UNITED STATES
The Jewish Week
Mon, 10/20/2014
Erica Brown
Special To The Jewish Week
It’s been a rough post-Yom Kippur for Jews in DC. What shook me most about the Freundel scandal – our `Water’gate – is how many people said, “I’m shocked but not surprised.” Really? Rabbi Barry Freundel, who was arrested for voyeurism this past week, is an articulate scholar with a reputation as a forceful leader who put down other rabbis and congregations and could be fierce about institutions and practices he did not like. A friend who heard the news observed, “Beware the rabbi who protests too much.” If the allegations are true, this was not a crime of intimacy. It was a crime of power. Crimes of power happen when power is unchecked. Another friend said, “The problem is that the rabbinate is still a deregulated industry.”
We tend to look at rabbinic crimes that traumatize congregants and break up families as terrible one-off misdemeanors that have little to do with us and nothing to do with normative behaviors in congregations. They are an aberration, of course, and we should never blame the victims. We can question, however, if we are doing enough to “regulate the industry.” Many synagogues are hesitant to institute real feedback loops, oversight committees and annual performance reviews for rabbis. We often let rabbis transcend professional evaluation until they fail us and fall far below expectation.
Feedback is often given with contract negotiations, but are true measures of accountability put into place? And how often do such negotiations take place? If you have an annual performance review in your job, so should your rabbi. A rabbi is there to serve a congregation – that’s you. You need to let the rabbi know if he or she is doing a good job. If there are any red flags, they must be identified swiftly and without hesitation. One woman in a leadership seminar asked about giving feedback to her rabbi who lacked skills in pastoral care.
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