HUC-JIR President Andrew Rehfeld on His First (Pandemic) Year

When Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s (HUC-JIR) Rabbi Aaron Panken died in a plane crash in 2018, the search committee to replace him suggested Andrew Rehfeld throw his hat into the ring.

Rehfeld, 54, didn’t take the request seriously. He’s not a rabbi, and at the time he was the president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis. Before that, he was a political science professor at Washington University.

The Journal caught up with Rehfeld to talk about his first year on the job and the challenges facing the Jewish community as a whole, especially during these pandemic times.

JJ: Have you learned anything in the first year that changed your view of what it means to be a Jewish clergy person?

AR: I don’t know if it changed my view so much as it deepened and focused it. Reform rabbis have had a transformative effect on my own life. I came here with the full knowledge that each is expected to do multiple things — be a pastor, be spiritually inspiring, be knowledgeable, show up and be present. What has changed is only the level of detail I have about each of those qualities. The one thing that is no longer clear to me is that we should be thinking about training rabbis simply as generalists. We need to be attracting the best pastors who want to have a rabbinical career [as] pastors; the best scholars who want a rabbinical career that’s really going be about transformative ideas, and rabbis who want to use their rabbinate to lead and transform great organizations.

JJ: Do you ever notice when you talk to colleagues that you are not a rabbi and most of your faculty probably is?

AR: The president of the university of Chicago, one of my alma maters, is a mathematician. He oversees one of the largest medical complexes in the state of Illinois, arguably the best business school in the world, arguably the best law school in the world, social science divisions, humanities divisions, biology, chemistry — things he has no knowledge or expertise in whatsoever. Nobody ever asked the president of the university “Why aren’t you a [fill in the blank]?” The reason is that they have a great understanding that the strength of universities comes from the ability of their president to recognize the things that he or she or they do not know and getting the right people to lead them.

The reason that I felt confident taking this job is that I believe the board finally recognized that HUC moved over 40 years ago to become a comprehensive leadership university for the Jewish people. Forty-six percent of our students are rabbis but it’s not even half of our students. So yes, every day I think, “Boy, I’m not a rabbi, I’ve got a lot to learn,” but I’m also not a cantor.

JJ: What are some of the challenges the Jewish community as a whole is facing?

AR: The challenges of the 20th century that we are familiar with, are what I call urgent and existential. Immigration at the beginning of the century, the Shoah, the birth of Israel, the sustaining of Israel, gathering of the exiles from the Soviet Union and Ethiopia. Those shifted from urgent and existential to slow and existential. And those challenges are defined, in my view, by three key pieces: 1) the level of Jewish education, 2) the rate of Jewish engagement, and 3) the sense of the depth of Jewish identity. Knowing, doing and being Jewish are a challenge, they are existential.

We are facing those existential threats for really good reasons. Jews are much more accepted today than we were a 100 years ago. Israel is now one of the strongest nations, even as it is facing some real challenges. That acceptance and that place of strength, even in the face of renewed anti-Semitism, means that we have to work doubly hard, because every Jew, particularly in North America, is a Jew by choice.

JJ: How has the pandemic affected HUC?

AR: Mainly in two ways: 1) It helped us develop a deep appreciation for the work that we are training our students for, because we see how our alumni are responding in such innovative and daring ways to the needs of their communities. 2) We needed to address some long-standing issues but knew it would take a long time, for example, how to do distance learning that’s at the same level of excellence as the education in-house. We are now going to spend 90 days developing a program in case we have to go online for the rest of the academic year.

JJ: How do you think the Reform movement in general has handled the pandemic?

AR: I think all arms of the movement, and not just the Reform movement, are managing a situation none of us has a playbook for. We are, in that sense, all making it up as we go, and we are relying on those values that inform and guide our work every single day. Values of equity, openness and justice.

JJ: What do you think the long-term effects of all of this might be? 

AR: Here are three thoughts: 1) It’s reinforcing all of our need for community. For deep, meaningful, physically proximate relationships with other human beings. 2) It is also showing us that technology can be used for spiritual and educational purposes. And I think that’s going to pose a challenge to business as usual. 3) During any crisis, the sense in which things will be different in the future feels a lot more significant than it turns out to be. If you think about what happened after 9/11, there were certainly some changes that were made. But day-to-day life in the United States has not changed demonstrably since then.

JJ: Will it have an impact on the relationship between the Reform and Conservative movements?
AR: This crisis is going to put stress on nonprofits and all Jewish organizations, and anything we can do to work closer together, to collaborate, is important. All of the heads of the seminaries have just met for a conference call a few weeks ago. And we are going to do that on a regular basis. I don’t view denominations as barriers. I view them as clarifiers of different approaches to Jewish life. I am stunned at the way we haven’t been doing things together and I’m glad that this is causing people to understand that we have to. We’re not going to be doing better by putting up denominational walls. That is 20th-century thinking of the worst kind.

Jessica Donath is a freelance journalist in Los Angeles.