No Pipe Dream: Is There Really a Clergy Shortage?

While we are living in tumultuous difficult times, it’s also good to write and read about messages of hope for the Jewish community. Many of us have read articles, listened to podcasts, and heard heated discussions about the dearth of individuals interested in becoming rabbis and cantors. The movement schools have been declining in enrollment. Synagogues have been told that there are not enough rabbis to fill positions. There have been additional concerns that the Jewish community no longer has the “pipeline” to Jewish leadership, the structures that continually supply the next generation of rabbis and cantors.

These are genuine and serious problems for the Jewish community to consider.  At the Academy for Jewish Religion, an accredited pluralistic seminary serving the Jewish community for almost seventy years, however, we have a very different problem. We are starting this fall after the busiest year of admissions that we have ever had. We have almost 90 students, the largest student population in our history. We have accepted 30 new students this year. So, our wonderful problem entails figuring out how to keep up with the tremendous growth of our institution and student body over the last years.

We have given serious thought to why it is that AJR is growing so beautifully while Jewish organizations are spending so much time, energy, and money worrying about the lack of a pipeline, and a lack of clergy. We have a few answers that may be of help to the Jewish community.

In order to understand our growth, it’s worth sharing a few important points about who we are. AJR is a pluralistic seminary. We are a Zionist seminary, recognizing that Zionism is a large tent, but with an understanding that anti-Zionism is outside of our tent. We are accredited by the Association of Theological Schools, the gold standard in seminary and divinity school accreditation. Our classes are primarily taught live and remotely, a fully synchronous education, while we have a few times a year that our full community gets together in person. This allows our students to live all over the US and Canada, with a student from Israel, and others who have joined us or plan to join us from other countries as well. In addition, our students are primarily second and third career students. They range in age from their 20s through their 70s and 80s, and they come to clergy training after successful careers in almost any field you can think of. They come with passion and care, with love of Jews and Judaism, and with a spiritual depth that enables them to serve with distinction. They follow AJR’s rigorous curriculum, usually studying for five or more years in order to be ordained. They are embraced by AJR’s warm, nurturing environment that treats each person as an individual.

So why are we growing? Because there are so many people who want to become rabbis and cantors, but they need a school that sees and respects them for who they are. They need an accredited school that enables them to live in Kentucky, or Texas, or Toronto, or Florida, and still receive a rigorous education. They need a school that appreciates that they have other obligations in their lives and enables them to be serious students at the same time that they are caring for family and working at their careers. They need a school that has a pluralistic vision in which we not only respect many approaches to Jewish life, but we cherish these many approaches knowing that each of us is a deeper and stronger individual and Jew because of the interactions with those who differ from us. AJR provides all of that.

I’ve been thinking about the issue of the “pipeline” and I am convinced that the pipeline is actually working very well. It just depends which pipeline you are looking at. One of my colleagues likes to say that we live in one of the golden ages of parashat hashavua and adult Jewish education. Serious adult education is more prevalent now than it has been in many years. The great success of that adult education can be seen in its being such a strong pipeline to serious Jewish seminary education. That successful adult pipeline is one of the factors that has led to AJR’s fantastic growth.

We will continue to enjoy our many new students. We will work to continue to build our beloved institution, and serve the Jewish community. Those of you spending time struggling with the pipeline issue, come join us. Come spend your time working toward the continued growth of AJR. Those of you spending money researching the pipeline issue, come invest in our students. We are here. We are making a difference. We are serving the Jewish community. Come join us!