On Rosh Hashanah morning, a rabbi stands in front of you, in front of God, having spent weeks preparing for this exact moment, praying that they can somehow reach everyone sitting in front of them. They do not know who will walk through the door, but they have been hoping for you. 

Maybe you are a regular, and they know exactly what this year gave you and cost you. Maybe you haven’t set foot in a synagogue in a while, and they know only that you came, carrying something you haven’t named, maybe even to yourself. 

Either way, they want the same thing for you that our tradition asks of this whole season: teshuvah, literally a returning, to yourself, to the people beside you, to something larger than either. They are trying to turn a room of strangers and regulars alike into a community, and to help you walk out having moved, even slightly, closer to who you’re capable of being.

This season is when rabbis are most visible. But much, if not most, of rabbinic leadership happens out of view: in pastoral calls, hospital rooms, hours of study and preparation, and the slow work of building relationships.

Because so much of this work is unseen, it is easy to treat the pressures of the role as the rabbis’ alone to manage. Yet the challenge is bigger than individual workload. Rabbis are often asked to be spiritual leaders, pastoral caregivers, educators, fundraisers, administrators and community organizers — with little agreement about which of those responsibilities should come first. The work that is easiest to see and measure can crowd out the work that matters most: the conversation that takes an hour, the hospital visit that changes a family’s........

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