“North American Jews need more rabbis. This has been true for some time, but this moment in Jewish history demands more spiritual, educational and pastoral leadership from rabbis than any other in recent memory. This call for reinforcements is not an indictment of the many great rabbis we already have in our midst; they know better than most how lonely their work is, and that having more creative leaders alongside them would bolster them in their holy undertaking of building vibrant Jewish life.

When I started working at the Shalom Hartman Institute nearly 15 years ago, I found myself regularly addressed, and often introduced, as “Rabbi Kurtzer.” There was perhaps an obvious institutional reason this kept happening. At Hartman, the professional development and learning programs we run for rabbis are the jewel of our institution and core to our brand, and I suppose it is a reasonable assumption that an educator of rabbis running an institute that loves rabbis would himself be a rabbi. At first, I found this mistake amusing; but I also feared that it might be insulting. Was my doctoral training — in rabbinic Judaism, no less — assumed to be insufficient for the work of teaching rabbis? And worse, was the ease with which people called me “rabbi” cheapening the hard work actual rabbis had done to earn that title?

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that there is a deeper reason why Jews want their teachers and leaders to be rabbis, even if they do so unwittingly, and that is because we, the Jews, need rabbis. The rabbi is the oldest, most venerable and perhaps the most important model of a Jewish professional leader. For nearly two millennia, our rabbis have been carriers of Jewish tradition through scholarship and teaching; interpreters of the world in ways that ensure our continuity; gatekeepers of our communities; pastors in our times of need; representatives of our community to governments and the public; and the exemplars of what it means to be Jewish. When we use the term rabbi, even when it does not quite fit, we are saying something about the creativity, compassion and excellence that we hope and look for in our leaders.

There are many reasons why this field has shrunk, why there has been a decline in enrollment in liberal rabbinical seminaries and why many jobs continue to go unfilled. Some of the problems stem from issues specific to the Jewish community, and some surely from a broader American phenomenon of loss of religious faith and distrust in its institutions. No single programmatic intervention can reverse these trends, but I believe our need for more outstanding rabbinic leaders for the North American Jewish community requires some radical experimentation, beginning with new approaches to rabbinic training.

Earlier this year, we at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, in partnership with the Jim Joseph Foundation, quietly launched one such radical experiment, which we are calling Rabbanut North America: The Hartman Beit Midrash for New North American Rabbis. Modeled in part on our thriving Rabbanut Yisraelit ordination program and network in Israel, we recruited a remarkable cohort of early to mid-career leaders in the fields of Jewish education and academia and individuals seeking to transition from careers outside the Jewish community to working for the Jewish people. The program — which is extremely intense but also part-time and non-residential — offers an accelerated pathway to the rabbinate for candidates with an MA-level or equivalent background in Jewish studies, Hebrew proficiency and demonstrated professional excellence and leadership skills. Most of our participants are already doing some version of the work that rabbis are meant to do, serving as Jewish educators, or in non-rabbinic clergy and clergy-adjacent jobs, or as lay or professional leaders in their Jewish communities; they feel called to rabbinic work, and the training and title will be both an accelerant of and a capstone atop their thriving careers.”

Read the full article in eJewish Philanthropy here.