Reflections on Leadership, Community, and Fellowship at the Second Annual Sephardic Rabbinic Conference
This week I had the privilege of spending two full days at the Sephardic Rabbinic Conference in New York, devoted this year to “The Art of Leadership.” Rabbis, educators, scholars, communal leaders, and activists came together from around the world to consider the responsibilities of Sephardic leadership today and the future we hope to build together.
There was a great deal to learn over those two days, and I have written below about what was discussed. But I should say at the outset that what has remained with me most strongly, now that I am home, is not any particular lecture or panel; it is the company in which they were heard.
A World Gathered in One Room
People engaged in good work in distant corners of the Jewish world were, for two days, no longer distant from one another. We prayed and ate together, compared experiences, spoke about our successes and our failures, exchanged books and ideas, and had the luxury of conversations that are difficult to conduct from opposite sides of the world.
Two days in one building allowed us to reconnect with people we work alongside from all over the world. Some of them we had not seen in well over a decade; others we had not seen in a few years, and others in a few months. We also met a great many people in person for the first time, colleagues whose work we had followed only at a distance, and others whom we had simply never had occasion to meet. For the kind of work the Rabbanit and I do, which is conducted for the most part across distances, this is not a small thing.
Participants came from across the United States and Israel, and from communities in Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Germany, Turkey, Russia, South Africa, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates, among others. The program speaks of communities stretching “from Brooklyn to Amsterdam, Mexico to Israel,” and the biographies extend that map further still, to London, Istanbul, Stockholm, Madrid, Berlin, Moscow, Cape Town, Montreal, Dubai, and Jerusalem.
The variety of those communities mattered as much as their geography. Some of the participants lead large and established institutions serving thousands of families; others are sustaining Jewish life in places where the numbers are small and the future cannot be assumed. Some have inherited institutions built generations ago, while others are building institutions that did not exist five years ago. The scale of the work differs enormously from one to the next, and yet the sense of responsibility that animates it was recognizable in all of them.
The Range of Leadership
One feature of this year’s conference deserves particular notice. The room was not composed of pulpit rabbis alone. It included communal leaders and lay leadership, educators and heads of school, clinicians, scholars, and men and women who have built institutions where none existed before them. The program had been assembled on the understanding that the work of a community is carried by considerably more than its rabbis, and the conversations were the sharper for it.
It included as well a substantial cohort of women in spiritual and communal roles, and they were not there as an audience. Women appeared throughout both days as panelists, as chairs, and as moderators, and they had been drawn from precisely those fields the conference had gathered to discuss: education, pastoral care, mental health, family life, and the guidance of women in our communities. A great deal of that work is carried by women in practice, in every community represented in that room, and a conference on the art of leadership that did not include the people actually exercising leadership would have been describing a world that does not exist. I want to say plainly that I appreciate the judgment of those who assembled this conference. In recruiting their speakers they understood that questions of this weight cannot be addressed adequately without the women who carry much of this work in our communities, and they extended to those women the same standing as everyone else on the program. That is not universal in our world, and it should be recognized where it occurs.
A further point deserves emphasis, since the name of the conference invites a narrower reading than the room deserved. Not everyone present was Sephardic, not every rabbi there was Sephardic, and not every community represented is a Sephardic community. What gathered us was not descent but commitment: to Torah, to the communities entrusted to us, and to the future of the Jewish people. This has been the message of Shiviti from the beginning, one the Rabbanit and I have been making for years and one we put to the organizers before this conference was ever convened, and to watch it emerge on its own in New York, voiced by the participants and by the leaders on the program without anyone needing to press it, was among the most gratifying aspects of the two days. The Sepharadi tradition gives this work its character, its intellectual habits, its liturgy, its temperament, and its way of approaching a question, and that is where we come from and how we teach. It was never meant to describe a boundary. What we were discussing over those two days was not the Sephardic future as something separate from the Jewish future. It was the Jewish future, approached from where we stand.
Pastoral Care
I was especially grateful that Rabbanit Dr. Devorah Halevy was able to join me for the entire second day of the conference. One of the highlights of these two days, for me personally, was watching her take part in the afternoon panel on “Pastoral Care: Loneliness, Addiction & Mental Health in Our Communities,” together with Rabbi Yoni Rosensweig of Bet Shemesh, founder of Maaglei Nefesh, moderated by our dear friend Rabbi Dr. Ari Soussan and followed by remarks from Ike (Isaac) Dweck of the SAFE Foundation.
Much of the most consequential work of communal leadership happens far from any pulpit. It happens when someone closes the office door and begins to speak about something he or she has been afraid to tell anyone else; when a marriage is unraveling, when a family is confronting addiction, when a person is profoundly alone. To recognize distress, to understand what help we can responsibly offer and where our own competence ends, and to have relationships with professionals already in place before they are needed: these belong to the ordinary work of the rabbinate, and not to its margins.
The panel took up the realities of mental health and addiction as our communities actually encounter them, the boundaries of pastoral care and where those boundaries properly lie, and the part that faith, community, and human connection play in healing. These are subjects that tend to be treated separately, by different people, in different rooms, and there is much to be gained from hearing them addressed together by people who work in more than one of those worlds at once.
I was tremendously proud to watch the Rabbanit bring to that conversation the several worlds in which she works: communal leadership, clinical practice, academic research, and teaching. Her presence there also represented something fundamental to the way we understand our own work, which is that healthy Jewish leadership requires that Torah, community, education, and serious pastoral care speak to one another.
Watch the full panel on Shiviti’s YouTube channel.
What We Did Not Expect
In the corridors and between the panels, the Rabbanit and I repeatedly encountered people who know Shiviti. People who watch our videos and our clips, who join our classes on Zoom from other cities and other countries, who have read our books, among them the English translations of the writings of my teacher, Mori HaRav Yaakov Peretz zt”l. Several approached us whom we had never met and whose names we did not know, only to tell us that they had been learning Torah with us for years.
They spoke to us as individuals, one at a time, about what a particular class or a particular book had come to mean in their own lives. It is a humbling thing to hear, and we are seldom in any position to hear it.
Those conversations gave us a view of something that is ordinarily very difficult to see. We place work into the world carefully and with intention, and then we lose the ability to follow it; a class taught in San Diego does not remain in San Diego, a recording made for one community is heard by people we will never meet, and a book arrives in places its author has never been. To receive some small portion of it back, in person and without warning, was among the most precious things we carried home.
To everyone who has supported Shiviti over the years, I wish you could have stood with us for those conversations. They say more than any set of figures about where your partnership travels.
Above all, our gratitude belongs to HaKadosh Barukh Hu, who has carried this Torah to places we never knew we could reach.
What We Discussed
The program had been built around questions rather than pronouncements, which is a good part of the reason it held the room for two full days.
The first day opened with the plainest question of all: what does it actually mean to lead a Sephardic community in 2026? From there it moved to the rabbi as the head of an institution, and to a subject for which most of us were never trained and which none of us can escape: governance, strategy, staffing, budgets, and boards, and what a rabbi ought to understand about running a synagogue before he is required to run one. The afternoon asked what serious educational leadership demands of us, and what standards and institutional culture are required if we intend to raise a generation of committed educators. The day closed with communities around the world reporting on themselves, as leaders from Brooklyn, Amsterdam, Mexico, and Israel described candidly what is working for them and what is not. That evening, at Congregation Shearith Israel, Rabbi Dr. Marc D. Angel asked the largest question of the conference: what will Sephardic Judaism mean fifty years from now, beyond ethnicity? The evening continued with Selihot and with music drawn from across our pan-Sephardic inheritance.
The second day turned from the office to the practice of it. Are we forming students by handing them conclusions, or by teaching them the reasoning through which a conclusion is reached? When should a rabbi rule, and when should he defer to someone better positioned to rule, and how is a difficult decision to be delivered to the person who must live with it? What is the rabbi’s responsibility beyond the walls of the synagogue, in advocacy, in interfaith work, and in civic life? The afternoon moved into pastoral care, and then into marriage and family, which is the most intimate terrain a rabbi is asked to enter. The conference closed by asking where we go from here.
The People Who Made It Possible
I owe tremendous gratitude to our dear friends Avi Garson, Ethan Marcus, and Ohad Fedida, and to all those who worked alongside them to make these two days possible.
To bring together this many personalities, institutions, communities, and schools of thought is no simple undertaking, and it requires a great deal more than assembling a program. Conferences of this kind do not convene themselves; they exist because particular people decide that they ought to exist and then take on the long and unglamorous work of making it so. What they created was not only the occasion for serious conversation but the conditions under which relationships could begin that might otherwise never have begun at all.
Gratitude is owed as well to the host institutions and sponsors who stood behind these two days, and who were willing to invest in conversations whose returns cannot be measured for years.
I am especially grateful, too, for the leadership of my dear friend Rabbi Joseph Dweck. Rabbi Dweck took part in the opening conversation on the role of the Sephardic rabbi today, though his influence was felt well beyond the panel on which he sat. As Educational Director of The Habura, he has helped to form a generation of serious young students who are not content merely to speak nostalgically about Sephardic Judaism, but have gone on to teach, to publish, to gather communities, to establish institutions, and to initiate thoughtful projects of their own. A teacher is measured by the work of his students, and a great many of his were in that room with initiatives of their own; his influence at the conference was therefore visible less in what he said from the panel than in what the people around him had already gone out and built.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The final session asked, “Where Do We Go From Here?”, and considered what institutions, coalitions, and shared commitments will allow our communities to flourish in the years ahead. Two days in New York could not answer such a question, and no one present pretended otherwise. But a direction did emerge over those two days, and this is what the conference came to.
We must keep learning from one another without requiring one another to become identical. We can share resources, open doors, make introductions, and support worthwhile projects even when our own names are not attached to them, and we can make room for new voices while remaining rooted in those who came before us. There is no reason for every rabbi, educator, scholar, and community to struggle alone with questions that friends elsewhere have already spent years attempting to solve. If those two days produced anything resembling an agreement, it was this: that we refuse to imagine that anyone committed to this work must undertake it alone.
Institutions and ideas matter enormously, and so do friendships. Communities are strengthened when people trust one another enough to ask for advice, to share what they have learned, to disagree without severing relationships, and to take genuine pleasure in the success of someone else’s work.
To all our friends and colleagues who were there, and to those doing this work throughout the world, may HaKadosh Barukh Hu bless your communities, institutions, initiatives, and everything good you are trying to build. Please know that the Shiviti family is here for you. If we can teach, connect, advise, collaborate, share resources, open a door, make an introduction, or simply stand beside you, we would consider it a privilege.
Most of all, the Rabbanit and I returned home grateful to HaKadosh Barukh Hu for allowing us some small part in this remarkable fellowship of people who, each in a different place and in a different way, have accepted responsibility for the Torah, the communities, and the traditions entrusted to us.
This year we gathered in New York. B’ezrat Hashem, next year may we all meet again in Yerushalayim.