This past fall, there was a great disturbance in the Force. You may not have felt it, but clergy everywhere sure did. A Presbyterian minister named Alexander Lang, left his job as senior pastor of a Presbyterian church outside of Chicago, and wrote a blog post about his decision.
In the essay, titled “Departure: Why I Left the Church,” Rev. Lang spoke candidly about the compounding emotional impact of being a congregation’s primary, and often sole, care provider – day in and day out, sometimes even on days off and vacations, for years – and to do it with a smile, striving to please all the people all the time. Ultimately, he said, “I realized that if I spen[t] the rest of my life” enmeshed in such a system, “I [would] end up an angry, bitter, broken shell of a human being.”
The blog quickly went viral, particularly among clergy and other congregational professionals.
According to recent studies, clergy and other congregational professionals are increasingly suffering from compassion fatigue, burnout, and worse. Many congregational clergy have left their pulpits in recent years, and even more have considered quitting. Countless others are clearly choosing not to pursue the career path altogether, as is evidenced by alarming reports of a nationwide clergy shortage. In the Jewish community, rabbinical schools across America are experiencing a significant decline in enrollment. As a result, the demand for rabbis, cantors, educators, and other professionals to serve congregations is rapidly exceeding the supply. Among the primary reasons given for this growing rate of attrition are stress and burnout, loneliness and isolation, and strain on religious leaders’ personal life, relationships, and family.
Of course, it’s not just religious professionals: according to some reports, there has been a mass exodus of caregivers across the board in recent years. Everyone from nurses and other healthcare professionals to therapists, teachers, and social workers are leaving their jobs at staggering rates, mostly citing burnout as the cause, in search of positions that afford better work-life balance and support systems. The result is the same as with clergy and other congregational professionals: the need for caregivers far exceeds the supply, and we are all worse off for it, unable to access the care we need when we need it. When no one holds the healers, everyone suffers.
This issue is in many ways at the heart of this week’s Torah portion. With Parashat Va-Yikra, we begin a new book of the Torah, Sefer Va-Yikra, the book of Leviticus – bane of B’nai Mitzvah, a book brimming with blood and guts: sacrifices and skin diseases, purity and pollution, abnormalities and abominations; a book that defies our desire for a Torah of self-help and social justice, wistfulness and wisdom, and instead reads more like a cultic manual, relevant only to the smallest un-squeamish subsection of ritual functionaries and religion nerds. It is perhaps for this reason that Va-Yikra is sometimes referred to by another name, Torat Kohanim, literally, “Instruction for the Priests.”
Why did our ancestors include this Torat Kohanim in the Torah, and why is it still part of the text after all these years? Most Jews are not kohanim, nor have they ever been. Why not just make a separate user’s manual for the priesthood, and give it directly and exclusively to the kohanim?
For example, today’s parashah lays out the procedure the priests were to follow for several different types of sacrifices that were offered in the Tabernacle, and later in the Temple. In chapter 4, the text turns its attention to the hattat, the sin or purification sacrifice, which would be offered when an individual realized they had violated one of the Torah’s laws unintentionally (4:1).
According to the text, the particulars of the procedure were different depending on the nature of the sin and the identity of the sinner – whether an average Israelite or a tribal chieftain or even the community as a whole. Given the fact that this whole book reads like a priestly manual, it’s perhaps unsurprising that this section begins by outlining what happens if a priest is the perpetrator.
But the actual language that introduces the passage is somewhat surprising, or at least strange. It starts, “im ha-kohen ha-mashiah yeheta…” OK, so far, so good: If the anointed priest sins. But the verse continues, “im ha-kohen ha-mashiah yeheta…l’ashmat ha-am,” literally, if the anointed priest sins for the guilt of the people. It’s the kind of oddly worded phrase that stops traditional commentators and biblical scholars in their tracks. What could the Torah possibly mean by saying “if the anointed priest sins for the guilt of the people”?
The Etz Hayyim Humash, along with many if not most other translations, renders the phrase “l’ashmat ha-am,” as “so that blame falls upon the people.” These translations, in other words, understand the verse to mean that a priest’s sinful behavior negatively impacts the community, perhaps because we look to our leaders, especially religious leaders, for cues about appropriate behavior. If a priest engages in wrongdoing, people who naturally see him as a role model will be led astray and act similarly. This understanding follows Rashi and other traditional commentators who similarly assume that the Torah is commenting here about a failure of leadership: when the priest sins, the people suffer.
Such an understanding is, of course, in line with the apparent focus of Leviticus as a manual for the priests – the verse in a sense cautions the kohanim to be especially mindful of their behavior and scrupulous in their observance of the commandments, since as leaders their actions impact the whole community. They have the capacity to inspire people to goodness or to influence them to behave badly.
But the Jewish mystical tradition offers an altogether different interpretation. According to the Zohar, the issue is not that the transgression of the kohen causes the community to sin, but rather the opposite – it is the crime of the congregation that leads the priest astray: “lama ‘yeheta l’ashmat ha-am’?” asks the Zohar. “Why does the Torah say ‘for the guilt of the people?’ Biglal hatta-ei ha-dor sh’garmu l’kakh, because the sins of that generation led him to this behavior. ‘L’ashmat ha-am’, on account of the sin of the people, v’lo la-ashamah shelo, and not on account of his own transgression.”
I don’t think the Zohar here is refuting the truth that people follow their leaders, and so therefore a priest’s transgressions will negatively impact the entire community. But I do think the Zohar is pointing us toward something that is also true, and too often forgotten or overlooked – that the behavior of the community also impacts the priest. After all, both the priest and the people are part of the same system. And in any system, the breakdown of one component part will inevitably impact every other component part. The brokenness of a leader will certainly result in a broken community. But it is also true that a broken community will invariably produce broken leaders. In the famous words of the ancient sage Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am [only] for myself, what am I?” Of course, we must take care of our own selves, because we cannot necessarily rely on others to provide for our needs, at least not as fully as might be necessary, or all the time. Yet at the same time, our own personal welfare is bound up in the wellbeing of others. Total self-absorption is, ironically, tantamount to self-abnegation.
Through this intentionally paradoxical lesson, Hillel points to a complicated truth about human flourishing: self-care and communal care are interrelated and interdependent. Or, as the great 20th century Israeli poet Zelda put it, “שלומי קשור בחוט לשלומך / My peace is tied by a thread to yours.”
The reality of שלומי קשור בחוט לשלומך, that my welfare is bound up in yours, points to the need for communities to adopt what political scientist Joan Tronto calls an ethic of “caring with.” An ethic of “caring with” means a culture in which all members of a community commit to equitably receiving and providing care for one another, helping one another live “as well as possible.”
French social psychologist Pascale Molinier illustrated what this looks like. A few years back, Molinier studied female domestic workers in Colombia, socioeconomically disadvantaged women who work long hours, day in and day out, cleaning, cooking, ironing, and preparing and serving meals for wealthier families. Molinier observes that the notion of “self-care” is virtually nonexistent, perhaps unthinkable, among these women. But the women instinctively compensated for this by practicing an ethic of “caring with.” Molinier observed how, for example, they cared for one another’s children, boosted one another’s self-esteem through acts of moral encouragement, and supported and advocated for one another.
Many of us would likely consider religious communities as settings characterized by an ethic of “caring with,” at least in their ideal. Yet in my experience, few congregations are actually successful at the equitable distribution of care. Most congregants, to the extent they participate at all, do so as recipients or beneficiaries of care, whether regularly or infrequently. Only some will embrace roles of care providers, and even fewer in congregations that employ professional clergy and other congregational professionals, who are disproportionately relied upon for the provision of care. Such communities form something of an inverse pyramid, in which the professional clergy, and a handful of other professionals, carry the weight of caring for the majority of the people.
There are, of course, understandable reasons for this dynamic: clergy and other congregational professionals often have expertise in caring for others that few others in the community possess; and we do this work in the first place because we are committed to accompanying and supporting people throughout their lives – at spiritual and emotional peaks, valleys, and everywhere in between. And congregations are justified in expecting their professional staff to shoulder a disproportionate burden of the congregation’s caring needs.
Yet while many congregational professionals, myself included, would readily say that caring for others is a great blessing, a sacred calling for which we are perpetually grateful, the work – as Rev. Lang pointed out – can take a toll, a toll that can be exacerbated by other challenges that are particular to congregational contexts, such as the fact that congregations are often short-staffed, under-funded, and pervaded by complex and sometimes even hostile communal politics. Congregational professionals are often expected to work long and irregular hours, making it difficult to establish and maintain clear and well-defined boundaries. And they often find it difficult to secure (and actually take advantage of) the time and resources needed for self-care, study, and spiritual nourishment; nurture their social and family lives; and feel supported personally and professionally in their values, priorities, and goals.
Over time, the weight of all this can be too much to bear, with negative consequences for everyone – the congregational professional as well as the congregation itself. Caring for others all day, every day, comes with a high physical, emotional, and spiritual cost. No professional, however gifted or skilled they may be, can realistically fulfill all of a congregation’s needs on their own. Professionals who are unable to refill their own proverbial tanks will, eventually, with 100% certainty, break. And it’s only a matter of time before a congregation with a broken professional will itself become broken. So too, a broken community – one that does not embrace and practice an ethic of caring with, in which all congregants take responsibility for caring for one another – also will eventually, with 100% certainty, break their clergy and other professionals. Broken professionals will inevitably break their congregations; and broken congregations will invariably break their professionals. Our wellbeing is bound up together.
Ensuring the wellbeing of the congregation as a whole is therefore inseparable from ensuring the wellbeing of its professionals. Just as a congregation’s professionals are called to care for their congregants, congregants have a responsibility, as my teacher Rabbi Sharon Brous puts it in her beautiful new book The Amen Effect, to hold their healers, to care for their professionals – seeing them as human beings with needs just like everyone else in the community, caring for them the way we would want them to care for us.
Why did our ancestors include Leviticus in the Torah, and why is it still part of the text after all these years? Perhaps in order to teach us שלומי קשור בחוט לשלומך – that our welfare is intertwined and interdependent. The priest can’t be well if the community is unwell, and the community can’t be well unless the priest is, too. My welfare is bound up in yours, and yours is bound up in mine.
Confronting a seemingly downward spiral of declining affiliation, shrinking resources, and now a growing shortage of clergy and other congregational professionals, religious communities like ours are at a historic inflection point. As we look toward the future, I pray that we renew and rededicate ourselves to the principle of “caring with,” holding our healers so that, in turn, they can hold us too.
Rabbi Michael Rose Knopf 