Campus Rabbi

The Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale

Role Overview

The Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale (Yale’s Hillel) is seeking a visionary educational and spiritual leader who will inspire and support our students through teaching, pastoral care, community leadership, and one-on-one engagement. We seek candidates for this role who possess Rabbinic ordination and who identifies with (and have been a part of) the Conservative or Reform movements. This is one of two new Rabbinic positions we are hiring for in this cycle. This new Campus Rabbi and our new Assistant Campus Rabbi will work closely with our incumbent Campus Rabbi (who holds Orthodox ordination), our Associate Chaplain, and the rest of our Student Life Team. As a group, our intention is that our Rabbis will serve complementary prayer communities.

In this role, you will work with our Student Life Team to further strengthen our rich, pluralistic community by embracing Jewish students from every background, while also serving as spiritual leader of either Slifka’s Reform or traditional Egalitarian minyan, depending on best fit. As an authentic Jewish teacher, you will inspire, empower, and guide the Jewish students at Yale so they will actively engage in the process of building and sustaining vibrant, meaningful, and pluralistic Jewish campus communities. You will bring a welcoming and energetic spirit to engaging with every student you meet. You will empower, and guide Jewish students in strengthening a vibrant, meaningful, and pluralistic Jewish campus community, and inspire students to deepen their commitment to Jewish ideas, values, texts, and peoplehood.

What You’ll Do

• Proactively engage with Jewish students across Yale, building relationships with as many as possible.
• Be the “first person” to reach out to students you haven’t met as a matter of course.
• Steward individual student Jewish journeys, and provide individual and communal pastoral care.
• Fiercely champion pluralistic culture in which deep friendship, study, debate, and a sense of shared Jewish peoplehood flourishes across denominational, political, and other differences.
• Inspire love for and commitment to Jewish texts, tradition, and Israel.
• Serve as spiritual leader, mentor, and primary staff support to Slifka’s Reform OR traditional Egalitarian minyan.
• Work with other Jewish student sub-communities.
• Bring dynamism and a deep knowledge of and love for Torah to every interaction.
• Serve as a visible campus presence and a Jewish role model.
• Embrace teamwork with Rabbinic colleagues, the Student Life Team, and the entire Slifka Center professional team.
• Listen carefully to student needs and interests.
• Bring creativity to problem solving.
• Pursue and deepen multi-faith, cross-cultural, and interfaith initiatives through and beyond participation in Yale Religious Ministries.

Potential areas of additional work may include:

• Faculty engagement: serving as a liaison, thought partner, and rabbinic resource to Yale faculty.
• Participation in shaping our programmatic vision including metrics of success.
• Additional academic or intellectual projects.
• Externally facing opportunities to engage with alumni, parents, donors and Yale administrators.

What You’ll Bring to the Job

• A passion for and proven track-record of being outgoing, warm, and welcoming to everyone you meet.
• Strong knowledge of traditional Jewish texts, as well as contemporary Jewish wisdom, culture, and unconventional Jewish sources.
• The ability to provide context, history, and nuance to push student thinking beyond current limits.
• Expertise in leading complex conversations about Judaism and Israel in a way that is approachable, appropriate to where individual students are in their own Jewish journeys, and that deepens a student’s Jewish commitments.
• A commitment to creating an inclusive, vibrant, and pluralistic Jewish community.
• Deep love for the Jewish people and Israel, and a vision for inspiring these dual loves in the next generation.

Qualifications

• Seven or more years of Rabbinic work experience.
• Rabbinic ordination from an accredited non-Orthodox institution and a commitment to a pluralist