Rabbis Need to Be Trained for the Job They Actually Do

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks taught, “Judaism does not mean living in the past. It means living with the past, but with eyes firmly turned toward the future.” While the concern for the rabbinic pipeline and the need for more quality rabbis has already been sounded, we need to simultaneously be engaging in the parallel conversation around rabbinic training. Emerging from the 18th/19th century Haskalah movement, the early Rabbinic Seminary sought to blend traditional Torah learning with secular studies and modern academic methods to best prepare its graduates for holy rabbinic work. Now in the 21st century our rabbinic seminaries still strive towards these same purposes – to prepare graduates for holy rabbinic work. Yet, as the role of rabbi has shifted, our training modes have not kept pace. 

Jewish communal survival is directly tied to our ability to innovate – using the present as the foundation upon which to build a better future. The establishment of the modern state of Israel is an example of such an innovation. In 1902, Theodor Herzl published his utopian novel “Altneuland” (“The Old New Land”). In this work Herzl imagines a future in which the old land is not forsaken but rather is transformed into a modern, thriving, advanced society. A student of his reality, Herzl understood that for the growth and sustenance of Judaism and the Jewish people, Jews need a nation of refuge and national pride. Now, roughly 125 years later, Herzl’s vision is widely celebrated as a core element of the Jewish present and not just a dream of the Jewish future. It is now our generation’s turn to pick up this mantel of vision and begin to imagine how we might critically engage our present as a directive towards building our future.

Let’s not pretend that training rabbis is an easy task. Professionally, rabbis take on a variety of roles including (but not limited to) spiritual guide, educator, pastoral care giver, Jewish legal adjudicator, public speaker, supervisor and fundraiser. A rabbi should be fluent in modern politics and ancient biblical and rabbinic texts, capable of inspiring youth many years their junior while also engaging with those many years their senior. As the classic joke suggests, a rabbi should emerge from school being both young and with 20-plus years of experience. Our seminaries have attempted to navigate the need for these diverse skills with semi-regular curricular shifts around their edges, aimed to better prepare their graduates for the professional work of rabbis. And it’s not enough. Small curricular shifts can’t equip rabbis with the requisite skills need to serve the variegated needs of the Jewish people in modernity.

Rather than patterning themselves on secular academies of higher learning, rabbinic seminaries should seek a new paradigm – the vocational school. Vocational schools provide their learners with hands-on, job-specific training, allowing them to enter the workforce already imbued with the practical skills to make an impact. By maintaining a model of the secular academy, each rabbinic training program tackles the impossible problem of attempting to adequately train rabbis by imparting 4,000 years of wisdom in three to five years of training through extensive coursework in subjects like Jewish History, Tanakh, Talmud, Midrash, Hebrew, Jewish Thought and Philosophy, etc. To add to the complexity, as schools have identified the increased need for skill-based learning, i.e. pastoral care, this discipline too has been shoehorned into the larger academic endeavor. As a result, rabbis are ordained with a significant amount of content knowledge and (at best) an ability and desire to continue to learn outside of the classroom. They learn very little of the valuable skill sets used for the majority of rabbinic work.

If one were to graph the tasks and roles rabbis most frequently navigate professionally, would that graph correlate with the similar chart of time allocation and focus during rabbinic training? At Mem Global, as we’ve invested in our work around building the rabbinic pipeline and developed our own rabbi-centered programs like Base and Embark, we’ve become increasingly aware of the dissonance between skill sets rabbis are trained for as students and the skill sets they need to be successful in their rabbinic work. We believe that rabbis are vital for the Jewish future. And we believe that the significant gaps in rabbinic education don’t adequately prepare emerging rabbis for rabbinic work.

Three examples:

• Relationship building is core to the rabbinic profession and yet, for most students, proportionally very little time is invested in building and refining this skill set.  How might relationship building be a core objective in rabbinic education rather than an ancillary part of a student’s learning?

• Public speaking is a common element within many rabbinic roles. What would it look like if students were equipped, not just with periodic moments of public speaking training, but rather if public speaking was a significant and repeated element of learning aimed to enhance a rabbi’s ability to articulate and communicate both inwardly and outwardly and through a variety of media?

• Rabbis serve as leaders. How might, over multiple years, rabbinical students dive deeply into leadership development, better understanding their own unique talents and leadership style? As a core element of training, how might it look for a student to learn about staff supervision, strategic visioning and change management, to deeply immerse in preparing for a career as a leader?

Admittedly, the shift I’m calling for isn’t simple and, as a zero-sum time game, an emphasis in one area of learning inherently requires a de-emphasis in another.  And yet, this is the hard calculus we are now called to do.  In an age of Sefaria and AI – access to Jewish knowledge is no longer the core element of a rabbi’s role.  Knowledge is now accessible wherever there is an internet connection. Rabbis are no longer the primary or sole access point to Jewish wisdom. Rabbis are now called on for different types of communal roles. Roles that can’t be outsourced.  Roles of relationship building, communication, teaching and leadership. The classic rabbinic training model, despite its fringe efforts to adapt, cannot meet this shift. Rather, a new model is needed. We need rabbinic training programs to serve as vocational schools – best equipping their students with the tool sets of classic Jewish learning and, equally critically, the toolsets of modern leadership to be best prepared to serve the Jewish people.

In the early 19th century Herzl had the courage to assess his reality and dream of an Altneuland – a better future built on the foundations of the present.  It is time for us to begin to dream of an AltneuRabbi, built on the commitment of service to the Jewish people that has compelled rabbis for ages, but enriched through a change of the training model to better meet the needs of the modern rabbinate.  Im tirtzu ain zo agadah – If you will it, it is no dream. 

Rabbi Ari Perten is the VP of Jewish Learning at Mem Global (formerly Moishe House).