The Rabbinate as a Career

Rabbi Melanie Aron

May 23, 2003

My father practiced medicine as a calling and not a career. He wasn't an obstetrician, so there weren't a lot of middle of the night phone calls, but as a radiation oncologist some of his patients were very sick and he routinely made rounds on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

I remember going with him to the hospital. I would fool around with the swivel chairs and the dictating machines in his office in the basement of the hospital, while he visited his patients upstairs.

This Sunday I am traveling down to Los Angeles to see our student rabbi Yitzhak Miller be ordained by the Hebrew Union College at Willshire Boulevard Temple. The ceremony will be a combination of old and new. Contemporary prayers, written by the young graduates, side by side with traditional prayers and Reform liturgy of the past century, innovation in an ancient ritual.

We know that ordination was an important practice of the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud. It was significant enough that when the Emperor Hadrian banned kashrut and circumcision, he banned ordination as well. Some of you may remember the story which we read on Yom Kippur afternoon about Rabbi Yehudah ben Baba who went into the woods to secretly ordain his students. When the Romans approached, he stood firmly in their path. He was already old and could not move quickly, but he urged his new ordainees to flee. I may die, he said, but this way, the Torah will live on.

The Hebrew word for ordination samach yado, goes back to the Bible. The public laying on hands as a way of transmitting authority goes back to Moses and Joshua. We read in the 27th chapter of Numbers.

And God said to Moses: Take Joshua the son of Nun, a man of spirit, and lay your hands on him. Have him stand before Eleazar the priest and before the entire community and let them see you commission him. Invest him with some of your glory so that the entire Israelite community will obey him.

The rabbis of the first centuries of the Common Era believed that they were part of an unbroken chain that went back to that first ordination. That is the importance of the first chapter of Pirke Avot, the book we read at this Omer season. The authority of a 4th generation Amora at the time of the redaction of the Palestinian Talmud was traceable in the minds of the rabbis to the first laying on of hands which took place under God's direct supervision.

The Conservative movement does not call their ceremony s'michah, to stress that the line from the ancient rabbis to the 2003 graduates of the University of Judaism in LA and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York is not a direct one. This was already the view of the Babylonian sages, who called themselves rav rather than rabbi, and conforms to the view of Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher: "today we are all lay judges and we do not exercise Toraitic power of jurisdiction." Similarly Rabbi Moshe Isserles, author of the Shulchan Arukh stressed the difference between their medieval ordination verses the ancient smichah, "the purpose of the ordination commonly practiced these days is to inform the community that the student has attained the requisite knowledge to rule on matters of Jewish law and that he does so with the permission of the rabbi who has ordained him." But when the Hebrew Union College was founded in 1875, Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, organizer of the Reform movement in America, chose to understand continuity in a different less literal way. The Reform movement saw the modern rabbi as able to legislate change in the manner of the ancient rabbis. They identified the rabbis of the Talmud as their forebears and insisted that we are their descendents. That is why, though our work differs considerably from the rabbis of Mishnaic and Talmudic times, we Reform rabbis are still ordained with the same words as those said in ancient times: "yore yore, yadin yadin, teach, instruct, judge, have authority with regard to the law".

At the service last week in honor of the 30th anniversary of the ordination of women as rabbis, Rabbi Janet Marder read a description of the rabbinate from Rabbi Jacob Z. Lauterbach's famous Responsa written in 1922. He writes against the ordination of women, but what I would like to focus on is his description of the work of the rabbi:

"If there is any calling which requires a wholehearted devotion to the exclusion of all other things and the determination to make it one's whole life work, it is the rabbinate. It is not to be considered merely as a profession by which one earns a livelihood. Nor is it to be entered upon as a temporary occupation. One must chose it for his life's work and be prepared to give it all his energies and to devote to it all the years of his life, constantly learning and improving and thus growing in it."

His words are very controversial today as a generation of male and female rabbis try to negotiate their roles as as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and individuals as well as rabbis. I think that rabbis today see themselves and are seen by their congregants as more of a regular Joe than in the years before World War II. We have taken off the robe, eliminated the grand and formal language, and tried to stress the leadership roles of lay leaders as well as clergy.

Within my own mind I go back and forth on the question of whether rabbis are extraordinarily kvetchy or whether there is something about the rabbinate that is different than other service professions or other demanding careers. I know that as compared to the business people I was in the American Leadership Forum with, I perform a lot more direct service to my constituents than those at a similar management level. There is the constant challenge of working when normal people are off, which actually is more easily managed with very young children, who do not have a schedule of activities, and more challenging as children have lives of their own. There is the paradox of having to plan one's vacations two years in advance so as to accommodate Bar and Bat Mitzvah dates but also never really knowing whether one will be home that evening because certain phone calls trump normal recreational activities. There is also for many of us a sense of meaningfulness in our work, which we do not believe would come from other less aggravating pursuits. Because we are working with people, and because we are often swimming upstream, we suffer frustration and times when we doubt the value of our exertions. But because we are doing what we each of us individually believes to be important, there is a kind of satisfaction not available to those who are working to support someone else's vision or merely to bring home a paycheck.

I don't think though that this sense of vocation is exclusive to rabbis. Rabbi Jeff Salkin in his book Being God's Partner: How to Find the Hidden Link Between Spirituality and Your Work tells the story of a mover who saw in his work a mission to help people at what is often a very traumatic time in their lives. He didn't see himself as a shlepper, but as someone who helped others through transitions. Certainly we have each met people like this mover, who because of the way they perform their duties, whether as the receptionist in an office, or the driver of a bus, show the true potential of their calling. My guess is that these individuals also have a sense of their vocation rather than feeling that they are just putting in the necessary hours at a job. Perhaps when Pirke Avot announces that the world rests on three things, torah, avodah , veal gemilut chasadim, on Torah, on work and on deeds of loving kindness, it is this vocational labor which is meant.