No Denominations, Thank You
On the very same day at the end of June, two items appeared in my e-mail inbox. The first was a note from a Florida academic alerting me to the subject of an upcoming survey. Are you worried about a dearth of non-Orthodox rabbis? That was pretty much in line with my long-held observation that Conservativism and Reform—that is, mainstream Jewish movements—are caught in the jaws of catastrophic decline.
Of course, I’m worried, I wanted to say. Admission at the West Coast branch of my seminary is currently paused while the institution re-groups on the verge of becoming non-denominational. The East Coast version also floundered last year, with just a handful of students preparing for the rabbinate.
This was a far cry from my own days in school. I entered the program at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) a year or two after the end of the military draft. People were no longer looking for exemptions, but there were still enough people in the rabbinic pipeline to fill out a class of twenty-five men. Eventually that gave way to the enrollment of women. I wouldn’t say that the numbers were ever robust, but they were enough to keep the movement intact.
The great unknown is what will happen next. Enter the other piece of e-mail in June. According to an optimistic article in the Forward, North American Jewry’s weekly newspaper of record, non-Orthodox seminary enrollment is up. Some five years from now, twenty-five candidates for the Conservative rabbinate will finish their studies and apply for positions. Not all of them (or even most of them) will want to work in pulpits, but some of them are likely to be matched to congregations. It means a return, in part, to the Jewish world I entered as a young Midwestern rabbi in 1980. It also means that we may be able to service congregations that cannot find rabbis to save their souls. Even in a world that feels ambivalent about authority, I would like to think that rabbis make a difference. Same with ministers, priests, and imams.
So what changed between last year and this? Some of it has to do with more effective recruiting. The muckety-mucks at the Seminary also instituted a prep course which gave a toe-in-the-water opportunity to people thinking about the rabbinate. There might also be financial factors at work. At the very moment entry-level positions are disappearing, you might well find your way to a progressive rabbinical school instead of looking for a non-existent slot in banking.
Whatever happens, there is some reason for hope. Regrettably the overall picture still isn’t great, especially for the community of which I am a part. Conservative Judaism is a centrist movement that came to prominence in the middle of the last century when American Jews were deserting Orthodoxy. That process has now come to an end, with a dearth of true believers left in its synagogues. According to a 2020 Pew Research Center study, over a third of Conservative congregations have closed in the twenty-first century. You may have noticed that the century has just begun. And if you’re a person who has a care for the rabbinate, you are far more likely to end up in Reform. As I said, the number at my seminary is twenty-five this year. The number at the Reform counterpart is forty-one.
The future clearly lies in another world that has yet to take discernible shape. I would like to think that our local community has adopted a promising, healthy path. At the risk of tooting an institutional horn, we are a congregation for the whole community, rooted in the tradition, wide open to change, and averse to definitions that involve national movements or ideologies. At the end of the day, I think we’ll survive and flourish.