Commencement season. Campus turmoil on our screens, on our news feeds. They are joined by the most provocative of commencement speakers, those with messages to generate the most resentment, which keeps us from exiting one social media site in favor of another. Those graduates who created a certain mayhem when not really responsible for much beyond completion of their studies, will find jobs that require a certain measure of obedience to those with authority. Yet their value to their employers also includes exporting what they learned at the university. We can expect our corporations, civil service, and non-profits to adapt to what the people with those upper-tier university degrees bring to their employers, both technical knowledge and ideology. At present, our companies still produce efficiently, our civil service serves its constituencies with mostly thoughtful protocols consistently applied, and our non-profits pursue their defined missions with the talent they are able to hire.
America's religious institutions have not achieved parallel stability. Church attendance has faltered for a lot of reasons. Data over about thirty years from mostly Christian sources show a downward drift in participation with no meaningful upticks. From my Jewish lenses, there are indeed more people studying Talmud today than at any other time in Jewish history. American Jews are embedded in every element of America's culture and productivity. Institutions that tend to the needs of Jewish Americans, our commitments to Israel, and more global philanthropy still raise funds needed to invest in the human talent that moves the various agendas forward. Yet a certain decline, measurable in a variety of ways, appears in many surveys. The core institution for centuries has been the local synagogue and the individual Rabbi chosen by the membership as its focal individual.
This commencement season, some of our flagship seminaries publish their commencement programs. Each newly ordained graduate can expect a career of about thirty years, invested in an assortment of possibilities. Each spring for the past few years, I have read selected seminary commencement programs published online. These include The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, American Jewish University, Hebrew Union College in its three American campuses, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and Hebrew College.
All but the Hebrew College are affiliated with denominations. Chovevei educates and ordains only men, while the others have students of each gender. Chovevei, as a small institution, updates the activities of previous graduates on its website. Some very raw data:
So each site has about a dozen students, half women. If about 80 graduates a year, that means 2400 mainstream secular rabbis accumulated over about thirty years assuming indefinite comparable enrollment and that none of these places have to close for financial or enrollment shortfalls over the next generation. I have no crystal ball to project how many will serve as congregational clergy, or even how many congregations will have the means to hire one or more Rabbi's over the coming generation. I do know from having read these programs for a few years that enrollment has followed a downward drift. And one seminary honors its 50-year alumni, alive and deceased, by publishing their names. That class, all men, was considerably larger than current ordination numbers at the same school.
The more difficult assessment might be how well these 80 new entrants reflect the denominations they represent. And do they need to? Invariably the congregational Rabbi maintains the Jewish traditions more fastidiously than the congregants. Kosher diets are the norm. Shabbat and Holy Days bring the Rabbi to Shul, though there are some leniencies in how they get there. All Rabbi's make a personal effort, if not a congregational one, to enhance their Jewish knowledge with some regularity, though congregants attend their classes in small fractions of the composite congregation.
And what are the congregants like? I can speak for my own, and have a good sense of those of the other denominations in my town. We are invariably older. Our children are older than those graduates. We have nearly all had traditional marriages that endure a lifetime. Divorces are rare. Same sex marriages are rare. Interfaith marriages are common at the other two congregations, rare at mine. People have careers. Relocations are few, though children graduating and pursuing their own careers elsewhere are the norm. We bought houses that we maintained until sometimes downsizing as empty nesters. And we have few political outliers, no antti-Zionists but no overt racists either. While a fraction think it OK to leverage their power, even intimidate, most are committed to being cordial and kind.
With only 80 graduates and with their sponsoring institutions providing biographies of their graduates, it is not hard to add a Google Search to learn a little about nearly all of them. Few of them really come across as people our Search Committees will sponsor with enthusiasm. Few have taken the usual career trajectories of ourselves or our children who graduated college, maybe took a gap year or two, then sought either a professional degree or accepted employment. Very few of this cohort went from college to seminary. Many did community organizing. Others worked for non-profits or taught at Day Schools. And when organizing or agency work, the sponsor would invariably fall in the far left progressive part of the political spectrum. Gay marriages were common. Use of neutral pronouns in the bios made some of the bios hard to read. Some had no clear post-degree destination specified in the bio or by a Google Search. Reconstructionist graduates seemed the most off-center. Hebrew College seemed dominated by people leaving their original career to find a second. Chovevei men, were all very traditional. They were not particularly attracted to pulpits, drifting toward chaplaincy, teaching, or advocacy careers. And a few accepted assistant Rabbi positions in metro areas, a small number senior Rabbi positions with smaller congregations in university towns or other places with stable but small Jewish populations.
Other than Chovevei, which updates its entire alumni cohort each year, I cannot really track career paths of recent graduates, prarticularly RRC and Hebrew College which ordain the most non-traditional classes. Chovevei generates few congregational Rabbi's though some now head large mainstream OU affiliates. And while we are all ever more sensitive to the spectrum of gender and non-traditional families, our current clergy are all people easy to identify with. All college graduates, all as literate as their congregants with elite university degrees, all dressing professionally, and none with outlandish hairdo's or skin art. But also none of our clergy really push the envelope, either in scholarly pursuits, political statements, or even eccentric hobbies. They are careerists, just like the congregants. Dependable, reliable, centrist. Surprisingly few of the ordination class of 2024 left a parallel impression.
What would our synagogues look like if our classes had the same standards as 1974? Exclusion of half the graduates as women would leave a shortage, for sure. Where have the men gone? What have alumni from the feeders from the youth groups of the different dominations that used to go directly from college to seminary opted to pursue instead? An essay in The Atlantic tries to grapple with the reality of Jewish seminaries' paucity of traditional sources of students.
There are declines in enrollment. There are shifting skills of the new Rabbi's reflected in what they pursued during their gaps between college and seminary. Eventually these people will take their places in our synagogues, schools, and sponsored agencies. Whether the institutions will become more like them or they will become more like the institutions as their tenure accrues may be one of the big question marks on American Judaism's future. For now, the new Rabbinical Class of '24 does not fully reflect the very centrist presence of our congregations and institutions.
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