Curricular Pathways for Spiritual Formation & Leadership Development
HUC-JIR’s Clergy Formation Investigation, completed in October 2024 and submitted by Rabbi Benjamin Ross and Dean Rabbi David Adelson, examines the spiritual grounding and leadership development rabbis and cantors need to serve today’s Jewish communities. Drawing on conversations with more than 100 clergy, educators, students, lay leaders, and other stakeholders, the report calls for the deeper integration of Jewish learning, spiritual formation, and practical leadership development.
It is surprisingly difficult to prepare rabbis and cantors for work that changes beneath their feet. We can name the capacities clergy need in the abstract—Jewish knowledge, spiritual grounding, pastoral presence, emotional intelligence, collaboration, comfort with conflict, and the ability to lead through change. But nearly two years after this investigation was completed, its deeper warning has become harder to ignore: no collection of skills, however essential, can make an unlimited role sustainable or enable shared leadership where the surrounding culture does not support it.
This report seeks to imagine clergy formation as an ongoing practice rather than a credential completed at ordination. Not as the acquisition of mastery, and not as the responsibility of seminaries alone, but as the integration of Talmud Torah, Neshamah, and Kehilah—Jewish wisdom, an examined inner life, and the capacity to build community with others. Read alongside the more recent pulse check of rabbis and cantors, it raises two questions that feel even more urgent now: How do we form clergy who can remain grounded, adaptive, and fully human in the work? And how do we create communities in which they do not have to carry that work alone?