Shelter Rock Jewish Center

Dear Friends,

Last week, I wrote to you about the impact the thirtieth anniversary of my ordination was (and is) having on me and I told you that I was planning to spend yesterday at JTS to attend the ordination and graduation ceremonies. I went, and I came away with a strange set of emotions that I would like to share with you this week.

First, I should set the background a bit by telling you that, earlier this week, I received an invitation to participate in a long, complicated survey being conducted by one of America’s foremost Jewish sociologists, Steven M. Cohen, who has been contracted by the Seminary to undertake a movement-wide survey precisely to determine what the membership of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international organization of Conservative rabbis, thinks the Seminary should be emphasizing in the training both of rabbis and cantors. It was a long survey. I hate taking surveys. I’m always possessed of the sense that these things are undertaken, at least most of the time, to justify some pre-existent plan or position by "proving" that it represents what people—in this case, rabbis—want anyway, not actually to learn what the constituency being polled actually wants, or how it actually feels, before undertaking any particular action in the direction under consideration. When possible, I avoid the whole thing. But I care a lot about how rabbis and cantors are trained, obviously…and I decided that, at least just this once, I would take the time to answer the man’s questions.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but one question jumped out at me…and not in a positive way. The whole thing is done by selecting the answer that most closely corresponds to the your personal views, but you can’t just type in your own answer: to make it possible statistically to analyze the results with any accuracy, you have to choose the one or several pre-suggested responses that most closely match how you feel. So, of course, one of the lead questions was: "What aspects of rabbinic training do you consider to be the most important?" A good question! There were many choices suggested, but it was only possible to click off three of them: these were to be the three parts of rabbinic training you think should be considered paramount.

So you can probably guess what the options were. A rabbi should possess excellent synagogue skills, should be able to daven well, to read Torah accurately. A rabbi should be trained to be a good counselor, to know how to interact with very sick people, with the bereaved, with the unhappily married, etc. A good rabbi should be an excellent teacher. A rabbi should know how to interact with very young children in a nursery school setting, with older children, with teenagers in a USY chapter or Hebrew High School. But what was missing—and this was the part that shocked me (and so much so that I actually thought I must have read incorrectly or missed the answer I wanted to check off)—was that nowhere was the pre-prepared answer given that a rabbi should be a master of rabbinics—in other words, a competent Talmudist, someone at home with ancient and medieval Jewish sources, someone imbued with a love of Jewish learning…and with the life-long dedication to remain a student of Torah. That’s not the same as being a good teacher! Knowing how to teach is also important—what use is knowing a lot of stuff if you can’t impart it successfully to others?—but that’s not at all the same thing as being a ben torah for life, as being someone wholly, and not tangentially or casually, involved in Torah study, as being someone whose life is the study of Torah.

Apparently this option—that one of the key qualities in being a successful rabbi is being totally at home swimming along in the sea of Talmud and possessing the skill and the will successfully to negotiate even its most intractable, confusing passages—did not apparently even occur to the framers of the survey. I don’t consider myself a person who is easily shocked. But this shocked me. And then, when the shock subsided, it also irritated me profoundly. I have devoted my entire adult life to studying these texts. Learning Mishnah, Talmud, Rambam’s Mishneh Torah—this is the stuff of my intellectual life, the one activity above all else that keeps me fresh, that gives me something to talk about, to teach about, and to preach about…and that gives me the platform upon which I stand when I appear in public as the rabbi of our great congregation. How can this have been missing from the survey?

I have no idea what was going on with the survey. But I felt vindicated—and truly and profoundly gratified—by what I saw yesterday at JTS. The graduation was in the late afternoon, but the morning hours were given over to a traditional siyyum, to the formal celebration undertaken when a tractate of Talmud is completed either by a single individual (as I do each year on Erev Pesach for our community) or, as in this case, by a group of people. The graduating class, including our own Rabbi Adam Watstein (and also my student of many years whom many of you also know, Rabbi Ben Kramer), undertook to study the tractate called Arakhin. It’s an obscure tractate, not much studied even in the most traditional circles. Like all tractates of Talmud, it’s about a lot of different things at once, but the one topic that pervades the whole book is one of the greatest interest: what is the measure of a man, what is a person worth, what constitutes the value of an individual. It starts from a rather arcane question of Temple procedure by asking a simple question: if someone were to pledge his or her worth to the Temple, what exactly would that person owe. It’s an old question. An initial answer, oddly enough, appears in this week’s Torah portion, but the rabbis went on from there and developed their own deeply interesting answers to the question. This is how philosophy and law intersect in the study of Talmud: by asking odd questions, then answering them seriously…and seeing where that leads.

It was just great. One after another, Adam’s classmates (and Ben’s) stood up and demonstrated in deed, not just word, what the study of Talmud means to them. Some spoke at length. Others made their contributions in writing. Still others participated in the public recitation of the Hadaran prayer that is recited when a tractate is concluded and in the Kaddish De’itchadeta that is recited, oddly, only on two occasions: when a Talmudic tractate is finished…and at burials. (Don’t ask. It must mean something!) The bottom line: twenty-two new rabbis came into the world yesterday, each one formally dedicated precisely to the kind of Torah study that our hired sociologist thought so unimportant as not even to be worth listing on his survey as a possible requirement for becoming a successful rabbi. I was irritated by the survey. But I was very impressed by what I saw yesterday at JTS.

And it was very impressive. I came away from the whole experience filled with hope, filled with a sense that there is a future not only for the Jewish people—which I’ve always thought and, I hope, always will think—but for the rabbinate. Seeing Adam among the graduates, and Ben, filled me with pride and with the sense that we are turning out quality leaders, after all: people who view Torah study as the foundation of their careers in the rabbinate, not as ancillary hobbies to be pursued or not pursued as the spirit moves. That these young (and not so young) men and women chose to celebrate their investiture as rabbis with an act of devotion to learning meant everything to me. I wish you could all have been there!

And so we move on. We’re looking for a rabbinic intern for next year. Adam, as you all know, is moving to Las Vegas. A new first-year class of would-be rabbis will enter JTS in the fall. The world, I suppose, will keep spinning. But in the midst of all that motion, there are certain things that must always stay the same. I am pleased to report to you that, at least in our little part of the Jewish world, the connection between spiritual leadership and devotion to Torah study remains intact. We are turning out rabbis who love the Talmud and who define themselves in terms of their ability to begin and finish full tractates. The love of Torah that animates, energizes and sustains me as a rabbi is apparently alive and well among this year’s graduates. And all that, I believe, is very good news indeed.

Sincerely,