Rabbi
Yehuda Kurtzer
Credit: Shutterstock
Yehuda Kurtzer is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute.
Liberal North American Jews do not have nearly enough rabbis, and the problem is getting worse. The rabbinic retirement rate, accelerated by burnout, is outpacing the graduation rate, and the number of students enrolling in American Jewry’s mainstream liberal seminaries has plummeted over the last several decades. But even if we were producing the same number of rabbis we once did, it seems to me that we still would not have enough leaders to serve the theological, spiritual, and moral needs of a North American Jewry starved for leadership.
Both rabbinic training and the rabbinic workforce desperately need our communal attention. Rabbinic jobs have gotten harder and lonelier; stakeholders are more demanding of the rabbis they hire to lead their institutions, even as they are growing less attached to those very institutions; the people who take these jobs often experience them as servile, and they come with widely variable pay scales. Most rabbinic training programs are long and expensive. And all of this takes place within an ecosystem of American Liberal Judaism whose institutions and ideas have been struggling for a long time.
But I think that what we need is not merely more rabbis—we could make that happen quickly and easily by further diminishing our expectations of rabbinic training and rabbinic competencies—but rather to restore rabbinic self-respect and rethink our expectations, so that our rabbis will be leaders we respect and, thus, the leaders we need. I believe that by emphasizing the democratic nature of Torah study over the last few decades, we have devalued the rabbinic role of protecting and preserving Torah over generations and carefully showing the way that it can change over time. The role of “the Rabbi,” like teachers and other professions once understood to represent expertise, has become increasingly devalued.[1] We have disempowered our rabbis for the sake of amplifying our own agency in shaping our Judaism, only to discover that we cannot go at it without guidance. For the sake of the future of a robust Liberal Judaism, a Judaism that truly empowers us, we need—paradoxically—the rehabilitation of a more elitist model of rabbinic Torah study and authority. This entails changes not only in what we expect rabbis to do but in what we expect them to know; and what we, as non-rabbis, are willing to sacrifice and make possible in return.
My argument draws upon two different models of Torah, both found in the Talmud. The first, which I believe we have overused, is distinctly liberal. We find it in texts like the late antique midrashic collection Pesikta DeRav Kahana 2:25, in which the revelation at Sinai is depicted “as though God were a statue with faces on every side, so that though a thousand people might be looking at the statue, they would be led to believe that it was looking at each one of them.” Here, Torah is received equally by all our ancestors; here, the revelation at Sinai empowers each individual to interpret and transmit Torah as they see fit. This version of the revelation has echoes in other similarly minded texts in the rabbinic canon, such as the charge that a person who is confused by the debates between the House of Hillel and Shammai but recognizes that their different traditions are given by the same God, should make for themselves a “heart of many rooms” to internalize even these conflicting ideas as part of the complexity of revelation (tSotah 7:7).
This was an idea ahead of its time. In texts like these, revelation exposes a huge chasm between God’s infinite character and our human limitations, suggesting that each of us can access only small pieces of the divine word. This is a theological argument for epistemological humility, which in turn engenders a kind of pluralism, the kind that makes us recognize that no individual or group of individuals has unique access to the vastness or accuracy of Torah; that we are each obligated to value our individual contributions to the continuation of Torah; and that we are dependent on one another to try to capture the complex tapestry of wisdom that God has bequeathed to the world.
Given the consistency of this message with liberal ideas about human equality, it is no surprise that liberal Jewish institutions—including the Shalom Hartman Institute—have privileged this narrative of Torah in our teachings to liberal Jews. Because we operate in a liberal order, and because our students tend to inhabit liberal mindsets, our work for decades has been to try to persuade Jews to participate in inheriting and transmitting Torah, even though the conditions of enlightenment and emancipation provide them with alternative life choices. To do so, we have emphasized those versions of the rabbinic tradition that privilege human autonomy and responsibility, and we have consciously de-emphasized the versions of the tradition that describe it as the province of an elite order.
But the idea of a rabbi as someone with unique access to Torah is also part of our tradition, and this is an image of Torah that I think we need to rehabilitate. Even as in some places they described revelation in more democratic terms, the Talmudic rabbis imagined themselves as the invaluable, cherished custodians of a treasure, a role that invested them with paramount importance. Over time, Jewish communities came to appreciate that rabbis were an elite group that had to be protected and respected for the benefit of the people they served and the tradition they were preserving. And the rabbis had high expectations of themselves and their knowledge.
We can find images of rabbinic elitism across the rabbinic corpus. The ur-text of rabbinic Judaism’s genealogy, mishnah Avot 1:1, imagines an unbroken chain of tradition from Moses to Joshua to the elders and progenitors of our Sages, the Men of the Great Assembly, continuing through to the rabbis who constitute the first few generations of the rabbinic order. Other than the emergence of the title “rabbi,” there is no marked difference between the earlier greats and the rabbis themselves in this text, and the implication is clear: the Torah has been preserved in its entirety from Moses through us—its prized protectors and transmitters.
In bMakkot 22a, the rabbis describe their own greatness as a result of the rabbinic courage and imagination it took to modify the Torah. The example they use is their modification of the Torah’s direct instruction to lash the violator of a particular rule 40 times in Deuteronomy 25:3; the rabbis reduce the punishment by one, to 39 lashes:
Rava said: How foolish are the rest of the people who stand before a Torah scroll and yet they do not stand before a great man; as in a Torah scroll, forty is written and the Sages came and subtracted one.
Anyone can be an automaton who reads the Torah and obeys what it literally says; the greatness of the rabbis is their bold creativity. They are worthy of as much reverence as the Torah itself. In many Jewish communities throughout history, this was the case; when Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was a small child, adults stood up as he entered the room, out of respect for his family, a Hasidic dynasty.[2] In my own modern Orthodox upbringing, it was commonplace for us to stand in the presence of our rabbis.
The sages were unapologetic in their portrayal of their own importance. In bPesachim 49b, the rabbis map out a social order in which they are at the top:
The Sages taught: A person should always be willing to sell all he has to marry the daughter of a Torah scholar. If he cannot find the daughter of a Torah scholar, he should marry the daughter of one of the great people of the generation. If he cannot find the daughter of one of the great people of the generation, he should marry the daughter of one of the heads of the congregations. If he cannot find the daughter of one of the heads of the congregations, he should marry the daughter of one of the charity collectors. If he cannot find the daughter of one of the charity collectors, he should marry the daughter of one of the schoolteachers.
To be honest, this is probably not an accurate depiction of the social hierarchy of Jewish late antiquity. I read it, rather, as a plea by the rabbis for the respect they believed they deserved. Not surprisingly, the rabbis put the am haaretz, an ignoramus they imagine to continually violate the law, at the bottom of the heap, reinforcing a link between their knowledge and their sense of their own superiority. The rabbis believed in the dignity of their calling, and they wished for a world in which it would be honored.
Another text (mAvot 6:1) argues for the value of “becoming dirty at the feet of a sage,” calling for its readers to “sit before him on the ground and accept upon yourself every word that comes from his mouth with fear and reverence, trembling and sweating, just as our forefathers accepted what they heard at Mount Sinai with fear and reverence, trembling and sweating.” Another audacious reading (bPesahim 22a) suggests that the gratuitous addition of the preposition et in the verse “You shall love [et] the Lord your God” signals that the Torah includes Torah scholars, along with God, as the object of our obligation. The sage becomes akin to the Divine.
To their credit, the rabbis were willing to place themselves within an ecosystem that also requires other leaders who have skills they do not possess. For instance, in mishnah Avot 4:13, Rabbi Shimon outlines a system of leadership consisting of three crowns—Torah (rabbinic leadership), the priesthood, and the monarchy—but also notes that a “good name” is the crown that rules all of them. I read this text as placing rabbinic leadership alongside other forms of Jewish leadership but making no claims of superiority. So long as it remains in balance with sacerdotal and political leadership, it has its rightful place in the system and sufficient aura in the presence of the people.
Love Jewish Ideas?
Subscribe to the print edition of Sources today.
But my favorite image of how the rabbis understood themselves emphasizes both the dignity and the responsibility that comes with the investiture of ordination:
One time the wicked kingdom issued decrees of religious persecution against the Jewish people: that anyone who ordains will be killed, and anyone who is ordained will be killed, and the city in which they ordain will be destroyed, and the boundaries in which they ordain will be uprooted.
This text describes a moment of desperate urgency in the aftermath of the Bar Kochba revolt. The rabbis tell of the Romans cracking down on the ordination of judges and sages to interrupt the Jewish people’s continuity of leadership, which the Romans regard as dangerous, a potential force against their rule. In this moment of urgency, in a moment of desperation rooted in the worst imaginable fear for the sages, the fear that Judaism would be rendered discontinuous, a courageous sage gathers his disciples and ordains them.
What did Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava do? He went and sat between two large mountains, between two large cities, and between two Shabbat boundaries: Between Usha and Shefaram, and there he ordained five elders. And they were: Rabbi Meir, and Rabbi Yehuda, and Rabbi Shimon, and Rabbi Yosei, and Rabbi Elazar ben Shammua. Rav Avya adds: also Rabbi Nehemiya. When their enemies discovered them, he said to them: My sons, run! They said to him: My teacher, what will be with you? He said to them: I am cast before them like a stone that cannot be overturned; They said: He did not move from there until they had inserted three hundred iron spears [lunkhiyot] into him, making him like a sieve. (bSanhedrin 14a)
Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava could have responded to the crisis and the crackdown against ordination by diffusing Jewish knowledge widely, finding an ancient equivalent to putting it all online and democratizing access. Instead, he chose to gather a handful of his key students together and invest them with authority. And now they could run in different directions as the Romans approached. The old sage could not escape death, but the text’s implicit hope is that at least a few of these newly ordained bearers of the tradition would make it to the future alive. (Strikingly, this story appears within a larger discussion of how sages should be ordained. It is one of very few texts in which the ancient rabbis describe how their power and authority is transferred from one generation to the next.)
The rabbis’ sense of their own elitism was altruistic in nature, not selfish. Altruistic elitism is the belief that Jewish continuity relies on the preservation of Torah, which can best happen by investing a small number of elites who have mastered its knowledge with the responsibility to sustain that body of knowledge over time and through tribulation.
The rabbis, in other words, are Judaism’s Jedi—a useful metaphor not just in describing the elitism and even secrecy associated with the possession of ancient traditions and the commitment to sustain them over time, but also in noting that experts can play with the tradition and tease out its powers in ways very different from those of laypeople and novice learners. This kind of elitism concentrates power in the hands of a few experts, in the hope that they will preserve the sacred knowledge for the communal good; and it enables these few experts to be competent and conversant with that sacred knowledge and to be uniquely capable of adapting and modifying the sacred tradition. This is the magic of rabbinic continuity: the Torah the rabbis received is not actually the same as the one they transmitted to us. The twin processes of tradition and transformation require skill, loyalty to the culture of interpretation, and a sense of mission; and a small number of individuals who possess all of these.
The chasm is enormous between how these texts imagine the stature and role of the rabbi, and how present-day rabbis are seen and treated or how they operate in our communities. Rabbis, in today’s Jewish community, are a beleaguered professional class rather than an elite. This is partly because of the external factors I mentioned above, and partly because the system for professional training of liberal rabbis has been depersonalized from the old model of individual transmission of authority and wisdom and secularized into a professional graduate program. But I think this also happened because liberal Judaism has foregrounded a different story about rabbis and Torah. We have done so at our own peril.
There is a chronic tension in contemporary Jewish life between, on the one hand, communal strategies that are designed to create more democratic access to our tradition, our community, and our institutions, and, on the other hand, those that privilege elitism or other means of preserving or protecting Jewish tradition against the losses that come with the changing winds. There is intense pressure towards democratic access, and there is much to praise about this instinct. But I think it has cost us a certain reverence for the tradition itself; for the rigor of what it means to know something about Judaism, and maybe, for our community, of self-respect. If studying Torah is so easy that anyone can do it, is it valuable?
This is one hypothesis about why fewer and fewer people want to be rabbis, and why rabbis feel less and less respected. In most of the current programs training rabbis for liberal Jews, the training privileges an assumption that we want our rabbis to be generalists on all aspects of the complicated rabbinic profession more than an insistence that they be talmidei chachamim, wise sages. It is a good thing that training programs of today have elevated the importance of pastoral care, counseling, spiritual formation, and executive leadership as important skills for many rabbinic jobs. But too few rabbinic jobs are designed to allow rabbis to be wise and learned people as their primary or even dominant skill. And because of the pipeline crisis, our rabbinical schools, which need enrollments to stay solvent, cannot afford to place obstacles before those who would choose this complicated profession. This has translated into a willingness to accept students with very little Jewish background almost directly into the seminary.
At the same time, there are precious few programs designed for adults to study Torah full-time in liberal settings, and most philanthropists and foundations view such programs skeptically, as expensive investments with returns that are hard to quantify. This last piece is particularly salient: Maybe ultra-Orthodox Jews have devalued the elitism of the Torah scholar by enabling simply too many people to spend their lives in community- or state-supported Torah study; but I think liberal Jews have devalued the elitism of the Torah scholar by enabling far too few.
Where there has been Jewish philanthropic investment in liberal Jews studying Torah, it has focused on reaching as many people as possible in the profound and admirable hope that access to Torah will build Jewish identity and attachment. It reflects a deep understanding of the power of Torah to attract and then empower Jews to take hold of their Judaism. But it is not clear that it does enough to ensure the perpetuation of Torah itself, as a treasure and a discipline that cannot merely be shared—it must also be sustained.
I have some clear prescriptions in mind. We need more community kollels and national programs for full-time Torah study by liberal Jewish adults. We need more rabbinic jobs that are built around teaching, writing, and thought-leadership, both on and off the pulpit; and we need to support the talented rabbis who can do this work with resources that free them from the thousands of other obligations that fall to the rabbi because there is no one else to do them.
We need to free the structure of identifying rabbinic talent and training new rabbis from a business model that—like the university—requires a certain number of students every year and does not allow for more iterative and custom-designed structures for the education that elite rabbis need. We need to hold the line on standards for the commitments and values we consider essential (as David Ellenson z”l did in refusing to lift the requirement that Hebrew Union College rabbinical students spend a year in Israel) or shifting ideological parameters to make it easier either to enter or to complete rabbinical school. In rethinking the models for training, we can integrate all the gains we have achieved in the last number of decades, especially in helping to ensure that our rabbis learn about the safeguards against abuses of power. The kind of elitism I am advocating for is ethical.
And most of all, we simply need to talk more about the majesty of Torah, to underscore the reality that our very existence as Jews today was made possible, in part, by exceptional rabbis who sustained this tradition before it finally made its way to us.
If liberal Judaism can elevate the expertise and the culture of excellence that once characterized Jewish religious leadership, we will make the calling of the rabbi once again something that our best and brightest students will compete to attain; and in attracting and supporting these students, we will cultivate the creative mastery that generations of Jews before us deployed to make sure Torah is alive and relevant. Communities will always protect what they consider important and entrust its care to those most able. For centuries, for our people, that has meant putting Torah in the hands of our great rabbis, the best and brightest of us. What will it take for us to look once again to our rabbis for wisdom?
