Advice for Rabbis 5 of 5

31. Shul isn’t camp; spirituality isn’t clapping hands. Shul is a place for personal and communal transformation, a place where the self and selfish give way to the Self and selfless. This requires four things: stirring poetry, transcendent music, deep dialogue, and silent contemplation. If these aren’t the building blocks of your services, you are building the Tower of Babel.  

32. Being Jewish isn’t the point. The point is to be a blessing to all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:3). Being Jewish is the way to achieve the point. If you’re not teaching people how to be a blessing, what you are teaching them is a waste of time.

33. Tevye is dead. Fiddling lasts forever. Fiddling on the roof is a metaphor for living creatively, even joyously, with uncertainty. This is the existential reality Judaism must address. To focus on dead fiddlers is idolatry. Jews make a fetish of the past; Judaism is all about living justly in the present.

34. Don’t make Judaism relevant.  Judaism—doing justly, loving kindly, walking humbly—is relevant. If you have to make it relevant, whatever “it” is isn’t Judaism.

35. Don’t mistake praying in Hebrew for praying. Just because people can pronounce the Hebrew words in a siddur doesn’t make those words meaningful. Just because they can say the prayers doesn’t mean they are praying. Prayer is an act of transformation, moving from self to Self, from me to we, from taking to giving to sharing. Teach your people to pray and not just how to read the script.

36. Stop reading responsively. Stop reading in unison. Stop reading. Pray.

37. Don’t turn Judaism into ancestor worship. God told Abraham and Sarah to get away from their land, their kin, and their parents’ house so that God might show them where to live and be a blessing (Genesis 12: 1–3). If you are teaching an imitative Judaism based on land, kin, and parents, you are undermining the very core of God’s call.

38. Don’t deify Debbie. Debbie Friedman (z”l) was good, but over using her music is making it kitsch.

39. Got ecstasy? Ecstasy—being lifted beyond the self to the Self, beyond the finite to the infinite—is the goal of worship. Music is vital to this enterprise, but not all music. Think Ode to Joy; Gospel; Klezmer; Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin; Shlomo Carlebach; Yofiyah; and Shefa Gold. Don’t rely on camp songs and sing–alongs; make music that soars.

40. Sell the shul. I don’t mean market your synagogue; I mean put your synagogue on the market. Survey after survey shows that people find spirituality in nature not in concrete shells. Sell your building, rent office and classroom space, and hold services in the wild. Or rent the local planetarium: there is nothing like praising the Creator of the Universe while sitting in a plush recliner in a dark air–conditioned room at the center of the universe.

41. Tell your people the truth. Religion is made up. God is made up. Tradition is made up. Torah is made up. Talmud is made up. Knowing Judaism is all made up frees you and them to make it up better.

42. Have faith in doubt. Faith fills you up; doubt empties you out. When you are full of faith there is no room to grow. When you are rooted in doubt you are always ready to bloom.

43. Add Jesus to your Yahrzeit list on “Good Shabbos.” Don’t let Christians rob us of one of the most famous Jews who ever lived. Reclaim Jesus as a first century God–intoxicated Jewish mystic.

44. Add Spinoza to your Yahrzeit list (he died on February 21, 1677). Don’t let the Orthodox rob us of one of the few Jews of the past who might still speak to Jews today.

45. Stop trying to apply Bronze Age mores to Digital Age lives. You wouldn’t go to a doctor who practiced Bronze Age medicine, why expect your congregants to come to a rabbi who promotes Bronze Age religion?

46. If science disproves your faith, change your faith. If your faith has to hide from science, chances are your faith is weak and your knowledge of science even weaker.

47. When participating on an interfaith panel, ask your fellow panelists if they think you’re going to Hell.  Rather than nod politely as your fellow panelists pretend that religion isn’t the problem, ask them if their God will let you into their Heaven when you die. This will bring the conversation to a quick close, and you can get home in time to do something more interesting.

48. Stop pretending there is only one God. When asked if Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in the same God, be honest and say “no.” HaShem and Allah have no kids (OK, maybe HaShem has a daughter, see Proverbs 8:22, but Allah is definitely childless), while God the Father is a father because he has a Son. Neither Allah nor HaShem ever sent Jesus to earth to die for anyone’s sins, and neither HaShem nor Jesus’ Dad revealed the Qur’an to Muhammad. There is nothing wrong with us believing in different Gods. There is something wrong in denying that we do so.

49. Stop stressing over the future of Jews and Judaism. If Judaism dies out it’s because Jews stopped caring about it. If Jews stop caring about it it’s because it isn’t worth preserving. If you don’t want Judaism and Jews to die out tomorrow, make being Jewish and living Judaism of value today.

50. Never let your congregants see you in shorts. They have a hard enough time taking you seriously as it is.

Advice for Rabbis 4 of 5

21. “Rabbi, we aren’t paying you to study.” That’s what your board will say. “Rabbi we are going to suck the life out of you—Run! Run! Run for you life!” That’s what you should hear.

22. Teach weekly, not weakly. You have to choose: you can spend your rabbinate as a prophet or you can spend it as a clerk. A prophet seeks to show people how to move toward True North: a life of meaning, purpose, and sacred activism. A clerk is only interested in selling compasses.

23. You’re not a parking meter. “Rabbi, can I have a minute of your time?” “No. You can have all of it.” You’re not a therapist. You don’t run on the fifty–minute hour. You’re not a lawyer. You don’t charge by the quarter hour. You’re a rabbi. You have all the time necessary to feed the hungry mind, clothe the heart stripped naked by suffering, heal the hurts inflicted by ignorance, arrogance, and greed all within the context of Torah. After you’ve made time to study, you literally have nothing better to do.

24. Be a gossip. “Did you hear what Rabbi Akiva said while the Romans were flaying him alive? No? Well….”

25. Be a storyteller. Telling a story is the most powerful way to convey life’s greatest truths, and the most effective way of inviting people to explore them. Read midrash, Buber, Nachman, Kafka, Jabes, Peretz, Agnon, Singer, and others. Then share their stories, and invite people to unpack them with you.

26. Speak simply enough that people can disagree. You want to be understood. When people understand, some will disagree. Good for them; better for you. Don’t hide behind jargon, technical language, or vague arguments. Say what you mean, mean what you say, and be prepared to listen to those who think differently.

27. Never have the last word. You want your people to react to what you say. Give them time to do so. Invite people to ask questions and offer comments after every sermon. You’ve had twenty minutes or so to make your case, now give them time to respond to it. If they ask questions, answer them briefly. If they offer counter arguments, promise to take them into consideration. Clarify any misunderstandings, but don’t argue your case a second time. Let your congregants have the last word.

28. Torah is true, just not factual. Torah is true the way dreams are often true: they reveal things about us in ways rational discourse cannot. Interpret Torah as one might interpret a dream: don’t look for historical facts, look for archetypal truths.

29. Crank it up, don’t dumb it down. When teaching Torah imagine you are teaching grad students not pre–schoolers, unless of course you are teaching pre–schoolers, in which case you have to wonder why you spent five years of your life in post–graduate rabbinic studies rather than spending a few years learning how to teach pre–schoolers.

30. Grok don’t Google. Robert A. Heinlein coined the term grok in his novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Grok is akin to intuition, Baruch Spinoza’s Third Kind of Knowing. It’s not irrational, but transrational. It embraces reason, but reveals something reason alone cannot reveal. This is the kind of knowing you want to invite people to experience. If all you do is impart information people could gather from Goggle or Wikipedia, they will stay home with their iPads, and you should get a job with Google or Wikipedia.

Advice to Rabbis 3 of 5

12. Israel is not a theme park. Most American Jews visit Israel the way other people visit Colonial Williamsburg: they want to see the past brought to life at a safe distance. Have a one–time tour rule: you will lead trips to Israel only for people who have not been before. After that, encourage aliyah.

13. Don’t send your congregants’ kids to Israel to make them Jewish. Send them to Chabad; it’s cheaper.

14. Your congregants aren’t Zionists. A Zionist is someone who lives in Zion without calling it Palestine. Even more, a Zionist is someone who is willing to die for Zion. Even more, a Zionist is someone who is willing to have her or his child die for Zion. If all your congregants do is visit Israel, plant a tree, sit through a subtitled Israeli film, write a check to Federation, or get all worked up when someone, even an Israeli, dares to question the policies of Israel, they are not Zionists; they are guilt–ridden American Jews.

15. Never settle for a ten–minute sermon. If your board tells you to keep your sermons to ten minutes, tell them you will consider that when they keep their board meetings to ten minutes. Learning takes time. If people don’t want to give you their time, they really don’t want you to give them anything at all.

16. Stand by your principles, not on them. When you stand by your principles you make judgments; when you stand on your principles you become judgmental. When you stand by your principles you allow others to stand by theirs. If you are asked to violate your principles, refuse. If you are asked to violate your principles continually, retire.

17. Get another job. You can be fired anytime for any reason, especially if that reason just wrote a huge check to the sanctuary renovation fund. Protect yourself: have a second career even while you are pursuing your rabbinic one. In this way when your synagogue job goes south, you can easily move north.

18. Don’t fear God. I’m not talking about the Guy who tells you to murder your son or commit ethnic cleansing—you should definitely fear Him; He’s insane. I’m talking about the

God you don’t believe in but pretend to believe in because your congregants who don’t believe in Him pretend to believe in Him and need you to pretend to believe in Him so that they can continue to pretend to believe in Him and not have to admit that they don’t. That Guy: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who we pretend is more believable when we add Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachael to His list of followers. A dead God is a dead God no matter how PC the eulogy. But, chances are you do believe in something; maybe even Something; maybe even Some One. Don’t be afraid to talk about what you do believe in, and invite others to do the same.

19. Let them eat cake, but only after feeding them something more substantive. If you haven’t tried to plant at least one potentially transformative seed of wisdom in at least one congregant during a religious service, you are wasting their time. And yours.

20. Torah! Torah! Torah! Your first obligation is to Torah. This is like the flight attendant telling you to first place the oxygen mask over your mouth and nose before placing one over your child’s mouth and nose. You can’t help anyone if you’re dead. Learning Torah is how rabbis stay alive. Make time to study every day. If the sign on your office door reads “Rabbi’s Study,” add one that says, “Rabbi’s studying.”

Advice to Rabbis 2 of 5

11. Be fire worthy. Chances are you’re going to be fired. You don’t have to do anything to get fired. All you have to do is grow old. At some point you will be too old to “relate to the kids,” or too old to bring in the younger families, or so old that your board of directors fears having to pay you as emeritus. So, sometime in your fifties, someone on your board is going to stab you in the back, and when that happens your friends will be outraged—outraged I say!—and powerless. Knowing it’s coming; be worthy of it: do something that is worth getting fired over. Tell your congregants the truth that religion is made up, that God doesn’t choose one people over another or dabble in real estate, that making a fetish out of the Holocaust and Zionism isn’t a substitute for living Jewishly, and that Judaism is dying because, when matzah comes to mitzvah, Jews just don’t care enough to keep Judaism alive. Just don’t say this until sometime in your fifties.

12. Israel is not a theme park. Most American Jews visit Israel the way other people visit Colonial Williamsburg: they want to see the past brought to life at a safe distance. Have a one–time tour rule: you will lead trips to Israel only for people who have not been before. After that, encourage aliyah.

13. Don’t send your congregants’ kids to Israel to make them Jewish. Send them to Chabad; it’s cheaper.

14. Your congregants aren’t Zionists. A Zionist is someone who lives in Zion without calling it Palestine. Even more, a Zionist is someone who is willing to die for Zion. Even more, a Zionist is someone who is willing to have her or his child die for Zion. If all your congregants do is visit Israel, plant a tree, sit through a subtitled Israeli film, write a check to Federation, or get all worked up when someone, even an Israeli, dares to question the policies of Israel, they are not Zionists; they are guilt–ridden American Jews.

15. Never settle for a ten–minute sermon. If your board tells you to keep your sermons to ten minutes, tell them you will consider that when they keep their board meetings to ten minutes. Learning takes time. If people don’t want to give you their time, they really don’t want you to give them anything at all.

16. Stand by your principles, not on them. When you stand by your principles you make judgments; when you stand on your principles you become judgmental. When you stand by your principles you allow others to stand by theirs. If you are asked to violate your principles, refuse. If you are asked to violate your principles continually, retire.

17. Get another job. You can be fired anytime for any reason, especially if that reason just wrote a huge check to the sanctuary renovation fund. Protect yourself: have a second career even while you are pursuing your rabbinic one. In this way when your synagogue job goes south, you can easily move north.

18. Don’t fear God. I’m not talking about the Guy who tells you to murder your son or commit ethnic cleansing—you should definitely fear Him; He’s insane. I’m talking about the

God you don’t believe in but pretend to believe in because your congregants who don’t believe in Him pretend to believe in Him and need you to pretend to believe in Him so that they can continue to pretend to believe in Him and not have to admit that they don’t. That Guy: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who we pretend is more believable when we add Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachael to His list of followers. A dead God is a dead God no matter how PC the eulogy. But, chances are you do believe in something; maybe even Something; maybe even Some One. Don’t be afraid to talk about what you do believe in, and invite others to do the same.

19. Let them eat cake, but only after feeding them something more substantive. If you haven’t tried to plant at least one potentially transformative seed of wisdom in at least one congregant during a religious service, you are wasting their time. And yours.

20. Torah! Torah! Torah! Your first obligation is to Torah. This is like the flight attendant telling you to first place the oxygen mask over your mouth and nose before placing one over your child’s mouth and nose. You can’t help anyone if you’re dead. Learning Torah is how rabbis stay alive. Make time to study every day. If the sign on your office door reads “Rabbi’s Study,” add one that says, “Rabbi’s studying.”

Advice to Rabbis 1 of 5

Never Let Your Congregants See You In Shorts:

Tips for Rabbis that Our Teachers Never Told Us

I’ve been receiving questions from rabbis asking for advice. I’ve boiled my 20 plus years of congregational experience into this collection of 50 ideas. They are offered here in sets of ten, and in no particular order. I offer them simply to respond to my questioners. If you like what I say, please pass them on.

1. Numbers matter. Attendance at Shabbat services is how you know whether or not you’re offering something people want. If numbers are low, don’t survey the congregation to find out what they want: what they want is not to attend services. Instead, offer what you want. If no one comes, find another job.

2. Shrink your shul. If your sanctuary is so big that you usually play to a largely empty room (religion is play, theater, though all too often boring play and poorly produced theater), install folding walls to limit seating and give attendees and yourself the sense that the shul is full.

3. Talk about what matters. What matters is how to make sense out of the senseless, impose meaning on the meaningless, and navigate the madness, joy, and tragedy of life. The problem is you never learned how to do any of this in rabbinical school. The assumption there was that Judaism matters to Jews, or, if it doesn’t, you can make it matter. It doesn’t and you can’t. Talk about what matters, and if you can bring a little yiddishkeit into the conversation, so much the better.

4. Never ever call out a page number. You didn’t spend five years (or more) in rabbinical school to tell people what page to turn to in the siddur. If your siddur is so thick that you aren’t going to read every page, make it thinner. If you want to call out numbers, work at a Bingo parlor.

5. Forget answers; ask questions. People don’t come to you to learn what to do; they come to have you excuse what they are already doing. If you won’t do that, they’ll find a rabbi who will. Don’t be that rabbi. Be the rabbi who helps them question what they are doing, and explore how they might do it differently.

6. Never eat at Oneg. Most people won’t bother to make an appointment to talk with you in your office. Most people will grab you during Oneg Shabbat and expect you to answer the most pressing question in their universe. You have to answer, but doing so with a mouth full of bagel is nasty.

7. Always drink at Oneg. Water works as well as coffee: you aren’t carrying the cup because you’re thirsty; it’s a prop. When people ask you to answer the most pressing question in their universe, nod thoughtfully, and take a slow sip of whatever it is you are carrying. This will provide you with the seconds you need to come up with the right answer.

8. The right answer is always the same: “What makes you ask that, [insert congregant’s name here]?” While it appears that the questioner is looking for an answer, what she really wants is an opportunity to connect with you, and that means she wants to talk rather than listen. Of course if the congregant is a “he” rather than a “she” he does want an answer, just not yours. No matter what you say he isn’t really listening. If you sip your drink slowly enough, he will forget his question and move on.

9. Try not to act like a 12–year–old. Congregations hire rabbis who can “relate to the kids,” but they don’t really know what that means. After all, “the kids” are their kids and they can’t relate to them, so why expect that you can do better? What kids want is someone to help them find the wisdom they need to get through middle–school with the least amount of embarrassment and brutality. Sadly for them, you were probably bullied in middle–school, and have no idea what to tell them. Sadly for you, talking to them about this makes you relive the horror of middle–school. Try and maintain your adulthood. If it helps, pretend you’re Yoda talking to Luke Skywalker.

10. Refer, refer, and refer again. When congregants come for advice regarding their collapsing marriage (for example), they don’t want to hear about Sarah and Abraham sticking it out for a lifetime despite his pimping her out to Pharaoh, her attempted murder of Hagar and Ishmael, and his aborted homicide of Isaac. They don’t want to hear anything Jewish at all. They want marriage counseling; they just don’t want to pay a marriage counselor to get it. Listen attentively, nod compassionately, and then refer them to a professional. This goes for every counseling situation: if you aren’t licensed to give advice on a topic, keep your opinions to yourself. After all you wouldn’t want a therapist to rule on whether or not sheep’s intestines are kosher, would you?