“Synagogues are contracting,” says Barak Richman professor of law and business administration at Duke University, “and American Judaism remains ossified in organizational structures that may have made sense in the 1950s but currently are unable to address contemporary needs.”
The “organizational structures” he refers to are the rules that “America’s rabbis implement . . . that are squarely illegal and are well outside any reasonable First Amendment protection.”
“When a synagogue wants to hire a rabbi,” he explains, it confronts a tightly organized labor market. Individual rabbis are prohibited from seeking employment independently, and instead are required to apply only for jobs through their professional associations. If they act independently, they are expelled from their associations . . . . Their collective dominance allows them to pursue full-employment policies, extract higher wages than other clergy, and stifle innovation and entry from would-be entrants. America’s synagogues suffer as a result.”
Professor Daniel Crane of University of Michigan Law School has agreed to engage Richman in a debate on Conservative Judaism’s process for naming rabbis on St. John’s University’s Center for Law and Religion Forum . To be continued . . .
You have a decision to make: double or nothing.
For this week only, a generous supporter has offered to fully match all new and increased donations to First Things up to $60,000.
In other words, your gift of $50 unlocks $100 for First Things, your gift of $100 unlocks $200, and so on, up to a total of $120,000. But if you don’t give, nothing.
So what will it be, dear reader: double, or nothing?
Make your year-end gift go twice as far for First Things by giving now.
