“Don’t hire a rabbi” I was surprised to hear myself say to a lay leader who was, ostensibly, interviewing me for the job.
After 12 and a half years in a pulpit position at a small and also mighty congregation on the coast of Georgia, I have moved to North Carolina. I am making this move because it is great for my family. I trust I will find my way, in time, to whatever is next for me professionally. And I keep getting this question: “If you are not in a pulpit, will you still be a rabbi?” In other words, are you really a rabbi if you are not standing at the front of the room leading services?
God, I hope so.
This moment of life transition has gifted me a new perspective, and I am blessed to ask some hard questions about the Jewish world. I mean literally, because as I seek out meaningful work for myself, I have called many Jewish colleagues and leaders and asked what they have going on. And each person I have asked has mentioned their anxiety over the drying up of the rabbinic pipeline. Will there be enough rabbis to serve the Jewish future? Atra just published a study telling us that fewer people want to be rabbis right now because of work-life balance and the enormous responsibilities we give to pulpit clergy, among other issues.
With younger generations relating and connecting so differently than older generations, what happens to the role of the rabbi? Not only are fewer people signing on to the rabbinate, but also, more clergy are leaving the pulpit. I have many rabbinic friends and colleagues who have left synagogues to create and lead decidedly non-synagogue types of meaningful and vibrant Jewish communities .
For the last 20 years, non-synagogue Jewish communities have been growing. Some are synagogue-adjacent, like Baltimore’s Soul Center, and some are entirely free-floating out there like San Francisco’s The Kitchen or At The Well. Yet all are really Jewish and the clergy leading them are really rabbis. Many of our large legacy Jewish institutions are trying to study these groups or even come into relationships with them; I hope that this will evolve into legacy institutions bolstering emergent Jewish communities and leaders of these new ideas teaching how to serve the needs of an emerging Jewish world.
Some of my comments to that lay leader, when I questioned why he wanted to hire a rabbi, were driven by this knowledge. He described to me his congregation: Growing in numbers over the last five years, a deep bench of lay liturgical leadership, a rabbi who leads services quarterly, vibrant multifaith connections which led to the creation of a Jewish-Christian-Muslim joint statement post October 7 (how many communities can say that?), a school, active volunteerism, social events, and so on.
This sounds like a healthy, engaged, community.
And I found myself saying “Once you get a rabbi, you will keep needing a rabbi to keep you going. And looking at where the world is heading, that might be hard to sustain.” They used to have a gifted lay leader at the helm, and once that happened, everyone else stepped back. Having a spiritual leader seems to give other people permission not to have to do Jewish life for themselves.
And not doing Jewish life for yourself is profoundly not what the future of Judaism wants, needs, or deserves. If they have a traditional rabbi, congregants will step back, expecting that person to step in. Or they will not step in at all, because people less and less want others to live out the most meaningful parts of their lives for them.
What if instead of hiring someone to run the show from the front of the room or from the head of the board table, they had a rabbi who helped support more of what already is? What if they never had a rabbi on the pulpit but had a rabbi in the streets, in the social hall, in the coffee shop, teaching yoga and so on?
There is something else happening here. I think fewer people want to be rabbis because what synagogues currently do doesn’t meet the needs of either emerging Jewish adults or the current world we live in.
We are seeing a steady decline in synagogue affiliation rates in the U.S. Or, we were before October 7, 2023, after which we saw an affiliation bump as many people deepened their connection to or returned to Jewish institutional life. Existential threats to the Jewish people make us do that. But overall, compared to several decades past, synagogues in the U.S. have fewer members and fewer Jews are joining them.
Most notably, folks in their twenties to forties are less likely to join synagogues. Some of the decline is about barriers to access, such as costs and lack of their own age cohort. These are people who want to engage with Judaism but are having a hard time either getting in or finding their place once they arrive.
But fewer younger Jews are looking to existing Jewish institutions to meet their spiritual needs or feed their sense of belonging. Perhaps being Jewish is less important to them, but perhaps what is important to them and could be Jewish is not held within the walls of the shul. Jews of all ages, especially younger ones, find meaning in all kinds of Jewish activities; they feel strongly connected to family, to Jewish culture, to Jewish history, and they largely believe in some Higher Power, even if not the God we read about in the Torah. But they do not seem to want to bring those expressions of Jewish life through the doors of synagogues.
Jews under 40 live in a world of authenticity over association. Following someone else at the front of the room may not appeal when they feel they can do it for themselves. We know that people who grew up in the time of Enron, the automotive buyout, the collapse of Freddie Mac and Sallie Mae, and the rolling government shutdowns have earned a deep distrust in institutions. We know that anyone under 20 in 2010 when the iPhone came out interacts with the world in fundamentally different ways than the rest of us. They understand relationships in virtual, asynchronous space based on likes and trends. And while research also tells us this is harming them, it does not change that this is their lived experience. This generation connects differently than any generation that came before.
Our institutions change at a much slower pace than the surrounding culture, so they have not yet pivoted to reflect that. The emerging non-synagogue Jewish communities may give us the insight necessary to begin to change. In my experience, we need a spiritually rich Judaism that provides authentic experiences of the Divine, without the sometimes vengeful, often puppeteering God of old. We need prayer that focuses not on connecting with the person at the front of the room or even with God on High, but that doubles down on connection with each other and an unwavering commitment to the possibility of personal evolution.
We need flatter corporate structures within our institutions, driven by collaborative leadership between volunteers and professionals. We need to practice the ancient Jewish art of sacred disagreement for the Sake of Heaven, and then bring that sacred container out into the marketplace of ideas.
And we need dynamic, savvy people, mostly behind the scenes, stitching it together who we will call rabbi. The role of the rabbi must change, in addition to our synagogues.
I hope that our wild mix of legacy institutions, emerging communities, and several million people invested differently in maintaining a vibrant Jewish future can set aside our anxieties and listen deeply, wholly, and openly to one another so that collectively we can bring into the world whatever it is next. Being a rabbi will change too: Fewer of us will lead from the front of the room and our jobs will be to elevate leadership from within. I imagine a world where we all work together in deeper partnership with those we lead, as they lead us into a new future.