by Yehuda Kurtzer, PhD
In his recent article on eJp, Scott Brown laments the absence of great talent and a steady supply of young professionals into Jewish life, and blames the organizations and institutions for failing to create the systems to invite in, grow and ultimately keep this talent. While I admire the self-reflective tone of Brown’s piece, most of the prescriptions that Brown offers (tools for retention and growth, e.g.) together with the correctives that commentators have added (better salaries!) – while valuable and needed – seem to be less specific to the Jewish professional sector, and merely good practices across the board for healthy professional environments.
What’s more, having spent two years recently on the faculty of the Hornstein program and meeting three classes of eager and talented prospective Jewish professionals, I sense that there actually is an extraordinary wealth of talent flowing into the Jewish world, whether via mainstream institutions or the innovation/start-up sector. I can share from anecdotal experience that the Jewish world also benefits from mid-career shifts and the influx of qualified professionals seeking to bridge their skills with their passions. Put differently: on a human resource level, I think there is a much greater abundance of talent in Jewish life than one might discern from Brown’s tone.
The conversation that is sorely lacking in the Jewish professional world is what we are offering to our colleagues and employees that keeps them oriented towards the specific demands of this work – to the missions and goals that come with working on behalf of the Jewish people and its institutions. I made this point adamantly to my Brandeis students: it is one thing to succeed in the work involved with Jewish professional leadership. There are skills to be learned, best practices to be adopted, and a landscape that needs to be mapped and understood. Most of the training we provide orients our students towards these professional skill sets. But then there is the stuff of motivation and aspiration, the sense of calling that keeps us in and pushes us through bureaucracies, conference calls and solicitations.
What are we teaching and learning in and around our institutions that impels us – and especially younger professionals – to see this work as aspirational, to continue to care deeply about the end goals even as they are stuck in the weeds and those goals are harder to envision? By far the most underserved population in the Jewish landscape with respect to ongoing learning are the professionals. Our community has invested heavily in lay-leaders and rabbis; it is the professionals and the educators who we see in the awkward position of being most connected to the implementation and transmission of Jewish ideas, and least supplied on an ongoing basis to renew their own resources towards those responsibilities.
This investment cannot merely be in the realm of leadership skills and the resources broadly applicable across professional sectors. One traditional term used to describe Jewish leaders – usually rabbis and cantors – is klei kodesh, alternatively translatable as ‘holy vessels’ or more accurately ‘the vessels of the sanctuary.’ The latter translation is more useful here and gets us away from the problematic theology. Our community’s institutions – big or small – represent the encapsulation and implementation of our ideas, which in turn have been our greatest legacy as a people. These institutions are our sanctuary, and they are served and ministered beautifully. But I sense we don’t take well care enough of these vessels in orienting them towards the holiness of their task. In the past year, with the launch of our North American branch of the Shalom Hartman Institute, we have been seeking to fill this need in Jewish life – to be a source of learning, thinking, ideas and inspiration for the Jewish professionals with the potential to lead Jewish life. I hope we will not be alone in this journey.
Yehuda Kurtzer is President, The Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
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I would propose that learning and inspiration are important components of the professional development that Scott’s article described, rather than antithetical to his (equally appropriate) skill-driven approach. It feels like both articles are stating a different side of the same coin – that we are not adequately valuing or investing in the professionals, who enter with talent and motivation to spare. I would venture that we can be even more explicit about the roles that gender, age, and professional status play in the dynamic where professionals receive far less in the way of skills training OR educational/spiritual enrichment than do top-level lay leaders and clergy.
Of course it is true that cultivating meaning and passion extends the level of satisfaction within any chosen professional position, i am not persuaded that either the practical proposals in response to Scott Brown or the aspiratonal gloss added by Yehuda Kurtzer adequately address the underlying issue. A few thoughts:
1. We live in a time when people change positions and careers numerous times in one’s life. This is likely to happen whether we invest in aspiraton or compensation. That doesn’t mean those 2 investments are irrelevant – they should be mandates – but we should not fool ourselves to believe that we can set up a standard which runs so counter to the prevailing culture. [there are many reasons for this, beyond the scope of these comments.]
2. That means that the same individual who spends some of his or her career working for the Jewish community will probably spend some time working outside that community. My own view is that this is a very healthy and welcome development. It will help eliminate the regrettable caste system which worked to downgrade the status of those who chose careers in the non profit sector in general and the Jewish world in particular. And it will help develop authentic and reasonable expectations for the institutions served and led by the professionals.
3. We also should remember that the Jewish ideal is not to be a kli kodesh, but for all members of the community to seek to actualize the command to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Our training of those who choose to work for and with the community should be at the highest standard, but we must resist the out of date concept that we are delegating the Jewish future to those people. The challenge is to educate non professionals and professionals about the nature of the volunteer- professional partnership without which any concept of change cannot succeed. This means that professional education needs to include being a volunteer at an organization beyond one’s employment, and leadership training for lay leaders must include a professional assignment.
4. One more point: My own view is that some of the most highly energized, highly motivated, highly educated, and most creative people I meet are the younger people who are working in and on the periphery of the organized community. Let’s not forget that some of the mobility is not only because of either of the two explanations proposed by Brown and Kurtzer but because of very different visions of how the Jewish world should be experienced and organized. Without that additional component, it is possible that the discussion will simply omit one of the most important variables in cultivating communal involvement.