analysts, ordained by their teachers as qualified to inter- pret the Bible. It was a calling but not a job: virtually all of these rabbis had occupations unrelated to their scholarly work and status. Rabbi Yochanan Hasandlar was a cobbler, for instance, and Rabbis Chisda and Pappa both amassed great wealth as brewers. The functions we now most associate with the rabbinate — leading prayers, pro- viding counsel, officiating at ceremonies and life-cycle events — came much later. A better model for the function of this early cohort of rabbis is that, for the most part, they were academic deans. Their rabbinates primarily took the form of guiding and teaching the students at their schools, though many of them were leaders in their respective communities as well. At the time, synagogues were not the locus of Jewish life; for most people, that was the home, and for rabbis and their students, it was the yeshivah. Prayer was led by whoever knew the liturgy, and it seems evident from the Talmud that people likely married themselves and wrote their own divorces. Rabbis might adjudicate any issues that arose, but life-cycle events were essentially handled as direct transactions between the parties involved. Religious law and textual understanding became matters to be adjudicated, and rabbis became leaders who defined what is permitted and what is forbidden. By the Middle Ages, rabbis were taking on general spiritual leadership, while still maintaining rigorous schol- arly work. In this period, too, while many rabbis devoted much of their days to study, the vast majority maintained some sort of occupation to sustain themselves. It was only around the 19th century that rabbis start- ed taking on many of the responsibilities we now associ- ate with the role: officiating at weddings and divorces, and tending to pastoral matters. This was due to two factors, both involving increasing integration with broader society. States in Western Europe were increasingly secularized and began to assume responsibilities — registering births and deaths, adjudicating civil law—that Jewish communi- ties had previously discharged on their own. Judaism, as a result, became a voluntary community, one that an indi- vidual could leave because essential functions were now administered by the secular state. At the same time, Jew- ish communities became less insular and started to gain a greater understanding of Christianity, which had a long tradition of ministers officiating at life-cycle ceremonies and providing spiritual leadership to congregations. As a result, rabbis —who increasingly functioned as com- munity leaders rather than arbiters of administrative and legal processes—began to emulate some of those practic- es. This included wearing clerical garments (which rabbis historically had not worn), officiating at all manner of life- cycle events where rabbis were not previously needed, and assuming duties of a more pastoral nature. This was the beginning of the professionalization of the rabbinate: the people who undertook these tasks drew salaries from their respective communities or, in some cases, from the armies where they served as chaplains.
With this decision, Altman became one of the grow- ing ranks of freelance rabbis. A quick Google search now locates a panoply of rabbis for hire, available in any or no denomination, geographically close to you or across the globe and available remotely. LinkedIn and wedding plan- ning sites like TheKnot.com reveal dozens more willing to travel for destination weddings or available on Zoom for independent study. As I sought some clarity on this growing movement and, truthfully, to get a better understanding of my own rabbin- ate, I began to realize two things. One is that — concerns about shrinking enrolment at many rabbinical schools and difficulty hiring for some congregational positions not- withstanding — the rabbinate isn’t going away anytime soon. The other is that the rabbinate is in the midst of massive change and appears to be evolving faster than at any point since its inception. THE RABBINATE: A VERY BRIEF HISTORY The rabbinate as a career is a relatively recent phenomenon. Rabbis first emerged in Jerusalem around the period of the Second Temple. The five centuries or so leading up to the Temple’s destruction, in 70 CE, saw a shift in lead- ership away from priests, who offered sacrifices and performed other Temple rites on behalf of the people, and towards intellectuals — a shift that accelerated after the Temple’s destruction, when priests no longer had their traditional venue for exercising power. Steven Wernick, senior rabbi at Beth Tzedec in Toronto and former CEO of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, describes this transition as defining development of the last 2,000 years of Judaism. “The rabbis essentially replace the priests as the authoritative leadership of the community, and the religious experience shifts from the Temple to the academy.” These newer leaders came to be known as rabbis, from the Hebrew word rav , meaning master. This opened up vast new terrains for the development of Jewish thought and practice. As Wernick puts it, “The au- dacity of the rabbinic claim is that the Mishnah was given at Sinai.” This was a new and radical claim: the ancient Is- raelites of the desert and the Jews of the First Temple era did not practise this form of Judaism. On this account, the many laws and prescriptions which were the subject of rabbinic writing and debate were all received by Moses at Sinai. Take the laws of Shabbat, for example. Most of what rabbis discuss about Shabbat in the Talmud—what kinds of knot-tying constitute a Shabbat violation, for example—is not explicitly mentioned in the Torah. And yet the rabbis’ claim was that these laws were given to Moses as part of an oral Torah at the same time he received the written Torah, and that the mechanisms for interpreting these laws were also presented at Sinai and handed down through the gener- ations. One consequence of this view: interpreters of Jewish practice became both more important and more powerful. The earliest generations of rabbis, the scholars of the Mishnah and the Talmud, were scholars and textual
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