Burnout Lessons: Seek Your Shofar; Find Your Envelope

By Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz

A March 2022 study from Barna, a Christian research organization, showed that 42 percent of pastors had considered resigning in the previous year. In recent years, the coronavirus and political divisions have created enormous stress within congregations; but the trends in clergy burnout go back for over two decades. A New York Times article in 2010 cited multiple studies on clergy burnout. In 2005, the Presbyterian Church found that since the 1970s, the number of ministers leaving their jobs during their first five years of work had quadrupled. A 2002 survey of the Evangelical Lutheran Church found that 13 percent of their ministers were taking antidepressants. A seven-year study at Duke University of 1,726 Methodist ministers in North Carolina found that compared with congregants, the ministers reported significantly higher rates of arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, and asthma.

Clergy burnout is understandable because communal leadership is by its very nature difficult. Rashi (Numbers 11:28) famously says that if you place the burden of communal leadership on someone’s shoulders, “They will disintegrate on their own.” The old joke about a Jewish mother telling her son that being a rabbi is “not a job for a Jewish boy,” has a fair a bit of truth to it.

Thirty years ago, when I started to attend rabbinic conventions, I’d listen incomprehensibly when older colleagues spoke about burnout. I couldn’t understand why they burnt out. Being a rabbi was such a thrill, such a privilege, that I planned to do it for free after I retired!

But now I understand those colleagues. Even though I have been blessed in my career, there are some days when it is a challenge to get going with a song in my heart, when it seems more desirable to turn over and stay in bed.

Now, I’m not embarrassed by burnout, because I know I’m in good company. For example, this is what Moses says to God (Numbers 11:12), after another one of the Jews’ complaints in the desert: “Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do you tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant...?”

As exceptional a man as Moses was, he was still struggling to keep up with the demands of his position.

Similarly, listen to the words of Maimonides, in a letter to a student who wants to visit:

I will write you my daily schedule:

I live in Fostat, and the Sultan lives in Cairo. The distance between them is 4000 cubits [a mile and a half]. My duties to the Sultan are very heavy.…….by the time I come back to Fostat, half the day is gone. Under no circumstances do I come earlier. And I am ravenously hungry by then. When I come home, my foyer is always full of people – Jews and non-Jews, important people and not, judges and policemen, people who love me and people who hate me, a mixture of people, all of whom have been waiting for me to come home.... I apologize and ask that they should be kind enough to give me a few minutes to eat. That is the only meal I take in twenty-four hours……. Patients go in and out until nightfall, and sometimes – I swear to you by the Torah –it is two hours into the night before they are all gone. I talk to them and prescribe for them even while lying down on my back from exhaustion. …..On Shabbat, the whole congregation, or at least the majority of it, comes to my house after morning services, and I instruct the members of the community as to what they should do during the entire week. We learn together in a weak fashion until the afternoon. Then they all go home. Some of them come back and I teach more deeply between the afternoon and evening prayers…That is my daily schedule.

Now, after writing all of this, Maimonides throws in the kicker: “And I’ve only told you a little of what you would see if you would come.”

Sadly, from Moses to Moses, burnout has been the rabbi’s lot.

Rabbis are idealists, and they expect a lot from the world. And so, we get disappointed all the time.

I can tell you that looking back at 30 years in the rabbinate, that I expected more.

I expected more of Jewish leaders. Today, there are entire blogs devoted to collecting news articles about the failings and foolishness of Jewish leaders and rabbis. These misbehaving rabbis are my colleagues, and sometimes they are people I had deeply respected. And so it hurts me personally when I have to read about stupid rabbinic pronouncements: like the rabbis who write a book advocating the murder of Arab babies, or the rabbis insisting that parents should not call the police to report sexual abuse. Even worse are the scandals, the rabbis who make headlines for crimes ranging from shakedowns to sexually harassing students. Each scandal hurts, and each one makes me a bit more cynical.

I also expected more of the Jewish community. Teaching Judaism in North America feels like a Sisyphean task, pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it roll down again. Jews are assimilating rapidly; just look at the marriages page in The New York Times on any given Sunday, and you can see how many of our children are marrying non-Jews. And then you turn to the other pages of the newspaper and read about young Jews who are passionate opponents of the State of Israel. How is it that young Jews are sometimes Israel’s greatest enemies?

I also expected more from God. Sure, when I started in the rabbinate, I knew intellectually bad things happen to good people; I was familiar with the Book of Job. But I had never seen with my own eyes the pain and suffering families endure. But now I have. How can you not question when you see good people suffer?

Someone once remarked to me that it must be “easier” for me to deal with difficult funerals,

considering that now I have thirty years of experience. Actually, the opposite is true. If you go to one tragic funeral, you imagine that this is the only one and that it is a unique event. But if you go to ten tragic funerals, you have a terrible sinking feeling in your stomach, because you know full well that if there have been ten tragic funerals, there can be an eleventh, too.

Last but not least, I expected more from myself.

Burnout, however, is not a rabbinic preserve. The coronavirus caused a major disruption to everyone’s lives; and even today, nearly 60% of workers are experiencing some form of burnout.

One of the great lessons about burnout comes from the Talmud, which makes the remarkable statement that God, too, is disappointed every day. This passage (Avodah Zara 3b) relates that during “the second three hours of the day God sits in judgment on the whole world, and when He sees that the world is so guilty as to deserve destruction, He transfers Himself from the seat of Justice to the seat of Mercy.” Remarkably enough, God is so disappointed in humanity every day, that He needs to change his perspective to mercy in order to accept the world.

This Talmudic passage offers a powerful insight: Even for God, disappointment is a daily part of life. Even so, God manages to find a way to get over his disappointment. And so should all of us.

There are two steps in the process.

The first is found in a text in the Midrash (Vayikra Rabbah 29:3) that complements the one in the Talmud. It says that the moment God hears the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, He moves from the throne of justice to the throne of mercy.

How does the shofar affect such a dramatic change?

I think the answer is that when God listens to the shofar, He sees a different side of humanity. The

ram’s horn is a symbol of the akeidah, a permanent reminder of Abraham’s willingness to say “Hineni,” I am ready. And even if God sees all of the stupid and petty things man has done, God remembers that when the chips are down, man can say “Hineni,” “I am ready,” just like Abraham did.

When the chips are down, we aren’t all that disappointing.

There are times we feud, yes…but there are also times when we run to the hospital and mend old rifts. (But why does it have to wait for the hospital though?)

And when it comes to the Jewish people, when the chips are down, we always seem to survive. The Holocaust ravaged European Jewry; yet somehow, three years later, those same survivors are fighting in Israel’s War of Independence.

And even for myself, there are times when I can look at one or two things I helped with and say that if my entire career had been for this one thing, it would have been worth it.

When we are burnt out, we need to do what God does and see the best side of our community, ourselves, and of the Jewish future. When the chips are down, we see who we really could be; and remarkably, we’re usually a lot better than we thought we were!

But that alone is not enough. There is a second step: embracing the importance of disappointment. This, too, can guide us out of burnout.

The strange thing about disappointment is that it seems to be part of God’s plan. In the Talmudic text we cited, it says that God gets disappointed every day. In the Midrash we cited, it says God is disappointed every Rosh Hashanah. And indeed, Rashi cites a Midrash that says that even during creation, God wanted to create a world that would withstand judgment, only to realize that it was impossible.

So, the obvious question is: why does God keep disappointing Himself? If at the very beginning He knew that the world would come up short when judged, why does He keep trying to judge the world? Isn’t it exhausting?

It may be exhausting, but it’s worth it. Judgment reminds us of who we really are. All of us start with a dream – a plan, no different than God’s. We have high hopes. But we get sidetracked and lost.

Being a good spouse drifts because we’re too distracted.

Being a good parent gets lost because we’re too busy.

Having good values gets lost because we’re too ambitious.

We forget who we are.

And so, we need to be disappointed, if only to remind ourselves of our own original plan. Disappointment helps leads us back home.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik explains that Teshuva, repentance, is a way of recovering our true selves. Sin is a by-product of losing our way while we chase foolish dreams and trivial goals. Teshuva is returning to our true identity. He writes:

While, in sin, man misidentifies and alienates himself from himself, in the case of Teshuva he reverses the process of misidentification: he discovers himself, and “returns” to his true self.

Burnout is our soul’s way of telling us to come home again; and on Rosh Hashanah, the holiday of disappointment, we need to remember to come home, to do Teshuva, and get back to our true selves.

Or, if I can put it another way, we need to find our envelope.

Let me explain.

Dr. David Pelcovitz visited Montreal a few years ago and told me a powerful story. A nine-year-old girl, encouraged by her mother, started to volunteer by visiting an elderly woman who had lost most of her eyesight. One day, while chatting with the young girl, the woman explained that she could recover her eyesight if she could have a small operation; but because she was on a fixed income, she lacked the resources to pay for this expensive procedure. Inspired to action, the girl went home and told her mother that she was going to do a fundraiser to pay for the elderly woman’s operation. The mother

smiled at her daughter’s good intentions, but assumed, like most parents, that her daughter’s naive dream would soon disappear.

The next day, the girl went to school and began to raise money. She went from class to class, from teacher to teacher, and at the end of the day, after all the change had been exchanged into bills, the girl had a grand total of 83 dollars. She took the thick envelope stuffed with singles and ran off to her elderly friend. Not knowing much about contemporary medical economics, the girl announced to her elderly friend that she had raised the money for the operation! So, the young girl and the elderly woman took a short walk over to the local ophthalmologist’s office.

The doctor examined the elderly woman, and says yes, she is a candidate for the procedure, and he can do it right away. At that point, the young girl chirps up and says that she will pay for the procedure and produces the envelope with the 83 dollars.

The doctor performs the operation.

The girl comes home, and reports to her mother the day’s events. The mother is mortified; she assumes that her daughter has somehow misled the doctor. She runs to the doctor’s office to apologize, and to negotiate a way to pay him the balance. As the mother continues to talk, the doctor cuts her off in mid-sentence and opens his jacket. In his inside pocket is the envelope, stuffed with singles; the doctor had not put the cash away. He told the mother that this envelope was far more precious to him than any amount of money, because this envelope reminded him of goodness of humanity and why he became a doctor in the first place.

Our job is to find the envelope in our pockets and remember who we really are. This envelope, the very essence of our inner goodness, is always there, waiting to be rediscovered.

When we find ourselves too lost in our ambitions, and a little girl comes to our office with a ridiculous dream, listen to what she has to say. Because she might be carrying an envelope with infinite value, one that reminds us of who we really are.

Shanah Tova!!