Sending suicidal people form letters

[I wrote this four years ago, in a different forum, in the week before Tisha b'Av. My life is different now; I no longer serve as a shul rabbi. Nonetheless, it still resonates with me, and particularly because just the other day a shul rabbi mentioned to me exactly the point I identified below - that a shul rabbi runs a great risk of burnout if he identifies too closely with the people he counsels, but that we do it anyway.]

I’ve been unusually depressed lately - beyond the normal dips and bottoms in my normal state of harried/anxious/depressed/exuberant.
Some of it is the Nine Days.
Some of it is miserable anticipation of Haftarat Chazon coming up this Shabbos; I never get through that without bawling like a baby.
Some of it is from lack of music during the Three Weeks of mourning.
And some of it is the rising tide of illness and bereavement I’ve been dealing with, in one of those morbid swings of the pendulum that happen from time to time.

I’ve been reading segments of Alan Alda’s autobiographical “Never have your dog stuffed,” and I just found two paragraphs that sum up the problem perfectly. [Note: I cannot recommend the book, because parts of it are too vulgar to be halachically permissible. Frankly, the early part is wandering and poorly put together. On the other hand, some of the later parts are great. And, it is Alan Alda, after all.]

On page 168 he describes becoming famous as a result of MASH:
I began receiving letters from people on the verge of suicide, asking me for help - help they felt for some reason I was qualified to give them. I wanted to answer these lettes before the people carried out their acts of despair, but after I struggled with what I should say in answer to the first letter I received, I realized I had taken a week. That was too long. At a certain point, even the right words might be useless. I couldn’t take that long with every letter.

Finally, I wrote a draft of a note that could be tailored to anyone who wrote me in desperation, and I checked it with a friend who was a psychoanalyst. In each letter, I included the number of the local suicide prevention clinic. I tried to make the letter seem personal and genuine, hoping they wouldn’t choose a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but each time I sent out one of these letters, and there were a number of them, I felt strange. This is what getting famous does to you, I though. You wind up sending suicidal people form letters.


That’s a big problem in the rabbinate. Members, non-members, locals and people from far away, they come to you looking for answers, for comfort, for a listening ear, and you can’t afford to send them form letters. They need, they deserve, more than that. They deserve someone who will listen.

Which brings me to an earlier paragraph in Alda’s book, page 160-161, discussing his evolution as an actor in doing MASH:
When I started out as an actor, I thought, Here’s what I have to say; how shall I say it? On MASH, I began to understand that what I do in the scene is not as important as what happens between me and the other person. And listening it what lets it happen. It’s almost always the other person who causes you to say what you say next. You don’t have to figure out how you’ll say it. You have to listen so simply, so innocently, that the other person brings about a change in you that makes you say it and informs the way you say it…

Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues. Like so much of what I learned in the theater, this turned out to be how life works, too.


To be a good listener means to be transformed: To sit and listen and absorb the other person’s experiences and point of view, and let them become your own, so that you can respond with a real sense of the other person. You can’t have an answer until you know what the other person is saying, until you’ve heard him out and absorbed her view.

I’m experienced enough to know the danger this poses during an intense period like the one I’m enduring. I know the warning signs and the pitfalls, and the need to step back and take a deep breath. But I’m a rabbi. I’m the rabbi. They come to me.

This is one of the reasons I don’t blog much about the “big issues” facing the Jewish community. All community is local; it’s the woman with cancer, the man with suicidal urges, the couple having marital difficulties. What Olmert will and won’t do, whether Lubavitch messianists are going Christian or not, asking if the Gedolim are given too much credence - I don’t have the patience, let alone the time, to play pundit on that these days. I’m trying too hard to avoid sending suicidal people form letters.

Proper care and feeding of the Rabbi

I wrote this in a different forum quite a few years ago, and still get a smile out of reading it...

So you are the proud recipients of a new Rabbi; congratulations!

Doubtless your community is excited at the opportunity to enjoy hours of endless fun with your fresh-out-of-the-package, dynamic new rabbi, but please take a moment to read the following guidelines. Following these simple and inexpensive tips could add years of life to your rabbi, and help make your experience much more fun and fulfilling.

First, do not allow your rabbi’s batteries to run down entirely before permitting them time to recharge.
Communities have trouble knowing when, exactly, to recharge their rabbi’s batteries, particularly because most models do not come with built-in charge readouts. Further, communities are loathe to permit their rabbis too much time off.
Fortunately, there is a simple, creative solution: Create periodic Rabbinic Off-Shabbos Weekends, in which the rabbi remains in town and is in his usual on-call mode, but he is relieved of responsibility for speeches, classes and krias haTorah. Such weekends should be instituted by the board, to reduce any rabbinic guilt feelings associated with taking a break.

Second, eliminate causes of daily exhaustion for your rabbi’s batteries.
Tests show that the primary daily drain for many rabbinic batteries comes from making sure that the synagogue maintains a viable morning and evening minyan. Allowing this frequent insult to your rabbi’s power cells fairly guarantees their early demise.
Be smart; require that your board members take weekly shifts at the minyan. Your rabbi will thank you for it.

Third, avoid stress loads beyond the recommended maximums.
Our recommended maximums apply only to new models in their first six months; following this "honeymoon" period, acceptable levels drop precipitously. This is a particularly great hazard within 50 miles of Brooklyn. Fortunately, there are ways to reduce the stress burden upon your rabbi's systems.
For example: Remember that your rabbi is designed to enforce halachah (Jewish law) within your synagogue and community. If you continually badger your rabbi for leniencies, you cause a great burden of stress for his internal circuitry. This could lead to system-wide disruptions and even short circuits.
A second example: In maximizing rabbinic sensitivity, engineers leave rabbinic empathy circuits in a state of heightened emotional vulnerability. Repeated exposure to complaints will shorten the life of your rabbi’s systems. Please make sure to protect your rabbi from repeated outbursts of whining.

Finally, remember that your rabbi’s batteries have the ability to recharge “on the fly” by exposure to repeated praise.
Do not fear overloading the charge capacity; this has yet to be accomplished in the entire history of our product line. If you are unsure whether the compliments are justified, appropriate or welcome, err on the side of offering praise; you will not regret it.

Thank you for purchasing our product. Remember, there are no refunds. However, we do specialize in product exchanges; call now to have a new rabbi in place by Rosh HaShanah!

I will become laid back. Really.

[I love this post at Life in Israel, even though we didn’t build them in the first place.]

Okay, so everyone who has known me during the past 20-plus years is laughing at the title to this post. But I’m actually serious.

Since mid-adolescence, I’ve unconsciously pressed myself into Type-A, schedule/rush behavior, along the way to certain goals. While in YU I wanted to complete certain sefarim, and I pushed to do that. Then I became a rabbi, and I pressed in a lot of different directions. Then I entered the world of the start-up kollel, and I’ve packed my schedule since Day 1. I had good reason for doing these things – I wanted the best and broadest success, and my role models were people who had led hard-driving, 24-7 lives. And that wasn’t bad, and, thank Gd, I’ve had some success and I’ve been healthy.

But the pressure makes me anxious, and when I'm under great pressure I become irritable, and for some time now I’ve begun to believe two ideas:
1 – It is possible to be hard-driving, 24-7, and still be laid back in going about it.
2 – Anxiety and tension are not what I want or need.

Psychologists like to say that people don’t change unless their current situation becomes unbearable. I don’t agree (unless you tautologically define the situations in which people attempt change as a priori unbearable). My life is quite bearable and satisfying, and I’m doing well, thank Gd. But I still want this change.

I want it because people who are laid back live longer. (Case in point: I daven mainly in two shuls when I’m in Israel, the Nasi on Ussishkin and the GRA shul in Shaarei Chesed. In both of those, during this past week’s trip, I learned that long-time stalwarts of the minyan, men who always struck me as strongly Type A and who were not that old, had died recently.) Enjoying my children, and Gd-willing grandchildren some day, is a priority of mine.

I want it because anxiety is habit-forming and contagious; it spreads, quickly, from necessary situations to silliness. Certainly, worrying about antagozing people, or about doing a poor job, makes sense. But once I begin to worry about major issues, that anxiety spreads to matters like missing a train (you can catch the next one, or just start out earlier), or sitting behind a slow-moving car in traffic.

I want it because this is the kind of life I want to model for my children. In the beginning of this week I described my belief that a primary job of parents is to teach their children how to cope; if my children would see me grow tense and upset over problems and prospective problems, they would naturally emulate this (at least until they would become mature enough to rebel, anyway).

I want it because I believe this is Jewishly correct. The concept of bitachon (trusting Gd to choose what is best for you) demands a degree of surrender, and emphasis on personal control encourages the illusion of כחי ועוצם ידי, that I am the source of my accomplishments.

And I want it because I like people who are laid back.

I believe that sheviras hamidos, breaking one’s traits, is possible. And I’m going to try.

I will still aim to accomplish everything, but I will be more careful about the cost/benefit in investing time in that goal. In the past I would willingly devote uncalled-for hours to pursue an additional tangent for a shiur, for example; I will need to remind myself daily to avoid that.

I will need to recognize the fungability of time – that time spent in one place truly can be made up elsewhere, on most occasions, and so I don’t need to be uptight about losing 15 minutes here or there. This realization can do wonders for road rage.

Finally, I will commit myself to Rush Happy. This means looking for humor in potentially-frustrating situations which really aren’t the end of the world, but which can feel like it (like when I boarded the plane for my return trip from Israel and realized I didn’t have a power outlet to charge my computer; or when I arrived in Newark from Israel to discover that my connection to Toronto had been cancelled). And it means that even when I need to rush, such as in leaving minyan early for carpool, I can keep in mind the positive aspects of the things I get to do – like driving carpool.

I don’t know that I’ll succeed, but I’m going to try. Advice and chizuk (encouragement) welcome.

Rabbi! Your job should not be fulfilling

NOTE: If you arrived here from my Beit Midrash email of February 4, the article you want is here; I apologize.

A few different people have emailed me a link to the New York Times' recent article on Clergy Burnout... gotta wonder if it's only because I'm finally taking a vacation...

The article gives me a chance to hold forth on an important issue within Rabbinic Burnout. I've talked about Burnout before, in posts you can access here. I've talked a bit about Rabbinic Vacations, as they do in that NYT article. But I think the Times article fails to drill down on a key question: Why don't clergy take vacations?

The article assumes that clergy don't take vacations because they are overworked, or because they feel it's irresponsible to take a vacation when congregants are in need. Those are part of it, certainly, but there is another, more scary reason why clergy have a hard time taking vacations: It's because we sometimes fall into the trap of looking to our jobs for the bulk of our sippuk hanefesh [fulfillment].

If I depend on a given activity for all or most of my fulfillment, then other activities become unattractive, empty, devoid of satisfaction. Rabbis who depend on "rabbi-ing" for their satisfaction will have a hard time spending time with family or friends, or travelling, or even learning Torah for the sake of their own growth. Those activities don't provide the reward - only being the Rabbi does.

Aside from the danger this poses to the rabbi's family life, it also poses a risk to his health, as noted in the New York Times article. And it poses a risk to his rabbinic performance, too, because your job, no matter what it is, cannot provide that type of satisfaction.

Why can't a job fill my constant need for sippuk? A job has natural stresses and tensions that come with its oblgations. A job has failures (gasp!) that come with its challenges. So it can't provide satisfaction all the time. Try to use it that way, and the job burns out.

A decade ago, I heard a talk on the topic from Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski on Clergy Burnout. The audio is on the RCA website, but for RCA members only; sorry. Here, though, is a transcript of a key section on why clergy should not look to their jobs for satisfaction:

We all need emotional sippuk… What are our sources? I’m going on record as saying that more than 50%, or perhaps 75% of our emotional input, should come from non-work-related sources, such as family, friends, learning Torah, mitzvos, whatever. Some of us have hobbies, some of us have kinds of things that we like to do for relaxation, whatever. But the work should not be expected to provide – we have a job to do, we have a tafkid to do, fine. But we should not be dependent on our work for the lion’s share of our emotional input, because if we do then we are going to reach burnout… Don’t expect the job to give you the greater part of your sippuk. The greater part of your sippuk should come from other sources…

Here Rabbi Dr. Twerski compared the job which is expected to provide fulfillment to a flat iron that is expected to double as a griddle and a space heater. Use an iron as an iron, and the filament will last for ten or twelve years of occasional operation. Use it for these constant purposes, and it will burn out immediately.

Sometimes we go so heavily into our jobs that we neglect the other sources. We don’t spend enough time with the family, we don’t spend enough time with friends, we may even find that we’re compromised on the time that we’ll spend learning, and there is a justification for it, sometimes מצוה שאי אפשר לעשות על ידי אחרים is דוחה תלמוד תורה, so there’s kinds of things we have to do that may take legitimate halachadik [his word, not mine] priority over learning, so what happens is – let alone that we don’t take enough time for relaxation except maybe we can get away for two weeks – and what happens is that we don’t get enough sippuk from other sources, which means that it’s going to depend totally on the work we do.

The title of this post is an exaggeration, obviously. All of us should find some fulfillment in our jobs, and this is certainly true for rabbis, who help people meet their own spiritual needs. But if a rabbi finds he can't take a vacation, he should ask himself: Is it because I feel empty when I take time away from the job? If so, it's time for some serious re-balancing. Don't take it from me, take it from Rabbi Dr. Twerski.

Ice Cream for Dinner

[This week's Toronto Torah is here!]

[Many of my recent posts have been more on the fluff side, and so I thought I would post tonight on a shiur I'm developing - but the shiur most on my mind is technical, on the Tur's view of Tevilas Kelim and the need for 40 seah vs. the Smak's understanding, and it just isn't working out in a blog-appropriate way. So, it's another fluffish post; my apologies to those who are looking for meatier material.]

As I type this, I’m hard at work on a serious container of chocolate and vanilla and some-undefined-chunky-stuff ice cream. (1.5 liters, for those who think in metric; really big, for the rest of us. It will all be gone by the time I finish writing this post, if my teeth don’t freeze.)

I’m usually a pretty healthy eater – real meals, with red things and green things that grew from the ground or ripened on trees, and even the occasional whole grain thing. If I want to grow up to be Batman, I need to eat right.

Nonetheless, over the years I have learned the importance of a Good Mood, and I’m in need of a Good Mood, so ice cream for dinner it is.

The week’s actually gone pretty well, thank Gd, all predictions of doom in the Rebbetzin’s absence to the contrary. Getting the kids up in the morning, assigning them clothes, parcelling out breakfasts and lunches and dinners, cooking the odd (but not too odd) meal myself, doing laundry and dishes (but not simultaneously, at least not if I was holding bleach)… it’s been pretty smooth, in no small part due to my wife’s preparation.

But today was very challenging, and so I’m falling back on one of the best pieces of advice I know: Get into a Good Mood.

I took a surprisingly long time to learn how important this can be; I dislike and distrust self-indulgence, and I've been taught to tough out any problems. But eventually my too-slow brain came to understand that this is not self-indulgence or surrender; it’s actually an investment in success.

Presumably, this counsel is not as important for some, but if you’re like me – no poker face, heart worn directly on sleeve and bereft of armor, you’ve read me long enough to know – then a Good Mood is key. Being down will affect everything from counseling to derashah-writing to program planning to communications to flyer design to committee recruitment (not to mention השראת השכינה).

Hence the ice cream.

Which is starting to melt on my keyboard, so I guess that’s it for this post. I have mood-altering work to do.

How to lynch your rabbi

Warning: Bad mood ahead.

The following outrageous Q and A exchange on Kipa illustrates the danger of trusting an “Ask the Rabbi” website, and of asking a schoolteacher (you can see the writer's bio here; I don't want to mention his name) for advice about shul politics:

The Question:
My community’s rabbi has been here for many years. I have no personal connection with him, but he is, in sum, a pleasant person. The problem is that he does not really guide the community. He doesn’t really connect with community members, beyond a small kernel of “chasidim.” Almost no one goes to his classes, and in general he does not create any meaningful path for the community. They say he was more energetic in the beginning of his career.

I assume there are things I do not see, and that he maintains some connections with people in private, but my impression – and that of others – is as I have described.

How does one turn to a rabbi and ask him to do more, without damaging his honor? And in an extreme case, may one try to remove a rabbi from his position in order to appoint a rabbi who is more appropriate?

Note: The questioner is already polling other people about her discomfort.

Note: The questioner has not approached the rabbi directly, given her penultimate question.

In other words: "Basically, I'd like to know: What should I do if I and seventy of my closest and dearest friends, who I just happen to know by osmosis agree with me since I don't gossip at all, think the rabbi is a washed-out has-been failure?"

The answer includes the following paragraph:
At the start of any practical path, you must ascertain clearly that your assessment is that of most of the community, and that the rabbi really is not creating spiritual and personal progress among the community members.

Therefore, in practice, I recommend that you check – with great discretion – a representative sample of 20-30 percent of the community members, not in a clear way but in a roundabout way, in the course of conversation about some other matter. Check many cases: Do they have a relationship with the rabbi, do they value his accomplishments in the community, do they go to other rabbis with personal connections.

Many rabbis are far from perfect, and some should be replaced - but DUDE! What are you doing?!

No mention of approaching the rabbi directly, just, “Sure, ma’am, just go poll your friends about what they think of the rabbi. Ask them what they think of him. Twenty or thirty percent of the community – one out of every three or four. See if they have a connection with the rabbi. But do it discreetly.”

Discreetly? Have you never dealt with human beings??

Here are some good opening lines for that discreet conversation:

So... talk to the rabbi lately? No? Why not?

Hey, remember when you went in for surgery last year? Who did you go to for advice? Oh, not the rabbi?

That class the rabbi gave - what did you think of it? Not for repetition, of course; please ignore my pen and paper.

What do you think of the rabbi's suits? His conversational abilities? The food at his Shabbos table - or have you never been invited there, like 12.7% of the people I have randomly sampled in a discreet survey I'm pretending not to be taking?

How about we poll the parents of your high school students, "Not to start any trouble, but: Are you satisfied with your children's teacher?"

You could have titled this column, “Advice on Creating a Lynch Mob,” or, "How to make your rabbi's life a living gehennom."

I'm glad that in the responses, a sensible reader wrote in:
Why not try to speak to the rabbi before anything else? Why isn’t the first step to explain the situation and the reactions – personal or communal – and hear his side, and then, if the situation does not improve, turn to another rabbi to speak with him, or something like that? Why is the immediate reaction to jump to gatherings and meetings, at which it will be impossible to avoid lashon hara and degradation of a Torah scholar?

To which the author responds:
Certainly, certainly, the first and most fundamental step, from the Torah and from basic ethics, is this; this is also likely to be the most effective approach. My response is given that the questioner had already tried this and not received a response. Yasher koach.

Yasher koach indeed. What you should do, Rabbi Schoolteacher, is delete your entire answer, beginning to end, and just insert your reader’s suggestion.

For a more complete set of instructions:
1. Talk to the rabbi directly;
2. If that does not yield an explanation or corrective action, talk to the president.
3. It is then the president's job to evaluate the concern and take it to the board for discussion and action, or not.

The last one to discreetly poll the people was Korach, you know.

הדיוט.

Keeping shuls from eating their rabbis

Back in May I wrote a post, “Why shuls eat their rabbis,” on the tendency of congregations to consume their rabbis (with or without ketchup, even on Yom Kippur and Tisha b'Av).

I have since followed up, within a group of rabbis, regarding some ideas of what rabbis might do to mitigate the problems inherent in the rabbi-congregation relationship. My list of ideas was popular enough that I will present an updated version here:

1) Make sure the shul membership and board are clear on the rabbi's job description.
This may be done with a clearly-written contract, with shul surveys and questionnaires, and with personal conversations, among other means.

A few years ago I felt my board wasn't presenting a clear sense of my job. I distributed a survey at a board meeting, listing a dozen different scenarios from different aspects of shul life, and asking them to prioritize what they felt should, and should not, be the rabbi's job. The results were enlightening for me.


2) Stoop to PR
Rabbi, remember! The shul at large doesn't see what you do. Even individuals often don't see what you do for them, as individuals.

Rabbis (not me, but others) are often so good at what they do, that they make it look easy. People don't see the time spent preparing a shiur or derashah, or arranging a shidduch, or quelling a dispute, or counseling a troubled teen, or visiting a prison, etc.

The answer may be to do a little subtle PR, letting people know (in general, without specifics) what's going on. I strongly dislike doing this, finding it both distasteful and self-serving, but sometimes a little PR is necessary.


3) Do what they recommend
Situation: A committee/individual makes a recommendation for a program, or a way to approach something in davening, or a way to address a community need, and the rabbi feels another way would be better. Sometimes that rabbi and congregant have entirely different agenda. So the rabbi does what he thinks is right.

The rabbi is often right, but people grow bitter if they think the rabbi isn't listening to them.

I know that I have a tendency to want to do things my way; something in me rebels automatically when I am told, "You should visit X" or "You should do it this way," particularly because congregants are often not tactful in making those suggestions. But - when I am in a good frame of mind - I swallow that rebellion, listen, and sometimes even try the suggestion despite being certain it won't work.

Note: Of course, congregants sometime expect unreasonable things, and yes, the rabbi must say No. Hopefully, though, the rabbi will have a strong Yes background against which the No will be viewed.


4) Help congregants see the big picture
Shul members, including the president, don't "live" the shul in the way that the rabbi does. The shul occupies only a small portion of their activities, let alone attention. The result is that they often don't think about the chesed and shiurim and minyanim and maintenance issues and kitchen issues and so on. They likely don’t even know many of the members.

Find ways to bring people in on what’s happening beyond their personal space, so that they will be aware of the life of the Shul, its needs and demands. This is not about PR for the rabbi, but PR for the shul itself.


5) Remember that you are a hired hand
Keeping this in mind might help a rabbi hold on to his sanity.

To some people in a shul, everything the rabbi does is automatic and required, because he is paid. A volunteer who puts in two hours for the weekly kiddush or comes to a weekly meeting and makes phone calls is doing more than a rabbi who puts in 80 hours per week, because the rabbi is drawing a salary for his time.

And there is truth to this view. Granted that the rabbi will never be compensated for the extra work he puts in, he signed on for this job of his own free will. He competed against other candidates for it, and negotiated a contract to do it. It’s hardly fair for him to expect to be honored as a volunteer, granted all of his extra work.

Hopefully, the rabbi who keeps this in mind will maintain realistic expectations.


Those are some things that rabbis can do to avoid strife. Now: What can congregants do toward the same end?

Fish Storm

I learned a new term yesterday, courtesy of CNN.com: Fish storm.

The article covered predictions for the year’s hurricane season, and the particular sentence read, Tropical Depression One then drifted over cooler ocean waters and turned out to be merely a "fish storm," one that remains at sea and poses no threat to land.

In other words, a “fish storm” is a storm that affects only the fish, not human beings.

Of course, the term is inaccurate, on multiple levels – the storm can affect boaters and fishermen, it can affect beach erosion through increased wave activity, it can affect butterflies in Tokyo, and so on. Nonetheless, I love the term, because it perfectly describes the way we manage our responsibilities toward the world.

Fish Storm is a defense mechanism, a natural reflex to protect me from the world. “It’s not my problem,” as they say.

I write off certain news stories as fish storms, and move on without reading them. Sometimes this reflex is a good thing, such as when the story is about the latest Ashton Kutcher-Twitter kerfuffle, or Filipe Fa and the World’s Biggest Loser. But other times it reflects a desire to run away from serious issues, such as when stories about North Korea, Tajikistan or Darfur come up on the page. Those aren’t fish storms; I just want to treat them that way.

The fish storm defense mechanism comes up in the rabbinate a lot. A trivial example: We hold a “Kever Avos” memorial service at the cemetery before Rosh HaShanah, and many people request that I say a Kel Malei Rachamamim (memorial prayer) at their relatives’ graves. I pass the grave of someone who doesn’t have any living relatives, or whose relatives didn’t request it. Do I say a Kel Malei? Do I then stop and say one for every person buried in the cemetery?

Similarly, think of the million-man Mi sheBeirach list, which is so long because various people in shul received names of ill people in emails years ago and have not heard any update on their conditions.

Those examples are relatively trivial, but a rabbi's overreaching OCD has no end short of burnout, and can apply in many and diverse areas – teaching innumerable classes because someone, somewhere, wants to learn; contacting every potentially needy person to make sure they are all right; reworking and reworking derashos and articles out of concern for hitting every listener/reader just right. Sometimes you need to declare Fish Storm and write it off.

We actually just came across the same idea in Daf Yomi the other day. Bava Metzia 33a talks about my obligation to help an animal which is sprawled under a heavy burden, and it places a limit on how far out of my way I need to travel to offer assistance. We need that limit, both to provide a Fish Storm limit for those who will try to save everyone, and to forestall the Fish Storm response for those who wish to save no one.

“Fish Storm,” indeed. I like it.

Top Ten Signs of Rabbinic Burnout

It’s that time of year again – Elul is coming, and with it comes the spectre of Rabbinic Burnout as the rabbi realizes he really ought to have taken vacation time during the summer, before the deluge began.

Now it's too late:
*People coming home from their trips need to meet with you about various issues.
*It's time to prepare for Shabbos-Rosh HaShanah-Shabbos Shuvah-Yom Kippur-Shabbos-Succos-Shabbos Chol haMoed-Shemini Atzeres-Simchas Torah-Shabbos.
*Boards and committees are starting up their meetings and their work.
*Your children are going back to school and will need homework help and carpool.

I just heard about a rabbi who abruptly resigned at the start of the month of Elul. I must admit that this has appeal. If there’s ever a right time to abruptly resign, it’s this week.

But, since most rabbis won’t resign this week and will begin feeling the tension of Elul/Tishrei, here are ten signs your rabbi is in the incipient (or, perhaps, not-so-incipient) stages of burning out:

10. Hands tremble when people mention Rosh HaShanah, or October, even in casual conversation. Or when he sees a shofar, or even a lemon. Or when he sees a child throwing bread to fish in a stream.

9. Found loitering outside a travel agency, staring wistfully at the posters. Alternatively, gets a dark look and begins to growl when you start describing your vacation. Says loudly, "I'm glad someone got to go away!" - and he's not smiling.

8. Visits congregant in hospital, and advises, “Well, we all gotta go sometime; toughen up!”

7. Begins delivering daily post-davening dvar torah from Gesher haChaim or other books on death and mourning.

6. Loses train of thought during speech and says, “Oh, heck with it, let’s just go on with the davening.”

5. Drains entire kiddush cup of wine, then declares he mispronounced a word and needs to say it again. And again.

4. Chases away people who come to join the shul as new members, shouting, “Beware! Beware!”

3. Leans for tachanun at Shacharit, doesn’t come back up until Minchah.

2. Denies child a lollipop after Adon Olam because the child “didn’t sing all of the words clearly.”

1. Includes self among the names in the Mi sheBeirach (prayer for the sick). Or in a Kel Malei Rachamim (memorial prayer).

And one more: The rabbi is more up on what's going on in the Jewish blogosphere than you are...

As far as advice for burning-out rabbis, my best advice comes from Rabbi Dr. Avraham Twerski: Always make sure you have another means of parnassah, so that you are not trapped in the rabbinate.

That, and this: Always keep your sense of humor. If you don’t have one, get one.