“The Honor and the Burden of Being a Rabbi”

   A year ago, I wrote that Covid could be a Hebrew/Yiddish word…Kavod in Hebrew, kovid itself in Yiddish. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase l’kavod/l’kovid? It means, “in honor of.” The other day I was on a zoominar dealing with bereavement, especially in the context of the pandemic. The presenter reminded us that the root of kavod k, v, d, and from that root one also derives the word meaning “burden” or “weight.” 

   If you think about it both meanings are very relevant especially for a rabbi. We have the honor of being an integral part of the lives of our congregants, but sometimes the honor can weigh us down. For example, we are called by a family upon the death of a loved one but we ourselves are often impacted as well from that death; it weighs upon us almost as much as it weighs on the mourners.

   I recall that a very short time after the retirement of my predecessor and my becoming senior rabbi, I officiated at four funerals in two days. He was shocked as so high a number never happened in his rabbinate; surely since those two days it hasn’t happened in mine either. But I had become close to those four people. To comfort the family through my presence and through the eulogies I wrote was difficult enough; to comfort myself was indeed a weight upon me.

   I spent my entire rabbinate in one congregation; no one else in the class of ’72 can claim that.  On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of our ordination, a classmate wrote asking what the best and worst aspects of that were. “The best,” I told him, “was getting to know all the people.” And then I added, “The worst was getting to know all the people.” 

   You often become an integral part of their lives one way or the other; you are the recipient of secrets; you are with these people in their most vulnerable moments. You are summoned, as it were, because you can be trusted, and to know that is an honor indeed. And then across the years members of the family die. As a normal person (rabbis aren’t “normal”? You know what I mean), should you not be touched, impacted, sometimes overwhelmed, by their deaths? Of course, you are, just as you join in the joy of their happy moments. That is the weight, the burden, just as it is the honor. Both come with the territory, as they say.