Relational Rabbinics: Reframing the Role of Female Clergy
Rachel Kohl Finegold
Rachel Kohl Finegold is the Rabba of Moriah Congregation in Deerfield, IL. She was ordained as part of the inaugural class of Yeshivat Maharat.
A 2010 Chanukah gathering at Temple Reyim in Newton, MA celebrating four pioneering women rabbis. Courtesy of the Jewish Women’s Archive
I stand in front of my congregation, hands gripping the podium, eyes fixed on the open siddur. My voice carries above the crowd as we recite the Prayer for the State of Israel with the desperation and pleading of these heady times. Since October 7, I have felt a new weight to my rabbinic role, as I hold a space for endless grief, trauma, and longing within the shul. We are all struggling to make sense of a world on fire, seeking to find comfort in community and in prayer.
As we recite the tefillah, I notice my body weight has gradually shifted onto one foot, and my head is slightly tilted to the side. I ground my feet, straighten my body, hold my head more steadily, broaden my shoulders, and strengthen my voice. My congregation needs to feel held. As the first female clergy of this congregation—and having served as the first female clergy in my previous two pulpits—I am potently aware that I, their recently hired rabbinic leader, am in uncharted territory. As one of the very first Orthodox women in the world to serve as congregational clergy, I have spent much of my career trying to present strong female leadership in communities accustomed to seeing men at the helm. Although those around the room might not be conscious of it, I presume they sense the way that my body is slighter, my voice higher pitched, and my presence less towering than the male rabbis who preceded me. I need to show the strength of my presence in subtler ways.
For the past 17 years, I have been navigating the world of female clergy working in the context of a male rabbinate. Overall, it is a tricky path, one that many other types of female leaders, including CEOs, politicians, and professors encounter, a path of trying to convey the gravitas of leadership that is feminine against a backdrop of leadership history that is overwhelmingly masculine. It’s almost impossible to achieve the right balance. There are contradictory voices coming at us all the time, saying: be strong but also be warm and nonthreatening; be assertive but be a good listener; be confident but don’t be too pushy. There is a reason that America Ferrara’s monologue in last summer’s Barbie movie resonated with so many women, and why her character’s words have been quoted by thought leaders around the country: “You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas.... You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people.” It is consistent with research from the Leadership Circle about the difficult line that women need to walk in order to succeed as leaders.
The struggle of being a pioneering female leader is not new. About fifteen years ago, as I finished teaching an adult education class, a few people gathered around me to discuss the material a bit further. One man lingered after the others were gone, and then asked with genuine curiosity, “Were you rubbing your chin because you wish you had a beard?”
Stunned and confused, I asked him to explain his question. He had noticed me rubbing my chin and face throughout the class, he said, and he was wondering if I was stroking my “imaginary beard.” He suspected that most of my teachers over the years had been male rabbis, and that, subconsciously, as I taught, I was trying to imitate them in every way.
Aside from reminding me to be more careful about mindless fidgeting while teaching, his question also led me to consider his assumption that great Jewish learning belongs to men. I explained to him that most of my Jewish learning, through 12 years of all-girls Jewish day school and years of post-graduate studies, had, in fact, been from and with women. My teaching role models do not, by and large, have beards.
When women are in rabbinic leadership positions, rabbinic gravitas looks and feels different from earlier models, and communal respect for rabbis must adapt to this new model. More rabbis today are female-identifying than ever before, and the new graduates of liberal rabbinical schools are overwhelmingly female. (In 2022, for example, Hebrew Union College, Jewish Theological Seminary, and Hebrew College all ordained more women than men as rabbis.) But in my experience, the rabbinate they are entering is still shaped by the expectations cultivated by its original masculine ideals. In other words, while the picture in someone’s mind of what a rabbi looks like may have evolved to include the possibility that the rabbi is now a woman, the structures and expectations in place in our communities and in our public discourse are generally still oriented toward the male leadership of the past. In non-Orthodox denominations, female rabbis have existed for half a century, but Orthodox women clergy are a new phenomenon, barely a decade old. Still, in many of our communities—both more traditional and more liberal—our assumptions about rabbinic roles have not yet fully adjusted to recognize that female gravitas might not look like older models. We have not yet defined women’s contribution to the rabbinate, much less given it its proper due.
Women leaders in many career fields tend toward a more relational style, one that favors cooperative partnerships over hierarchical structures, relying on webs of personal interactions and empathetic connections. It is a model in which leaders wield authority without being authoritative. Some see this model as weak or too flexible, and in the case of the rabbinate, I think this is one factor that might contribute to some female rabbis’ experience that they are not taken seriously, or that they are not respected and revered in the same way their male colleagues are.
But, despite these challenges with being seen as strong leaders, women in every field have brought this relational leadership to the fore with great results. Over the past several decades, professionals of all genders in all career areas have learned that they do need “soft skills” such as empathy and listening, and that an elitist hierarchy is not the most effective way to lead, as a rabbi or anything else. These traits are no longer seen as just feminine or masculine traits; they are good leadership practices. However, I believe that our communities have not yet become accustomed to seeing this type of leadership in the rabbinate. While this may be more extreme in more traditional settings, conversations with my colleagues suggest it is true to some extent across the different movements of contemporary Judaism.
In the Spring 2024 issue of Sources, Yehuda Kurtzer argues that contemporary rabbis must be scholars and thinkers, restoring depth of learning and scholarship as the centerpiece of the rabbinate. He argues that this will return rabbis to the positions of reverence they once held in the larger Jewish community. It is true that this type of rabbi—a thought leader—offers essential contributions to global Jewish discourse on a host of important issues, and we need more rabbis who are trained in this manner. But scholarship should not be the highest priority for all rabbis. For instance, community rabbis—which might include congregational rabbis, Hillel rabbis, JCC rabbis, and others—must be equipped with depth of scholarship but they must also bring that learning into conversation with the daily lives of the people they serve.
The community rabbis of today know that to focus only on scholarship is to enact a leadership akin to the stereotypical shul rabbi of a bygone era, who was often closed in his study, spending more time with his books than with the people he was serving. Given the democratization of Jewish knowledge in our modern world, where Jewish learning is readily available through online classes and global websites, the relational aspect of the community rabbinate is more important than ever. Women rabbis have shown themselves to be especially adept at this relational skillset, and they have expanded the rabbinic landscape to include these essential elements. But these skills are not always recognized to be as essential as scholarship, and female communal rabbis who excel at relational leadership are not always revered or respected to the same level as peers who excel in scholarship but lack relational presence.
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The dichotomy of the scholarly rabbi and the relational rabbi is not an absolute binary, but it is useful for considering some of the rabbinic models of the past. When we look at the history of the rabbinate this way, we realize that yes, even when all rabbis were men, some were more focused on their books while others were more focused on their communities. Mishnah Chagigah 2:2 shows us that as in the era of the rabbinic zugot—the pairs of leaders in mishnaic times—there were always two distinct rabbinic leadership roles: one member of the zug was the av bet din, a scholar focused on administering the halakhic court, while the other was the nasi, governing in closer proximity to the people.
The most well-know of these zugot are Hillel and Shammai. They epitomized this kind of dichotomy, which is sometimes simplified by describing Shammai as stricter in his halakhic rulings and Hillel as more lenient. However, a more nuanced view suggests that Shammai represented an objective and uniform approach to Jewish law, while Hillel espoused a more people-centered and subjective approach, one that attempted to be more attuned and connected to the particular experiences of individuals he served. Perhaps, though it would be anachronistic, we could refer to Shammai, the av bet din, as the academic scholar, and Hillel, the nasi, as the community rabbi.
I would suggest that the dichotomy of scholar and community rabbi extended all the way to two of the halakhic greats of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Mishnah Brurah and the Aruch Hashulchan. The Mishnah Brurah, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, also known as the Chafetz Chaim (1838-1933), based his scholarship on pure text analysis, as opposed to his contemporary, the Aruch Hashulchan, Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein (1829-1908), who was a congregational rabbi and offered his teachings with deference to local customs and sensitivity to the people whom he served. While this might oversimplify the significant differences in their approach to adjudicating Jewish law, strikingly, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein was said to have asserted that in cases where the Mishna Brurah and the Aruch Hashulchan have a difference of halakhic opinion, one must rule like the Aruch Hashulchan precisely because he was a community rabbi, as opposed to the Mishna Brurah, who was immersed in the world of the beit midrash. One might even draw a parallel here back to the fact that in cases where Shammai and Hillel disagree, we almost always rule according to Hillel. When scholarship is paired with relational wisdom, the ruling has more staying power.
In summary, since the dawn of the rabbinate, there have been some rabbis with a greater focus on scholarship and others with a focus on being in deep relationship with the community. It is only now that women are a greater presence in the rabbinate, that the relational aspect of communal rabbis’ work is looked down upon as “women’s work.”
I believe that we must reframe women’s contributions as a renewal and strengthening of the relational rabbinate, and we should embrace its expanding importance for our 21st-century communities. We must give the community rabbis of today—female and male—the respect they deserve for the way they combine scholarship with relational presence.
To be clear, the relational aspects of the rabbinate should not entirely replace the scholarly aspects. Some female rabbis emphasize the importance of relationship building to the point that they obscure the Jewish learning that undergirds their work. In a recent piece in eJewish Philanthropy, Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso (another pioneering rabbi, the first female ordained by the Reconstructionist movement) describes accompanying people at every age and stage through celebrations and tragedies, and what these experiences have taught her as a human being. She writes, “Congregational rabbis walk through the life cycle with families, know generational joys and sorrows and help people, with whom they celebrate and mourn, sanctify the everyday. Congregational rabbis nourish souls and accompany us through the seasons of life.”
Sasso discusses the many ways that she has supported individuals through life’s milestone moments at length. She asserts that the essence of her rabbinate is the richness of her pastoral presence, her standing side-by-side with people through their life challenges and celebrations.
I think that Sasso is right to highlight these beautiful and true aspects of being a congregational rabbi. But they are not a complete picture of the contemporary rabbinate. Rabbis do not only accompany people, listen to them, and stand with them during hard times. Overemphasizing these aspects of the work risks the implication that rabbis are little different from therapists. Congregational rabbis walk alongside the individuals they serve, but they also inform and educate, bringing their Torah knowledge to bear on a moment that desperately needs it. They provide ritual and halakhic guidance for those who may not have the resources—emotional or liturgical—to do so for themselves at a crucial time in their lives. It’s significant that Sasso also writes that rabbis “speak out for justice and compassion by connecting text to place. They open minds by allowing tradition to inform the individual and enabling the personal to reimagine tradition.” Here, she acknowledges that it’s not just about the emotional relationship, but it is also about connecting these experiences to text and tradition.
Unlike therapists, congregational rabbis create connections to Jewish wisdom and ritual in everything they do. And unlike academics and scholars, rabbis provide pastoral presence and build deep relationships. Ideally, community rabbis inhabit the cross-section of these two fields. They hold the space where text meets life.
This is how I see my own role. The value of the rabbinate to a modern Jew is in having someone who knows the law, the text, and the ritual, and who also knows the person, the community, and the moment. When I offer halakhic guidance, I am not just answering the question, but also connecting with the questioner. When I convey knowledge or teach a class, I am helping my learners bring their own lens and their life experiences to bear on the ancient text.
As I noted above, there have always been rabbis who are in deep relationship with the communities they serve and the people they teach. But in the age of web-based learning and divrei Torah written by AI, relationships are what makes the communal rabbinate more relevant than ever, and yes, what I believe people will come to understand as a new type of rabbinic gravitas, worthy of respect. A rabbi not only knows the text, but understands how that text can elucidate the moment, or how it can comfort the family, enlighten the teenager, or hold the room on the holiest of days. This gravitas is the grandeur, the spark, the excitement of the rabbinic ability to speak to our moment.
I am especially energized when I have occasion to take a single verse from the parsha and teach it to different groups of people on the same day, eliciting completely different lessons. I might begin my day by offering a d’var Torah at our daily minyan, and then use the same verse to illustrate a piece of parenting wisdom to our preschool parents, and then offer it with a completely different message to the b’nai mitzvah students. Three different aspects of wisdom, three different commentaries on life emerge from a single piece of Torah. In these moments, I am a conduit, or a conductor, finding the delicate meeting point between a single text and the lives and needs of many different individuals at different ages and stages.
The modern community rabbi is one who holds. She holds her tradition with knowledge and reverence; she holds her people with care and with deep seeing; she uses her intuition to join these two things together. She taps into the majesty and reverence and gravitas of unique moments for Torah and human beings to mingle and connect with one another.
If the community rabbis of today are to have the respect of their communities, it won’t happen like it did in the days of old. We won’t glean their wisdom while “sitting at the dust of their feet” (mAvot 1:4). Reverence for our community rabbis will not grow if we put them on a pedestal, or if we insist that they remain focused on their books; it also won’t come if we reduce them to only their pastoral presence. It will come in the moments, large and small, that are the delicate meeting place of text and life: the sermon or the private conversation that evokes tears of recognition when a piece of Torah is crafted and transmitted in such a way that it hits a truth one feels with the heart.
When I stand in front of my congregation, I hope that my congregants feel a sense of gravitas, but not only because I am standing strongly at the front of the room. Projecting a confident and weighty physical presence is only the beginning. If they sense that we are in relationship, if I give them the tools of ancient ritual they need in that moment, then the gravitas of the work will come through. This effect is not about any particular rabbi at any given time; but it emerges in the moment, with the weaving together of a web of Torah and humanity for those who are open to receiving it.
