Today was the last morning of the siddur pilot.
They handed out evaluation forms and asked us to
bring them back next week. The questions that
the CCAR did, and didn't, ask gave me a little
insight into their goals. More about the evaluation
in a separate entry, later.
At Torah study we talked about the question: why do
we need a rabbi to lead services? We don't, of course;
any somewhat-educated person who meets the (straightforward)
halachic requirements can lead. In most Orthodox and
some Conservative congregations, in fact, the rabbi
doesn't lead services -- other congregants do.
But in the Reform movement, by and large, the rabbi
leads, unless you're such a small congregation that
you don't have a rabbi.
( Aside: what do rabbis do? )
My theory (which I wasn't fast enough to articulate
this morning) is that this is a product of our culture.
People (Americans specifically? people in general?)
tend to want access to the expert. We don't want to
settle for the physician's assistant to treat our
illness, even if that person is perfectly qualified
because it's only the flu and the flu is a well-understood
problem; we hold out for the doctor. We don't want
the apprentice electrician even though it's only a
light switch; we want the experienced one. We only
consider the "lesser" positions if we can save
money, for the most part. (Yes, of course I'm
over-generalizing.) So I think it's the same with
rabbis and services; people want the rabbi, who they
know will do everything right, and not the qualified
layman who has no credentials, even though it's only
a regular Shabbat service and that person has seen
this hundreds or thousands of times. I've already
seen this with respect to music; the Reform congregations
I'm familiar with want the professional singers, even
if they're not Jewish, and not the ameteurs from
within the congregation.
Why is this a more common attitude in Reform than in
other movements? Two factors, I think: first, we're
more assimilated into the surrounding culture and
second, we're (overall) less educated.
Assimilation means, in this case, that we are more
inclined to imitate what we see or hear about from
other parts of Americana, like church services.
That organ at services isn't a coincidence,
after all. The Reform community is more outward-focused,
while the Orthodox community is more inward-focused
(or so it appears from the outside). We're more likely
to have had diverse worship experiences, and the ideas
rub off. (Remember that most Orthodox would not set
food in a church at all, and some of them will not
set foot in non-Orthodox Jewish services.) I'm not
trying to say that they're shutting the world out; it's
not nearly that active. But they will have fewer chance
encounters, and therefore fewer opportunities to pick
up foreign ideas about "how things are done". Combine
this with the fact that most Reform Jews do not
attend services regularly, and you get a community
that's more in tune with the outside world than with
its own traditions and history.
And then there's the education factor. In the Orthodox
community, it is pretty much presumed -- correctly --
that almost any adult male present is capable of
leading services. He's been davening daily for most
of his life, after all, so he knows the drill and
can probably read the Hebrew correctly. Maybe he
doesn't have a good voice, but that's not so important.
I see this dynamic in play in the morning minyan at
the Conservative shul I frequent, by the way; at least
half the regulars can step in to lead services if the
regular guy isn't there. (By the way, I am not yet
one of those people. I am in the bottom third of
that group for liturgical skill. I have most of
the knowledge, but am just not fast enough with the
Hebrew yet. Ironically, I am in the top
half or third for pronoucing the Hebrew correctly -- I'm
just too slow.)
Most Orthodox and many Conservative Jews of my
generation have had significant Jewish educations
-- day school, or at least a daily after-school
program, and maybe Yeshiva, and maybe something
beyond that. They also attend services regularly,
so the Hebrew component of that is reinforced on
a regular basis. But there's more to it than just
the Hebrew; they learn halacha, study Talmud, study
Torah in some depth, and so on. Most of my traditional
friends can quote relevant sources off the tops of
their heads, and know how to look up most of the
rest. And they're just regular people -- lawyers
and accountants and programmers and shopkeepers, not
rabbis.
Most Reform Jews of my generation have not had a similar
education, and are not seeing that their children get
that kind of education. They send their kids to Hebrew
school, which meets after school one day a week and
on Sunday mornings, until bar mitzvah. A smaller number
continue on through high school. They are studying a
broader range of topics (after all, the Reform movement's
focus isn't on traditional halacha), and they are spending
less time on it, so of course their knowledge isn't as
deep. Hebrew is not a large part of it, judging from
what I've heard when the various classes lead services;
they just don't read well, for the most part. I'm not
dissing the kids; they read better than I probably
would have at that age, and some of them read better than
I do now. But most of them do not read well,
do not maintain the skill past the bar mitzvah, and
are not going to emphasize it with their eventual kids.
So, all told, the average person at a Reform service
probably isn't capable of leading it. (Some
of those could if they had time to practice.) So if
you suggest to the average Reform Jew that someone
other than the rabbi can lead the service, his thinking
will probably go something like this: "Well, I
can't do it, and I'm pretty normal, so why should I
assume that David there can? He hasn't had any more
schooling than I have; he's just a regular guy. No,
he'll probably screw something up. We should stick
with the rabbi; he's an expert." And if they've never
actually heard David lead services, how are they to
know that he's actually capable of doing it?
So the Reform Jew who is qualified to
lead services faces a real up-hill battle -- not
necessarily with the rabbi or the administration, but
rather with the congregation. And who wants
to put up with that kind of grief? Speaking only for
myself, why would I want to try to force myself onto
people who apparently wouldn't want me? And who am
I to go to the rabbi and say "please make a pitch and
let me do this"? Unless the rabbi decides
that you don't have to be a rabbi to lead services,
thus drawing flack from people who will say he's
shirking his job responsibilities, it's not going to
happen. So at some level, it's all politics.
And that's why, in the Reform movement, you have to be
a rabbi to lead services, most of the time. In my
opinion, of course.
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