You might say that it is in his DNA.
Consider Rabbi Elan Babchuck. He is the founding director of Glean Network, an incubator for faith-rooted innovation; the executive vice president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL); fellow with the Faith & Media initiative advocating for improved representation of faith in media; and a nationally recognized commentator on religion, technology and the evolving needs of communities today. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic and Psychology Today. He is also a regular guest at the Pentagon, where he consults with military leaders, in connection with CLAL’s work with the military.
In 1837, there was a devastating earthquake in northern Israel that caused major damage to the holy city of Tiberias. Rabbi Babchuck’s great-great-great-grandfather was a rabbi in Tiberias at the time, and he had to rebuild a community that had quite literally been leveled.
That experience found its way into Elan’s family story, and it became his own job description.
Because that is what Rabbi Babchuck does now: He teaches us how to live Jewishly in the midst of earthquakes.
Over the past few years, there have been several: COVID-19, October 7, rising antisemitism, the military and intellectual assaults on Israel, challenges to Jewish institutions.
The ground is shifting beneath our Jewish feet.
First, there is a rabbinic earthquake. The rabbinic population is aging. More than that: A large number of people are choosing the rabbinate as a second or even third career. A new study from Atra, on the current state of the rabbinate, shows that younger rabbis are increasingly not choosing pulpits. They are choosing chaplaincy, nonprofits, startups, federations, JCCs, schools, online communities and roles that did not exist a generation ago.
And, more than that: People are doing rabbinic work without traditional rabbinical education and traditional ordination. That troubles me; there are bodies of knowledge that matter.
But it also tells us something: Institutions have not delivered enough perceived value to sustain the old model. When you don’t deliver value consistently, budgets collapse, salaries shrink, and the market adapts in ways that may not be ideal.
So, who, or what, is a rabbi?
Rabbi Babchuck puts it this way: “Rabbi” is a relationship term. It literally means “my teacher.” Just as you cannot be a doctor without patients, you cannot be a rabbi without students. Someone has to point to you and say: “That’s my teacher.” Here is how he puts it: “If you are not teaching Torah, learning Torah, offering pastoral presence, then ‘rabbi’ is just ink on a business card.”
Second, the earthquake in synagogue funding.
How do most synagogues make their budgets? Through dues.
For years, though, many synagogues have moved to a different model. They are abolishing dues and moving to voluntary contributions.
Rabbi Babchuck endorses and promotes that idea.
But why?
When people pay dues, they are paying up-front for a year of service.
But that is not the way we live now. Today, we live in a subscription world. People can cancel anything with a click. They are trained—by Netflix and Peloton and every app in their pocket — to evaluate value continually.
If synagogues moved to voluntary contributions, they would have to ask, every month: Are we elevating dignity, joy, belonging? Are we helping people live better lives? Are we building a community that feels worth supporting?
Yes – gulp. Especially when there are buildings to be maintained and salaries to be paid.
It means we stop relying on inertia. We stop telling ourselves, “Where else will they go?” Because the answer is: nowhere. Or elsewhere. Or online. Or out.
Now let’s name the shadow side. If the synagogue becomes a marketplace, rabbis will burn out even faster — right?
Not necessarily. Because the answer is not “do more.” The answer is “do what matters.”
Which brings us to our third earthquake: AI.
Rabbi Babchuck asks: Is it OK for rabbis to use ChatGPT to research or write sermons?
There are ethical questions, yes — environmental impact, intellectual honesty, the temptation to outsource not only tasks but thought itself. And we are probably overreacting both in our embrace and our fear.
But the deeper issue is burnout. Rabbis perform many tasks that are not, in fact, their sacred superpowers. If AI can take some of that load — administrative language, drafts, summaries, organizing materials — then maybe rabbis can do more of the work that only a human being can do: listen, teach, guide, comfort, bless.
Which is why Rabbi Babchuck answers the AI question with another question: If you use AI as your helper, what will you do with the time you save?
Which brings us to the fourth earthquake — about religion in America, in general.
Is American religion dying?
No, Rabbi Babchuck says.
Maybe what’s dying is our old vocabulary. Maybe what’s fading is the assumption that authority only counts if it comes through traditional pipelines.
So, what rabbi do we need right now?
We need the rabbi who can rebuild after these earthquakes, not reenact the past. The rabbi who refuses the captive-audience mentality and insists on earned relationship. The rabbi who can experiment without losing reverence. The rabbi who uses tools wisely so the human work can remain human.
A Hasidic story tells of a rabbi walking at night who meets a watchman and asks, “Who do you work for?” The watchman answers, then asks the rabbi the same question. The rabbi says, “I’m not always sure — but walk with me and keep asking me.”
That’s the job description.
And not just for rabbis. For communities. For all of us.
Because in this moment — when the world feels brittle, when institutions feel strained, when burnout feels normal — we do not need nostalgia. We need purpose.
So: Who do you work for?
TRANSCRIPT:
MARTINI JUDAISM: Being a Rabbi in the Midst of an Earthquake
Guest: Rabbi Elan Babchuck
Host: Rabbi Jeff Salkin
—
RABBI JEFF SALKIN: Imagine the following scene, which, come to think of it, is very easy to imagine. It’s around nine o’clock at night, and the synagogue is dark, except for the glow of a laptop in the rabbi’s study. The rabbi is looking at a mental pile of sermons half written, and on the screen, emails unanswered. There’s a family that has experienced a loss—they’re expecting a phone call. And then the president of the synagogue, of course, wants just 10 minutes, which mathematically speaking, is always 40 minutes. And somewhere between the draft of the sermon and the adult ed lecture that needs preparation and the response to the email from the congregant in crisis, the rabbi quietly wonders: how long can I do this?
And into that very real exhaustion walks Rabbi Elan Babchuck. Now you might know him, or you may not. He had his 15 minutes of fame, which I hope will stretch into much more than that, several months ago, right around the High Holy Days. There was an essay that he wrote in The Washington Post that really grabbed me, and it should be required reading for anyone who might self-diagnose as rabbi-dependent. The piece is called “This Help for Rabbis Might Sound Unseemly, But It Could Save Them.”
It’s not just because I’m a rabbi and Elan is a rabbi, but we’re going to talk about rabbis. From Religion News Service, this is Martini Judaism, for those who want to be shaken and stirred. I’m Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
Rabbi Elan Babchuck is a rabbi, a writer, an entrepreneur, and I have to say he’s really one of the most compelling voices who has been reimagining what spiritual leadership can look like in the 21st century. He is the founding director of Glean Network, which is an incubator for faith-rooted innovation. He is the Executive Vice President of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership—that’s CLAL. He’s a fellow with the Faith and Media Initiative, and he advocates for improved representation of faith in media. Along with his partners, he’s a nationally recognized commentator on religion, technology, and the evolving needs of communities today.
You might have seen his work, yes, in The Washington Post, but also in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today. He’s delivered talks for TEDx and the Chautauqua Institution. He’s also, by the way, regularly invited to give talks at the Pentagon in connection with CLAL’s work with the military.
We are going through an unbelievable rise of stress and pressure in the world in general, and in the Jewish world in particular. There’s rising antisemitism—more than I’ve ever seen in my life. Political polarization, unprecedented technological disruption, and clergy across the board are burnt out. And so Rabbi Babchuck is asking some really big questions about what it means for us to exhibit resilience and to demonstrate justice and how to build thriving communities. And so we’re really glad to have him today.
It’s always great to have colleagues joining me on Martini Judaism, but it’s even better when they are people that I’ve only recently discovered and who I want to know everything about, because even at this late stage of my career, I’m a learner. I’m a lifelong learner. I expect to be learning for the rest of my life. And you know, my father, of blessed memory, was 98 when he died, so that means I have, if I’m lucky—as we say in Yiddish, *kein ayin hara*, not wanting to jinx this—I might have 27 years left to learn. And since Rabbi Babchuck is younger than I am, that means that for the next 27 years I expect to be learning from him.
So Rabbi Babchuck, it’s great to have you here. Welcome.
RABBI ELAN BABCHUCK: Thank you so much. Gosh, that was the greatest introduction that I’ve ever gotten, and I hope—probably not by the time this goes live, but I hope someday—to actually live up to even half of what you just described about me. What a gift. I really am truly humbled to be here and so grateful for the opportunity to be in conversation about—look, these are big topics. These are the issues of the day, and I’m really grateful to be in conversation about them.
SALKIN: So Elan, every other day I have a conversation with a retired colleague, and I’m retired from the full-time congregational rabbinate, though I still am a writer, podcaster. I have my own educational startup that I share with Sandra Lilienthal—she’ll be our guest very soon—Wisdom Without Walls, an online salon for Jewish ideas. So I’m sort of kind of retired. But when I speak to my friends and my colleagues who are retired, we always breathe a blessing at the end, and we say, “Thank God we’re retired,” because this is really, really hard work. And it’s my sense—correct me if I’m wrong—that it’s gotten harder in the last several years, after October 7th, after COVID, and it’s not going to get any easier.
So let me ask you a question. There are many expectations that communities place on rabbis. In your opinion, what are the expectations that you think are the most unsustainable?
BABCHUCK: To do things exactly the way that our rabbinic predecessors did them. That’s the most complicated, heavy expectation that’s put on rabbis today. And look, so much of this is generational, and we’ll talk more about the different studies that have come out recently and some of the trends we’re seeing in the quote-unquote rabbinic pipeline—which, by the way, we should never be talking about spiritual leaders like we talk about oil. We just shouldn’t. You want to talk about objectifying people and the work that they do? Great. Let’s find another metaphor other than drilling for oil in Oklahoma.
When I think about my own family, I think so much of this is generational. The hardest thing we can do, the worst thing we can do, the heaviest lift that we can ask of new rabbis, early career rabbis, even mid-career, is to do exactly what their predecessors did, because generationally, it’s just not going to be something that gets them out of bed in the morning. It’s not the reason why they became a rabbi. It’s not the reason why they went to five years of rabbinical school, and it’s not the reason they wanted to serve, whether it’s in communities or somewhere else.
I think about my own ancestry. I come from four generations of Chief Sephardic rabbis from Tiberias, from Tiberias, Northern Israel. In fact, the second in that line passed away in the Galilean earthquake, 1837.
SALKIN: I’m so sorry.
BABCHUCK: Thank you. And there’s an amazing story about reinvention when you’re talking about an entire community that was literally brought down to rubble. My great-great-grandfather was left to rebuild it, and he was three years old, so he had to go through a whole process of growing up. And he was raised by an Ashkenazi family in Jerusalem. When he was 18, he went back. And you know what happened? The people there were so excited just to have the opportunity to put brick and mortar together and build something sustainable that they never said, “Hey, do things the way your father once did them.” They said, “Just build something.”
And I think that’s what young people want to do right now.
SALKIN: Do we have writings and texts from your ancestor about what that was like?
BABCHUCK: Only through my grandmother, of blessed memory. She passed away at 102, and she was the tenth, by the way—they were Kohanim also—she was the tenth in a line of ten daughters and no sons born to the fourth of that lineage. So the Kohanim ended, the priestly lineage ended. The rabbinate ended with her. She was the last daughter that they had. They finally said, “Okay, God, we get it. It’s not going to continue.”
But you know what she did? She shadowed her father every single day at work, and she watched the way that he served as a rabbi in the community, whether he was raising money to make sure that everyone had food and had care, or he was building and serving inside of the synagogue in Tiberias—which, by the way, is one of the only synagogues that has two sanctuaries, one for Ashkenazim, one for Sephardim, as it should be forever up there. One of them has a white dome, one has a blue dome. It’s one of the most beautiful testaments to my own lineage, adopted lineage, because the adopted parents after the earthquake were Ashkenazim, but they raised my great-grandfather in Sephardic tradition. So he built that synagogue as a testament to them.
Anyway, to get to my grandmother, and I think this really does apply to the world as it is today. She said, “Okay, I actually have a barrier. I can’t be a rabbi the way my dad’s a rabbi, but I want to serve.” So she reinvented herself, reinvented the rabbinate in real time, became a social worker, and then went on to build community and serve in pastoral roles for her entire life. She didn’t have to do things the way that her predecessor did them, the way that her father did them. What a gift.
And I think that’s what emerging rabbis, early career rabbis really want. That’s why they’re drawn to the concept of an entrepreneurial rabbinate. Even if they don’t want to start a business, they’re drawn to that concept because the idea of reinventing these ancient technologies that have been given to us is so appealing. It’s in the culture right now, and people are really drawn to it.
SALKIN: I want to jump on this idea of the entrepreneurial rabbinate, entrepreneurial Judaism, and you often write about that. We’re going to get back to the rabbinic role, but let’s just bring this in for a moment here. What does that look like in a spiritual context, and how do you teach that spirit of entrepreneurship to rabbinical students and to community leaders?
BABCHUCK: The first response to that is: carefully. That’s how you teach it. There is a growing sentiment of anti-capitalism in many of the seminaries that I’ve taught at over the last five, six, seven years. At CLAL, we created a class called Leading Through Innovation, and it was kind of this little 16-week incubator. We taught it at 14 different rabbinical schools over the course of five years. And what we found is that capitalistic concepts—like if there was a word that appeared in the last episode of Shark Tank, you’re going to get pushback from the students if you reuse that concept in class on Thursday morning.
So the first thing I’ll say is you’ve got to be really careful, because the truth is that entrepreneurship, or even the term innovation, those are concepts that are very much in the modern parlance connected to capitalism, even rooted in capitalistic ideals. And that rubs folks the wrong way for great reason. So carefully is the first answer.
But the second, and this is really simple, is: let’s say we’re talking about a class of rabbinical students—pick the seminary, AJR New York, JTS—your average age, even if you get some second-career folks, your average age is probably going to be 25, 30, 35 tops, right? But it’s likely going to be 25 or so. Those students grew up in a culture, probably America, where entrepreneurship was the norm. It was celebrated. Nobody owns a small business anymore. Everybody is an entrepreneur. The concept of owning a small business is so anathema in our modern culture because the term entrepreneurship became so overused it just ended up in every corner of our culture. So there’s both familiarity with it and a jadedness about it.
So the other thing I’ll say is I teach the tools and the mindsets and the modes of service. And I don’t care if you call them innovation or entrepreneurship or customers or even talk about money—it’s complicated. I want to know: what’s your approach to serve people, to bring them Jewish wisdom, Jewish experience, and Jewish practice in a way that’s accessible and meaningful and transformative? And frankly, that’s the language that rabbis have probably been using for a couple thousand years.
SALKIN: I think you’re absolutely right. And before we get into this current study that has been done about the state of the rabbinate—and I agree with you, the word pipeline is not a great metaphor—but we are hearing increasingly of younger rabbis who are not choosing pulpits, who are not choosing congregations. They’re going into startups, they’re going into chaplaincy, they’re going into nonprofits. So one of the things I’ve always admired about CLAL is that it’s always a little bit forward. It’s always a little bit on the cutting edge. What does this cutting edge, this shift, tell us about what the next era of religious leadership is going to look like?
BABCHUCK: If we do things right—and when I say we, I mean everybody in this ecosystem, the deans of the seminaries, the next generation of students, all of the funders that are reading the studies and salivating over the possibilities and gathering in their little gatherings—if we do this really right, what’s it going to look like? Really similar to what the previous generation looks like. If we do it right, the only difference being the context.
You can work in a nonprofit, and if you’re not teaching Torah and learning Torah as a rabbi, eventually you’ll be reminded of the fact that “rabbi” is a possessive term. Meaning to say, if there’s not someone out there saying, “That’s my teacher, rabbi, my teacher,” well, then you might just have a title and a business card.
SALKIN: Exactly right. You could be a police person, a policeman, without people being policed.
BABCHUCK: That’s right. Then what are you? You’re a crossing guard, you know, or whatever it is.
SALKIN: Can’t be a doctor without patients.
BABCHUCK: Exactly right. Then you’re a retired doctor. Look, I left the pulpit 10 years ago. I served in the pulpit for four years, an amazing community. In fact, my wife and kids and I, we continue to be members, active members, of that community. We love it beyond imagination. And I served there for four years, and it was great. And then I knew I was ready to go.
There’s not a day goes by that I don’t learn some kind of Torah. There’s not a week goes by that I don’t give some kind of teaching. And there’s not a month that goes by where I’m not officiating some kind of life cycle, spending time with people in transitional moments, visiting people in hospitals. Some of that I seek out on my own. Some of that is because of the work that I do at CLAL and the communities that we build there.
So what I mean to say is: what’s it going to look like if we really stick the landing? Well, we’re still going to be teaching Torah. We’re still going to be doing pastoral counseling, God willing. We should be visiting people in the hospital, and we should be celebrating with them in good times too. And if we’re not continually learning—and I mean capital-T Torah and lowercase-t Torah, the most expansive definition of how you might think of what Torah is—if we’re not doing those things the way we describe Eleazar ben Arach as an ever-flowing stream, if we’re not part of that stream of Torah learning, well, then we might just be out of the rabbinate.
But I think you can be very much centered in that world. You can be contributing to the ever-flowing stream, the ever-increasing bounty of Torah in this world, whether you’re in the pulpit, at a nonprofit, serving at a Hillel, or in other kinds of organizations. There are for-profit organizations that I’ve helped people start where they are absolutely, without a doubt, serving as rabbis.
SALKIN: You’ve said, and I agree with you, that religious institutions need to become more experimental. We’ve just talked about being an entrepreneur. Let’s talk about experimentation. What would be one bold experiment that you’d love to see a synagogue try?
BABCHUCK: I’m going to tell you—this is going to be the most boring answer.
SALKIN: Go ahead.
BABCHUCK: In fact, 15 years ago, I was invited to the house of a very, very well-known, brilliant philanthropist, one of the most well-known philanthropists in the country. He was looking for younger board members to join in his grant-making philanthropic endeavors. And he said, “Oh, here’s a guy who’s getting an MBA.” I wasn’t even at a rabbinical school yet. Anyway, I went to his house, and we had an interesting conversation. He sort of peppered me with questions. He said, “What would you do to change the landscape of Jewish life?”
And I said, “I’d get rid of dues. I would encourage every synagogue to just get rid of dues.”
He said, “That’s your most innovative response? That’s what you would change?” This is a guy who has created programs that have impacted tens of thousands of Jews over generations. Of course, I didn’t get asked to be a trustee and join his board.
But what I will tell you is that when I arrived—my MBA thesis was actually about this specific concept. I studied everything from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the minyan I grew up in, to big communities and small communities all around the country, Jewish and otherwise. And the first thing I did when I got to that big, Conservative suburban synagogue that was aging in place—where my wife and I were the only member units under the age of 35 out of a synagogue of 850 families, we were going to fall off a demographic cliff—and the first thing I did was convince that board to let us experiment with voluntary contributions. And that was 2012.
So to answer this question in 2026 and give you the same answer I would have given 15 years ago sounds ridiculous for the guy who does innovation and entrepreneurship and blah blah. But what I can tell you is I’ve counseled at least 50 synagogues around the country, big, small, everything in between, and given them the playbook for how we launched voluntary contributions and the meaningful changes that it made in the culture of the community. And not one of them has called me up and said, “You led us down the wrong path.”
Here’s why. It’s a really simple thing. The calculus is as follows: we live in a world where you can cancel your subscription to anything on a moment’s notice, and you’ll get the prorated money back for whatever you paid that month. We operate institutions where the expectation is you will pay in a lump sum for an entire year’s worth of quote-unquote services, and there is zero expectation that the synagogue will actually produce value for you on a monthly basis, let alone a daily basis.
When you move to voluntary contributions, your job as a synagogue is to make sure that you are providing value to every one of your members on a consistent basis. It puts the onus on you, the service provider. Again, I’m using business language, I apologize, rooted in capitalism. But actually, given that I’m talking about switching to more of a socialist model where we’re not charging dues, it puts the onus on the institution to produce value on a regular basis.
And every service that we subscribe to, whether it’s Netflix or Peloton or you name it, if they’re not providing value on a consistent basis, and you’re a savvy consumer, you’re going to cancel that membership, or at the very least pause it.
SALKIN: This is really amazing. How does this challenge and motivate rabbis to do better?
BABCHUCK: Have you ever gone to a kosher restaurant recently?
SALKIN: Sure.
BABCHUCK: How was the service? Be honest.
SALKIN: Traditionally, there’s a deep tradition—I don’t know if it’s a Sephardic tradition or an Ashkenazic tradition—but the service can only be described as surly.
BABCHUCK: That’s it. I’m vegetarian, so I’m not going to prime steakhouse, but I’m going to pay $47 for an eight-ounce filet, and you’re going to look at me like you’re doing me a favor for allowing me to sit in your restaurant.
SALKIN: That’s correct.
BABCHUCK: Like, we have a captive audience problem. And look, I live in Rhode Island, Providence, Rhode Island. When people would come to the synagogue and not have a good experience, or they wouldn’t re-up their membership, I would ask the executive director, my colleagues, “Hey, why don’t we do exit interviews? Why don’t we call them up and say, ‘Listen, I just want you to know I get it. Your kids just had their Bat Mitzvah, and you’re saving up for college. I get it. But I just want you to know we had a great run, and I love your family and will always be here for you, even if you’re not a member. Just know that we had some beautiful moments.’”
And now, of course, we never have that conversation because they feel ashamed, so they don’t answer the phone, or maybe they’re mad and they don’t want to have this sit. But we don’t do the exit interview. Because we feel betrayed. We feel betrayed.
So then what happens here in Rhode Island? The response tends to be, “Well, what are they going to do? Go to some other big Conservative synagogue in Rhode Island?” Guess what? It doesn’t exist. So we have this captive audience mentality. “But we’re the greatest Conservative synagogue in all of Rhode Island. Where else are they going to go?”
You know where else they’re going to go? Nowhere. Nowhere. Or they’ll go to the Reform synagogue, or they’ll drive to Connecticut, or they’ll go to the Park Avenue Synagogue services on the High Holidays on Zoom, or they’ll just join a Unitarian Universalist chapel. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but we don’t have them as a captive audience.
The notion that in the Jewish world we have a captive audience—we have to get rid of that. And the only way to do that is get out of the mindset of, “Well, what else are they going to do?” Because the answer is, they’re going to pause their membership, or they’re going to quit and stop answering the phone. Which means that we need to be providing value on a regular—now, I don’t mean we have to entertain them. We’re not in the entertainment industry. I don’t mean we have to visit their house every Friday afternoon. Again, you opened up with that beautiful scene of the rabbi in her office at 7 pm with eight phone calls to go. And we don’t need to burn out in pursuing that. But we do need to make sure that we’re actually elevating the dignity, the joy, the experience, the sense of belonging among every single person on a more consistent basis than we currently do.
SALKIN: So since we’re talking about rabbis and burnout, let’s shift, because the conversation makes me think of the study that was done by ATRA, the Center for Rabbinic Innovation: “From Calling to Career: Mapping the Current State and Future of Rabbinic Leadership.” You’ve read it, or you’ve skimmed it?
BABCHUCK: Yeah.
SALKIN: First thoughts.
BABCHUCK: Look, it’s an organization called the Center for Rabbinic Innovation. The title ATRA, of course, means we’re talking next generation, next generation, next generation. So look, when that’s your title and that’s your reason for being, you’re not going to produce a study—I don’t care how many Ross Consulting firms you hire—the results of your study are not going to say you should keep things exactly as they are. It’s just—it’s not.
So my first instinct was, I have a sense that when I read this, it will say, “We have to change many, many, many things about the Jewish world in order to make for a more robust rabbinate.” And that’s true. I don’t disagree with those conclusions, to be clear. But I’m also suspicious of any study that comes from an organization where the results happen to advance exactly what the organization is setting out to prove and do in the world.
SALKIN: What’s amazing to me is the list of things that it discovered, not all of which we would have the time or the interest or energy to discuss today. But something that struck me is the aging nature of the rabbinate—that only about 6% of rabbis are under 35, 26% are over 65. And I don’t know if that means 26% of working rabbis are over 65—there’s going to be a coming wave of retirements. But the most interesting thing, and I think this is really shifting how things are playing out, is that many rabbis are now being ordained in their mid-30s, and 66%—a majority, a clear majority—are second-career people. What is that saying to us, and what does that mean to us?
BABCHUCK: First thing, I think that’s great. I think that is great news, that they’re going out having some other life experience. You know, I have a good friend who’s a lawyer, and he went to law school right after undergrad, and I said, “Oh my gosh, that’s so exciting, Dave, what are you going to do? What kind of lawyer do you want to be?” He goes, “Oh, I don’t know. And that’s why I’m going to law school, because I don’t know what I want to do with my life.” So the answer was, go to law school, spend a few hundred thousand dollars on tuition, and then figure out if you want to be a lawyer.
Now, I happen to think that for a fair number of folks, maybe a generation ago, maybe even 20 years ago, they might have looked at the rabbinate as that kind of path. “Well, I get to go to rabbinical school for five years, study Torah, sip coffee at cafes in Jerusalem, and then go into a job that’s going to pay much better than any other job that I would otherwise be eligible for.” Now, I’m not saying that was their mentality—you don’t go into the rabbinate for the money. That should be stated pretty clearly. But it was sort of the path of least resistance to a job of great sustainability. That’s what it was for a previous generation of rabbis.
Many of those people, there is no way they are getting a six-figure salary in the year 2000 right out of school. It’s not happening. So the market corrected, as it does. There were probably too many rabbis. Eventually, with so many rabbis, rabbinical schools started changing, maybe admissions practices and so on. And we just had too many, and there weren’t yet enough alternative paths for rabbis in the world. It was really kind of pulpit, Hillel, or bust. Maybe some small percentage went to schools, some went into fundraising, some worked in higher education. But really a small, small, small percentage, and there just weren’t enough jobs.
Thankfully, thankfully, now we have—you know, every major Federation in the country has a rabbi in residence. JCCs are hiring rabbis. Of course, hospital chaplains. We have kind of an explosion of alternative paths. So that’s the first thing I want to say, is that’s actually really good, that we’re diversifying the ways that people rabbi in the world, and you’re one of the leaders out there, reimagining exactly what that means, right? Podcast host, thought leader, author, founder of a new organization, public intellectual. Those are job titles that rabbis didn’t always have. Those are new concepts.
I think that’s really great for people to rabbi differently in the public square, to different audiences that might otherwise not get exposed to Jewish wisdom in a way that can elevate their life. So great. Check. I’m really excited that ATRA found that out and came to that conclusion.
The second-career thing is also really exciting, because it means you have rabbis who can be bi-vocational. “Oh, you were a real estate agent. Now you’re a rabbi. Great. Go be a part-time hospital chaplain and supplement your income by selling real estate on the side.”
SALKIN: It’s so interesting you say this. I wrote a book years ago called *Being God’s Partner: How to Find the Hidden Link Between Spirituality and Your Work*. And I played a spiritual and intellectual game with myself. The book, by the way, is about 30 years old, and I tried to figure out, how do you bring Jewish values into your work? And I spoke to a rabbi who left the rabbinate and went into real estate, becoming a real estate agent. And I asked him, “How has being a rabbi influenced what you do?”
And he said, “It’s so interesting. I’m still a rabbi.” He said, “Because I’m helping people find their dreams. I’m helping people create a place that will tell their story.”
And I think that kind of expansive look at what Judaism is—first of all, it’s always what CLAL has been about, but we’re going to need more of that in the coming years.
BABCHUCK: Much, much more. Bi-vocational rabbis also solves the quote-unquote pipeline problem. It also solves a workforce development issue, because right now, there’s probably not enough funding in every Jewish community around to create 10 new rabbinic jobs. But with AJR New York having its biggest graduating class ever, with new pluralistic rabbinical seminaries opening up, and this mail-in seminary doing their thing and that—we’ve got all these rabbinical schools popping up that are lowering the bar of entry. More people are going to come out calling themselves rabbi. And right now, there aren’t going to be enough jobs for all those folks. So a bi-vocational rabbinate is an incredible opportunity.
SALKIN: Which, by the way, just before we take the break, just to bring us back to history, was always the way it was until the late Middle Ages.
BABCHUCK: Right. Maimonides was a doctor. He was a physician. We forget about that because, yeah, he wrote Mishneh Torah. He was probably the most well-known rabbi of all the rabbis. He was a physician.
SALKIN: Do you think it’s easy to say in Arabic, “I am sorry, but we’re not accepting your insurance”?
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SALKIN: And we’re back. I’m Rabbi Jeff Salkin. This is Martini Judaism, for those who want to be shaken and stirred. And Rabbi Elan Babchuck is shaking and stirring us today, and it’s been a wild ride. We’re talking about the rabbinate. We’re going to talk about faith, media, culture.
All right, very quick question, very complicated issue. Let me just put this out there. When I did my introduction to you, I used my assistant to put together stuff about you, and then I rewrote it. My assistant’s name is Chat. Her last name is GPT. And I’m not alone. Everyone’s using AI for everything in some very weird ways.
Okay, quick question. Was that bad?
BABCHUCK: I would ask, what did you do with the time you saved?
SALKIN: Ooh. Well, that’s a very important question. I made myself a cup of coffee. I should have gone out exercising. What did I do with the mental space that opened for me? Yeah, that’s a deeper question, isn’t it?
BABCHUCK: Look, is it bad? Is it good?
SALKIN: Teasing you.
BABCHUCK: Of course, yeah. But it is such an important question, too. There are ethical questions. How much water was used to produce the machine power that AI consumed? The ChatGPT consumed preparing that introduction. How much electricity? There are bigger questions.
SALKIN: Now I really—no, I really—yeah. Look, did AI use—
BABCHUCK: Now I know that ChatGPT has a partnership with The Atlantic. They don’t have one with The Times, but I bet ChatGPT read that article somehow. So were there other ethical implications around copyright infringement? I bring up all these questions because it’s such a thorny issue. AI is also really ubiquitous right now. We’re probably over-correcting on its use, and we’re also probably over-correcting on our concerns about its use.
Colleges are still going to be colleges. High school students are still going to be high school students. Now, instead of CliffsNotes for Hamlet, they’ll get AI notes on Hamlet. But the people who aren’t going to read Hamlet are still not going to read Hamlet.
In the bigger picture of it, I like to look at it holistically. In this article, we originally titled it “AI Won’t Replace Your Rabbis, But It Might Save Them.” How will it save them? From a burnout perspective, there are so many things that our colleagues do every single day that a well-trained AI—not even agentic AI, not even one that’s meant to mimic human interactions, just inputting commands into ChatGPT and prompts—there are so many things one does on an everyday basis that could be outsourced to that.
It could be seating charts for the gala. It could be reminders about, “Hey, give me a review of the day’s events so that when I walk into this mixer, I won’t seem like I had my head in the sand all day.” Or, “Remind me about that text from Berakhot 13a in the Babylonian Talmud. I know it’s something this rabbi says something to that rabbi, but just remind me what happens in there.” Okay, now, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, before Schottenstein, you have to know Aramaic to get in there and remember what Berakhot 13a says. Fifteen years ago, you can read the English translation, get the synopsis. And now you get the answer in 10 seconds.
You’re probably going to forget it, because the less time you spend learning and immersing in it, the less likely it is to stick to your brain, which is also a long-term concern. But the argument I made was very simple: the things that you do that can be outsourced—unless they are a core part of your function, a core part of your rabbinic superpowers—maybe spend more time on the things that are going to have the kind of impact that you set out to have every day.
SALKIN: I think that’s beautiful. I think that’s absolutely essential.
Faith and Media Initiative. You’re currently a fellow with that, and that studies and advocates for fair representation of faith in media. This is a big issue of mine. Tell us more about this. How is it impacting what you do?
BABCHUCK: First of all, it’s an incredible organization. This Faith and Media Initiative was founded by a number of different foundations that came together, the Fetzer Institute, among others, the Radiant Foundation. And the gap that I think they identified very clearly—and again, going back to studies and what we can learn from them—go to the Faith and Media Initiative website, you’ll be able to find incredible information. “The Deforestation of Faith,” actually, is the name of their first study.
And what it demonstrated was something very simple: that if you are consuming any kind of traditional forms of media, and you are not exposed to positive faith representation, you probably might not even be exposed to any faith representation in that media stream. And if you are, it’s probably some form of a caricature of whatever that faith, you know. And that’s a way of the writers or the producers kind of using shorthand. “Oh, this person’s a conservative Christian. I’m going to do a shorthand version of that.” So you’re just going to get a caricature. “This person’s a Jewish person from the Bronx. You’re going to get a shorthand version of that,” which means they’re going to be relying on Woody Allen stereotypes to convey that the person is Jewish.
And I’ve picked on *Nobody Wants This*, even though I’m really glad that it’s out there. Find me a positive representation of a Jewish woman who doesn’t nag, who isn’t certain that they are the last generation and that Judaism is going by the wayside, who isn’t deeply disapproving of an interfaith relationship.
SALKIN: Have you seen *Long Story Short*?
BABCHUCK: Yes. Oh my God. Such a different story, right? Such a different story than *Nobody Wants This*.
SALKIN: So let me ask you a question about how the media portrays religion. Let me tell you a little something that I noticed 20 years ago. I watched every single program that took place in a hospital—*ER*, *Chicago Hope*. You got it, right? All of those shows, every one. And you know where I’m going with this. Do you know what you never, ever saw on those shows? A chaplain. Never. Which is so contrary to the experience of anybody who has spent any time in a hospital. Is this an allergy that we have in elite culture?
BABCHUCK: It is. I love the term “allergy” too. It really does feel like we’ve just decided that any kind of faith depiction has to either be a caricature or a throwaway kind of side character or a—let’s call it a plot device that advances a specific narrative. That’s correct.
You talk about hospital dramas. Have you seen *The Pit*?
SALKIN: I haven’t, and I really need to.
BABCHUCK: Oh my God. We should end this podcast. Just start watching season one, because season two is coming out soon. Look, Noah Wyle plays this Dr. Robbie. He’s Jewish. He has a—they say no atheists in foxholes. There’s a major catastrophe. I won’t spoil it. A major, major catastrophe. Everyone’s overwhelmed. They’re working beyond 24-hour shifts. And they finally sort of have a moment, and it’s such a traumatic experience for everybody. He breaks down in the hallway and whispers the Shema while he’s holding his Magen David necklace, his Star of David necklace. Says it under his breath. The moment passes and he moves on.
He doesn’t go become a rabbi. He doesn’t go to Chabad. He doesn’t decide, “I want to keep kosher.” It’s just he has a moment. His faith carries him through that moment, and we move on. It’s 15 seconds, but it tells you everything—a positive—about what Judaism can do and be, even for a largely, maybe secular person like this.
We don’t have those depictions. If you’re Jewish and it matters, it’s got to either be a funny plot point or something you feel guilty about because you don’t practice like your parents practice, or we have to project some kind of generational trauma onto them in order to make it feel authentically Jewish, because that’s how we’ve depicted Jews in the media.
This happens across every faith. I think there’s such an opportunity to change that narrative and flip that script. And the last thing I’ll tell you is we’re in the process of doing it now. I’m not a major Angel Studios guy, right? Angel Studios has had some of the most successful returns on investment of movie investments over the last 15 years. And they put out *Sound of Freedom*. They were involved in the David movie. Just now, there’s another movie coming out about Jesus, a cartoon. They also did that. I think it was called *The House of David*. Very successful show on Hulu, if I’m remembering correctly.
But they’re committed to putting positive representations of faith out there in the media. Not Pollyanna-ish, just positive, net-positive depictions and telling stories that others have shied away from. CNN now has Faith Fridays, where they do a whole segment. Dana Bash does a whole segment centered on some kind of faith practice out in the world. That’s exciting to me, to see those things happening.
SALKIN: The way that the media has not portrayed religious faith, the way that people of faith are not depicted on television, on Netflix, gives one the impression—and to some extent this is borne out by statistics, shocking, by the way—that American religion is dying. But in the article that I read that you wrote in The Atlantic, Elan, you really push back on this idea. So what signs of resilience or renaissance give you the most hope?
BABCHUCK: So I’m going to diagnose here. We have the same problem in the sociology of religion as we do in the conversation about the quote-unquote rabbinic pipeline. And that’s that we are using terminology and categories from 30 years ago to try to describe what’s emerging in the current moment.
Let me give you an example. I could probably list 10 people who I know personally and respect deeply, who call themselves rabbis who never went to a traditional rabbinical school or got rabbinical ordination, but what they do is very rabbinic. In fact, if you go down to South Florida, probably 30% of the synagogues in South Florida are served by rabbis who never got a traditional *smicha*.
SALKIN: I know. I moved from South Florida. And I got to tell you, maybe it’s because of my age and generation, this troubles me.
BABCHUCK: Me too.
SALKIN: No, because it troubles me in terms of what they don’t know.
BABCHUCK: One hundred percent. One hundred percent. I think that’s a market adjustment. That’s an example of disruptive innovation happening out in the world. Disruptive innovation is: we’re going to go downstream, make things cheaper, lower barriers of entry, and access customers who otherwise could not access the quote-unquote premium version of that good or service.
So if you’re—when I say 30% of the synagogues in South Florida, these are the ones that if they were still paying union salaries for rabbis who went to JTS or HUC, the synagogues would be out of business. So you have these other people call themselves rabbis or whatever they do. They say, “Oh, I’ll take half that salary.”
SALKIN: But I wonder to what extent the inability or lack of desire to pay living salaries, real salaries, diminishes the quality, not only of the rabbinate, but the quality of what participation and membership at a community should look like.
BABCHUCK: Oh, I agree 100%. I agree. This is what happens, right? This is the end result of maybe those institutions for a long chunk of time, assuming they had a captive audience, and not delivering value on a regular basis. When you don’t deliver value on an everyday basis, you have a tough time making the budget work.
SALKIN: One of the biggest takeaways as we move towards the end of this conversation—and we could go on forever, and we might have to have you back, because I love it. This has been so powerful for me. One of the biggest takeaways is the idea that younger people have shared with me, and people my kids’ age—my kids are in their 30s—which is the idea that you join a synagogue up front without having experienced anything of it beforehand. And this is counterintuitive, even in a capitalist system.
And for so many years, I have been fighting the idol of consumerism within American Jewish life, and now I’m wondering what it means to really be a consumer. In other words, I think the battle I’ve been fighting—and listen, it’s a 1970s battle—I have to now upgrade, in my own mind and soul, what it means to be part of a religious market economy at this particular moment in American history. I own that. My bad. Or it’s my growth spurt.
The second thing that you said that’s really powerful—and there are a lot of things that you said—but this one really sticks with me: that when there are no dues, and when the synagogue becomes, as it were, *k’ilu*, as it were, like Netflix or any other subscription service, and you know that there is no financial commitment or emotional commitment guaranteed beyond the 30th day of this month, by definition, that means you have to work harder.
It’s exactly right. It’s a weird way of understanding the notion of *kinnat sofrim*, of the jealousy amongst scribes, that if you are a rabbi and there’s another school that opens near you, you have to work harder. You have to teach better. And why do we absent religious institutions from a basic law of American capitalism?
I can leave my house right now in Montclair, New Jersey. In fact, I will at a certain point. I can walk into town, Elan. I’m going to pass four coffee places within two blocks. That includes Starbucks, which, by the way, is the McDonald’s of caffeine. And they’re all doing their own thing, but they’re trying to do it better. And so that cliché of a rising tide lifts all ships. What you’re saying is that the competitiveness of the religious marketplace with everything else in our lives can only make religion better.
BABCHUCK: Absolutely. Look, you wake up in the morning. You’re a synagogue rabbi. You want to get people out Saturday morning. It used to be, “Well, now I’m worried, because all the parents are sending their kids to soccer practice on Saturday morning.” You’re not competing with just soccer practice. You’re competing with the yoga studio, the Peloton app, Netflix. You’re competing with anything that puts butts in someone else’s seats. Anything that gets people spending their time and their energy and making connections somewhere else.
Look, I don’t like to think of a competitive marketplace as a zero-sum game, but—
SALKIN: It is, because we have a limited amount of time and resources.
BABCHUCK: And I believe what we have transcends those limitations.
SALKIN: I agree with you.
BABCHUCK: Judaism can transcend every single one of those limitations if we let it, if we have the right vehicles that allow us to deliver it to people in the right ways, and if we actually believe.
The last thing I’ll say about this is: we’re talking about the quote-unquote rabbinate. Notice that we’re not talking about Chabad rabbis.
SALKIN: No, we are not.
BABCHUCK: We’re talking about the liberal seminaries, and that’s who ATRA could study, because it’s not like 770 is giving them access to all the Chabad databases, right? And that’s fine. But we’re not talking about Chabad. That’s like, “Hey, let’s talk about the NBA, but we’re not going to talk about the Lakers or the Celtics or the Oklahoma City Thunder for this year.”
SALKIN: Let’s talk about rock music, but not talk about the Dead or Phish, right?
BABCHUCK: Yeah, and who are the Beatles anyway?
We have to be having this conversation in progressive, liberal, whatever, non-Orthodox circles, Modern Orthodox circles. We have to be having the conversation to ask the following question: when we talk about a zero-sum game or something can transcend, find me a rabbi that came out of a non-Haredi, non-Chabad seminary rabbinical school, and ask them, “Is your fate in *Olam Haba* tied to the experiences of the person that you’re going to meet later today?”
SALKIN: Is your fate in the World to Come, in heaven, in the afterlife, tied to that?
BABCHUCK: Tied to that? Is it tied to whether or not they do *mitzvot*, whatever you mean by good deeds, commandments, wrapping tefillin, giving tzedakah? Do you actually believe that your fate is intertwined with that person’s fate?
Ask somebody, you know, Conservative rabbi, Reconstructionist rabbi, and I tell you, to a person, maybe they will say it in theory, but I’m not sure that that is the framework that they are taught in rabbinical school. I’m not sure that’s the theology, and I’m not sure it’s the relational practice, the relational ideology. You can read Ron Wolfson’s book *Relational Judaism* a thousand times, and I’m not sure you believe your fate is intertwined with theirs.
Find me a Chabad rabbi. I don’t care if they’re in Omaha or Fiji, and I will tell you their answer is going to be yes.
SALKIN: I’m going to tell you a story as we end. One of my favorite Hasidic stories about Reb Naftali of Ropshitz, my favorite Hasidic rebbe. Once in the middle of the night, he could not sleep, and he took a walk in a neighboring town. And in the darkness, he started walking with another man, and he asked the man, “Who do you work for?”
The man said, “I work for the village. I’m the night watchman. I make sure that people are safe.”
And then the man turns to the rabbi and says, “And who do you work for?”
The rabbi says to him, “I’m not always sure, but come work for me, and I’ll double your pay.”
He said, “What do I have to do?”
He said, “I want you to walk with me. And from time to time, I want you to ask me, ‘Who do you work for?’”
We all work for God.
And friends, as we come to the end of this, I want to share something with you. Rabbi Elan Babchuck, our friend, and I were both rabbis. We both come from the general world of non-Orthodox Judaism. But I’m slapping a sticker on this podcast, because if you are a Christian, a Muslim, a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints, Hindu, Buddhist, whatever it is in this salad bowl of American faith, whatever your faith is, this is a conversation you need to be part of, because this is not for Jews only. We’re only the tip of the spear. We’re only figuring this out for ourselves.
But frankly, I have to say this, and I think, Elan, this would be a great, great project. You and I are involved with interfaith work on several different levels. But for me, the emerging next generation of interfaith work has got to be not tea and sympathy and not talking theology—as interesting as that is—I want to sit down with the local imam, and I want to ask him for career advice. I want to ask him, “How do you do what you do?” I want to learn from the Mormons. I want Presbyterians to learn from Orthodox Jews about what it means for us to create communities of meaning. That’s the next generation, and that really will be, I think, what God wants us to do.
So, friends, again, thank you to our friend, Rabbi Elan Babchuck. And I invite you to follow my column of the same name, Martini Judaism, on ReligionNews.com.
Our producer is Jay Woodward. We get production assistance from Julia Windham. Martini Judaism is a Blue Jay Atlantic production for Religion News Service.
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Transcribed and cleaned for Martini Judaism
