“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 . . .
October 4th, 2012 | 11:50 am
Prof. Richman’s arguments are beyond absurd; they are indeed animated by a personal resentment of the Conservative movement’s policies as it pertained to his own synagogue’s rabbi search. (Just google it.) Let’s be clear: membership in any Jewish “denomination,” which is really a way of describing loose federations of like-minded synagogues, is purely voluntary and in no way a “cartel” with which you are forced to do business.
A synagogue wants to hire any rabbi it pleases? Sure, no problem, all it has to do is declare independence from the denomination (United Synagogue, Union of Reform Judaism, Orthodox Union, etc). Of course, in that case the synagogue lose the privileges of membership, like consulting services and the memberships of affiliated youth and women’s and men’s organizations.
The cranky professor can’t really believe that any federal court is going to interfere with the ministerial hiring arrangements of purely religious organizations- especially when there are “exclusive provider” arrangements made in secular businesses (e.g, franchises, among many examples.) So it seems that he’s just frustrated that his synagogue had to choose: be part of a denomination, and get the privileges of membership, or don’t be, and don’t get those privileges.
Like many Americans, he wants all the freedom to choose and all the benefits due him with none of the responsibilities of contributing to the community. It’s a bitter irony that that the lessons of Judaism itself are lost to him in his rant against rabbinical organizations.