Where Have All the Rabbis Gone? (Part Two)
A Newsletter from Rabbi Jonathan Miller
In 2006, my son Aaron, graduated Brandeis University with a degree in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. The next week he married my wonderful daughter-in-law, Lauren, and headed off to Jerusalem as a first-year seminarian at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. “OMG,” I said to myself. He is following exactly in his dear old dad’s footsteps.
In 1976, I graduated from Brandeis University with a degree in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and shipped off to Jerusalem with my wife Judi to the same school for the same purpose. I loved being a rabbi. Aaron also loves his vocation. (We do talk “shop” a lot.) Aaron’s rabbinic school class was smaller than mine. The class today is much smaller than both of ours. Religion just doesn’t seem to be the magnet today that it once was.
I clipped an article from the Washington Post about the most regretted college majors. Let these statistics sink in.
Nearly 50% of humanities majors regret their collegiate field of study, compared to less than 25% of engineering students. In today’s undergraduate population, the least popular major is the classics—Latin and Greek and their accompanying literature and philosophy. Just a scant century ago these were the core texts that a well-rounded college educated citizen was expected to know. On the Washington Post scale, majoring in religion ranks just one up from the classics. What does it say about our state of affairs when kids choose not to study the major religions of the world?
I will answer my own question. It says, across the religious board that people in today’s age see that, more and more, religion is irrelevant. Politics, genetics, civil engineering—these, more than the great ideas which energized western civilization, these practical skills are more important than the thoughts and the themes and the human struggles which defined us over the millennia.
In this day and age, I would be hard pressed to imagine a parent experiencing joy as he drops his firstborn daughter off at her freshman dorm with a $70,000 per year price tag attached to her presumptive Latin major. Or someone trying to pay off 100 grand of student loans being grateful they studied Martin Buber or Paul Tillich. Young people reading the cultural tea leaves are not super excited about what religion has to offer or how religion has been used, cynically, by certain individuals to advance their political agendas.
Religion and faith have been sullied by the cultural crosswinds afflicting us all. They can feel less like a sanctuary and more like a tribal truncheon to be used to beat up those in opposition. When I was young (don’t you hate when old folks say that?), religious leaders were my heroes who had answers to the ills plaguing the world. These days, religious leaders have to hide from their congregations and avoid taking stands that might aggravate an unruly congregation.
Answers? We don’t even know enough to ask the questions.
In my day, the horrors of the twentieth century begged for a religious response, to create meaning and purpose and optimism in the wake of the scourges of Nazism and communism and Jim Crow and unfettered capitalism. Today, we cannibalize our prophets on altars that we have built to enforce what we already believe.
So the rabbis and pastors and priests are all diminished both in impact and in number. Across the religious board, seminaries are closing, and proud religious institutions are downsizing as they try to figure out what’s next.
In the meantime, all hail the engineers (look, I like a new car and sound bridges as much as the next guy!). All hail the engineers, for they shall inherit the earth. And all the religion majors say, “Tall, Grande, Vente, Cold Brew, hold the whip, half caffe.” Such is the way of our world, today.
And let us say, “Amen.”
The next issue of Backwards and Forwards will conclude my thoughts on where have all the rabbis gone and how maybe to get some back.
They say to virgin authors, “write what you know.” So that is what I did.
Let me introduce you to one of my beloved characters in Take My Dog.
Rabbi Tuvya Greenblatt wanted to change his name. He was plagued by the legacy of his namesake, his dead uncle who perished with the Jewish resistance against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Tuvya was a star in rabbinic school and from there on in, his life went sadly downhill. Now he is the rabbi at Temple Sim Shalom in Cumberland, Alabama. He is beginning to realize after serving many congregations, that maybe the pulpit was not a good choice for him. As he feels his life coming apart, again and again, he has a premonition that this time he may not be able to survive to drag himself across the finish line.
The Temple board and his very own family can feel the downdraft. He is not enjoying life at all as he goes through the motions. Rabbi Greenblatt is his own worst enemy. He is haunted by ghosts, and, at every turn, he seems to say the wrong thing. He can feel the temperature rising and the reader can feel the heat.
I love Tuvya. You will too. And I am grateful that my life is not his in anyway at all.
Please enjoy and stay tuned. Backwards and Forwards will appear, again, magically in your inbox in a few weeks.
In the meantime, feel free to drop me a note at backwardsforwards.newletter@gmail.com.
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Whether we are going backwards or forwards, none of us is standing still. And successful people can move both forwards and backwards at the same time.
Until next time, shalom,
Jonathan