CLERGY BURNOUT PATTERNS AND THE GIFT OF

By Rabbi Dr. Tzemah Yoreh

The phenomenon of clergy burnout during these COVID years is well documented. The load we have borne has sometimes been unimaginably heavy, with so much sickness, death, and canceled celebrations. It was enough to break your heart every single day. Sometimes the only thing that kept us going was a sense of duty, a feeling, maybe irrational, that our flocks would not be able to function without our guidance.

And yet the pandemic impacted communities unevenly, and this is true for clergy as well. A small subset of us flourished and grew during the pandemic. I am one of those people.

And I feel so guilty.

I am a diary keeper, so one of the ways I processed this guilt was by writing a book and trying to figure out why I functioned well during the pandemic. In that book, I come out of the closet of neurotypicality and speak of my autism.

It was my autism, and specifically the gifts of my atypical neural wiring, that have allowed me to thrive during these pandemic years. I want to speak here of two of these gifts: the gift of patterns and the gift of veils.

One of my favorite pieces of biblical literature is Ecclesiastes 3, immortalized in English by the beautiful rendition of the Byrds:

To everything, there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die, A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together.

This appeals to me fundamentally.

I am autistic, and I live a very patterned life. At 5:15 a.m. I wake up, and I spend the first 45 minutes reading about 10 articles in various online presses. At 6, my son Nadav gets up—he wants to be with his mother, and I transport him there. I then work on translating or writing a new book for about 15 minutes. And then I do some poetry.

Anything out of the ordinary is a stress factor. A difficulty.

Stress is not inherently a bad thing! It is not a four-letter word; it is six letters long.

Stress becomes a deliberate catalyst to try something new. I incorporate stress into the pattern of my days. I plan for the inevitability of stress.

If my son Jaime starts screaming like a banshee at 3:30 a.m., either because of a bogeyman or because he wants candy, obviously, my morning will not look the same. I am not going to get the same things done. That is difficult. But like an experienced surfer, I ride the wave of exhaustion and do something with it. I write a poem about the quality time I spent with my lovely four year old at 3:30 am. I can’t translate, and I can’t do emails, but I have found, like other people who write, that particular flavors of exhaustion are conducive to creativity.

Even on bad nights, there is generally an hour or two of lucidity in the mornings when I can get important emails done, such as explaining to the board in excruciating detail why a kids’ service is not desirable for a particular event, so I do manage to work.

And then at noon, when the little imps are resting, I can lay down my tired head and sleep.

Exhaustion and stressors simply lead to a different type of pattern, which I fall into after figuring out the nature of the situation.

Now that I have figured out how COVID-19 has shifted the way we do things, I can live in this brave new world." I can live in the world COVID-19 has fashioned. I can live, and I can thrive.

COVID-19 also allowed me the time and space to discover what was most important to me in my interactions with family, friends, peers, and colleagues.

For many years I have struggled with defining my deep need for others. The caricatured autistic person doesn't need anyone else. They are an island deep in the ocean while the rest of the people of the world are at the very least peninsulas This is nonsense, of course, as I articulate any chance I get. As I have articulated a few times. Autistic people need others, just in different ways than our neurotypical brethren. I often need the comforting presence of others near me while I do my own thing. I need my wife to sleep next to me. Otherwise, my sleep is disturbed. I need my two-year-old to call for Abba at 6 a.m. each morning, so I can pick him up and kiss him, and then I need him to ignore me the rest of the morning because he wants to be with his mother. I need others to validate my existence, but I also need partial anonymity. I need a veil.

That is why the COVID world is my world. It has imposed a veil between so many of us. A veil no one has chosen, a veil of necessity. For so many people, the veil has been destructive: Extroverts have been cut off from each other and have found the virtual world a pale shadow that cannot replace in-person interaction. A veritable plague of mental health problems has been the result of forced separation. The continuity and patterns some kids need to thrive in their educational frameworks have been cut off root and branch. And so on.

And then there are people like me, people who feel guilty for how they have survived and flourished. Suddenly the expectations and pressure surrounding face-to-face interactions had ceased. The need to look other people in the eye is gone—no one can tell anymore. And in public, everyone is wearing a mask anyway, so they can’t read people’s expressions, just as I can’t.

I can create so much more content for my congregation because I am less tired. I can teach more classes, make more phone calls, and be present. I could never do that as fully as I wanted to before the pandemic; it would have been too draining. There is much less forced small talk, which is so very hard for me. When there is a conversation, a higher ratio of it is meaningful and substantive, and that is such a pleasure!

It is now becoming safer to congregate most of that time. But I have figured out when the veil between me and the world should continue to exist and when I should take it off to gaze upon the world; I have figured out my balance. I write this not to toot my own horn or in any self-congratulatory tenor. I feel so bad for my fellow clergymen, my dear friends, who had a very rough time in the past three years. I write this to demonstrate that integrating people with a significant difference is of great value to our communities. Autism and other neuroatypicalities are viewed primarily through the lens of deficits, and I want to shift the focus to our gifts, gifts we can share, but only if we are granted a place at the table. Please make room for us.

Rabbi Dr. Tzemah Yoreh is one of the intellectual leaders of Jewish humanism and the head of the City Congregation in New York City.

He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he obtained his Ph.D. in biblical criticism in 2004. He earned a second Ph.D. in Ancient Wisdom Literature from the University of Toronto for the joy of studying the ancient text. He is the author of the new book, So Compassionate it Hurts: My Life as a Rabbi on the Spectrum, He is also the author of The First Book of God, the Kernel to Canon series, which include Jacob’s Journey and Moses’s Mission, and more recently, Why Abraham Murdered Isaac: The First Stories of the Bible Revealed