A Rabbinate Where Women Can Thrive

The recent study on the American rabbinate by Atra-Center for Rabbinic Innovation, highlighted what has been called the “Great American Rabbi Shortage.” Ask synagogue lay leaders and they will tell you how hard it is to find a well-qualified rabbi. There are many factors that contribute to this shortage. The focus of this article is on the significance of women entering the rabbinate and how the Jewish community can do a better job supporting that talent pool.

Last year, women accounted for 39% of all working rabbis in the U.S. Judging from the current student profiles of non-Orthodox seminaries, we will be seeing a growing feminization of the American rabbinate in the years to come.

As Boomer male rabbis retire, more women are stepping into senior roles. In the Rabbinical Assembly (Conservative), almost 100 women now serve as senior or solo rabbis. Yeshivat Maharat, the Modern Orthodox seminary that started ordaining women in 2013, has placed 14 of its 107 graduates in senior rabbinic pulpits. Given the religious and cultural barriers that female clergy face in the Orthodox world, this is no small achievement.

Meanwhile, the job of a congregational rabbi only gets harder. Talmud classes give way to active shooter trainings, and rabbis’ spare time gets spent learning productivity platforms, AI, or how to make TikTok videos. The COVID-19 pandemic required massive adjustments to the way rabbis did their jobs; many rabbis chose to leave the profession. Now, political polarization, both in the U.S. and in Israel, has made it harder and harder for rabbis to speak out boldly on issues of the moment.

The Jewish community is fortunate that many women — as well as rabbis of color, gay and trans rabbis and other non-traditional candidates — are entering the field in greater numbers. The question is: Are congregations prepared to accept them, adapt to difference, and ensure that they can thrive? The experience of female clergy today, more than five decades since women were first ordained in the U.S., offers lessons for supporting rabbis from any historically underrepresented group.

Hired, But Not Accepted

I am a female rabbi with 14 years in the field, but I have chosen to focus this article solely on the experiences of others — using accounts from colleagues, mentors, and officials across the field — as well as ethics reports, surveys, denominational statements, and media coverage. Taken together, their experiences suggest that being hired isn’t always the same as being fully accepted.

To become a senior rabbi, many women have to serve patiently as junior clergy for one or two decades before getting promoted. In the interim, denominational reports show that some women are bullied by senior colleagues and can experience retaliation if they try to report it. Some women serve faithfully for years but never advance, despite their qualifications and best efforts — what’s now called “the cement ceiling.”

For the women who do reach the top, new trials unfold. Biased behavior is often rampant. Congregations must work through any visceral discomfort with first-time, female leadership. If lay leaders don’t understand or get too frustrated by the discomfort, that rabbi could lose her job within her first year, and a successor female rabbi could suffer the same fate. It can take years for congregations to become accustomed to women on the pulpit.

Many congregations have completed the journey of embracing and normalizing female clerical leadership, especially in progressive denominations and in major Jewish population centers. However, certain inequities remain.

The most recent salary study from the Rabbinical Assembly found that female rabbis earned 14% less in salary and 16% less in total compensation than men do, largely because they remain concentrated in smaller congregations and lower-paying positions. Benefits were unequal also; male rabbis were “far more likely” to receive full-family health care coverage than women. Unpaid family leave further widens these gaps over time. The Reform Movement tells a similar story, citing an 18% pay gap in 2022, even though there is a dedicated arm of the movement actively advocating for gender equity.

The Harms You Don’t See

Other inequities are less visible. In female clergy groups that I follow, it is still routine today to read about micro-aggressions that were documented in the 2010s: insensitive comments directed at a colleague’s body, clothing, pregnancy, or marital status. Even 10 years after one female Reform rabbi proudly declared that “gender is irrelevant,” some female clergy still relate being sexualized, diminished, or finding their authority undermined at every turn.

Since the pandemic, we’re also seeing more serious indicators of harm: distressed female clergy leaving their congregations, contracts cut short, and renewals denied when renewal was expected. If congregations were becoming more comfortable with female leadership, wouldn’t we expect fewer abnormal exits?

Women often don’t talk publicly about an abrupt departure. Reputational fear, shame, burnout, and the constraints of non-disclosure agreements keep cases quiet — even when there was no misconduct. Forced exits may include some severance, but often they leave clergy with conspicuous resume gaps that they can’t explain. From the outside, it’s all too easy for community members, future employers and even some colleagues to presume the female clergy was at fault. On top of that, a forced exit often costs women thousands of dollars in legal fees, therapy, medications, and moving costs — and lasting effects on her health, her marriage, and her family. If it happens more than once, the harm compounds. She may leave the field altogether.

Forced exits are costly for congregations too: new searches, legal fees, congregant attrition, and disruption to community life, including children.

“Everyone Knows About It”

Denominations are aware of these patterns. In statements, they decry bias and call on communities to support a diverse rabbinate. But the big denominational ethics investigations of the early 2020s understandably focused more on harms clergy and institutions had committed, rather than the other way around. I had to dig through hundreds of pages of ethics reports to find a few mentions of rabbis describing abuse on the job. One such rabbi, quoted in a 2023 ethics review conducted for the Rabbinical Assembly, said they felt “totally alone and without support; while another said they “routinely withstand abuse and harassment because complaining would only worsen the situation.”

The Reform Movement was first to launch outside ethics investigations, and that has done much to improve ethics transparency. But blind spots remain. In the 2022 ethics review released by the URJ, the Reform Movement’s congregational arm, one sentence noted that “congregational issues” had been reported during that review — but that the URJ lacks “the authority to conduct ethics investigations or to impose discipline within congregations.” If they don’t, who does?

The curriculum at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College has long included ethics training to help its rabbis avoid becoming abusers. In addition, the movement’s professional arm, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, has offered its members training on how to end gender abuse, harassment and toxic culture in Jewish communal spaces.

When clergy with ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal challenged their movement to address a “pervasive climate of acceptance and enabling of sexual harassment, abuse of power, and bullying in our midst,” ALEPH responded. ALEPH’s board issued a statement in 2023 that it was committed to “genuine accountability” and “action to repair the harm done to others and to our communities.”

Clearly, this type of bias crosses all denominational lines, including movements that pride themselves on progressive values. As one official said privately to me: “Everyone knows about it.” But the prevalence of NDAs keeps things murky and quiet. Without open discussion, female clergy’s claims are easily dismissed — or denied altogether. That silence leaves women isolated, unprotected, and vulnerable to further abuse.

What We Owe Our Clergy

We need more data to properly evaluate these issues. The Atra study, cited above, called for more systematic research into clergy burnout. I recommend that we study job tenures, compensation, and working conditions by denomination, gender, race, age, sexuality, and ability — and include claims of harassment and bullying, forced exits and NDAs in the research.

Here is what else would help:

1. Push denominations and communal authorities to address harassment, bullying, and forced exits more openly.
2. Take clergy bias and bullying claims seriously. Employers: look beyond job tenure before drawing conclusions.
3. Fund an outside ethics review for every denominational body, including seminary programs, once a decade. Share outcomes publicly and provide funding to support any needed changes.
4. Train a cross-denominational cadre of interim clergy specializing in post-traumatic placements; Afterpastors, a practice developed by some Christian denominations, offers a model for this.
5. Establish accountability systems for congregations that bully and cycle through clergy — and for their denominations.
6. Create a registry of congregations and Jewish workplaces that have issued NDAs, managed by a neutral third party and sortable by institution and denomination. Individuals’ names would not be published. It’s a radical idea, but this kind of transparency can motivate change.

The Atra report includes proposals to address the rabbinic shortage in North America. But such efforts will be minimally effective if too many congregational settings remain unsupportive of female clergy, rabbis of color, or LGBTQ rabbis — or turn out to be hostile environments for the rabbis that they do hire.

If we listen to women’s experiences and take them seriously, our next steps will become clear. We must summon the funding, the candor, and the institutional will to find a better way. Our communities — and the clergy who hold them together — cannot afford to wait.

___________ 

Rabbi Chana Leslie Glazer is a former journalist, editor and industry analyst who was ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She has spent 14 years leading congregations in three denominations and a Hillel/Jewish Life program, covering two Appalachian communities, the suburbs of the American Northeast, and the Deep South.