I think over the years, I’ve experienced something very powerful which is that I’ve had a lot of people come to me to talk about it. I had two women who grew up at BJ who called and to set up a time to talk about thinking about becoming single parents.

And that’s been true of rabbis, I’ve gotten calls, and that was the only reason also I was in this movie, like a documentary about women clergy who became parents. And the only reason I did that was because I felt like that Torah needed to be taught. I would never have put myself in that situation otherwise, but I felt like that’s a privilege and a responsibility of my leadership of being a symbolic exemplar, if you want to call it, to say like, this is actually a wholly viable, should be celebrated option.

Yehuda: Every rabbi has their personal Torah to teach. Sometimes, as in Ari’s case, rabbis lean into the opportunities for communal and symbolic leadership from inside their own homes – opportunities to shape a community’s values and norms that still feel natural to their family’s own religious identity.

Ari Kaiman: When the pandemic happened, my children were at Jewish day school and they were going on Zoom Tefillah for their modern Orthodox Jewish day school. And it was not good. It was just, it was like, really, it’s like really, it was like, really, like, there’s nothing good about it.

And so, I said, you know what, like forget that, that block of time to be with the school, like we’ll do it ourselves. And we started to daven ourselves and I brought my guitar out and we, it was very musical, we were singing a lot. And it was just us. And one day one of my kids said, well let’s bring this to, what if we brought this to Facebook Live? And we did, we went on Facebook Live and we started doing Kaiman Kids Tefillah, which was in one way very public, like, you know, all the people who are part of my Facebook world could see. And they wanted to be there, and people were chatting with us, and talking with us. And the culture of Kaiman Kids Tefila became a part of our family life in COVID.

And when I look back at that really, really difficult time, I feel so blessed to have those memories, and to have, to happen to have kids at an age when that was something they wanted to do.

Yehuda: I love these examples; I’m sure many of the rabbis listening can think of their own such moments, when their religious lives or personal family decisions became vehicles of their rabbinate, those sweet moments of feeling like an exemplar in the good sense of just doing good and other people learning from it, unlike the strained effort of trying to pretend to be something you’re not.

But all of this can be a lot of pressure to put on a person. Like the many of us who struggle with balancing multiple commitments – where you sometimes feel like you’re failing on multiple fronts! – rabbis can struggle with letting others down, and letting themselves down too.

One time I ran into a rabbi in our community in a supermarket and the rabbi was a little cold to me and I found it jarring. I wondered, what I had said or done? It took until I got to my car to just process that this rabbi was also, like me, rushing to grab some groceries to go home and make dinner for some hungry kids. What a complicated dynamic, to walk through the world trying to be a human and being seen always as something else.

Joel Nickerson is the new senior rabbi at Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, one of the largest congregations in the country. The new job brings new responsibilities and a new kind of pressure as well.

Joel: I have the benefit of being at a synagogue with people who are extremely successful in their careers, and thought leaders. And I feel the pressure that, who am I to be able to teach them or inspire them? At the same time, it’s a great motivator.

Felicia: I’ve certainly made choices. When you’re a single parent, you can’t like just delay going home and do your work. Like you actually have to leave to relieve the babysitter. Like there wasn’t a lot of gray. I don’t feel martyrdom about it. I hear that a lot in the rabbinate, like rabbis are like, I can’t do either job well. Like, that’s a terrible place to be. Like, I love my work, I love my kids, and I feel super purposeful in both of those spaces. They overlap. My calling is not exclusively as a parent or as a rabbi. I’m just a person living my life and serving.

David: I often have the feeling of not living up to my own standards of what Torah study and Torah scholarship entails. So that’s an ongoing source of sadness.

Ari: I have so many commitments and so many things that I get to do that are responsibilities. It can be exhausting. It can be exhausting. And I would say the hardest part, the part that I would say drains me are the moments that I feel I’ve let someone down. You know, no one, no one can tell us, when we’re a leader, exactly what the right choices are. And they look to us to know something. And I think what keeps me up at night sometimes is the not knowing and the fear of what it means to share that I don’t know. we make decisions and we try our best and we’re not always right.

Yehuda: The struggles to create clarity in the role also show up in questions about clarity in relationships. I had a fierce debate with a friend of mine right after college who was in rabbinical school that he was going to insist on using his rabbinic title everywhere he went when he graduated. I insisted that I would never call him by his title. But then again I have rabbis in my life now who I absolutely call rabbi at synagogue and use their first times on Whatsapp – and those little distinctions are just a tiny representation of what rabbis struggle with when it comes to the intertwining of their professional and personal identities.

Joel: I’ve always felt that part of being the leader of a community is to be with the community, not just physically, but to be able to engage with them, speak with them, for them to feel as though I am with them and not above them, so to speak. And at the same time, I’ve learned over the years to, to really be clear that there is a line. And I think congregants want that line to exist. And I need that line to exist for myself so that I can have a piece of my own life, whether it’s my personal life with my family or whether it’s just a piece of my job that is not shared with others.

Carey: I mean, I don’t think this is unique to the rabbinate, but I think it’s that kind of, you know, rabbis want to, at the one hand, be really accessible to people. We want our people to know that we’re here for them, you know, anytime, no matter what. And at the same time, email is like, you know, the model of us not having boundaries and people being able to reach out and expect a response quickly and anytime, and sometimes when I’m just, you know, say, how did I just spend, you know, a few hours of my day in front of my computer when I could be doing more hospital visits or checking in on people and all those things.

Ari: I’m expected and want to be in many places at once. I try to apply a calculation where I am in the place I’m needed the most, and I change the way I weigh the formula of that in my mind, depending on if it’s my day off or it’s not.

Yehuda: A few years ago there was this hashtag that kept appearing on social media, #whatrabbisdo; I think it was an effort by some rabbis to try to pull back the curtain on their jobs, and in particular to amplify the banal activities that they found essential to their work like writing sermons, hanging with the Hebrew school kids, as well as those that drew less public attention than the public activities that might land some rabbis on a Newsweek top 50 rabbis list.

I found some of it a little bit self-indulgent, the hashtag, I mean, in the sense of – sure, your job is complicated and multifaceted, but so is everyone’s! But the rabbis reflected out loud the complexity of their jobs, especially in congregations, and the vast constellation of different forms of professional expertise that rabbis are expected to have, from the professional to the educational to the pastoral to the administrative.

Today’s great rabbis are expected to be wise on the pulpit and snappy on social media; competent by the bedsides of the sick and in the intricacies of the synagogue budget; knowledgeable about ancient sources and modern scholarship. It’s… a lot.

Ari: People come with different abilities. And if everyone comes also with humility, that like they know what they’re good at and what they’re not good at and can help one another, then that’s an ideal leadership. I think so too in my rabbinate, there are areas that like, I have strengths and the congregation appreciates them, and I feel after eight years there that they love me enough that they just tell me when there are areas that I’m not good at.

Yehuda: At Temple Shalom in Vancouver, Carey Brown is involved in a wide set of activities and holds many different responsibilities, ranging from directing a program called East Side Jews, a kind of sub-community outside the synagogue, to coordinating and teaching in a program for people considering conversion, and of course, teaching in the Hebrew school, giving sermons, and more.

Carey: So I think about, you know, being a rabbi, it’s like a utility player, right, in baseball. Like you get to play all the positions. And most of the time I actually, I really like that about the work. I like that no day’s ever the same. You never kind of know what to expect. I feel very fortunate personally that I am in a position as an associate rabbi.

So some of those pieces you mentioned, particularly fundraising, is not really on my table. And I have an amazing rabbi that I work with who is excellent with that. But in our minds, I think, you know, today people mostly, for lots of jobs, they’ve become super specialized and people are really good at one thing or two things. I don’t think we have to be amazing at everything.

Sarah: Even when I was a congregational rabbi, there was a very clear division of responsibilities. I was not the one who shapes the prayer experiences. I am not musically inclined in the least bit. That was held by one of my fellow clergy. Like, my responsibility was on the words of Torah, was on the Divrei Torah, on translating the tradition, on inviting people in.

Joel: I’ve learned over the years that my attempts to either try to be everything to everyone or for me to try and take on other people’s expectations of me as my own is not going to land me in a place that’s healthy for myself or my community. So yes, it’s, it’s an overwhelmingly large job, but I think part of it is you get the right people on the team to help you with that job.

Yehuda: Rabbis can be specialists and they can be generalists, like in a lot of professions, but the truth is that the most significant variable in whether rabbis can choose one area of expertise or have to take on all aspects of the job is the size and wealth of the congregation. In general, synagogues in North America increasingly divide less along denominational lines, and more along the line between the haves and the have nots. We’ll explore this later in the series. But many rabbis don’t have the luxury to skip out on aspects of the job that they don’t love. I asked our rabbis what parts of the job fill them up, and what parts drain them.

David: The pieces of the work that are more draining rather than inspiring and fueling to me are the logistical aspects of being a sort of in a senior management position of a complicated organization. I think shuls are often understaffed, and even when they’re very well staffed, there are just a lot of small decisions that cross the rabbi’s desk, and they don’t make use of my training, they don’t make use of my idealism, they just make use of the fact that I’m a senior professional working at a synagogue, which is a strange kind of hybrid organization that, you know, engages in education and also like, you know, chairs have to be set up in the room at the right time for, for shalah shudes and things like that.

Felicia: I think it’s often a resource problem and it’s an excellence problem. I’ve been deployed differently over the years. Up until like two years, actually, a year ago, I was overseeing all the programmatics of BJ, so I would have the power to influence that. But then what became clear, after probably, I don’t know, five or seven years, it was like I couldn’t do that and like then have a funeral, like that needed more consistency that I could provide, and it meant that I was completely kind of stretched.

David: I don’t think rabbis are lazy, so I think anything taken off the rabbi’s plate will be replaced by the rabbi investing themselves in, like, their core rabbinic work qualifications and their core skill set. So I think it’s, I think it’s really win-win. It’s not like, oh, the rabbi wants a morning off, so he’s going to pass on to the lay leadership this particular task. I think it’s, anything that the rabbi doesn’t have to do because someone else in the community, either a professional or a lay person, can do, that then the rabbi can prepare a better shiur, or do an additional shiur, or call another homebound elderly person, or whatever it might be that the rabbi can uniquely do.

Ari: I love people really easily. And what that means to me is that I feel a sense of obligation toward them. If they have chosen me as their rabbi, or not chosen me but are either blessed or cursed depending on the day to be my child, or my partner, I feel an endless obligation to them and I just can’t be everywhere at once. And so when I feel like I’ve let someone down, those are the moments that I’m, I’m hardest on myself and, and that I, I always am striving to do better.

Yehuda: I asked all the rabbis whether they found the work lonely. Rabbinic work is in public and in relationship with people all the time, so the suggestion that it might be experienced as lonely may sound strange. Then again, think about your synagogue: there are probably a handful of doctors and lawyers and teachers and baristas and college students, but there’s only one rabbi of the community, and who do they talk to about work over kiddush? Moreover, who do they ask their big halakhic questions to? Who guides them spiritually?

Like therapists, rabbis bear a lot of people’s private stories, secrets, and struggles, but unlike therapists, they show up in community every week with those same people. This invites a kind of otherness, by necessity.

Carey: I think rabbis, I think all clergy are actually very lonely, profoundly lonely. I think it’s hard to kind of connect on a real personal friendship, intimate level with someone once you have that label on you. I find I’ve made some really wonderful friends in Vancouver, mostly through my kids’ friends’ parents, but my deepest friendships are my friends from when I was 10 years old.

David: I think the challenge in being friends with congregants has come from the fact that a professional rabbinic relationship is about serving the needs of the congregant. And whenever the rabbi is getting, like, emotionally fueled from that relationship, I think that, that is potentially abusive and, and can lead to really dark places and an actual, like, friendship friendship is about both people getting fueled emotionally and sustained by that relationship. So I think that’s been, that’s been a barrier for me. There are many conversations that you would have with even a mid level friend that would be off limits to like a member of the shul where I work.

Joel: I think it’s really important for me to be vulnerable with, with people when I’m meeting with them, when I’m talking with them, to share pieces about who I am, my life, what I’m thinking about, that are not all positive, or where I don’t feel like I have everything together, and to share some of my own vulnerabilities, but not, you know, not to the place where, where it feels as though I am placing a burden upon them, that they need to hold something for me. At the end of the day, my job is to care for them. They are, they are paying me to care for them, to inspire them, to comfort them. That is not their job. And so that’s the line that I draw.

Carey: It gets a little fuzzy when a congregant, because, you know, we’ve had nice conversations at, you know, Kiddush lunch or something, and then sometimes there are assumptions of friendship. and it can be hard to navigate sometimes if it’s, you know, you like this person but that’s not really who you’re, you know, you’re one day off a week that you’re really gonna spend your time with.

David: I have a policy, I don’t friend congregants on Facebook. If they friend me, I’m happy to engage with them on Facebook, but I don’t solicit their friendship. I don’t necessarily, like, if they don’t want me to see their pictures on vacation or Shabbat afternoon or whatever it may be, right? Like if they’re happy sharing that, that’s fine, but I don’t want to impose that intrusion on them.

Joel: There are a lot of pieces of my job that even my wife doesn’t know all of the things that I have to deal with. So I’ve come to terms with that. And there are some pieces that I think are actually valuable about the loneliness. And there are, of course, negative repercussions of that as well.

Ari: I think that when the work is oriented to combat loneliness, I’m never alone, right? I’m never alone. but, I don’t know if anyone gets through life without sometimes feeling lonely.

Yehuda: I think Ari is right: there’s no job, or human experience, without some measure of loneliness. For Rabbi Soloveitchik, the idea of loneliness was theologically essential, arguing in his essay “The Lonely Man of Faith” that true religiosity makes a person unsettled, never fully at home; for Soloveitchik, some acceptance of that existential loneliness was a way of confronting the and repudiating the instinct towards self-indulgence and self-satisfaction that he saw as defining the modern experience. It was also a way of opening up the human towards a more relational encounter with the Divine.

But if you’re not so much a God person, I’d suggest that the true antidote for loneliness, the personal kind, and the religious kind, is best found in community. I’d even venture to argue that community can help remedy loneliness even better than companionship or partnership. Couples and families can also feel alone and unsettled, content in their four walls but still untethered, like Noah in his ark. The beating heart of synagogue communities, and I think most rabbis would agree, is not the moment when everyone is listening to the sermon, but in the little communities that form around morning minyan when a small group shows up to help its members say kaddish, or when the whole congregation is singing together at the end of Yom Kippur and the rabbi can blend in as the invisible choreographer of the drama, or when the rabbi’s quiet pastoral guidance of a family beginning the mourning process is supplanted by strangers from the synagogue showing up with platters of appetizing to convert the home into a shiva house.

The rabbi as leader of community – 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. Thank you to Sal Litvak for permission to use his joke. You can find hundreds more at accidentaltalmudist.org.

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.