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In the late 1950s, Chaim Potok was scholar in residence at a suburban synagogue outside Philadelphia. He was charming and charismatic and identifiably brilliant. "On the side," Stephen Fried writes in The New Rabbi, "he was working on his first novel (which was never published but allowed him to learn how to write a novel) and was completing course work for a ph.d. at Penn in philosophy. When he finished his term as scholar-in-residence, he was offered three excellent pulpits, but he was ambivalent about continuing his rabbinate." Potok's wife asked him what he most wanted to do with his life, and Chaim answered that he wanted to write. The senior rabbi at his synagogue quietly gave Potok two thousand dollars from his discretionary fund so he and his wife could go to Israel for a year. There, Potok finished his doctoral dissertation and also wrote The Chosen. The story of two young Jews struggling with their religious obligations in the years after World War II, The Chosen is a classic American novel. It is not quite as good as the best Bernard Malamud or Philip Roth, but it belongs on the same shelf. And so Potok never worked at a synagogue again. He wrote books for the rest of his life.
Chaim Potok is only a minor figure in the The New Rabbi, mentioned in passing because the synagogue whose rabbi was so generous with him, Har Zion, is the setting for Stephen Fried's book. But in a sense, Potok is Fried's real subject: the rabbi that could have been.
Anyone with religious friends knows at least one or two of them who simply must become clergy: they are so bright, their faith so inspiring, that their absence from the pulpit somehow indicts God. Why do they insist on other careers? Some, like Potok, hear another calling. Some seek higher pay or more prestige. Maybe they have no stomach for congregational politics. Some find the clerisy intellectually beneath them: seminaries have become less demanding, loosening their language requirements and replacing courses in Scripture with pastoral counseling or other therapeutic disciplines. One kind and learned friend of mine, now studying to be a physician, left Jewish Theological Seminary because he found that the professors taught to the weakest students rather than challenging the brightest. The curriculum discouraged the kind of rough-edged brilliance he was capable of. "At JTS," one rabbi had warned him, "they circumcise everything that sticks out."
It may be that the good old days weren't always good; plenty of rabbis and ministers were always, as the elderly Jew might say, from hunger. But matters are, if anything, getting worse. Several recent books have documented the slide among Christian ministers. Thomas Reeves' The Empty Church (Free Press, 1996) lays bare the problems in mainline denominations; Betrayal (Little, Brown, 2002), by the staff of The Boston Globe, is a painful, brutal read, both for its depiction of the current priesthood and for how it may discourage future vocations. Along those lines, Donald Cozzens' The Changing Face of the Priesthood (Liturgical Press, 2000) delivers more bad news. Jews do not yet have such a book, one forcing them to confront their troubled rabbinate. But The New Rabbi, while not a broad survey, is an intriguing case study that raises the same pointed questions in measured tones.
In the late 1990s, magazine writer Stephen Fried was in need of a good rabbi. Returning to religion to cope with his father's death, he began to daven, or pray, at Har Zion, a thriving shul in Philadelphia where for three generations middle-class Jews have worshipped, socialized, and brought their children for religious training. At the time, Har Zion was beginning the search for a new rabbi. Gerald Wolpe, a scholar and brilliant preacher, was retiring after 25 years. Sensing that the search to replace Wolpe would be contentious, Fried knew he had found a good story.
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