I deeply respect Rabbi Daniel Landes and the seriousness with which he approaches the future of the rabbinate through his organization, Yashrut. His recent opinion piece (“For Tomorrow’s Rabbinate, We Must Up Our Game,” eJewishPhilanthropy, Jan. 12) reflects a genuine concern for the spiritual and intellectual vitality of Jewish leadership. He is also working with far more rabbinical students than I am currently connected to and far more world experience; my perspective comes from 16 years in the field, serving a single congregation through profound change. That difference in vantage point may explain why I arrive at a different conclusion, and why I offer the following critique with both respect and urgency.

Rabbi Landes identifies three primary challenges: an a-ideological and a-denominational student body that is rebelling against institutional dogma; inadequate and insufficient mastery of classical Jewish texts; and a growing disconnect between teachers and students in rabbinical education. While each of these observations contains a kernel of truth, I do not believe they explain why so many rabbis in the field are struggling today.

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First, I do not see rabbinical schools “beating students over the head” with denominational ideology or enforcing rigid orthodoxies. In fact, the opposite is often true. Many rabbinical students today hold views that fall well outside the norms of the congregations they will eventually serve, and they are nonetheless ordained and serve our institutions. The problem is not excessive ideology. If anything, it is a growing gap between rabbinical training and the lived realities of congregational life. This gap is not only pedagogical but geographic. Rabbinical training still assumes that Jewish life is centered in New York and parts of Los Angeles, while most rabbis will serve communities shaped by very different cultural, political, economic and social realities.

Second, I do not believe rabbis are struggling because they lack textual mastery. As a member of the Rabbinical Assembly’s Executive Council and a mentor to newly ordained rabbis and rabbinical students through various programs, the rabbis I see faltering are not due to insufficient exposure to Talmud, codes or commentaries. They are struggling because they are being asked to lead communities through challenges that are unprecedented in history.

For example, during my now 16 and a half years in the rabbinate, I have led the same congregation through: the Great Recession that began in 2008 and hit South Florida harder than any other area of the country; an increasingly polarized and volatile political climate that has torn at families and communities; repeated climate-driven disasters, including powerful hurricanes here in South Florida; the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School just miles from our synagogue, followed by a relentless wave of gun violence in schools, houses of worship and public spaces; a historic surge in antisemitism that has touched our community directly; and a once-in-a-generation pandemic that claimed over a million American lives and permanently reshaped how synagogues function. Since Oct. 7, 2023, we have been navigating the moral, emotional and communal aftershocks of that day and the ongoing war in Israel, which have reverberated through Jewish life worldwide and further intensified fear, grief and division.

The iPhone had been on the market for barely a year when I was ordained as a rabbi, and it was not until 2013, four years into my rabbinate, that more than half of Americans owned a smartphone. Social media was also in its infancy when I began my career. Yet every crisis I have described unfolded in a hyper-connected, digitally mediated world that our predecessors never had to navigate, a world in which congregants and clergy are now perpetually accessible, constantly visible and under unrelenting emotional and informational pressure. 

And now, as we stand at the beginning of the AI revolution, it already seems clear that this technology will reshape human relationships, work and meaning in ways we can barely imagine. For instance, I doubt any of my teachers in rabbinical school imagined that part of my rabbinate would include pastoral conversations with congregants navigating romantic relationships with an AI bot. 

Third, while I agree that rabbinical education should be warmer, more relational and less purely academic, I do not believe pedagogical distance is the central crisis facing the rabbinate today.

I write this as someone who has spent these years serving a single congregation and growing it significantly, despite the tumultuous events we’ve all experienced. None of those challenges were addressed meaningfully in rabbinical school as part of the core curriculum, yet they now define the daily work of my rabbinate. 

What I see again and again is this: rabbis are not failing because they lack intellectual seriousness or textual depth. They are struggling because they are being asked to lead complex, anxious, polarized communities without having been trained in adaptive leadership, organizational management, conflict navigation, governance, fundraising or relational resilience.

In other words, they are being trained for a world that no longer exists, and then sent into one that barely resembles anything their teachers experienced.

The rabbi of today is not simply a teacher of texts or a steward of tradition. The rabbi is a chief relationship officer, a culture builder, a crisis manager, a public communicator, a fundraiser and often the emotional first responder for an entire community that is constantly connected not just with each other but the entire world. 

None of this work is intuitive, but I believe all of it can be taught. Unfortunately, very little of it is taught systematically.

That’s why I found my colleague Rabbi Ari Perten’s recently published article, Rabbis Need to Be Trained for the Job They Actually Do, to be far more compelling. He begins not with what we wish the rabbinate were, but with what it actually is. He argues that rabbinical schools must function more like vocational institutions, not in the narrow sense, but in the deepest one: intentionally cultivating the skills required for real rabbinic work, including leadership, communication, pastoral presence, team-building, governance and the capacity to navigate constant change.

In my own rabbinate, what has allowed our community not only to survive but to double in size and impact has been the ability to adapt creatively, to build trust in moments of crisis, to communicate vision amid uncertainty and to lead with emotional intelligence alongside Torah. Those skills were learned primarily by learning people — often on the job, often painfully — and almost never through formal training.

I believe deeply that immersion in sacred texts, in their original Hebrew and Aramaic, is among the greatest gifts we can give to future rabbis and to the Jewish people. But text alone does not transmit itself. If rabbis cannot relate to people, cannot hold conflict, cannot lead organizations and cannot sustain themselves emotionally, then even the deepest learning will remain inert.

The most formative training I received came after ordination: through leadership incubators, spiritual formation programs and professional development that addressed the realities of rabbinic life head-on. Those experiences were transformative, and I wish they had come sooner for all of my colleagues. 

I am wary of the claim that the future of the rabbinate depends primarily on producing more brilliant scholars. I truly believe that great scholarship will always matter. And, in an age of fragmentation and fear, the rabbinate’s survival also depends on developing healthy, resilient, relational leaders who can hold communities together and make a commitment to them for the long haul. 

Rabbis cannot do this work alone. The broader Jewish ecosystem must take responsibility for making the rabbinate more sustainable, a challenge worthy of its own full conversation.

If our seminaries truly want to “up their game,” then the game they must learn to play is not the one they inherited, but the one rabbis are actually being asked to play today. 

Learning and transmission of Torah will always be the heart of the rabbinate. But the future of Jewish leadership will be determined by whether we prepare rabbis to hold communities together in an age of fragmentation, fear and relentless change.

Our Sages of blessed memory spoke about the importance of Torah study often, but one of the most powerful teachings in my eyes comes from the Talmud, when the sage Rava teaches about the questions we will be asked when we go before God in judgment at the end of our lives. “Kavata ittim la Torah?” (“Did you set times to study Torah?”) is one of them. 

The lesson is clear: becoming a Torah scholar is not a stage of life but a lifelong practice that requires constant self-work. The same must be true of leadership. The learning of how to lead cannot end at ordination. Rabbinical school must prepare its students not just for graduation, but for a lifetime of formation. 

The future of the rabbinate and Jewish America depends on it.

Rabbi David Baum received his rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2009. He has served as Congregation Shaarei Kodesh of Boca Raton’s first full-time rabbi since. He is an alumnus of Adamah’s Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI), the Institute of Jewish Spirituality’s Clergy Leadership Program and American Jewish World Service’s Global Justice Fellowship. He currently serves on the Rabbinical Assembly’s Executive Council.