This Rabbi May be in Pain but not Despair

I was quite saddened after reading Betsy Stone’s July 16th blog post, “Your rabbi is in pain.” I am not sad because I share in the clergy despair to which she refers, but because Dr. Stone’s examples of existential crises causing Jewish clergy’s inability to cope right now, revolve entirely around political and social changes in our society.

From Dr. Stone’s blog post: We thought our institutions were safe and would support us. We believed in Roe and the Supreme Court and Israel as a moral country. We thought the truth mattered. We didn’t know anti-semitism could be normalized, both within the Jewish community and across our nation.

I call upon our ancient sage, Hillel, when I ask in response, Eimatai? If not now, when? This is precisely the time when Judaism matters most. If our tradition can’t speak meaningfully in these kinds of moments, of what value is it in the first place?  If when the going gets tough, the rabbis get going, what really is the point?

Of course Judaism does indeed speak movingly and inspiringly to central human issues such as a woman’s bodily autonomy, seeking to live in and help create an ever more civil society, and our hopes and dreams for the safety and longevity of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.  However, Judaism also speaks to fundamental strategies for living lives of meaning and purpose when things feel broken, disorienting, and let’s just say it, completely out of whack! This is precisely why our tradition should matter to Jews and the Jewish people – to provide us with customs and calendar, rituals and time-tested lessons, spiritual direction and communal strength – especially for the moments when life gets hard.

Is the writer (and are the rabbis she is referring to) just ignoring that this is not the only time in Jewish history (to say the absolute least) when societal forces make us feel like the world is shifting beneath our feet?

From Dr. Stone’s blogpost: “Clergy in the groups I run tell me that the work has lost its reward, and they feel like they are the only ones suffering. October 7 and its aftermath have forced many of our best people to rethink their relationships with Judaism, with Israel. How can they lead when they can barely manage themselves?

I know no rabbis who would even deign to claim that they are the only ones suffering, and I am also not at all sure to whom “our best people” refers! Are we not meant to serve all our people? Is qualifying our people really helpful here?

In actuality, many of us rabbis are seeing more involvement, more engagement, and more moments when our people are seeking us out for guidance and wisdom, or simply a steady hand.  This is the time when our people need to hear and understand that Jewish wisdom and experience and story and just the “everydayness” of life cycle, can and need to be that much more paramount in how we approach our lives.  This is what Jewish life is for! To raise up and recognize the best times, and to help us endure and maybe even thrive in the face of the most challenging.

I am not nor have I ever been a Rabbi because of Roe, or because of who lives in the White House, or because of who leads the Knesset. Shabbat comes every week no matter what.  Every year we read again and again the stories of our spiritual ancestors who, as ordinary people, faced extraordinary circumstances.  They and so many who have followed have lived through “the best of times and the worst.” And in the meantime, Jewish life, thank G-d, always goes on! I have B’nai Mitzvah children and families to attend to, wedding couples to counsel, religious school students and volunteer teachers to teach and to prep and to cajole and to inspire!  I have 500 + people who are going to come to High Holy days this year with an even deeper need and desire to be guided and taught and provided with some path forward that helps us overcome the bewilderment that arises within all of us when facing difficult circumstances.  This year has been and continues to be existentially anxious.   We have witnessed and discovered the unsteadiness of our beacons of safety. Beacons that had, over time, gone unnoticed until October 7 forced we Western Jews back into history.  The relative good news is that we have thousands of years of history and tradition borne out of, more often than not, living in and through broken times.

“Rabbis! Cantors! Educators! Unite!” Dig back into prayer, learning, and doing good in the world.  Listen to your congregants, meet them where they are, develop and earn their trust, and speak your truth.  As Hillel’s words echo upon my eardrums, “All the rest is commentary, zil gamur, go and [re]-learn it. “