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Reclaiming the Rabbinate: Why This Moment Demands Moral Seriousness and Urgent Action
The interior of Geneva’s main synagogue. Photo: Geneva Jewish community
Three years ago, a mid-sized Conservative synagogue in the Midwest began searching for a new senior rabbi. The search committee received 42 applications. Not one candidate combined deep Talmudic learning with congregational experience. Most were second-career professionals with limited textual fluency. Several had never led a community through a full Jewish calendar year. The committee eventually hired a capable rabbi, but the search exposed something deeper: the pipeline of traditionally-formed Jewish leaders is running dry.
This is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern. And now we have the data to prove it.
The newly released Atra report, “From Calling to Career: Mapping the Current State and Future of Rabbinic Leadership,” is the most comprehensive study of the American rabbinate in a generation. It offers something rare in Jewish communal life: clarity. We now know who today’s rabbis are, how they are formed, and what the next generation will look like. The portrait is sobering. But it also reveals an extraordinary opportunity, if we have the courage to seize it.
This moment could mark not the decline of rabbinic authority, but its renewal. Everything depends on what we do next.
At the Crossroads
The numbers tell a consequential story. There are approximately 4,100 non-Haredi rabbis currently serving in the United States. Only six percent are under 35, while more than a quarter are over 65. The long-anticipated retirement wave is cresting. At the same time, the pathway into the rabbinate has fundamentally shifted. Many new rabbis now enter as second-career professionals — often with limited immersion in traditional Jewish learning and communal life.
Why does this matter? Because rabbinic formation isn’t simply professional training. It is the transmission of a civilization.
Rabbis formed young develop textual fluency that becomes second nature. They absorb communal norms through years of apprenticeship. They build mentorship relationships that span decades. They learn to think in Jewish categories before the default assumptions of secular culture take root. They spend Shabbat after Shabbat in communities, watching master rabbis navigate conflict, comfort the mourning, inspire the indifferent. This kind of formation cannot be replicated in a compressed professional program, no matter how well-designed.
Second-career rabbis bring valuable life experience — maturity, professional skills, perspective that comes only with age. These gifts are real. But when second-career entry becomes the dominant pathway rather than one pathway among several, something essential is lost: the deep grammar of Jewish thought and practice that has sustained our people through every upheaval.
To its credit, the Atra report highlights rabbis’ enduring sense of calling. Ninety-seven percent report that their work remains meaningful. This devotion is real and admirable. Yet many also speak of unclear expectations, emotional strain, and insufficient institutional support. The rabbinate increasingly resembles a helping profession under strain rather than a moral office grounded in tradition, discipline, and collective purpose.
This is not merely a workforce challenge. It is a civilizational one, for rabbis do not operate in isolation. They shape schools and federations, influence donor priorities, frame communal responses to antisemitism, and articulate the public moral voice of American Jewry. When rabbinic authority weakens or when it becomes culturally detached from the communities it serves, the entire ecosystem of Jewish institutional life feels the strain.
Formation, Not Demographics, Is Destiny
The next generation of rabbis will look markedly different from previous ones. Among current rabbinical students, 58 percent identify as women and 51 percent identify as LGBTQ+, with a significant portion identifying as trans or nonbinary. Many come from non-traditional Jewish backgrounds — converts, children of intermarriage, Jews who found their way to serious practice later in life.
These demographic shifts are inevitable and, in many ways, enriching. A diverse rabbinate that reflects the breadth of Jewish experience can strengthen our communities. The question is not who enters the rabbinate, but how they are formed.
A diverse rabbinate formed in deep textual literacy, halachic fluency, and communal responsibility will serve the Jewish people brilliantly. A diverse rabbinate formed primarily through ideological conformity and therapeutic training will not. The issue isn’t identity. It’s formation. It has always been.
Religious leadership cannot long endure when it becomes unmoored from the moral instincts, lived traditions, and covenantal expectations of the communities it serves. A rabbinate shaped more by the ideological grammar of elite secular culture than by the rhythms of Jewish religious life will struggle to command authority, inspire loyalty, or sustain continuity — no matter how sincere or well-intentioned its members.
Judaism has always thrived on creative tension: between past and present, law and compassion, authority and humility, particularism and universalism. The best rabbis hold these tensions with grace. They can advocate for change while honoring tradition. They can welcome the stranger while maintaining boundaries. They can engage contemporary questions without flattening either the questions or the tradition. But this capacity doesn’t emerge naturally. It must be formed — through years of study, through apprenticeship with master teachers, through sustained immersion in communities where these tensions are lived rather than theorized.
What Excellence Looks Like
Before charting the path forward, we must envision the destination. What would a renewed rabbinate actually look like?
Imagine rabbis who combine the textual fluency of traditional yeshiva training with genuine pastoral sensitivity. Who can navigate both Talmudic argumentation and congregational politics with equal skill. Who arrive in communities not to affirm what’s trending, but to guide toward what’s enduring. Who lead with moral authority earned through learning, humility, and years of service.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s the future Jewish life requires.
And we already see it emerging. There are communities where young, traditionally-trained rabbis are revitalizing Jewish life through serious learning and warm welcome. There are synagogues where Torah study, social justice, and ritual observance reinforce rather than contradict each other. There are day schools where rabbis teach with both intellectual rigor and deep care for students’ spiritual lives, and campus settings where rabbis offer students substantive Judaism — not watered-down platitudes — and find eager audiences hungry for depth.
The Orthodox Invitation
This brings us to the most consequential omission in the Atra report: the absence of Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) from full participation.
Founded in 1896, RIETS has been the backbone of Modern Orthodox rabbinic life in America for over a century. It ordains approximately 50 rabbis annually — a significant portion of the Orthodox rabbinate. Its graduates populate synagogues, day schools, and communal institutions across the country. They embody a leadership model rooted not in expressive identity, but in disciplined obligation: years of intensive Talmud and halachic study, rigorous preparation for pastoral work, and formation within a tradition that sees the rabbinate as a sacred responsibility rather than a personal calling alone.
Yet RIETS did not fully participate in the Atra study. Its student data was estimated rather than integrated. Its voice was muted. This omission distorts our understanding of the American rabbinate and inadvertently shifts the perceived center of gravity toward institutions more aligned with progressive formation models.
But absence is not destiny. And critique can become an invitation.
This is RIETS’ moment. For over a century, it has quietly trained rabbis who embody halachic seriousness and communal service. Now, it has the opportunity to demonstrate publicly what rigorous traditional formation produces: not rigidity, but resilience. Not narrowness, but depth. Not exclusion, but excellence that genuinely serves diverse communities.
By fully engaging the national conversation about rabbinic leadership, RIETS would provide an essential counterweight — not through opposition, but through demonstration. It would show that there are multiple pathways to rabbinic excellence, and that the path rooted in intensive traditional learning has produced extraordinary leaders for generations.
In an era when data increasingly drives philanthropic priorities and institutional strategy, presence is leadership. Participation is not capitulation to progressive norms — it is stewardship of a vital tradition.
The alternative is to cede the narrative entirely. And that would be a loss not just for Orthodox Jews, but for everyone who believes that Jewish leadership requires both deep learning and moral seriousness.
Building the Future
The Atra report hands us a gift: clarity about where we stand. The data is sobering, but the opportunity is immense. Yet this requires action and courage from multiple actors.
Seminaries and training institutions must reclaim non-negotiable standards. Textual fluency cannot be optional. Every ordained rabbi should be able to navigate a page of Talmud, engage classical commentaries, and ground contemporary questions in traditional sources. This isn’t fundamentalism, it’s literacy.
It’s the difference between a doctor who can read an X-ray and one who cannot. Extended apprenticeship must become standard. Classroom learning must be complemented by years of embedded communal experience. There is no substitute for watching a master rabbi navigate a contentious board meeting, comfort a family in crisis, or inspire a reluctant bar mitzvah student. These skills are caught, not taught.
Seminaries should create exchange programs between institutions. Let students experience different formation models while maintaining their home institution’s standards. Imagine HUC students spending a summer immersed in Talmud study at Yeshiva University — not to change their denominational commitments, but to deepen their textual foundation. Imagine RIETS students learning pastoral counseling from master teachers at the Jewish Theological Seminary. This kind of cross-pollination would strengthen the entire field.
Donors and philanthropic leaders must shift funding from innovation theater to formation infrastructure. The Jewish communal world loves pilot programs and convenings. What we need now is patient capital for the slow work of formation. Endow rabbinic chairs at institutions committed to traditional learning combined with pastoral excellence. Make 10-year commitments, not three-year grants. Create post-ordination fellowships that place newly ordained rabbis in strong communities with master mentors for two or three years before they take senior positions. Fund the apprenticeship model that produces excellence. Fund gap-year programs in Israel and intensive pre-seminary preparation. Give talented 35-year-olds considering a career change the resources to spend a year studying Talmud seriously before they apply to rabbinical school.
And measure what matters. Ask grant recipients not about diversity metrics or innovation buzzwords, but about textual competency, communal integration, and long-term placement success. One major philanthropist could transform the field by endowing a fund that provides significant annual support to institutions meeting rigorous standards for traditional learning, pastoral training, and placement support, regardless of denomination.
Communities and search committees must become more sophisticated consumers of rabbinic talent. During interviews, probe beyond résumés and talking points. Ask candidates to walk you through their approach to teaching a page of Talmud to diverse audiences. Ask how their formation prepared them to navigate tensions between tradition and change. Ask about their longest mentorship relationship and what they learned from it. Ask what it means to be a link in the chain of Jewish tradition.
An Urgent Call
The American rabbinate stands at a crossroads. One path leads toward continued fragmentation: rabbinic training driven by ideological fashion, second-career professionals with limited formation, institutions talking past each other, and communities unsure what excellence even looks like.
The other path leads toward renewal. Seminaries committed to both traditional learning and pastoral care. Donors funding formation rather than innovation. RIETS and other serious institutions leading publicly. Communities demanding rabbis who are both deeply rooted and genuinely responsive.
We don’t have to choose between tradition and inclusion, between excellence and accessibility, between past and future. These are false choices designed to paralyze us. We can have — we must have — rabbis formed in the deep grammar of Jewish thought who can lead diverse communities with wisdom and grace.
The Atra report should be read not as a warning of inevitable decline, but as an invitation to institutional courage. It surfaces truth. And truth creates possibility.
A rabbinate with moral gravity will not simply anchor Jewish life in an unsettled age. It will renew it. It will produce leaders capable of holding both tradition and change with grace. Leaders who can welcome the stranger without abandoning boundaries. Leaders who can engage modernity without being captured by it.
This is not the moment to retreat into tribalism or settle for mediocrity. This is not the moment for hand-wringing or passive resignation. This is the moment to build — not to drift, but to define. Not to mirror culture, but to shape it. Not to manage decline, but to engineer renewal.
The data is clear. The path is visible. The opportunity is now.
All that remains is the will to lead.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100
The television entertainment personality Gene Shalit, who celebrated his centenary on March 25, semaphored a Jewish appearance for decades to viewers of NBC’s early morning gabfest The Today Show.
With his Jew-fro hairstyle that fascinated celebrity interviewees and his abundant mustache that outdid Groucho Marx’s mere greasepaint simulacrum, Shalit was one of a kind. Born in New York City in 1926, he clearly aimed to be recognizable even through half-opened bleary eyes of half-asleep viewers. And audible too. Shalit’s precise pronunciation, always at a vigorous decibel level, sought to be comprehensible even during voiceovers. The Canadian comedian Eugene Levy, transfixed by this persona, imitated him on SCTV roaring at high decibel levels.
In one skit, Levy embodied Shalit with haimish affection, hawking a remedy for a migraine presumably caused by his own bellowing. In another, Levy spoofed Hollywood celebrities who were notorious fressers at local restaurants, including the American Jewish actress Shelley Winters (born Shirley Schrift). In still another lampoon, Levy-as-Shalit danced and also kibitzed with the late Catherine O’Hara as the Jewish gossip columnist Rona Barrett (born Burstein).
Shalit apparently kvelled at the notion that he was prominent enough in media culture to be affectionately kidded like other Jewish noteworthies Levy imitated, including Howard Cosell, Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Milton Berle, Judd Hirsch, Jack Carter, James Caan, Lorne Greene, Norman Mailer and Neil Sedaka.
Years later, Levy recalled that when the SCTV comedy troupe was invited to appear on The Today Show, before the segment was filmed, chairs were arranged so that Catherine O’Hara was seated next to Shalit. Suddenly Shalit exclaimed: “Wait a minute, shouldn’t the person who [imitates] me be sitting beside me?” Another Jewish comedian, Jon Lovitz, would likewise attempt to imitate Shalit on Saturday Night Live, but without the zest of Levy’s indelible incarnation.
Shalit once told showbiz reporter Eileen Prose that at first, his looks limited him to radio jobs in more conventional times for TV talent. By the more liberated late 1960s, when long hair and a hirsute upper lip were more common, he was hired as quasi-permanent house Jew on The Today Show. Although his mustache fit the counterculture in the mode of Jewish activist Jerry Rubin’s, Shalit as an aspiring journalist may have grown his facial hair more in tribute to earlier literati like the playwright William Saroyan or the eminent humorist Mark Twain.
At times, Shalit’s appearance could be clown-like or cartoonish, so it was natural that characters inspired by him would appear on animated series such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Family Guy as well as The Muppet Show.
Famous interviewees like Peter Sellers were plainly at ease with Shalit’s persona. A conversation filmed shortly before Sellers’ untimely death was cordial, with the sometimes tetchy actor on his best behavior, acknowledging Shalit as a fellow entertainer. And with Mel Brooks in 1987, Shalit looked to be in paradise.
A warm-hearted empathizer and enthusiast, Shalit was more suited to promoting films than criticizing them. In 1989, a tzimmes occurred when a memo drafted by Bryant Gumbel, a Today Show colleague, deemed Shalit a “specialist in gushing over actors and directors” and added that Shalit’s interviews “aren’t very good.” To his credit, Shalit minimized the controversy, telling The Los Angeles Times that Gumbel’s disses were “not big whacks.”
“Listen, I’ve been interviewing people on the show for 17 years,” Shalit said. “I must be doing something right.”
Part of his inspiration was a sincere appreciation for humor, Jewish and otherwise. His 1987 anthology, Laughing Matters featured contributions by Jewish wits such as Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Woody Allen, Fran Lebowitz, Samuel Hoffenstein, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, George S. Kaufman, Milt Gross, Arthur Kober, Leo Rosten, Allan Sherman, Max Shulman, Calvin Trillin, Rube Goldberg, Sam Gross, Roz Chast, B. Kliban, Robert Mankoff, J. B. Handelsman, Jules Feiffer and George Burns. The volume was dedicated to, among others, the Jewish screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who was Shalit’s instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His visceral reaction to Jewish parody was such that during one commuter train ride, Shalit admitted in a preface, Perelman’s story “No Starch in the Dhoti, S’il Vous Plait” caused a conductor to lean down with concern, stating: “A passenger says you’re crying.” To which Shalit retorted, choking and rubbing away tears: “I’m laughing.”
The subliminal message of Shalit’s book was that without Jews, America would have distinctly fewer tears of laughter. And he regretted not being able to include funny Jews like Jack Benny and Ed Wynn whose performances could not be transferred to the printed page.
Shalit also reviewed books for years. Sticking firmly to the content of cultural products with a few brief hints of value judgment, Shalit seemed to have neither the time nor presumably the inclination to subject new items to analysis of Freudian intensity. He clearly preferred boosting things to panning them, and when a film displeased Shalit, he could be uncomfortable saying so.
One occasion when Shalit raised hackles was his response on The Today Show to the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. Shalit described one of the gay characters as a “sexual predator.” The LGBTQ media group GLAAD objected to Shalit’s characterization as a homophobic stereotype. Shalit’s son Peter wrote an open letter to GLAAD, identifying himself as a gay physician with a Seattle practice helping the gay community. Peter Shalit admitted that his father “did not get” the film in question, but was “not a homophobe.” He might have added that his father had even included an excerpt from Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy in the aforementioned humor collection.
Shalit followed up with his own apology, stating in a mensch-like way that he did not intend to cast “aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself.” When Shalit finally retired from broadcasting at age 84, with the Yiddish-inflected declaration: “It’s enough, already,” he left behind admiring viewers and decades of bonhomie as one of morning television’s most genial protagonists.
Mazel tov, Gene Shalit. Biz hundert un tsvantsik (May you live until 120)!
The post Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100 appeared first on The Forward.
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How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay
I’m almost positive I heard about the old lady who swallowed a fly before the father who bought a goat for two zuzim.
This occurred to me a few years ago while riding in my sister’s minivan. My niece was in her car seat fidgeting with a toy that plays a catalogue of public domain children’s songs. But unlike the version I’d grown up hearing, where the old lady’s ravenous habit of devouring ever-larger animals is met with the prognostic shrug of “perhaps she’ll die,” the refrain was changed to the more kid-friendly “oh me oh my.”
The Seder tune “Chad Gadya,” which involves a quite similar conceit, has no such timidity when it comes to the ravages of death.
Jack Black once described it as the “original heavy metal song” for the way it progresses along the chain of life from a little goat bought for two zuzim, to the cat who ate the goat, to the dog who bit the cat, all the way up to the angel of death. (“Very Black Sabbath.”)
It is pretty metal — in a kosher Kidz Bop, tot Shabbat kinda way. But why we sing it should, in Jewish circles, be as popular a seasonal question as what a bunny with a clutch of eggs has to do with Jesus’ resurrection. (Some Haggadot explain the greater significance of “Chad Gadya;” my Maxwell House does not.)
Dating the song or rooting out its precise origins is not easy.
As historian Henry Abramson wrote, scholars have noted the song’s similarities to a late Medieval German folk rhyme. While the fact that it is mostly in Aramaic, not the vernacular in Europe in the Middle Ages, suggests an earlier provenance, it is missing from extant Sephardic and Yemenite Haggadot, where one would expect to find texts originating in the language, and the Aramaic itself has many errors.
Abramson reasons that, given the surviving written versions, it was likely adapted sometime in the 14th century from a German children’s rhyme called “The Foreman that Sent Jockel Out,” about an idler named Jockel who a foreman tries to rouse to fieldwork with an escalating series of messengers, ending with a hangman. (Abramson notes the original is characterized by “some Teutonic weirdness,” like a witch sent to subdue a vulture.)
“Chad Gadya” belongs, like its Seder companion “Echad Mi Yodea,” to a genre called “cumulative song,” where verses build with new information a la “12 Days of Christmas.” But “Chad Gadya” stands out for its strangeness and its more oblique message.
Abramson and others see the goat, small and vulnerable, standing in for the Jewish people, and the ensuing parade of antagonists corresponding to historical enemies (Assyrians, Babylonians) and periods of time (Exodus, various conquests), ending with redemption in the Messianic age when the Holy One smites death.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in a commentary for his Haggadah, the song “teaches the great truth of Jewish hope: that though many nations (symbolized by the cat, the dog, and so on) attacked Israel (the goat), each in turn has vanished into oblivion.”
That this truth is conveyed in song, with much banging on the table or animal noises, speaks to the centrality of children in the Passover Seder. And, some think, its inclusion serves a practical purpose: keeping the kids awake through the last leg of a long ritual meal.
My own interpretation is admittedly less lofty. I don’t think of Israel’s tribulations. I do think of the abundance of stray cats in Jerusalem, said to have originated during the British mandate when the city had a rat problem.
And, in the years since my own days as designated Four Questions asker, I’ve been reading “Chad Gadya” into non-Jewish contexts. “The White Cat,” off of Mitski’s new album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, contains a lyric that recalls the song, only altered to be a metaphor for the predations of capitalism.
In it, the speaker says she must work to pay for the cat’s house and “for the bugs who drink my blood/and the birds who eat those bugs/so that white cat can kill the birds.”
These cycles speak across cultures and time because they represent a fundamental rule of nature: There’s always a bigger fish (or cat or dog or stick).
To erase death from the equation, like my niece’s toy does with that hapless, insect-ingesting pensioner, is a concession to today’s sensitivities. That’s not to say “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” represents anything more homiletic than a choking hazard warning, but in the case of “Chad Gadya,” death is the story, and an end to death is the hope.
“The Haggadah ends with the death of death in eternal life,” Rabbi Sacks concluded his drash on the song, which ends when God strikes down the Angel of Death. “A fitting end for the story of a people dedicated to Moshe’s great command, ‘Choose life.’”
I know it’s a principle of faith all over the Haggadah, but I’m more agnostic as to that Messianic promise and maybe more in the camp of our old lady. My understanding of Jewishness, which accords with Moshe’s command, says life is best lived knowing that — perhaps — we’ll die.
The post How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay appeared first on The Forward.
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Katz: ‘Israel’s Goal in Lebanon is to Disarm Hezbollah’
Then-Israeli transportation minister Israel Katz attends the cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Feb. 17, 2019. Katz currently serves as the foreign minister. Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz held a situation assessment Friday with senior military and defense officials, reiterating that the country’s policy in Lebanon remains focused on disarming Hezbollah by military and political means. Katz emphasized that the goal applies “regardless of the Iran issue” and pledged continued protection for Israeli northern communities.
Katz said the Israel Defense Forces are completing ground maneuvers up to the anti-tank line to prevent direct threats to border towns. He outlined plans to demolish houses in villages near the border that serve as Hezbollah outposts, citing previous operations in Rafah and Khan Yunis in Gaza as models.
The Defense Minister added that the IDF will maintain security control over the Litani area and that the return of 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon who had evacuated north will not be permitted until northern communities’ safety is ensured. Katz also reaffirmed that the IDF will continue targeting Hezbollah leaders and operatives across Lebanon, noting that 1,000 terrorists have already been eliminated since the start of the current campaign.
“We promised security to the northern towns, and that is exactly what we will do,” Katz said. He further warned that the IDF will act decisively against rocket fire from Lebanon, stating that Hezbollah “will pay heavy prices.”