Rabbis on the Move
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
Ha’aretz, Israel’s newspaper of record, just published an article about rabbinic migration. Israeli rabbis, born in the country, are leaving Israel for other destinations. Most are coming to North America to work in synagogues like the ones where I have served. But the whole Jewish world seems to be benefitting from this phenomenon. There are Israeli rabbis in Australia and South America. Several serve congregations all over Europe. Eventually I’m sure we will see one in Tulsa.
The numbers aren’t huge, at least not yet, but the surprise is that this is happening at all. Progressive Jewish movements with flagship institutions in America labored mightily to create seminaries in Israel. They felt that Israel represented an aspirational future. Native-born Israelis with no taste for Orthodoxy would turn to left-leaning, progressive alternatives and plug into movements like Conservativism and Reform. Orthodoxy is still the brand many Israelis love to hate. It’s closely associated with punctilious observance, separatism, draft evasion, and militant zealotry. Israelis generally cast their lot with cosmopolitan modernity and reject the model of retrograde shtetl-ism. How could black-hat Orthodoxy survive?
What no one counted on is that precisely this attitude would come to be associated with a diminished elite, the “enlightened” Ashkenazim of the first generations who thought that Orthodoxy was not long for this world. It turns out that many educated Israelis, disenchanted with secularism, are attracted to the forms of piety and mysticism, seeing the Orthodox model as seductive and authentic. A cousin of ours from a politically prominent family of socialists recently confessed a taste for his tiny Orthodox prayer group. Jews from Arab countries never lost that preference and now represent a powerful demographic.
It means that those hapless Israeli seminarians have a hard time finding congregations to employ them. Unlike their Orthodox colleagues, they get no government salaries, and they generally operate alone in the desert. They spend much of their energy defending their legitimacy in a country that doesn’t regard them as real rabbis, anyway. Even for the most assimilated Israeli, a rabbi is supposed to have sidelocks and a hat. He is not supposed to be an activist in a kerchief, protesting the patriarchy at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. That same set of biases carries over to America. For many of the million Israelis in the U.S., the only synagogue that “works” is the local Chabad House, with its messianist brand of Orthodox Judaism. Like it or not, people choose what’s familiar.
The result is that a new exodus has begun. The thousands of natives who continue to exit Israel have now been joined by a trickle of rabbis. The positive here is that they will enrich the Jewish community and help us remedy our own deficit of rabbis. Over the past decade, our seminaries have shrunk, and we cannot staff the congregations in our movements. My own class of grads included thirty-plus newbies. At this point, our seminaries are lucky to squeeze out six. Even in an era of failing congregations, that isn’t enough rabbis to go around.
Whatever happens next, we are in the middle of change. For s host of reasons, including politics and demographics, Israel will continue to grow more hospitable to Orthodoxy. Any movement that supports ethnonationalism is likely to enjoy growing prominence. Meanwhile, North America will continue to develop as the proper home of a different Judaism, one in which traditionalism and modernity are usefully co-mingled. The downside is a rupture in the middle distance and a split that continues with unpredictable consequences.