Who needs rabbinic leadership?

The other day I quoted a 2007 survey performed by YU’s Center for the Jewish Future (in its Community Growth Initiative) on the way that young couples choose a community.

According to the CJF's published report, they surveyed 100 “young families” from Riverdale, Washington Heights, Teaneck, University of Pennsylvania, Einstein, Kew Gardens Hills and Holliswood.

The participants were from early 20s to early 30s, from newlyweds to families with 2-3 children under the age of 5. The great majority of the participants had grown up on Long Island (16.4%) or in Queens (14.4%); the highest-ranking non-NY/NJ hometowns were Chicago, LA and Philadelpha, each with 3.4% of the participants. There was no small community with 2% or more of the results.

As I explained in that previous post, these families ranked the importance of 12 factors for choosing a community. The overall result was:

1. Hashkafa
2. Choice of Day Schools
3. Affordable Housing
4. Job / Higher Education
5. Young Couples
6. Eruv
7. Values
8. Mikvah
9. Convenience
10. Proximity to Family
11. Rabbinic Leadership
12. Kosher Restaurants

Which led one commenter to note how low rabbinic leadership ranks in the survey results. To me, though, this makes perfect sense, for several reasons:

• As the study authors noted, younger families usually have not experienced a need for real pastoral involvement, as in helping people through severe illness or marshaling community resources in a crisis;

• As the study authors also noted, the families interviewed still had strong connections to their rebbeim from yeshiva and may not have seen the need for a communal posek or pastoral authority;

• The study authors also noted that a great percentage of the young families surveyed lived in apartment communities, without any substantive rabbinic presence. [Similarly, many of them ranked eruv and walking-distance mikvah low on the list; presumably they felt they could always build one easily enough, with or without rabbinic leadership?]

• I would also add that the young families surveyed likely had little awareness of what a rabbi does in a community, particularly a small community. Coming from Long Island, Brooklyn, Queens and Teaneck, their experience with community organization and growth would be entirely theoretical. Speaking for myself, I had no clue about the role of a rabbi in a non-New York community.

• And, finally but perhaps most crucially, good rabbinic leadership generally takes place behind the scenes, so that these families, and most families, would likely not be sensitive to it. If a rabbi does his job well – organizes help for people in need discreetly, works well with committees, arranges for shul and community decisions to flow properly – then no one knows what he has done.

So, no, I’m not that surprised by the result. I’m curious, though, as to what those same couples will say if they are re-surveyed five and ten years down the line.

Re-upping as a Rabbinic Mentor

I found out yesterday that I will be invited to serve again this year as a mentor for the Center for the Jewish Future / Legacy Heritage Fund Rabbinic Enrichment Initiative’s rabbinic mentorship program.

In this mentorship program, experienced rabbis are paired with rabbis who are just starting out, for a period of two years. The rabbis visit each other, and communicate regularly (at least weekly) to talk about issues, to discuss long- and short-term planning, etc. And, sometimes, the mentor rabbis have to spend some time clarifying to the mentee's shul that his job is to help the mentee, and not to be a liaison between the mentee and his shul.

To my mind, this is a great program; I could have used a mentor when I was starting out.

All right, full disclosure: I would not have taken advantage of it, because I was way too insecure to trust anyone to be my mentor. I was sure that all information and skills fit into one of two categories: (A) Things I know, or (B) Things I will never admit I don't know.

But I should have had one.

When the program started a couple of years ago, I was absolutely, positively sure I didn’t belong as a mentor. I was the most junior mentor by far; I had 9 years of experience, and the next-junior mentor had 20-something years. I’m still not sure why they asked me, except that more senior rabbis had declined the opportunity. But there I was at the table with rabbis whose experience and wisdom still awe me.

After a couple of years in this role I finally feel like I do have some small sense of what I am supposed to be doing. A very small sense, but it's there.

Certainly, being a mentor has been good for me, for all the reasons that mentorships usually benefit mentors:

-I’ve had a chance to travel to places I would never have seen otherwise. Granted that I don’t travel well (understatement alert), it’s still been a good, deepening experience for me;

-Seeing others’ challenges has given me perspective on my own (Wow, am I glad that's not my congregant);

-Helping others with their weakenesses has given me insight into my own (Those can't do...);

-Mentoring has forced me to think systematically and thoroughly about the mechanics of the rabbinate (Yes, there is a system. Or there should be, at any rate.);

-I’ve gleaned new ideas for implementation in my own rabbinate.

About the only thing I would really want to change is the title “mentor,” for two reasons:

-I think it’s off-putting for the mentee, although most of them wouldn’t say so directly. This new rabbi is someone who has completed a serious course of learning and who is already in the field, counseling people and dealing with tough issues, and labelling myself – still relatively young in this field – as a “mentor” is a bit patronizing. Not to mention it can be undermining if the senior rabbi is introduced to the community as a formal mentor; I prefer the title "partner rabbi," "buddy rabbi" or something similar.

-The title suggests I know something. Certainly, I’ve seen a lot over the years, but experience makes you a זקן without necessarily being a זה שקנה חכמה – in other words, it gives you the gray hair, but necessarily the gray matter to go with it.

In the past two years I have worked with three young rabbis, and I’ve learned from dealing with each of them. I hope they have benefited as much from me – and I hope to become even better at it over the course of this year.