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Mishpacha had a feature on Rabbinic stress due to overwhelming demands for guidance by their congregants. Isn’t an obvious solution for this to hire assistant Rabbis in larger shuls so that people don’t fall between the cracks competing for the Rav’s attention? Why don’t more shuls do this?
I think the solution is to pay them decent salaries so they dont also have to teach, or be kashrus mashgichim, or whatever else they need to do.
The article concluded like that, an idea to form kind of a union to make sure they get fair contracts.
I heard someone from YU once say that YU is working on putting something in place where any YU Rabbi placed in a community will be paid somewhere around the median salary of his congregants. The Rabbi should not be richer than his congregants, but it’s not fair for the congregants to expect them to make ends meet with (sometimes much) less than what they live on themselves.
thats interesting…
How many people, in that case, will be wanting to compete for pulpits in wealthy areas like the Upper East Side, Beverly Hills, Great Neck, etc.?
That means the congregants will have to disclose their salaries to the shul in order for the shul to calculate what the median is.
I kind of doubt anyone will go along with this plan.
Heard from Rabbonim at a conference a few years ago:
The tasks of being the congregation leader in shul itself are menial. Most of us are well prepared to darshen on Shabbos, say a daf yomi shiur, pasken the average shailos that arise. What becomes overwhelming is the volume of personal problems that are best handled by someone with appropriate training. Congregants bring these issues to rabbonim, in the hope that we possess “daas Torah”, and that our counsel will resolve the issues. The trouble is that these issues are beyond anything we experienced in our training for rabbonus, and they are painful enough that they diminish our own ability to function in the capacity as a rov.
Now, are we at all surprised at the concept of “Rabbinic Stress”?
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