Rabbinic leader and the volunteer leader, The

Religious Education, Fall 2002 by Kelman, Stuart, Jordan, Alison

Abstract

Power both defines and confuses the roles of clergy and lay volunteers within a congregation. One Kabalistic model that describes the relationship between God and humans is used to provide a structural analogy to the issue of clergy and lay volunteer relationships. In this model, the rabbi is no longer the one in charge of everything and the congregant is no longer simply a passive recipient.

"If sex was another generation's "Dirty Little Secret,"" as D. H. Lawrence termed it, surely ours is power. Now that we can admit we bear this primal lust, we see it operating everywhere, often more decisively than money, class, conditioning, genetics, or the other usual determinants of behavior. The "purest" relationships reveal a political structure. In sex and not only between parents and children, in education and not only in political dealing, in religion, art, literature, and culture and not only in business strategy, most decisions are made on the basis of power. So our hope of accomplishment in most fields rests largely on how power is organized there or what can be done to change that arrangement.

Perhaps we should not be shocked to discover the extent to which power determines most human affairs. It is more than a century now since Nietzsche proclaimed man's will to power as his dominant characteristic. Yet what has moved many in our generation to despair is neither the ubiquity nor the decisiveness of power but rather the recognition that almost everywhere we see power in action we see it abused.... We despair because the abuse of power seems endemic.

Our constant experience is that we have not been consulted, or have not been listened to, or have not really had a voice in matters that deeply affect our lives. In short, we exist in the continuing consciousness of being the objects of someone else's power rather than being persons in our own right though we are involved with people of greater status than ours. "I therefore want to make a suggestion which might help ethicize the leader's role and which does so by going a step further on the road which turned the benevolent tyrant into the responsive chairman-executive," so begins an essay by Eugene Borowitz originally printed in Religious Education (1974). In starting his article with the notion of power, he defines the problem in the relationship between the function of the rabbi and that of the lay leader (or, to use our preferred term, volunteer leader). Borowitz's response was to take a sixteenth century, Lurianic mystical model, and one facet of it in particular, and suggest strongly that it is a useful model for contemporary leadership.

What we would like to describe briefly is an application of the Lurianic model of leadership, as understood by Borowitz who uses the modern lens of leadership theory, for the purpose of providing insights into the functioning of congregations and their rabbis.

First, a methodological problem: Much as many would have us believe (or for that matter, what we might believe about ourselves), the rabbi is not God! So it is with great trepidation that Borowitz and we use a transcendent model for the purposes of transposition into the realm of the human. It is much too complex an issue to deal with here. We refer you to the article and others of this kind.

Lurianic mysticism begins with two well-known themes: God as creator and humans as co-creator-shituf in Hebrew. Along with these two come the three familiar terms of tzimtzum, shevira, and tikkun (contraction, collapse/breakup, and repair). There are, for Borowitz, two ways that creation can be viewed: the normative way and the Lurianic way. In the normative way, God "spills over" the being of God. But the problem is, if God is everywhere, where is the place to create? So emerges: the Lurianic theory. Creation occurs not by expansion (externalization), but rather by contraction, tzimtzum-by withdrawing into the self. "God does not initiate the existence of other things by extending Himself. There would be no place. God must, so to speak, make Himself less than He is so that other things can come into being. So great, says Luria, is God's will to create; so great is God's love for creation" (Borowitz 1974, 334). In effect, God pulls back to make space for creation. In that space, the world was created. But God was not in the world-yet. God then sends some light into the space and this light is contained in vessels.

Creation, though, is imperfect and there is a cosmic accident. The vessels containing those divine sparks break, shevira, and those nitzotzot (sparks)-- God's powers-are out there in the universe. What we see are shells or husks of what should have been, hiding their proper kernels of God's energizing light-for us to fix and bring back together and restore creation. The task of tikkun (repair), is human, not divine. The ailing cosmos is healed. (Borowitz 1974, 336)

Tikkun olam, the fixing of the universe is our task, not God's alone. When we think of leadership, we often assume that it means the use of power to achieve specific ends. Borowitz suggests that leadership be refined and redefined not primarily in terms of the accomplishment of plans, but equally in terms of the humanizing effect on the people involved. It is a common practice at one educational camp associated with a particular religious denomination, for example, that should a baseball game get too nasty, the game must be stopped and the players and counselors engage in a "humanizing" session. People are always as important as, if not more important than, the current undertaking.