Community Blog Tapping Tomorrow’s Rabbis
The Mascott Beit Midrash, with windows from floor to ceiling along one wall to catch the morning light, is the beating heart of Hebrew College Rabbinical School. Each day it is filled with the sounds of Torah study and Tefillah, friendship and community, as emerging rabbis cultivate their love of Torah, discern the voices in our sacred texts, and engage respectfully across difference. Indeed, our distinctive pedagogy is built around the vitality and multi-vocality of the Beit Midrash, putting relationships at the center of the educational process — and at the center of our vision of leadership. As enrollment in our ordination program continues to grow, incoming students consistently cite their interest in or visit to the beit midrash as a crucial factor in their decision to enroll.
Aiming to address the growing deficit of rabbis in North America, Hebrew College has been awarded a significant grant from a private foundation to work against this trend by embracing this relational approach to Jewish leadership development and systematically identifying and mentoring young people who may be interested in joining the rabbinate. The grant will fund Hebrew College’s new “Tapping Initiative”, designed to support and mentor young people who may be interested in pursuing a rabbinic path. As part of the grant, an initial recruitment stage will enable the college to partner with Jewish leaders across the United States and Canada to locate and “tap” potential future rabbis from within their communities.
In recent decades, the number of students entering non-Orthodox rabbinical schools has precipitously declined. “The demand for rabbis nationwide exceeds supply, as baby boomers are retiring and others are leaving because of burnout,” wrote Barry Wanger in the Jewish Journal last summer. The pandemic only exacerbated this trend, with many seminaries seeing sharp drops in enrollment.
This leadership deficit is explained in part by broader shifts in American society: “We know that the liberal Christian world has seen a significant drop in the number of people interested in ministry over the last several years. Anybody who follows basic religious American trends should not be surprised that the Jewish world is following the Christian world,” says Hebrew College Provost Dan Judson, a historian of the American Jewish community. “At the same time, the Jewish community has its own dynamic, and the surge of interest in Jewish life as a result of increasing antisemitism is a countervailing force.”
If the current trajectory holds, the supply of rabbis will continue to trend downward even as demand begins to rise. Addressing this challenge is not just about numbers — the rabbinic deficit has profound implications for the future of Jewish life in America. Rabbis play a central role in sustaining Jewish communities, providing spiritual guidance, and transmitting Jewish wisdom to new generations. With fewer young people pursuing the rabbinate, the Jewish community in North America faces an oncoming shortage of qualified Jewish leaders to meet its needs.
Hebrew College has managed to buck broader enrollment trends by remaining hyper-focused on providing a pluralistic, text-driven rabbinical training, where students are regarded as both inheritors and innovators of Jewish life. This non-denominational, intellectually curious approach creates space for students to engage in the fullness of our tradition and create a rabbinate from ‘the ground up’ that meets the needs of today’s Jewish community. In this period of change and upheaval, we are proud of an approach that prizes flexibility and experimentation, while cleaving to text and tradition.
But fixing the pipeline of future rabbis is a challenge for the entire North American Jewish community. Wrote Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer in eJewishPhilanthropy last summer: “No single programmatic intervention can reverse these trends, but I believe our need for more outstanding rabbinic leaders for the North American Jewish community requires some radical experimentation.”
The Tapping Initiative is one such radical experiment, and is so named because it will attempt to systematize and concretize what is usually an informal process. As Hebrew College President Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld emphasized in the process of developing the vision for this initiative, “Nearly 100% of our applicants tell us during the admissions process, that — at some point, somewhere, somehow — a significant mentor, teacher, role model, or friend saw something special in them, and said to them: ‘Have you ever thought of becoming a rabbi?’ We do not underestimate the power of that question.”
The initiative will begin with an effort to reach out to 1,000 Jewish influencers — including rabbis, academics, community leaders — and ask each of them to nominate a young person in their life who they believe could make a good rabbi. Selected participants will then have the opportunity to connect with Hebrew College faculty and join a year-long fellowship for prospective rabbinical school applicants. This cohort of 40 to 50 fellows will launch with an immersive, five-day retreat at Hebrew College before transitioning to six months of online havruta study with guidance and resources from the Rabbinical School. Finally, each fellow will receive one-on-one mentorship from a highly regarded rabbi in the field as they consider their next professional steps.
The Tapping Initiative will allow Hebrew College — and the ecosystem of rabbinic education as a whole — to welcome more talented, creative, passionate young people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives into Jewish leadership. We are excited to invite them into our community of pluralism, innovation, and relational learning. For over a century, the College has been a home for students seeking a deeply rooted yet forward-thinking approach to Jewish education and leadership. In the rabbinical school, our beit midrash-centered pedagogy fosters meaningful dialogue, collaboration, and intellectual exploration, while our shared campus — with partner organizations like the Jewish Women’s Archive, Keshet, and the Jewish Studio Project — offers a unique environment for creative engagement.
Reflecting on the work of cultivating the next generation of rabbis, Rabbi Anisfeld notes, “It is a deep privilege and joy to invite young people to bring their hearts and minds to the tables of Jewish learning and leadership; to join the Jewish conversation that has been carried on for millennia; to contribute their distinctive voices, to offer their unique gifts, to enrich, enliven, and expand our community and allow the words of Torah to speak to us in our own time. For me, this is what hope looks like.”
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