Can This Relationship Be Saved – The Mediation Project

By Joanne Palmer

November 2007 – When two people stand together under the chuppah, they imagine a sunny, boulder-free road in front of them, a path to perfect understanding and lasting partnership.

Sometimes that happens, and sometimes it doesn’t.

When a rabbi and a congregation come together, expectations often are similarly high. The process is not exactly the same – the negotiations are more protracted, the relationship is consummated with paperwork, and the eventual installation ceremony lacks the band, the broken glass, and the Viennese table – but the underlying truth of the relationship is not so different.

Most of the time, things go exactly as the rabbi and the congregation had hoped; the rabbi’s combination of skills and characteristics matches the congregation’s needs and hopes, and so the two live happily together for many years, until the rabbi retires. Sometimes the rabbi and congregation aren’t a perfect fit, both sides recognize it, and the relationship ends gently and without acrimony. Sometimes one simply outgrows the other, or needs on either side change.

And then sometimes things go really badly, and one or both sides want out.

Until now, when the relationship between the rabbi and the congregation became unfixable, someone often would go to court, the issue would become public, it would be settled without regard to Jewish values, and often it would bring up issues of church/state separation. To forestall that, for many decades United Synagogue’s committee on congregational standards has offered mediation and binding arbitration.

Now, the committee – a 40-member United Synagogue body with representation from many of the Conservative movement’s professional organizations – working in cooperation and partnership with the Rabbinical Assembly, has established a new group of mediators. It chose 17 people – all lawyers, all already trained mediators, all committed Conservative Jews, among them congregational presidents, at least two past congregational presidents, and two past regional presidents – and given them a two-day training program that made explicit many of the implicit Jewish values that should inform effective mediation. The mediators’ goals will be to try to reconcile the rabbi and the congregation if it is possible, or to soften the affect of the split on both sides if it is not.

Although the system of binding arbitration works well, said Rabbi Moshe Edelman, the committee’s director, intercession often comes very late in the process. “We’re trying to find a way not to go to mediation or arbitration,” he said. “We are creating a corps of talented, Jewishly sensitive, value-laden, and highly qualified mediators.”

The 17 new mediators were brought to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York from across the United States and Canada. The program was underwritten by special allocations from the United Synagogue and the Rabbinical Assembly. The training session, held in mid-October, offered the mediations “the Jewish perspective on compromise and mediation,” Rabbi Edelman said. “That’s why we brought in Rabbi Mayer Rabinowitz for a session to study Talmud about the centrality of compromise. It already has 2,000 years of tradition behind it.”

Now, if congregations and rabbis begin to have problems, if both sides agree at we can recommend one of our mediators, who will try to work with them to resolve the problem and restore shalom bayit in the congregation. Some relationships, of course, cannot be saved, but others can be. Through mediation, both congregations and rabbis might be spared some of the worst ravages of ruined partnerships.