Rabbis who have served congregations know the power of standing at the pulpit before an assembly of our people to teach and preach the words of Torah. On such occasions, we bear the mantle of Moshe Rabbeinu, who brought Torah to our people at Sinai. Could there be a more important leadership role for a rabbi? Yes, I believe there is—a role that is equally critical and perhaps even more important, just as there was for Moshe.
In our Torah study in recent weeks, we have read the accounts of Moses in his quintessential role as lawgiver, prophet, and intimate partner of the Holy One. He ascended Mount Sinai and stood face to face with God—panim el panim—and received the Torah. But the moment didn’t last. The holiness and purity of the scene on high wasn’t matched with appropriate piety from the Jewish people below. They grew anxious and fearful that they had been abandoned, and so they committed an epic act of apostasy by building and the Golden Calf.
Seeing what was happening on the ground, God told Moses to “go down…” (Exodus 32:7), to descend from on high. In the Talmud, Rabbi Elazar offers an important understanding of the words “go down.” “What is their meaning? he asks. The Gemara replies: “Go down from your exalted position, for I granted you greatness only for Israel’s sake” (Bavli B’rachot 32a).
Moses had a world-shaping role to play at the top of the mountain in receiving Torah, but as Rabbi Elazar suggests, his most important leadership role was performed at the bottom of the mountain with his people. He advocated for them and helped them to find their way forward when all seemed lost.
This is true for rabbis today. The greatness of our service is not primarily in grand public oration or in great scholarly teaching, but in the ways in which we hold and heal our people in their times of crisis and trial.
This “leadership from below,” this binding of the wounds of our people and walking with them from darkness toward light, may be the truest measure of our value as rabbis. We see it here in America among our colleagues in their faithful service to their communities, and we see it among our colleagues in Israel in particularly powerful and poignant ways.
Consider the story of Rabbi Yael Vurgan, who has served the regional council of Sha’ar HaNegev, right on the Gaza border, since her ordination six years ago. Working in partnership with a handful of dedicated lay leaders, Yael has brought Jewish culture and spirituality to secular Israelis in a beautiful spirit of openness, inclusion, and pluralism. She has led from below, meeting people where they are and helping them grow individually as Jews and together in community.
Since the brutal massacres on October 7, for so many members of the communities she serves, Yael has been there, heart and soul for her people, spending hours upon hours listening to them, supporting them, conducting funerals, offering spiritual care, and traveling all over the country to bring a healing presence and the power of Jewish ritual to thousands displaced from their homes. One small but powerful example of the impact of her work on the ground are the two hundred mezuzot she delivered to two hundred displaced families that are now affixed to the doorposts of their temporary homes.
Another shining example of leadership from below is the work of Rabbi Orit Rozenblit. Orit grew up a secular kibbutznik who began to search for her Jewish identity as a young adult. She studied Judaism and then taught at the Oranim Academy. In 2000, Orit moved with her family to Metula, in the far north, and began working in Kiryat Shmona. In 2008, she established a pluralistic beit midrash for young adults. Shortly thereafter, she was recruited to HUC-JIR, where she received her rabbinic ordination while also building a congregation that by 2022 had grown to eighty members.
Then came the war, with its daily bombardments from Hezbollah, which forced Orit, her entire community, and tens of thousands of others in the north to evacuate, scattering them throughout the country as far away as Eilat. Wherever her people have gone, Orit has stayed connected to them and been there to support them individually. But how could she keep her community together in its dispersion? Though unable to restore them to their physical homes, she helped them find spiritual shelter: together, they would write a new sefer torah. Thanks to a generous donor from the US, she was able to commission the first Israeli Reform sofer, Rabbi Shlomo Zagman, to write a Torah scroll, bringing the community together to join in the process, restoring their spiritual center, and giving them hope for renewal.
These are but two of the many, many moving and inspiring stories I could share of Israeli Reform rabbis who are leading creatively and dynamically, imitating the Holy One as “healers of the broken-hearted,” (Psalms 147:3) taking account of every individual they can and drawing them close to one another in life-affirming communities. They are our heroes, and we are blessed to have them as our friends, colleagues, and role models of the power of leading from below.
L’shalom ul’shuvam shel kol hachatufim.
Rabbi Arnie Gluck is Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Beth-El in Hillsborough, New Jersey where he served for thirty-three years as a tireless teacher, scholar, and advocate for social justice.
