No One Prepares You For Clergy That Is Younger Than You
By Hillary Weintraub, CBB’s Religious Practices Trustee
No one prepares you for clergy that is younger than you.
There are other versions of this particular midlife milestone. The first doctor who is younger than you. The first lawyer. The first teacher who looks suspiciously like someone made a clerical error.
Those moments can be mildly alarming, but they are also easy enough to explain away. A younger doctor went to medical school. A younger lawyer knows the law. Their authority rests, at least in part, on specialized knowledge.
Clergy feels different.
Of course rabbis have specialized knowledge too. Years of study, text, history, liturgy, pastoral training and Jewish law. But we ask something more of them. We ask them to stand beside us at births and deaths, marriages and divorces, illness and celebration. We bring them questions about family, faith, grief, purpose, fear and, every so often, the meaning of our entire lives before lunch.
In other words, we ask them not only for knowledge, but for wisdom.
And then you realize that the person you are turning to for spiritual wisdom has been on the planet considerably less time than you have. It takes a minute.
Can someone younger than I am be my spiritual elder?
That question first occurred to me when joining CBB in the midst of a generational change. Rabbi Steve announced his retirement not long after my family joined, and our new rabbinic leadership is a generation younger.
The question, however, was answered rather quickly. In watching Rabbis Daniel and Maddy teach, lead and care for our community, I discovered that I had been conflating wisdom with accumulated experience.
What I have come to understand is that I don’t actually need my rabbis to have experienced everything I have experienced. I need them to know how to sit beside me in it.
That may be one of the great gifts of clergy. They don’t have to fix our grief or resolve our uncertainty. They can listen without needing to supply an answer. They can help us make sense of what we are carrying without pretending to know exactly how it feels.
And they don’t come to that conversation empty handed. They bring Torah, generations of Jewish thought, and often the question we didn’t know we needed to ask. We bring the lives we have actually lived. Perhaps wisdom is found somewhere in that exchange.
Maybe that is the midlife surprise no one prepares you for: wisdom doesn’t have to come from someone farther down the road. Some wisdom can only be found with the person willing to walk beside you on it.