New Bottles for Old Whine:
The Crisis of American Jewish Leadership
Maggid Joel Rothschild
Ravenna Kibbutz, Seattle WA
A story: R’ M’ Sarah asked me some time ago to write a piece for Eruv on the subject of being a professional Jew. My protest, that I’m not and don’t want to be a professional Jew, was irrelevant—the piece was to address ambivalence about becoming a professional Jew, a subject on which I am certainly expert—and my protest was also, at bottom, a lie—I founded and run the Ravenna Kibbutz, a Jewish residential cooperative that expands into its third house next week, a labor of love but also of social entrepreneurship from which I intend to earn some livelihood. I am a professional Jew. So why would I not only deny my role in Jewish leadership, but resist being outed even as a tentative, half-hearted, or potential Jewish leader?
Why?
Because being a Jewish community leader sucks.
Sure, there are exceptions but, nine times out of ten, to bear professional responsibility for the Jews’ alternating obsessive and apathetic attitude toward survival as a people is to enter a nightmare of overwork, under-compensation, territorialism, overwrought politics, diminishing returns, diminishing funding, disrespect for private-professional boundaries, and, ultimately, burnout. I have seen so many energetic, creative, inspired leaders—many personal friends—exhausted and demoralized by the Jewish community that employed them, my rule now is to dissuade would-be professional Jews, to warn them that it’s a heartbreaking career, and only a few survive.
I have assumed that Jewish leadership is a tough job because the Jews are a tough people. We’re opinionated, all differently opinionated, cheap yet demanding, and, when the stakes are nothing less than the survival of our grandparents’ beleaguered heritage, we’re known to be a bit pushy. This may be only half of the story, however. The Jews have been a tough people for at least a couple millennia, but the rabbinate remained among our very most desirable career destinations until quite recently. There may be something to the Jewish institutional landscape of the present era that is peculiarly dysfunctional—not your every-generation Jewish neuroses, but something new and unsustainable.
I have an acquaintance I would describe as a Talmud chacham, a deep expert on the Talmudic literature, and he does not work for a synagogue or yeshivah or kollel. He works for a university. I once overheard him being asked, “Why aren’t you a rabbi?” His answer: “I can earn twice the money as a religion professor and I don’t have to interrupt dinner with my family to answer another family’s kashrus emergency!” One interpretation of this story is that synagogues can’t compete with research universities for today’s sages because not enough Jews are interested in keeping kosher. My interpretation is that American Jewry has purposefully retooled its institutions (including university Jewish Studies programs) away from safeguarding the Jews, toward instead safeguarding Judaism.
And why? Because the Jews are safe.
In other words, maybe Jewish community leadership has become fraught with its own obsolescence. Perhaps we should just accept a good thing: the Jews are finally safe! One could counter-argue that turn-of-the-twentienth century German Jews were similarly sanguine and look what came of that. Then one could counter-counter-argue that Berlin today, to say nothing of New York, is paradigmatically more multicultural than Berlin of three generations ago. I suspect both perspectives carry some wisdom. In any case, it’s hard to dispute that the average American Jewish community circa 2000 is charged much less with the physical and spiritual defense of its members than was the average Polish Jewish community circa 1900.
Yet Jewish culture remains fundamentally defensive. Its raison d’être is to maintain a safe space for people who can recall the horrors of exile, strangeness, and oppression. Does today’s typical American Jew require rabbis, spokesmen, experts, institutions to protect her from antisemitic discrimination, or from violence, or even from religious coercion? If not, then those institutions and their leaders may be in the business of selling last year’s oppression to those who are glad to be rid of it. How could that not be a hard and thankless job?
If our Jews are adequately protected by civil society, then what is there for Jewish leadership to stand up for?
Well, there is the rich heritage—stewarded today by museums, film festivals, lecture series, book publishing, and academic programs. These may preserve Jewish culture precisely as a heritage, like Celtic or Japanese heritage, but one’s heritage doesn’t typically put food on the table, so even among Jews, history-obsessed as we are, only the academically-inclined minority will ever need the work of these institutions for more than the occasional class or family outing.
What about religion and spirituality? If not for Jewish community, where will Jews go to get married, circumcise a baby, get counseling, or celebrate a child’s entry to adulthood? Answers: the county courthouse, the hospital, a therapist, and college graduation. Though they will, likely as not, encounter Jewish lawyers, doctors, counselors, and professors at each of these stages, the Jewish families going outside established Jewish institutions for lifecycle support have become assimilated, haven’t they? Possibly, but there is a great danger to defining assimilation in terms of secularism: namely, doing so defines many Jews out of the tribe, including a possible majority who are perfectly proud to identify as Jewish, but simply don’t have spiritually- or religiously-oriented personalities. If these Jews get the message from Jewish leadership that a lack of interest in shul is tantamount to a lack of interest in Jewishness, they may decide that Jewish identity isn’t important to them after all—and this would be everyone’s loss.
Finally, there is Israel, or: if we aren’t under threat, then at least we can be called to solidarity with other Jews who are. Israel is a highly compelling cause for many American Jews, but many more justifiably consider the Jewish state to be responsible ultimately for its own affairs (otherwise, is it really an independent state?), and few will ever have the time and energy to keep up with Byzantine Israeli politics. There is also a great danger to using Israel’s cause as a pretext for American Jews coming together. Doing so invests us emotionally in Israel being beleaguered and therefore in need of our solidarity and support. Such an investment may build emotional resistance within the American Jewish community to envisaging real peace between Israel and its neighbors, which could prove harmful to Israel.
So, the three classic functions of a synagogue, the prototypical Jewish institution—beyt midrash (academy), beyt tfillah (prayer sanctuary), and beyt knesset (town hall)—and each may be largely irrelevant to the contemporary living needs of a majority of Diaspora Jews. A rabbi friend in Seattle, who is doing wonderful work and deserves praise, keeps telling me that my generation needs to take over all of the old Jewish institutions—not only the synagogues, but also the Federations, the Jewish Family Services, the schools, the retirement homes, the festivals—because they’re all slowly dying from lack of interest, and if they die now it will take a great deal of work to rebuild them later. But I wonder. If those institutions die now, how would my grandchildren know the difference? Is their preservation worth the cost and the tsuris?
I am reminded of how the Federal government now owns General Motors, and how I am intrigued, and somewhat skeptical, to see what good can be done with it. A giant, powerful institution, one that would be terribly expensive to rebuild if it were lost. I can easily understand why it shouldn’t be discarded lightly. But what can it do for my children? I don’t mean to suggest that this question has no answer. I do mean to suggest that it’s foolish to assume there must be an answer, at great expense, without first seriously asking the question.
My honest suspicion is that the answer involves many Jewish institutions disappearing, and many more continuing to shrink. Perhaps this is why the question is taboo. I find hope in this, however. Today’s Jewish institutions, even the trusty old synagogue, are radically different from our institutions of the Temple period. For that matter, the state apparatus of modern Israel is a new one on the Jews (which partly explains its dysfunctional bits). Having obsolete institutions does not make us an obsolete people, however it may spell a bumpy—and exciting!—transition.
In addition to being hopeful for Jewish community’s continuing relevance, I am not so sanguine as to imagine that my peers and our descendents will escape adversity or even oppression. Profound challenges face us. Though we may not fear the Czar it is not because we have no fears. Jewish community’s two greatest assets, its brilliant people and its deep literary tradition (from the Tanakh to Gemara to Saul Bellow), position it well to produce valuable insights to our most pressing questions, and valuable solutions to the living needs of even non-religious Jews.
First of all, we must ask the question: What will Jews, not Judaism, need to survive the next 30, 60, 120 years? What are the big challenges, anxieties, threats? And then we must be open to the possibility that some of our institutions do not serve the anticipated needs and should be permitted to fade. Others will need to contract so that resources can shift elsewhere. No one wants to talk about this, but the sooner we accept it the sooner we can get moving.
Many young Jewish leaders have decided not to wait for these reforms, and are already using startup and social entrepreneurship models to jumpstart new initiatives that serve the Jewish people where we are and where we’re headed. It’s worth perusing the projects by past PresenTense Institute fellows (http://presentense.org/institute/2008/projects) to get a quick sense for the breadth of what’s already started. It runs a wide gamut, befitting a far-flung people—from organizing backpackers into social action groups, to bringing new-media innovation back into Jewish education (where it has arguably been stalled since the Talmud introduced hypertext). And, of course, I would be remiss in not mentioning the exciting work being done building new Jewish residential communities across North America, including my home Ravenna Kibbutz.*
If this new, entrepreneurial model were recognized as a fully legitimate form of professional Jewish leadership, we might see not only a rapid emergence of new institutional containers for Jewish joiner-ism, but also Jewish leadership itself restored to the high status of respect it once enjoyed among Jews. I sometimes call myself a Jewish social entrepreneur. If “professional Jew” could evoke that role as readily as it evokes the rabbi, cantor, or Federation president, then I would be happy and proud to call myself a professional Jew. And if Jewish institutional leadership included asking the hard questions about how we are allocating Jewish resources relative to actual Jews’ needs, then I predict younger Jewish Americans would consider those careers much more seriously. Including, even, myself.
* Full disclosure: I was a technology consultant for PresenTense Institute in 2007 and 2008. On the new residential-community projects, see my contribution to last ERUV, see http://ravennakibbutz.org, also:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1219572149705&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Editorial Note, R’Sarah:
Guess what Joel? I’m outing you as a professional Jew. As people may have noticed, I have planted the “Maggid” moniker in front of Joel’s name, in recognition that he is a maggid par-excellence. One of the best and brightest in his generation. Not only is Joel an adept prayer leader (when he wants to be) but also a brilliant singer-songwriter, rambling storyteller and teacher of classic Jewish sources (also when he wants to be). Beyond that, Joel represents two varieties of maggidic practice not commonly thought of as maggidus, namely, the maggidic activist and a specialist in non-traditional Hebrew narrative. Many of the start-up Jewish entrepreneurial initiatives that Joel refers to in his article are, in fact, forms of maggidic activism, and Joel is one of the best of the younger folk working in these modalities of Jewish Leadership. In the area of non-traditional transmission of Hebrew Narrative, Joel has worked for many years developing innovative Internet technologies to facilitate the greater Jewish/Hebrew communal narrative. Among other things, he has a specialty in applying the maggidic process to web design, taking the virtual out of virtual reality and imbuing the websites he creates with the feel of real live breathing space within the community.
(If you are looking for someone to design a website for you or your organization/community, go to www.mahzeh.org to see what he can offer you. I’ve worked with Joel extensively in maggidic web design and can personally vouch for his inspiration and professionalism.)
As for the question of to be or not to be a professional Jew, I want to suggest two things into the dialogue: One, it is my experience as a maggid, rabbi and shamanic practitioner that the need for Jewish Spiritual leadership is greater not less than what it was even a decade ago, and that this is a trend that is likely to continue, even as the functionality of mainstream synagogues and normative Jewish institutional structures languish in apathy and uncertainty. Two, that professional Jew does not need to always mean full-time earn your livelihood from your trade, but can be just as potently Avocational in nature.
