Religious Roles & Titles
Rabbi
Also Known As Rav · Rabbanim (plural)
Judaism Roles
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Origin 70 to 200 CE
A rabbi is a teacher and a judge, not a priest. This is the single most common misunderstanding of the office and it matters, because Judaism has a priesthood and the rabbi is not it. Rabbis do not offer sacrifice, do not mediate between God and Israel, and are not required for any Jewish ritual. A minyan of ten can pray without one. A layman may lead the service, read Torah, and conduct a wedding or a funeral. What a rabbi has is training and the authority that comes with it, semikhah, ordination, is a certification that the holder is competent to decide questions of halakhah, Jewish law.
What only a rabbi does in practice is rule. A question of whether a kitchen is kosher, whether a marriage may proceed, whether a conversion is valid, whether a get, a bill of divorce, is properly written, these go to a rabbi, and to a beit din of three for the weightier ones. The authority is that of a recognised jurist within a community that accepts the ruling, and it is real precisely to the extent that the community accepts it.
Ordination of women divides the movements sharply. Reform ordained Sally Priesand in 1972, Reconstructionist Sandy Eisenberg Sasso in 1974, Conservative from 1985. Orthodox Judaism does not ordain women as rabbis; within Modern Orthodoxy a movement to ordain women as halakhic authorities under titles such as maharat and rabba has produced graduates in the United States and Israel and has been formally rejected by the Rabbinical Council of America and by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. The argument is active and is about authority rather than learning, since women's advanced Talmudic study is now widespread in Orthodoxy and largely uncontested.
Facts
Organisation
OrdinationRestricted to men 1Tradition: Orthodox Judaism OrdinationOpen to women and men 3Tradition: Reform and Conservative Judaism OrdinationConferred by a teacher's certification of learning 2Tradition: Judaism Conferred by semikhah, the certification of a teacher, not by ordination to a priesthood Reach of Its AuthorityOne congregation, house or temple 2 The community that appoints him, with weight beyond it only by reputation Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 2 Origins
Origin Period Learn More
Why the Rabbi Is Not the Priest
Judaism has a priesthood. It is hereditary, it descends in the male line from Aaron, and the rabbi does not belong to it by virtue of being a rabbi.
The confusion is understandable, because the rabbi occupies the position that a visitor expects a priest to occupy: he stands at the front, he speaks, he is the person you ask. But nothing he does requires him. Ten adult Jews constitute a minyan and may pray. Any competent member may lead the service, read from the Torah, or blow the shofar. A wedding requires a valid contract and witnesses. A funeral requires a burial. None of these require a rabbi, and in communities without one they proceed.
What the rabbi has is semikhah, a certification that he is competent to rule on questions of Jewish law. His authority is juridical and scholarly. When he is needed, it is because a decision has to be made: is this permitted, is this valid, is this document correctly written.
The kohen, meanwhile, is still a kohen. He is called first to the Torah. He pronounces the priestly blessing. He avoids corpse impurity, which is why some Jewish men do not enter cemeteries. He may not marry a divorcee. He does none of this because anyone appointed him and nobody can take it away, because it was never given.
The offices did not merge. One survived the destruction of the Temple with its functions intact but suspended, and the other was built to replace what the Temple had done.
An Office the Destruction of the Temple Made Necessary
The rabbinate as a formal office grew out of the crisis of 70 CE, when the Roman destruction of the Second Temple ended the sacrificial cult the priesthood had existed to run, and the sages who reorganised Jewish life around study, prayer and the synagogue in the centuries that followed became the ancestors of the modern rabbi. Semikhah, rabbinic ordination, was originally understood as an unbroken chain of authority reaching back to Moses, a chain the classical sources describe as having lapsed in late antiquity, after which the ordination given by yeshivas and rabbinical schools has been a recognised but formally distinct successor to the original chain.
The office today varies sharply by movement. Orthodox ordination remains restricted to men, trained typically in a yeshiva under a recognised rabbinic authority; Conservative Judaism began ordaining women in the 1980s; and Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism ordain women and, in most of their institutions, openly LGBTQ rabbis as well, a set of differences that tracks the wider theological divide between the movements over the authority and interpretation of Jewish law. Israel and a number of diaspora communities also maintain the separate institution of a chief rabbinate, a state-recognised or communally recognised office with authority over matters such as marriage and conversion that goes beyond what any single congregation's rabbi holds.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Conservative Judaism has ordained women as rabbis since 1985, when the Jewish Theological Seminary ordained Amy Eilberg after reversing its prior policy.
Haredi Judaism ordains rabbis through yeshiva semicha and does not ordain women.
Modern Orthodox Judaism ordains rabbis through the same semicha process as Orthodox Judaism generally; some Modern Orthodox institutions train women as communal scholars under other titles, a contested development, but the mainstream movement does not ordain women as rabbis.
Orthodox Judaism ordains rabbis through yeshiva semicha; the mainstream movement does not ordain women.
Reform Judaism has ordained women as rabbis since 1972, when Hebrew Union College ordained Sally Priesand, decades after Regina Jonas received an unrecognized private ordination in Berlin in 1935.
Conducted
Contrasts With
The rebbetzin's authority is derived from marriage and personal standing; the ordained woman rabbi, available in Reform since 1972 and Conservative since 1985, holds the pulpit office directly in her own right.
Element Of
The Conservative movement has ordained women since 1985, having debated the question at its seminary for more than a decade first.
Held, with the yeshiva head rather than the congregational rabbi as the central figure of authority.
Held on the Orthodox terms, with a secular training alongside the rabbinic one, and the ordination of women remains outside its boundaries.
The rabbi is a teacher and a judge rather than a priest, ordained by other rabbis, and Orthodox ordination is held by men only.
Reform Judaism ordained Sally Priesand in 1972, the first woman ordained by an American seminary, and Regina Jonas had been privately ordained in Berlin in 1935.
Held Differently
Humanistic Judaism ordains rabbis who do not affirm God, as teachers of Jewish culture and celebrants of its life cycle. The training and the title are kept and the theology they classically carried is not.
Rejected Here
Karaite Judaism refuses the authority of the rabbis and of the oral law they transmit, holding the written Torah alone to be binding. Its own scholars carry a different title and a different kind of authority.
Instances
How this title is used in Judaism.
Sources
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