“Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.” — Daniel Kahneman

Twenty-five years ago, I served on my first hiring committee. The starting salary for the position was approximately $40,000 (the actual amount has been altered to protect the individual candidate’s privacy). Twenty years later, I was a hiring manager for the same position; this time, the advertised salary was $55,000, not including benefits. While on paper, the salary increased by $15,000 over 20 years, had it merely kept up with inflation, it would have been slightly under $72,000. 

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In other words, adjusted for inflation, the salary for the same position was reduced by $17,000 during this timeframe.

This story is not unique, and it raises an uncomfortable truth that we rarely discuss in Jewish organizational life: We pay many Jewish professionals criminally low salaries.

In recent weeks, I’ve seen several thoughtful pieces about burnout in the Jewish professional world, as well as sobering data on the current mindset of Jewish professionals. Each article raised important points — but I couldn’t help noticing something missing. Not one headline read, “Let’s fight burnout by paying people more.”

Passion doesn’t pay the bills

Of course, I can already hear the objections. Salary isn’t the only factor in job satisfaction, and even if it was, where would the money come from? Keep calm — I’ll get there in a minute. 

First, let’s get the “steel man” argument out of the way: Yes, intrinsic motivation matters. But it’s not enough.

The American Psychological Association defines intrinsic motivation as “an incentive to engage in a specific activity that derives from pleasure in the activity itself” rather than any external benefits. 

I didn’t choose to become a rabbi because I would make a high salary; I became a rabbi because I am motivated for its own sake to strengthen Jewish life through Jewish practice. Not only that, but I know several people who became Jewish professionals after working in professions where they earned far higher salaries precisely because the extrinsic motivation of high compensation was insufficient to overcome dislike of the work itself.

However, to unlock the benefits of intrinsic motivation, a baseline salary must first be high enough to meet a person’s needs. Beyond that point, as economists Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton have demonstrated, higher pay does not necessarily lead to increased well-being; but below that point, no amount of intrinsic motivation can compensate for the shortfall.

This tension is reflected in data on job satisfaction in the United States published by the Pew Research Center in December 2024. Among the 29% of participants who said that they are “not too satisfied” or “not at all satisfied” with their pay, 71% said that their income is too low for the quality of their work, 70% said their pay is too low for the amount of work they do, and 54% said they don’t earn enough to pay their bills. 

A 2021 report from the Urban Institute found that non-monetary benefits in “low-wage, high-social-value” careers can compensate for poor compensation; but most Jewish organizations do not offer top-notch health insurance, dental insurance, retirement matching and other benefits (if they offer them at all). As a result, while there are circumstances under which a person will intentionally choose a lower salary due to other benefits, in a situation where most positions offer inadequate wages and inadequate benefits, all of a sudden you have two issues negatively compounding upon each other.

As in any profession, those entering the Jewish organizational world early in their careers often begin in lower-level roles with the hope of eventually advancing to more senior and better-paying positions. But when entry- and mid-level jobs are precisely where salaries and benefits are most inadequate, we risk losing countless future leaders who simply cannot afford to pay their dues in the hopes of higher compensation later.

Most Jewish professionals I know are brimming with intrinsic motivation — that’s why they chose this path. They never expected to become wealthy, but they can recognize when the most critical factor for their professional satisfaction is being overlooked or worse, actively ignored.

Bikeshedding is a choice

Imagine you are on a committee tasked with designing a nuclear power plant. (Stay with me now.) Three weeks into attending committee meetings, you find that instead of focusing on the core elements of building this nuclear plant, the committee spends the majority of its time arguing about what color to paint the bike shed where staff members will park their bikes.

C. Northcote Parkinson calls this group dynamic “Parkinson’s Law of Triviality”: when a group working on a task spends an inordinate amount of time on unimportant issues while ignoring substantive ones (in honor of the above example, it’s also known as “bikeshedding”). Anyone who served on a highly ineffective committee is familiar with this dynamic (personally, I call it the “Case of the Little Table”).

Parkinson identifies several reasons why the law of triviality is so powerful. Still, my favorite is that sometimes leaders are tasked with doing something that they lack the knowledge or skill to achieve. By turning far less critical issues into the main topic of conversation, these leaders are shifting focus away from the topic where they are worried about being held accountable, in favor of something else. 

Turning to the issue at hand, the obstacles that stand in the way of many organizations paying higher salaries are not challenging to identify, as they include a combination of consistent fundraising, high-level budgeting and increased revenue through program recruitment and retention. In terms of identifying the main issue, the challenges are surprisingly uncomplicated to locate.

But when a leader throws out platitudes like “the program needs to be rethought” or “we need better staff accountability” to a team whose wages are consistently below-market, it’s reasonable for these employees to question whether or not these leaders are focusing on secondary and tertiary issues as a misguided attempt to avoid holding themselves accountable for the primary driver of employee morale.

None of this is intended to cast aspersions on leaders; I doubt that any are intentionally keeping salaries low. But budgets are curricula, in that they teach something to every stakeholder. To use Elliot Eisner’s framework from “The Three Curricula That All Schools Teach,” talking repeatedly about every way to improve professional burnout except raising salaries results in a kind of “null curriculum”: When leaders do not explicitly acknowledge the need to pay people what they are worth, it sends a message far louder than any other initiative.

Pay is not peripheral 

The best job I ever had was serving as senior director of USY. Every hour in that role felt like a gift. To this day, I get chills thinking about the teenagers whose lives were touched by our work. 

But my proudest achievement wasn’t a program or an initiative. It was that during the height of the pandemic, when furloughs and job reductions were rampant, our staff received cost-of-living increases and bonuses.

Did those increases in compensation suddenly make salaries adequate? Absolutely not. Years of insufficient increases had left pay far below market standards, and it would have taken years of sustained growth to reach what they should have been paid all along. Still, I’d rather fail at tackling the most important issue rather than succeed wildly at ones that matter far less to my team’s well-being. They deserved higher salaries; all the rest was commentary.

Communities everywhere are grappling with rising costs of living, and the Jewish community is no exception. As Richard Rumelt writes in The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists, effective leaders cut through the tangle of problems and focus on “the crux” — the issue that is both “vital and addressable.” Without that vision, all the charisma, carrots and sticks in the world amount to little more than firing blindly into a sea of challenges.

So yes, take the time to hear the other fantastic pieces written about burnout, but don’t lose sight of the key issue. Because even if you fall short, those willing to confront this cultural avoidance will at least be fighting for the heart of the matter, not what was merely convenient. 

May it happen soon and speedily in our days. 

Rabbi Joshua Rabin is the rabbi of the Astoria Center of Israel and the author of the Substack “Moneyball Judaism.”