During a recent coffee meeting I had with a young Jewish professional who works at a local Jewish organization, she asked me, “Why is this work so hard and lonely?”
As the community rabbi at GatherBay, an organization that helps young adults make meaningful connections with the Jewish community and each other, I’ve had many conversations like this one. Out of 70+ coffees with early and mid-career Jewish professionals across the Bay Area, a significant majority of people I meet are struggling to the point of considering leaving the field.
In my previous six years of rabbinic work at a local synagogue, I mentored and supervised many young and early-career educators. While working in the Jewish world has always been hard, it’s definitely gotten harder.
Engagement professionals, whose work centers on building relationships among members of Jewish communities, face compounding challenges. These workers, who are often younger adults early in their careers, are tasked with closing the gap between what community members want and what is realistic or feasible at their organizations — a difficult tension to hold, and one that their organizations may not be equipped to help them face.
At the same time, organizational budgets are razor-thin, and salaries haven’t kept pace with cost of living, especially with inflation and within the Bay Area. All of this makes it likely that these workers will burn out and leave the field, taking their knowledge and skills with them.
On top of that, institutions are not always equipped to navigate the range of ideological and cultural differences among their employees, which leaves some of the young professionals I meet with unable to express their opinions in the workplace. While this isn’t a new challenge, I’ve seen the intensity of those experiences increase since Oct. 7, 2023. With sometimes-porous or complex boundaries between work and non-work life, emerging professionals often need separate spaces to unpack their own Jewish questions, without the pressure to be “on” around community members.
The trends I’ve witnessed in the Bay Area are reflected nationally in Jewish nonprofits, as reported by Leading Edge. According to its “Jewish Workforce Snapshot: Spring 2024” report, “employees under age 30 were 89% more likely than their older counterparts to leave their organization.”
These trends are concerning, but what’s the bigger impact on the field? Today’s early-career Jewish professionals will grow into tomorrow’s leaders and innovators. Some are already doing so. But this can’t happen if they take their talents elsewhere.
While these challenges are widespread, the impact is especially pronounced for young Jewish professionals with experiences of marginalization — including being BIPOC, LGBTQ+, disabled, and/or coming from less class privilege — since they also face bias within Jewish community. If our field doesn’t prioritize supporting young professionals, the Jewish future will be less diverse, organizations will offer a narrower range of options for constituents across the Bay Area, and the entire community will be poorly positioned to meet new challenges.
Obviously, creating a more robust Jewish professional landscape and talent pipeline requires systemic solutions. However, I’ve seen firsthand how a specific intervention — one-on-one spiritual direction and mentorship from a trained rabbi or chaplain — can make a profound difference.
In my coffee chat with the young professional I mentioned above, I responded to her question with a teaching from midrash. Commenting on the Exodus story, a text from Shemot Rabbah raises the question of why God spoke to Moses from the midst of a thornbush. The answer: to show that nowhere, not even a thornbush, is absent of the Divine presence.
It’s like that with your work, I offered. It may be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be lonely. Just as Moses had company in his work, my goal is to be in it with you.
This is the work of accompaniment, a core tenet of my rabbinate. Our tradition never promises that challenges can be eliminated, but we don’t have to face them alone. The combination of pastoral care and professional development enables Jewish professionals to navigate complexity more successfully, thrive in their work and feel accompanied through difficulty. Ultimately, this kind of care reduces suffering and expands capacity.
At GatherBay, we take an ecosystem view of supporting Jewish professionals, and we’ve developed two powerful interventions that we’ve already seen be extremely effective.
One of these is the Community of Practice model, where engagement professionals meet regularly to learn, collaborate, share resources and build relationships. The other is the free, personalized mentorship and coaching, where I work one-on-one with Jewish professionals to navigate challenges such as sunsetting their organization, dealing with a board or learning how to be a supervisor.
These person-by-person support-based solutions are necessary, but not sufficient. To truly make the Jewish professional world sustainable for the people who work there, greater systemic solutions are needed as well. The well-being of our emerging professionals is a public good for the Jewish community, and so we should invest in it collectively, rather than organization by organization.
The problem is urgent. While we work on systemic solutions, it’s essential to offer immediate, effective interventions. By investing in the spiritual care of Jewish professionals, we invest in the health, well-being and resilience of the Jewish community as a whole. When front-line Jewish professionals are more supported, Jewish organizations have less turnover and better leadership pipelines, and ultimately are better able to sustain Jewish communities that reflect the true diversity, expansiveness and multiplicity of Jewish life in the Bay Area.