ACRE Blog

The following remarks were delivered by Dr. Maury Hoberman, Trustee of the Lasko Family Foundations, during the 2nd Annual ACRE Conference on October 15, 2009. 

Good Morning and welcome to the 2^nd National Conference of the Alliance for Continuing Rabbinic Education.  I’m Maury Hoberman, a trustee of the Lasko Family Foundations, which is again sponsoring this conference as part of its investment in continuing rabbinic education.

You may be wondering why a surgeon is giving the opening remarks at a conference on continuing rabbinic education.   The fact is this concept is not only about rabbis, but about the impact rabbis can have on the congregations, the schools and organizations that they serve.  It is about their effect on the Boomers, and the Generation X’ers and the Millennials.  It is about the approach to some of the problems that we face in Judaism in America today. Truth is that this conference, this subject and, in fact, the Alliance is only a convener of representative thinkers for a vision of Judaism in the 21^st century.  And what is that vision?  Rabbi Richard Hirsh in his study, The Rabbi-Congregation Relationship, offered a simple, yet elegant statement: kevod hatzibbur and kevod harav…res ipso loquitor…that the congregations respect the rabbis for their body of knowledge and continued learning and the rabbis respect their congregants for their recognizing that knowledge and allowing them to continue on their path of learning and involvement.  This also entails the rabbis themselves having self-respect by truthfully living the vision of their rabbinate.

Now there are some naïve individuals who think that rabbis learn all they need to know in rabbinic school and there are some delusional rabbis who think that they did learn everything they need to know.

Learning everything you need to know including the skills to be effective and productive does not happen for any profession in any school of higher learning. Acquiring the knowledge to be effective in one’s profession must continue after leaving that school. This is true for physicians, this is true for lawyers, and for teachers and for social workers and even personal trainers and it is also true for rabbis. 

In my experience, which includes serving on three rabbinic search committees and being involved with several continuing rabbinic education  programs as a foundation board member, many rabbis at about the 10 year mark are disillusioned and burned out.  In many cases they have lost touch with learning.  They are pulled one way and another by their boards.  Part of the reason for this, I believe, is an absence of clearly focused congregational priorities.  As one of our research projects, I would like to see a longitudinal study of rabbis prior to entering rabbinic school, during the rabbinic school years, at smicha, 5 and 10 years out.  I suspect that we would find a contraction of dreams.  The young rabbi in Jonathan Rosen’s novel Joy Comes in the Morning expresses just such a disillusionment when she says: “is this what we have become Ecclesiastical functionaries, clerical administrators?”

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin tells a story of a congregant who brings his son to speak to the rabbi.  “Rabbi, my son is interested in attending rabbinic school and I thought he should speak to you before he makes a commitment.” The rabbi asks the boy if he has any questions.  One question: “Other than giving speeches once a week, what do you do with the rest of your time?”  The rabbi’s reply:  “Young man you don’t want to be a rabbi.  You want to be a synagogue president.”

 ACRE advocates that synagogues support their rabbis by giving them time to study and supporting them financially in attending courses.  There is obviously, benefit to the community in having a rabbi who continues to learn and grow; rabbis who live to the maximum of their potential.  It is after rabbinic school, when rabbis are faced with the pressures of their positions that they can begin to learn new ways of balancing their own needs, the requirements of their families and the needs of their organizations and congregations.

In the world of Jewish education we support pre-schools and day schools, congregational schools, Hillels and Judaic studies programs, but I can count on the fingers of a carpenter’s hand the number of foundations that support continuing rabbinic education.  That makes no sense to me.

And who are our leaders? Developing leaders is a new thrust of the Jewish community.  Aren’t our rabbis the natural leaders of the community?  They are there for the long-term; they are in just about every Jewish community in the country.  Isn’t the investment in skilled rabbinic leadership training the natural and logical route to take?  Charles Liebman, OBM, recognized this in an article in the Jewish Yearbook of 1968 -41 years ago. 

 This is the lesson that Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav was teaching when he told the story of the woodchopper who dreamt that if he went to a far-off city he would find untold treasure.  The woodchopper packed up and went to the city.  He fell asleep under a bridge and was found by a policeman, who questioned his being in the city.  The man decided that the best thing to do was to tell him the dream.  Whereupon the policeman told him of a similar dream that he had had, and described the treasure under the floor boards of the woodchopper’s house.  And sure enough, when the woodchopper returned home he found the treasure he had dreamed of.  Maybe we are looking in the wrong place for our leaders.

 But we must not only be looking at “the who,” but “the how” to make the process work.  This involves doing the necessary research, applying the results of that research for guidelines in developing appropriate courses, sharing best practices, looking at outcomes and analyzing the results.  Trial and error methods and anecdotal reports for congregations, schools and organizations will not bring us the results we need.

There are those who make things happen; there are those who watch things happen and then there are those who say “What happened?”

Here we are at in the second annual conference of the Alliance for Continuing Rabbinic Education.  Since the last Conference a year ago the Alliance under the co-chairmanship of Rabbi Jerry Wieder and Rabbi Rachel Cowan and facilitated by Steven Kraus at JESNA has followed up on last year’s recommendations. The Alliance has a mission statement and vision statement.  A governance structure is in place. The Alliance is now a 501 (c)(3).  A web site is up and updated to keep current of all courses by all the participating organizations.  We have made a commitment to ongoing research. And, most important, we continue to work together with a goal of sharing best practices and developing recognition that continuing study is a benchmark of the rabbinate.  We now have to increase the recognition of rabbis, congregations and organizations of the need for continued learning and increase the capacity by developing meaningful learning opportunities.

We are aware that the generations that, for the most part, inhabit the synagogue are the GI generation and Baby-boomers.  These generations want to participate and have a need to do what is expected of them.  They are very comfortable in adhering to congregational life as it was and is.  Synagogues and organizations easily assimilated them into the status quo. Now we have the subsequent generations of Generation X - the “sovereign self” generation and Generation Y - the Millennials and the next generation, which is called Generation G for Google. They are more worldly. They are better educated. They are certainly more questioning.  “Because”  or “That’s the way it is.” is not a satisfactory answer for them. 

They have a desire to participate.  The challenge is for our leaders - our rabbis - in the synagogues, in the schools and in the various organizations being up to the task of listening to them, understanding them and answering their needs within the context of the tradition; in other words working with them in finding that Torah is relevant.

I believe that our leaders are up to the task.  I believe that they have to be up to the task.  By the end of today’s session, we should be able, together, to set a course for the Alliance for the next year.  The next ACRE national Conference will be on October 13, 2010.  Rabbi Rachel Cowan and Rabbi Hayim Herring, our program chairs have developed a Conference that will set the next steps in ACRE’s role as the participating organizations work together to enhance the skills of our rabbis in meeting the complex challenges of the modern rabbinate.

Nehama Liebowitz, z’l, said:  The Midrash states that teachers go straight to heaven because they have more than their share of hell on earth.  And then she went on to say that this was one of the few times that she disagreed with the Sages, because she thought that teachers have more than their fair share of heaven on earth.

Should this not be true of our rabbis.  This path we are taking has the potential, in time, to change the lives of our rabbis, their congregations, their organizations and ultimately the trajectory of the Jewish people.