Does-the-Great

Does t h e Great
American
Synagogue
Still H a v e
a Prayer?
It's growing tougher for
congregations and rabbis
to form a lasting bond.
For much of my life,
S T E P H E N
F R I E D
I was a six-day-a-year Jew—doing the High Holidays,
Hanukkah, and two seders on Passover. I suppose this made me
twice as good as the traditional three-day-a-year Jew, but I was
still far from observant or spiritually engaged. Like many peo­
ple in my generation, being Jewish mattered deeply to me, but
the traditional synagogue was part o f my past—my religious
alma mater—rather than my present.
Then, when I was about to turn 40, my father died. He was
only 62. And, after years as a wandering Jew, I found myself
attending synagogue regularly for the first time since I had set
out from my bar mitzvah reception in Sisterhood Hall with my
breast pocket stuffed with gift envelopes. M y motivations for
returning were completely selfish: I needed comfort, and the
synagogue happened to be a place where I found it. Saying kaddish for my father every day was the only thing that seemed to
help assuage the pain % f his loss.
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Suddenly, congregational life fascinated me. Its
survival seemed crucial to my own. It was a heady
time—not only was I was reconnecting with Jewish
observance, but I was hanging out with rabbis after
the minyan. On any given day, there were two or
three rabbis among the ten or twelve (or occasional­
ly nine) people praying in the chapel at Beth Zion
Beth Israel, a Conservative synagogue in center city
Philadelphia. I would listen to the rabbis talk shop,
learning about the many challenges and mysteries of
the profession. T h e senior rabbi at BZBI, Ira Stone,
lost his own father just after I did, so I got to know
him both as a member o f the clergy and a fellow
mourner. Also in the congregation was Rabbi
Michael Monson, whom I had known since college—
we met through the High Holiday services he ran as
Hillel director at Perm—and who had married my
wife and me. Michael had never held a synagogue
pulpit. But now, at the age of 50, he was thinking of
changing careers and becoming a full-time pulpit
rabbi. He was actively and openly discussing the real­
ities of life on the bimah—or, what I've heard one
rabbi describe as "the retail business of religion."
at Har Zion Temple in Philadelphia, the storied con­
gregation that snatched him from my hometown
synagogue back in 1969.
Har Zion is one o f America's largest and most
powerful houses of worship. And, in 75 years, it had
had only three rabbis—each one a giant in his own
right. Choosing a new rabbi would not be easy.
It sounded like an unbelievably demanding job—
especially when I thought about how needy I was at
the moment, how much attention I wanted from
both Ira and Michael, and then multiplied that by the
number of families even in this medium-sized con­
gregation. But I could also see it had immense
rewards, for both the rabbi and the congregants.
had been hired via telegram upon his graduation
from seminary, went on to become a role model for
a generation of American rabbis, first as provost of
the Seminary and later as leader of the University of
Judaism. He was succeeded by his friend David
Goldstein, one of the first American-born pulpit rab­
bis, and a straightforward Midwesterner with a
genius for using the pulpit for fundraising and strong
ideas about how Jews could create their own Amer­
ican-style communities. After a disastrous fire during
his second year on the pulpit, he rebuilt the temple
with an auditorium, a gym, a community center and
a day school, making it a national model for the
postwar "synagogue center," and building up mem­
bership to over 1,800 families. Goldstein nudged
Har Zion members into donating the land and
money for Camp Ramah in the Poconos, and fos­
tered the careers o f rabbi-turned-novelist Chaim
Potok and Biblical commentator Nahum Sarna,
two stars of Har Zion's innovative synagogue scholar-in-residence program. (He also used his discre­
tionary fund wisely—he gave Potok $2,000 in the
early '60s so he could move to Israel and write what
became The Chosen)
During this time, I started thinking about a proj­
ect that would be ambitious both journalistically and
Jewishly, and would honor my father's memory. I
wanted to write a book that followed a congregation
hiring a new spiritual leader—as a way of telling a
resonant and true story about American religion. I
could still recall how a change in clergy in my syna­
gogue in Harrisburg, when I was 11, had made an
indelible impact on my family and my community.
You never forget your first rabbi.
"
It happened that halfway during my period o f
mourning, my first rabbi announced his retirement.
Rabbi Gerald Wolpe, a masterful synagogue politi­
cian and orator whose rich, compelling voice could
make even the most stilted English translation o f
prayer sound like Shakespeare, was leaving the pul­
pit after nearly 50 years. T h e last 30 had been spent
Founding Rabbi Simon Greenberg, one of the
first English-speaking rabbis in America presided
there for over two decades: his charisma and multi­
ple allegiances to the synagogue, the Jewish T h e o ­
logical Seminary and Israel became the cornerstones
of his shul's international reputation. Greenberg, who
Being an embedded reporter in a
community of my own religion
was some of the most difficult and
rewarding work I've ever done.
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By the late 1960s, when Wolpe was chosen to suc­
ceed Greenberg, Har Zion was again a national
model—of urban synagogues deeply divided over how
to respond to suburban flight. Wolpe and a group of
young leaders had to save Har Zion from itself, even­
tually winning the fight to unite Har Zion's large
urban and suburban campuses by building a huge new
synagogue on 25 acres o f prime real estate on
Philadelphia's Main Line. In 1976, the new building
was opened, and Har Zion was reborn. Yet while
revered for his pulpit and political acumen, he became
best known for his response to a private event that
almost ended his career. At the height of his rab­
binate, Wolpe's wife, Elaine, suffered a stroke. But
instead of leaving the pulpit, he shared the pain and
medical dilemmas of her long recovery with the con­
gregation, expressing and evoking emotion in a place
where reason and power had traditionally held sway.
I went to see Wolpe at his Har Zion office just
after the news o f his pending retirement hit the
newspapers. And in his last act of bravery as a pulpit
rabbi, he agreed to grant me unprecedented access
to the private life o f his synagogue at this pivotal
moment in its history. His wife and their four sons
also agreed to cooperate fully, including two who are
rabbis, especially the celebrated clergyman and
author David Wolpe, who after ten years of lectur­
ing and teaching had just taken his first pulpit, at
Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.
T h e Har Zion search was supposed to take a year
or, at most, two, and was not expected to be partic­
ularly eventful. Instead, however, the original candi­
date chosen by the search committee—Rabbi David
Ackerman, a rising star at nearby Tiferet Bet Israel—
withdrew unexpectedly at the last minute and the
drama went on for several more years. Synagogue
leaders ended up westling with Conservative clergy
placement officials at the Rabbinical Assembly,
attempting to bend the movement's rules to elevate
Har Zion's assistant rabbi—Jacob Herber—who was
beloved, but not yet thought to be experienced
enough to fill the job. And, as soon as they won that
wresding match, another began. Leaders reconsid­
ered and eventually reversed their own decision, set­
ting off something akin to a civil war.
I watched and chronicled the entire process from
many vantage points. I had private access to the rab­
bis and cantor, to synagogue leaders and would-be
synagogue leaders who second-guessed their every
move, to congregants both involved and disconnect­
ed, to synagogue senior staff, to rabbis from other
synagogues interested in the job, to the clergy match­
makers at the Seminary, and even to the synagogue
secretary, cook and janitor (who are, of course, the
ones who know everything.)
Being an embedded reporter in a community of
my own religion was some of the most difficult and
rewarding work I've ever done. And I saw a lot.
What happened there, between people I know and
like in a congregation that has made a considerable
contribution to American Judaism, was not always
easy to watch. I was often reminded of the misdi­
rected emotions and unexpressed love between
fathers and sons or between rival siblings.
But Har Zion is hardly an isolated case. Since
starting the research in 1997 that became my book,
The New Rabbi, I've been following events at a cross
section of American synagogues. An amazing num­
ber of them—some say more than ever before—are
having rabbi troubles. T h e r e are divisive contract
negotiations with current rabbis over renewals or
retirement, struggles to choose replacements and
problems adjusting to new rabbis.
When my book came out in hardcover last fall,
every synagogue I had been observing had a new
rabbi and every displaced rabbi had found a new job.
As the book comes out this fall in paperback, I must
report in the new Afterword that almost every one
of these synagogues ended up parting ways with its
new rabbi, and was now seeking a new new rabbi.
T h e synagogue I grew up at in Harrisburg, for
example, just hired its fifth rabbi in seven years. And,
later this fall, the congregants at once-stable Har
Zion will be welcoming their fourth spiritual leader
in the past five years.
T
hese are trying times in American congrega­
tional life, but not for the reasons normally
reported in the media. These days, most cov­
erage of religion comes in the form of stories about
sexual abuse by the clergy. It is a terrible problem, but
it's not the main one facing most houses of worship. In
the day-to-day world of American religious communi­
ties the problems are far more mundane. Most aren't
even religious—they're institutional. And many have
as much to do with being an American institution as
a religious institution. T h e problems are the accu­
mulated disappointments, miscommunications, exag­
gerations and gossip—a community's kindling, all too
easily ignited by the sparks from a major policy
dilemma, a change in lay leadership, competition
from another congregation down the street where
the services are shorter or the singing better.
These tensions tend to become most noticeable
when a synagogue has to search for new clergy.
That's partly because the process of choosing a new
leader involves reevaluating the goals o f the com­
munity, asking big questions about the kind of lead­
ership and future you want. Also, whether it's a
long-time rabbi retiring, or a rabbi and congregation
deciding to break up their relationship, congregants
often find themselves feeling like children of divorce
during a clergy transition. T h e period of congrega­
tional dating, and sometimes even cohabitation, on
the way to a successful new marriage of clergy and
synagogue can be disorienting and difficult As in any
divorce, the parents and kids sometimes act out.
But, the biggest problem is that finding the right
new rabbi is really hard. In fact, it is harder than ever.
Some believe we are in the midst of a full-fledged
"rabbi crisis" that threatens the future of American
Judaism. Four years ago, Rabbi Eric "Vbffie, president
of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations,
announced that the rabbi shortage was "the most sig­
nificant issue" facing the Reform movement. He
promised an all-out effort to increase enrollment in
Reform seminaries (including doubling the capacity
of summer camps, a traditional clergy breeding
ground). At the time, the Conservative movement
more quiedy acknowledged the squeeze on their cler­
gy personnel. T h e Orthodox rabbinate also is affect­
ed by these trends, perhaps less so, because fewer
Orthodox rabbis expect a full-time job on the pulpit
This past May, Dr. Jack Wertheimer, the provost
of the Jewish Theological Seminary, proclaimed a
national "rabbi crisis" which threatens the future o f
the synagogue and American Jewish life as never
before. H e did it first in a lengthy and thoughtful
essay in Commentary, followed by a provocative
speech before the N$w York Board of Rabbis. His
remarks were greeted with a lot of nodding heads,
according to the religion columnist of the New York
Daily News, who also noted that Wertheimer's mes­
sage "sounded very much like the bleak warnings
voiced by many Catholic and Protestant leaders"
about the erosion o f the American clergy.
Wertheimer has his detractors. "I wish there
were more rabbis, but I don't agree with Jack's view
that it's a crisis," says his Seminary colleague Rabbi
Joel Meyers, executive Vice President of the Rab­
binical Assembly. Meyers says that as long as the
Tensions within a congregation
tend to become more noticeable
when a synagogue has to search
for new clergy.
RA has kept records, there have been periodic
shortages o f rabbis—especially affecting smaller
congregations in less urban areas—but the number
o f truly problematic congregations is still quite
small. H e insists that the real news is just how
many rabbi/congregation matches work, consider­
ing all the risks involved.
He does concede, however, that in the last few
years "we've had a run on retiring rabbis, especially in
large congregations." Many of those large, high-pro­
file congregations have been unable to pick a new
rabbi during a full season of rabbi-searching. These
synagogues have been forced to quickly hire interim
rabbis—veteran rabbis available to be airlifted in by
the movements with the understanding that they can
only work in the synagogue for a year (and who like
the idea of one holiday cycle in a community that has­
n't already heard their best sermons.) Regardless of the
quality of the interim rabbi, this kind of last-minute fix
can confuse congregants anxious to. bond with a new
permanent spiritual leader. And it often leaves search
committees loudly complaining about the quality of
new rabbinic candidates.
"Congregations all want to hire the same rabbi,"
says Rabbi Elliot Schoenberg, the behind-thescenes matchmaker for conservative synagogues at
the Rabbinical Assembly. "They all want.. .someone
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who attends every meeting and is at his desk work­
ing until midnight, someone who is 28 years old but
has preached for 30 years, someone who has a burn­
ing desire to work with teenagers but spends all his
time working with senior citizens, basically someone
who does everything and will stay with the congre­
gation forever.
"We try to tell them [congregations], you're not
looking for the best rabbi, you're looking for the best
match, the best fit."
Yet more and more synagogues like Har Zion
There is a crisis in the great
American synagogue. But it's
bigger than just the quantity,
the quality of the rabbis or even
the match.
seem to be having a tough time choosing their best
match. Why? One reason is that fewer and fewer
rabbis are seeking pulpit jobs. It is estimated that only
half o f today's Jewish seminarians expect to spend
their careers leading congregations. And this comes
just at a time when many synagogues have decided
they want a "rabbinate" of two or more rabbis instead
of the traditional, all-powerful senior pulpit master.
W h e r e have all the pulpit rabbis gone? In all
faiths—not just Judaism—pulpit work has become
less attractive. Respect for clergy has been diluted.
And some of the things that make being in the cler­
gy most interesting and challenging—like the chance
to foster change in a broader community and the
opportunity to continue personal learning—are now
less important to some congregants, who are more
interested in making sure the rabbi shows up at every
bris, bar mitzvah and hospital bed. Like other Amer­
ican industries, the clergy has shifted from R & D to
service. And the sheer volume o f the services
required is staggering.
Alternative career choices for ordained rabbis have
blossomed. With more day schools than ever, and jobs
in teaching and chaplaincy that were once part-time or
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volunteer becoming professionalized and decent-pay­
ing, there are many new, more family-friendly
options for the increasingly two-career families of
clergy members.
At the same time, some of the rabbis available for
pulpits can be out of step with the shifting demands
of American congregations. T h e longtime problem
of the Conservative rabbi who is much more obser­
vant than many of his or her congregants has been
inherited by Reform rabbis who have now grown
more traditional in their observance. (It is becoming
almost impossible, for example, for Reform congre­
gations accustomed to having a rabbi who performs
intermarriages to find a new, younger rabbi who
will.) Modern Orthodox congregations often have litde choice but to bring in a Chabad rabbi who is far
more strict in his observance.
There is a crisis in the great American synagogue.
But it's bigger than just the quantity, the quality of
rabbis or even the match. Rabbis tend to be any syn­
agogue's most high profile employee. But that's just
it—they are employees. What about the synagogue
officers and congregants? T h e employers could be tak­
ing more responsibility. Often, however, they aren't.
So, we also have a synagogue officer crisis, an
informed congregant crisis, a community reality
check crisis. It's a crisis of leadership among the lead­
ers and the led.
T h e way synagogues make decisions has changed
dramatically from the time of my parent's generation.
Congregations have become more democratized, so
their leaders have less power. And the players are dif­
ferent: Lay leaders used to be authoritarian entre­
preneurial types—who were at least willing to put
their money where their big mouths were. Today's
leaders are likely to be professionals who are more
educated and interested in consensus-building, but
sometimes lack decisiveness and the ability to pro­
vide strong leadership. They also are more interest­
ed in raising money than donating it. While
synagogue presidents often complain that they don't
make rabbis like they used to, rabbis say the same
thing about the synagogue presidents.
Ideally, the rabbi search can be a time to take
stock of all these other crises. Rabbi searches are sup­
posed to be driven by the results of a frank self-analy­
sis of the congregation's problems, needs and desires.
This is, I think, an attempt to return each congrega­
tion to the moment o f its creation—to remind peo­
ple that the synagogue was not started by a rabbi. It
was started by their parents or grandparents or greatgrandparents who had strong ideas about the way
they wanted to be Jewish in America and decided
to create a new community and hire clergy that
represented their vision.
Unfortunately, this self-evaluation process usual­
ly ends far too quickly. Congregations and their lead­
ers usually start off idealistically, viewing a rabbi
search as a chance to reinvent their community for
the next generation. And sometimes they have too
long to think about this; when a beloved rabbi
announces he will retire at the end of his last threeyear contract, there will be three years to obsess
about the future, even though the search can only
take place the year the rabbi is actually leaving. And
then, once the search formally begins, reality sets in,
none of the applicants seems quite right, and leaders
get so caught up in fmding the right candidate that
they overinflate what that candidate can do for their
synagogue. Some start hoping that maybe the right
new rabbi will actually allow them to put off having
to reinvent themselves for yet another generation.
T h e y move from viewing the community's chal­
lenges as theirs to solve, to viewing them as issues
only solvable by the perfect new rabbi.
Some observers believe that all synagogues replac­
ing a retiring or long-term rabbi—whether the part­
ing was friendly or not—need a major "time out."
They suggest that instead of hiring interim rabbis only
at the end o f a season o f failed searching, that the
movements should encourage, or even force, congre­
gations to take a year with an interim rabbi while they
are doing their search. Rabbi Arnold Sher, director of
placement for the Central Conference of American
Rabbis, says the Reform movement has been trying to
"diagnose" synagogues that are most in need of such
a time-out But he concedes that so far, there are more
Reform congregations in need of this option than
there are rabbis "trained in interim management"
In the Conservative movement, the concept o f
hiring a "preventive interim" is still just a concept
But if what happened at Har Zion is any indication,
it may be time to rethink that. Har Zion actually had
to hire two last-minute interims in four years.
After Har Zion's chosen candidate changed his
mind in the spring of 1999, the synagogue leadership
panicked. T h e situation was made worse by the fact
that their long-time rabbi, Wolpe, took his wellearned sabbatical during the last six months o f his
contract, and so wasn't involved in the day-to-day life
of the shul. His very promising assistant, Rabbi Herber, only three years out o f the seminary, was scram­
bling to run the synagogue by himself. And then,
suddenly, the search committee decided that Herber
should be the next senior rabbi, even though the
Rabbinical Assembly rules say that he needed at least
another three years as an assistant at the synagogue
before being eligible for such a large pulpit. Har
Zion's leaders tried to lean on the RA to bend the
rules. When the RA wouldn't back down, the syna­
gogue agreed to search for another year and hire an
interim—Rabbi Moshe Tutnauer. But Har Zion
insisted on making Tutnauer a quasi-assistant to Her­
ber, whom they still hoped to groom for the posi­
tion, instead o f instalhng him as an interim senior
rabbi with full control of seasoning the young rabbi
and helping the congregation transition. This unusu­
al situation continued for two years, even after the
RA broke down and let Har Zion hire Herber—with
the stipulation that the young rabbi couldn't actual­
ly be installed as Wolpe's official successor until the
end of his sixth year of ordainment. After Tutnauer
left, in the spring o f 2001, the synagogue hired an
assistant fresh out of the seminary, Rabbi Jill Borodin,
and began making tentative plans to formally install
Herber the next year. Instead, by the beginning o f
2002, the synagogue had quietly postponed the
installation, and last October, Herber resigned, as did
the synagogue's president. Rabbi Borodin ran the
synagogue herself for a short time until Har Zion
could bring in another veteran, Rabbi Matthew
Simon, who was made interim senior rabbi while
they did another search. This time they chose 37year-old Rabbi Jay Stein, who trained at synagogues
in Chicago and central New Jersey, and who grew up
in the congregation of his father, Rabbi Israel Stein,
in Bridgeport, Connecticut. But, because Stein's syn­
agogue would not release him early from his con­
tract, interim Rabbi Simon is preaching the high
holidays at Har Zion, and the new new rabbi will
Continued an page 74
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Tomorrow's leaders are here today.
A m e r i c a n S y n a g o g u e amtmuedfivm page 61
begin to slowly join the synagogue's life in
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the late fall. Oy.
So, what are we supposed to do to insure
the future of the great American syna­
gogue? And, when I say great, I don't nec­
essarily mean large, I mean great in its other
mearimgs—wonderful, noble, important—
all of which apply.
First we have to acknowledge that there
is a crisis and that the problems are not
unique to any one synagogue. I have
watched too many congregations I care
about overhaul the way they make decisions
and communicate those decisions only after
losing control of a difficult clergy or policy
situation. And once a community has
shocked itself with such a self-created
trauma, it can take years to recover. I
believe that with greater awareness,
improved communication between and
within congregations and more controlled
reality checks—learning from the learning
curves o f other communities—real
progress can be made. Then rabbis, syna­
gogue presidents, executive directors, lay
leaders who run the committees, and the
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thing need to work together to re-examine
what synagogue life is supposed to look
like, sound like and feel like for my gen­
eration and those that follow. We can only
make progress i f we address, and even
confront, everyone with a stake in the
future of the great American synagogue.
And that includes us: the members of the
congregation. Whether we show up often,
six times a year, three times a year or never,
most congregants are not aware of their
own strength and the fact that we need to
choose our comments moughtfully. Before I
wrote The New Rabbi, my primary interaction
with rabbis involved listening to four ser­
mons a year—two on Rosh Hashanah, the
big one after Kol Nidre and the shorter one
about death just before the Yizkor stam­
pede—and then loudly critiquing them dur­
ing family meals. The deconstruction of the
sermons usually began just after the analy­
sis of the gefilte fish and rose in volume and
intensity from basic content analysis to
broad statements about the rabbi's abilities
as a thinker and public speaker. Some years,
we would even question his employability as
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Now I am cognizant of the clout this
kind of critique can have. I have watched
rabbis—at Har Zion and elsewhere—lose
their jobs because of the cumulative power
of all these dinner-table rabbi evaluations.
And I have watched congregations lose their
way in the aftermath of such decisions. In
synagogue wars, the shot heard round the
world is often aimed at the rabbi's sermon
over a nice roast chicken and kugel. Once
war has broken out, all you can do is pray
for peace. Luckily, for most synagogues, it
will eventually come.
At the height of the tension at Har Zion,
I received a copy of a prayer for the end of
all "synagogue wars." It was written by
Rabbi Moshe Tutnauer, who had returned
to Israel but was still in close touch with
many in the Har Zion community. Its sub­
ject line was "War Zones."
It began by describing two places near his
family's Jerusalem home, the French Hill
junction and the Mount Scopus campus of
the Hebrew University, which had been the
sites of recent deadly terrorist attacks. "Both
are so close that we regularly hear the omi­
nous sound of ambulance sirens rushing vic­
tims to the Hadassah Hospital on Mount
Scopus," he wrote. "So, no matter how
complex and no matter how bitter syna­
gogue wars get, they are relatively trivial
compared to what we face on a daily basis."
He went on, "I do not mean that the syn­
agogue wars should be taken lighdy by us.
People have strong feelings about their syna­
gogues. They expect their synagogue to be
above petty power plays. They are profound­
ly disappointed to discover that 'clerg/ can­
not resolve interpersonal relationships and
professional problems with love and grace.
"Clergy, on the other hand, often find
themselves victims of unrealistic expecta­
tions by congregants and poor management
by synagogue leaders. They are thrust into
situations beyond their ability to handle.
The result is often anger and frustration that
impacts their families ... Rabbinic war zones,
though usually not life-threatening, are often
areas of emotional hell for congregants, rab­
bis, synagogue staff, and their families.
"... I pray that the coming year will bring
peace and reconciliation not only to French
Hill junction, but to all areas of conflict. I
pray for peace and understanding for all the
synagogues of the world, for their members
and their leaders and for all the souls of
individual human beings whose hearts long
for love and peace."
To which I e-mailed back, "Amen." ®
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