CLERGY TRAINING MEETS THE iGENERATION

BY MICHAEL KRESS
Photos by Dan Vaillancourt and Paula Lerner ©2003

Time was, not so long ago, when the rabbi's role was fairly clear-cut. Rabbis were unquestioned authority figures, learned men—since they were, of course, only men—who preached from on high, guiding their rapt congregations in the ways of their denominational traditions. They delivered sermons, taught classes, officiated at simchot and funerals, and were given a place of honor in the community.

Those days, however, seem to have passed with the era of doctors' house calls and the Big Three television networks. In this 21st century of managed health care and TiVo, rabbis must excel at both the macro and micro level of congregational life—from running cost-effective congregations to nurturing individuals' spiritual quests. And that requires a rethinking of rabbinic education.

"Any institution involved with rabbinic training has to ask itself: What are the roles that today's rabbi needs to fill?" says Hebrew College President David M. Gordis.

The short answer is: many. In addition to being teacher and preacher, he or she—since now there are "shes" in all but Orthodoxy—also must play the roles of politician, marketing expert, administrator, fund-raiser and financial-management guru, as well as personal spiritual guide, therapist and interfaith ambassador.

Even the traditional clerical roles—teaching and sermonizing—have grown more complex. Forget unquestioned authority. A growing number of American Jews no longer see traditions, organizations, institutions or even highly certified leaders as inherent sources of authority; they refuse to be bound by categories of the past and insist on seeking their own personal spiritual paths, drawing from whatever and wherever they find inspiration.

"The consumers in the field today are looking for how Judaism can help in their lives," says Norman Cohen, provost of the Reform seminary, Hebrew Union College (HUC), in New York. "That question wasn't asked 20 years ago."

Indeed, across all faith traditions in America, the individual seeker is ascendant. As a result, the very nature of religious leadership and authority has changed dramatically. Evangelical Protestantism, which has many resources to foster and support individual conversion, has been in a strong position to respond to the change. By contrast, many other, more communally focused religious institutions are just beginning to grapple with it. "I don't think the old mainline Protestant seminaries, rabbinical schools and Catholic seminaries have thought as much about what form religious leadership will take in this culture," says Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, a Presbyterian institution, and director of the Center for Theological Education, which studies trends in Jewish and Christian seminaries.

"Most of the basic assumptions on which theological education has been based have been swept away," maintains Reverend Nick Carter, president of Andover Newton Theological School. "The context in which we do ministry has radically changed."

To prepare for multiple roles within a congregation of individualistic spiritual seekers, today's rabbinical school students are taking classes in nonprofit management and professional development, focusing on the personal spiritual journey through meetings with mentors and internships in hospitals and other pastoral-care settings, and engaging in interfaith dialogue with their counterparts at Christian and other seminaries. And in a radical departure from past rabbinic training, these students are learning how to lead a new, more member-centered congregational community.

Across all faith traditions in America, the individual seeker is ascendant. As a result, the very nature of religious leadership and authority has changed dramatically.

Reinventing Leadership
In the classroom and beyond, many of today's rabbinical students are interacting as members of a model community that seminary leaders say will better prepare them for the more participatory and consensus-driven synagogues that are becoming the norm.

"The community a student experiences in rabbinical school will be a model for the community that she or he seeks to build, seeks to replicate, out there in the world," says Dr. Arthur Green, Rector of Hebrew College's Rabbinical School.

In the past, he says, rabbinical schools were strictly hierarchical, just as the synagogues themselves. "There was the professor, you got up when the professor walked in to the room, the professor had his opinions, and your questions were very deferential and respectful. You didn't raise things you knew the professor wouldn't want to hear," Green says. "Certainly, your doubts about the truth or authority of a text had no place in the professor's classroom."

Today, however, seminaries such as the Hebrew College Rabbinical School are trying to create a less hierarchical community that shares decision-making power among lay leaders and other active members. "If you model a more intimate and creative community, then students will recreate that," Green maintains. Schools accomplish this by fostering a culture of informality, greater access to faculty members, consensus-based decision-making, permission to challenge teachers and one's own beliefs, and the skills to deliver informal divrei Torah in addition to formal sermons.

"If you model a more intimate and creative community, then students will recreate that," Rabbinical School Rector Art Green maintains.

Oksana Chapman, a first-year student at Hebrew College's Rabbinical School, recalls an example of this philosophy in action. Students faced a question involving how to split up for bet midrash, when students study texts informally in hevruta, with a partner. Instructors refrained from imposing a solution, asking students to work out a decision on their own, which they did successfully. "It's very important for us to learn how to come to a consensus, how to respect and hear every person," Chapman says.

The emphasis on empowering each individual congregant, however, must be balanced by a command of Jewish knowledge and tradition. Otherwise, rabbis risk losing sight of their own role as leaders—becoming, instead, mere coaches or guides.

"We live in an age where everybody can be their own authority," says Hayim Herring, executive director of STAR (Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal). "The issue of vision, of understanding trends and demographics in the community, understanding the role of autonomy and how a tradition that's based on responsibility and commitment can speak to people who live in an age of heightened individual choice while remaining authentic to the role—those are some of the real challenges," Herring says.

In short, as individual members are given a greater voice in congregational life, rabbis must still be prepared to set the tone. "The rabbi is not simply a marketable product, programmed to respond to what the public is looking for at any particular moment," Gordis says. "The rabbi needs to be speaking out of authentic Jewish knowledge and conviction. While responding to what people are seeking, the rabbi should have a sense of his or her own leadership challenge, where to move the individual and community. It would be a failure if we lose the notion of the rabbi as a visionary trying to inspire people to move to a higher level."

Toward that end, many of today's rabbis lead by engaging and empowering congregants through shared learning and spiritual experiences. "Instead of telling people what to do, you go together," says Oksana Chapman. "You have to work for the sake of the community, not for your own sake. Together, you grow."

Emphasizing the Pragmatic
Spiritual leadership is one challenge. Handling the day-to-day demands of congregations that function as spiritual homes, community centers, schools and safety nets is quite another. In response, seminaries are stressing as never before the role of rabbi as professional.

In the past, rabbinical schools were places for serious Jewish learning, where students focused on mastering texts rather than how to fill the rabbi's role, Gordis says.

To prepare cantors for wide-ranging roles, Cantor-Educator program Director Scott Sokol says, cantorial education needs to achieve a new balance: "less focused on music and liturgy, and more focused on Jewish studies, pedagogy, working with kids and families—getting their hands dirty in all aspects of communal life."

These days, however, these institutions stress the practical aspects of being a rabbi, including delivering sermons or divrei Torah, often aided at least in part by acting or public-speaking coaches; pastoral counseling, for which trained clinicians are tapped; and financial and organizational management, drawing on teachers from the business world.

Even the content of seminary text study—the most traditional of rabbinical school pursuits—is shifting to a more pragmatic emphasis.

At Hebrew College, rabbis-in-training use a strong grounding in texts to identify the "multivocality" of traditional sources, Gordis says, "so they have a palette to draw on as they help people along their journey."

At Hebrew College, for instance, students focus each year on a different book of Torah, studying the text in tandem with traditional and modern commentaries, as well as related theological and historical scholarship. The reason for this approach, Gordis says, is that rabbis' regular teaching and preaching centers largely on the weekly Torah portion—meaning they need a solid grounding in the Bible and how it's interpreted. In the past, states Gordis, Bible study was, strangely enough, largely neglected at many seminaries.

Though Orthodox seminaries traditionally focus almost exclusively on Talmud, the program at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a Modern Orthodox seminary in New York, includes a heavy dose of halakhah study. The thinking was that rabbis need to answer very practical questions in which a strong grounding in Jewish law is vital, says Rabbi Dov Linzer, the school rosh yeshiva and head of academics. "Our goal is to make students realize there are a lot of gray areas, and they need to appreciate human sensibilities when making halakhic rulings," he says.

Accentuating the Spiritual
Complementing this professional training, rabbinical schools also are opening new avenues for students to explore their own spiritual beliefs. HUC offers one typical approach: Students and faculty participate in a variety of co-curricular activities in which they discuss their beliefs and questions. Students also are matched with faculty members who are responsible for "mentoring students through the College, constantly pushing them to reflect on where they are in their own thinking about their beliefs," says HUC's Norman Cohen.

In addition to helping students better understand and articulate their own faith, programs such as these prepare tomorrow's rabbis to nurture their congregants' personal spiritual quests.

It's a task complicated by the fact that the very definition of "spirituality" has broadened. For some, Gordis observes, the spiritual search involves trying to connect with the transcendent. Others are "seeking a sense of community to overcome a sense of loneliness and isolation," while still others are looking for a connection with a sense of values or ways of marking transitions. And for the rest, it's some "vague combination of all those," he says.

Auburn Theological Seminary's Barbara Wheeler sees the same phenomenon of self-defined spirituality across all faiths in the United States. "Increasingly," she says, "students preparing to be religious leaders come from a culture in which religion is more individual, private, personal. People put together theologies and become a denomination of one."

The ramifications of individualistic trends in religious practice are everywhere. Gordis recalls the head of an Orthodox yeshiva speaking at a conference in Jerusalem about the impact of the Internet. The rosh yeshiva described how teshuvot—rabbinic responsa or legal rulings—are received in today's increasingly wired Jewish world: The moment a rabbi issues a legal decision, it is out there on the Internet to be critiqued, discussed and opposed. "People realize the rabbi is not the ultimate source," Gordis says.

To prepare their students to assume a less authoritarian role, many rabbinical schools still look toward traditional texts for answers, but in a very different way than in the past. At Hebrew College, rabbis-in-training use a strong grounding in texts to identify the "multivocality" of traditional sources, Gordis says, "so they have a palette to draw on as they help people along their journey."

Crossing Borders
Rabbinical students are also listening to the voices of other traditions as they sharpen their vision of Jewish spirituality. Andover Newton President Nick Carter defines the necessary task as "border crossing"—moving from the comfort of our positions to engage others and learn from them. More than ever before, seminary students are meeting and engaging with one another through formal and informal programs. In some cases, they're visiting each other's prayer services and communities, or working together on social action programs.

This interaction across religious lines helps students in two ways, says Rabbi Daniel Brenner, director of the Center for Multifaith Education at Auburn Theological. Recalling his own experiences as a seminary student involved in interfaith dialogue, Brenner says, "It challenged me to think about my theology and my relationship with the rest of the world more than any course I took. It's invaluable training for when graduates go out into the world. They're going to be taking care not only of people in their buildings, but also taking care of people in their cities, their regions."

Hebrew College and Andover Newton have a particular need for interfaith cooperation since the two institutions "live together on this little hill," as Carter puts it. The College's Rabbinical School is housed mostly in space rented from Andover Newton, and as both schools plan for future expansions and changes in their buildings and programs, they are conferring to ensure they don't "end up with two of everything," Carter says. That process has brought together committees, leaders, even architects and lawyers to share each other's plans.

Students are also listening to the voices of other traditions as they sharpen their vision of Jewish spirituality.

"We are now making decisions about our future based on Hebrew College's plan, and Hebrew College is making decisions about its future based on our plan," notes Carter. "The degree to which we each change our plans marks the degree to which the other has shaped our vision for theological education. Which means we need to be clear about what is negotiable and what is not."

Students and faculty members from both schools are likewise "border crossing." A student-led interfaith dialogue group, called Journeys on the Hill, meets regularly, involving about 50 students from both schools, including rabbinical students and those from other college programs. The group has met for dinner, attended Christian and Jewish services, and organized joint holiday programs, such as one in December for Advent and Hanukkah.

"When we don't know each other, we tend to get into problems on both sides," says Van Lanckton, a second-year rabbinical student who helps organize the group. "There's a lot we can learn from one another." There's time for some levity as well. This past year, the group screened and then discussed the 1977 film Oh God!, starring George Burns in the role of God, who appears to a grocery store owner played by John Denver.

Some students from both schools have taken a class together on the Book of Ruth, and Van Lanckton says they hope to co-develop more classes in the future: There is a joint class being offered in the fall 2005 semester, Sacred Texts and Their Interpretive Contexts in Jewish/Christian Comparative Perspective. The Rabbinical School will soon begin to require that students take an introductory Christianity class, taught by Andover Newton faculty, reports Art Green. "We are, after all, a minority group in what is mostly a Christian country," he says, adding that he hopes Andover Newton will likewise offer an introduction to Judaism.

The two schools also jointly run the Interreligious Center on Public Life, which produces scholarly publications and conducts conferences and other programs relating to the value derived from Judaism, Christianity and Islam as they intersect on issues of public policy.

Postordination programs help rabbis fill in the gaps of what rabbinical school may not have provided, allow them to learn from the vantage point of having worked in the field and offer them opportunities to stay on top of new trends and developments.

Beyond Ordination
With so many new classes, programs and priorities redefining the rabbinical school curriculum and experience, seminary leaders are challenged to fit them all in. After all, it's not as if seminaries can jettison the topics they were teaching all along—tradition and texts—and just focus on the new needs. "It's a trade-off," Herring says. "Anything you teach in one area means it's coming out of another."

One solution is continuing education for rabbis, one of the programs star provides. Hebrew College, too, is now planning a transdenominational continuing education program for rabbis. In fact, The Lasko Foundation of West Chester, Penn., awarded the Rabbinical School a $135,000 planning grant in July 2005 to create an institute for continuing rabbinic education at the College. These postordination programs help rabbis fill in the gaps of what rabbinical school may not have provided, allow them to learn from the vantage point of having worked in the field and offer them opportunities to stay on top of new trends and developments. "There's only so much a rabbinical program is able to provide in terms of real-world education," Herring says. "The vantage point of a boardroom and of a classroom are very different."

Even as seminaries act to address new congregational demands, other challenges impinge on them from society-at-large: students, often embarking on their second careers, who have rising debt levels that can hardly be alleviated with the average clergyperson's salary; women and gay students who may be welcomed at liberal seminaries but find limited job opportunities afterward; or shrinking numbers of students interested in pursuing a career in the clergy. But for all that, Carter says, "I can't think of a more exciting place to be."

"Where will the next Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa come from, and how will they be prepared?" Carter asks, with a question that can apply equally to the next Abraham Joshua Heschel or Joseph Soloveitchik. "The whole world is yearning for these people. While there are challenges, never has the need been greater."

Michael Kress is an editor at Beliefnet.com and a freelance writer on religion and spirituality.

	: The Cantorate Evolves, As Well Rabbis are not the only synagogue professionals who have seen their role evolve and become more complex in recent years. Their liturgical counterparts, cantors, have likewise been forced to respond to the changing needs of synagogues, communities and individuals by expanding their job description and taking on new challenges that place them on more equal footing with rabbis. And, like rabbinical schools, cantor training programs have had to adjust to this new paradigm. A case in point is the new Cantor-Educator program at Hebrew College, which prepares its students to assume a broad range of responsibilities—many of them recent additions to cantorial turf. Teens often turn to cantors rather than rabbis when they need to talk, increasing the need for cantors to be effective in counseling. "In the past, cantors were primarily focused on the liturgical and musical life of the synagogue, while now they are increasingly involved in areas such as education—especially around lifecycle events—and pastoral duties, like hospital visits," says Dr. Scott M. Sokol, director of the program and cantor of Congregation Beth Sholom in Framingham, Mass. "In the previous generation, cantors probably spent three-quarters of their time conducting or preparing musically for leading services. Now, that's more like 25 percent of their time, and 75 percent is spent in all these other areas." The change is evident on and off the bima, and particularly in bar and bat mitzvah preparations. As the educators who work most closely with young teens before that momentous occasion, cantors assume a responsibility and opportunity with longer-range consequences than the child's haftorah performance. "Hazzanim, in the relationships they forge with bar and bat mitzvah students, are the synagogue professionals largely responsible for whether kids stay connected with Judaism after their bar or bat mitzvah," Sokol says. Because of that relationship, teens often turn to cantors rather than rabbis when they need to talk, increasing the need for cantors to be effective in counseling. Bar and bat mitzvah students "almost always carry with them a huge amount of anxiety about this big day in their lives," says Hazzan Brian Mayer, adjunct associate professor of Jewish music at Hebrew College and cantor of Temple Emanu-El in Providence, R.I. Toward that end, Hebrew College's cantorial program will teach students cognitive behavioral techniques in anxiety management. "If we can help kids through their fears, the child can savor the experience and be sorry when it's over, rather than having it be a sense of release," Mayer says. To prepare cantors for such wide-ranging roles, Sokol says, cantorial education needs to achieve a new balance: "less focused on music and liturgy, and more focused on Jewish studies, pedagogy, working with kids and families—getting their hands dirty in all aspects of communal life." The Hebrew College program focuses heavily on pedagogy. Students will graduate with a Master of Jewish Education along with their cantorial certificate. It is the variety of the cantor's role today—especially the emphasis on cantor-as-educator—that excites Sarra Spierer, a fourth-year cantorial transfer student at Hebrew College this year. "A cantor not only teaches music—but uses music as a tool to access the traditions of Judaism." When it comes to the liturgical side of the job, cantors' roles are evolving as American Jews' preferred type of prayer service changes. The prayer communities that are thriving follow a participatory model, with "huge amounts of congregational singing, harmonizing and humming," Mayer observes. "People crave that spiritual uplift, and you need a skilled catalyst to energize that kind of religious, musical and spiritual ambiance and opportunity." The problem is that congregants often lack the knowledge to match their energy and enthusiasm. "There is so much yearning—sometimes latent and sometimes blatant—that it's really palpable how much people want, but how little they know," Mayer continues. "You have to address the gaps in people's educational backgrounds, but you also have to meet people's spiritual yearnings." Unlike their predecessors, today's cantors and rabbis must learn to do both. "The cantors who trained me entered the profession in the 1950s and '60s, so the world that they were responding to is one that was long ago," says Hazzan Jeffrey Klepper, visiting instructor in Jewish music at Hebrew College and cantor of Temple Sinai in Sharon, Mass. Now, "the world and the synagogues are much more complex, and we are trying to meet that need." "To reach many of our youths, the cantor needs to know about Jewish rock and hip-hop," says Hazzan Jeffrey Klepper, "because those are musical languages that appeal to high-school and college students." Cantors, rabbis and other educators must therefore work "harder and longer to teach the same kind of material that would have been simpler a generation ago," he adds. For cantors, that extra work includes becoming proficient in a broader range of musical styles—above and beyond the panoply of liturgical styles they've always needed to master. Even as they devote a greater fraction of their time to nonliturgical duties. "The knowledge base a cantor must have is so broad, because it has to include a foundation in Jewish texts, and it has to encompass every aspect of Jewish music, from nusah to cantillation, to choral music, to folk music," Klepper says. "And now, to reach many of our youths, the cantor needs to know about Jewish rock and hip-hop because those are musical languages that appeal to high-school and college students, and unless we can meet these young people where they're at, we're going to miss the chance to grab them." Cantors, like rabbis, also have a role to play as ambassadors of Judaism to society-at-large and activists for Israel, social justice and other causes, Klepper says. That's true not only because cantors are Jewish professionals and members of the clergy but also because of their unique talents. "Music is such a strong language that the cantor has a unique opportunity to reach out to people of every group," he says. "We have something that no other Jewish professional has. We have the power of music. It's a magical, mystical power, and we have to know it inside and out, and be able to communicate it. To have that power is a wonderful thing, and it really can work miracles." —MK

	Seminaries Offer a Range of Alternatives In concert with the evolution of rabbinical school education, several new seminaries have emerged, particularly in the past decade. For fifty years, however, prospective students have had a wide variety of options from which to choose—from the mainstream to the transdenominational. In addition to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, aspiring Conservative rabbis could also enroll in the Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires, which opened in 1962, the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem (1984), and the University of Judaism's Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies (1996). Reform Jews had Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and, by the late 1990s, the HUC-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles and New York City. Reconstructionists had the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia. The Orthodox world was always more diffuse, but Yeshiva University remained the flagship of the Modern Orthodox movement. More recently, in 1999, a new Modern Orthodox seminary was founded in New York, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. Options outside of the "Big Four" denominations have likewise been available for a half-century: the Academy for the Jewish Religion, a part-time transdenominational seminary in New York established in 1956; the Jewish Renewal movement's aleph Rabbinical Program in Philadelphia (1974); and the Union for Traditional Judaism in New Jersey, a nondenominational institution often referred to as "Conservadox," that emerged in the 1980s. In 2003, Hebrew College inaugurated its own Rabbinical School, the nation's only full-time transdenominational ordination program at an accredited academic institution, led by Dr. Art Green. —MK

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