WHY BECOME A CCAR MEMBER?
The Central Conference of American Rabbis offers unparalleled lifelong learning, support, career services, and community to strengthen rabbinic careers and leadership skills in an ever-changing landscape. Throughout the full career of Reform rabbis, the CCAR provides both professional and personal support to help Reform rabbis grow, evolve, and thrive.
The CCAR helps Reform rabbis achieve the highest standard of rabbinic quality and integrity.
The CCAR empowers and strengthens Reform rabbis with the innovative skills, resources, career guidance, personal development, community, and resources they need to embrace change and build the Jewish community of tomorrow.
The rabbinate of today often looks different than the rabbinate of the past. Beyond mastery of Torah and text, life-cycle events, and pastoral counseling, rabbis today are expected to possess acute business and financial skills, master the advanced technology needed to gather and decipher data and run hybrid offerings, supervise staff and run organizations, provide guidance on the security of the communities, and understand how to navigate often polarized climates.
The CCAR is the only organization that understands and fulfills the unique needs and constantly changing landscape of the modern Reform rabbinate.
The CCAR supports Reform rabbis—congregational, organizational, freelance, and entrepreneurial, wherever and however they serve—with bespoke offerings, including:
| CONTINUING EDUCATION GROUNDED IN JEWISH VALUES AND TORAH |
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| The CCAR creates and provides innovative programming, tools, resources, and curricula for rabbis to strengthen their leadership skills and the congregations and organizations they serve. Over 600 rabbis annually participate in over 40 diverse, ongoing Continuing Rabbinic Education learning opportunities. The CCAR provides multi-session courses to develop skills in management, supervision, fundraising, and transition. Webinars and online gatherings provide the opportunity to study Torah with leading scholars, explore rabbinic resilience, strengthen pastoral expertise, and explore critical and urgent contemporary issues. |
| INNOVATION AND ADAPTATION |
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| The CCAR helps rabbis manage ever-shifting expectations, landscapes, and demographic, cultural, political, and religious shifts. The CCAR also helps rabbis learn and sharpen skills to help them meet the demands of the modern rabbinate—from fundraising to workplace management and best practices. |
| CAREER GUIDANCE, JOB PLACEMENT, AND MENTORSHIP |
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| In addition to pension planning, the CCAR helps Reform rabbis plan, focus, and advance rabbinic careers with custom job placement, mentoring, and transition training. Career guidance is tailored to the needs of the modern rabbinate, meeting Reform rabbis wherever they are, wherever they serve, whether in traditional roles or on less traditional paths. |
| PASTORAL AND PERSONAL SUPPORT |
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| Who rabbis the rabbi? The CCAR offers pastoral, personal, crisis, and spiritual support and wellness programming customized for individual rabbis and small rabbinic groups and cohorts. |
| CHEVRUTA AND COMMUNITY SUPPORT |
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| The rabbinate can be a lonely place. The CCAR provides chesed, connection, and community, from our yearly CCAR Convention to study, connection, and wellness groups. |
| SUPPORT FOR URGENT SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES |
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| CCAR provides vocal communal support, resources, and actions for urgent issues of the day. |
| REFORM JEWISH LITURGY, BOOKS, AND DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS |
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| CCAR Press publishes liturgy, commentaries, and scholarship to support Reform rabbis in prayer and teaching. CCAR members receive a discount on all books and a subscription to CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly. |
| RABBINIC ETHICS |
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| The Central Conference of American Rabbis holds Reform rabbis to the highest standards of rabbinic behavior. Being a member of the CCAR means being part of a peer-to-peer agreement to uphold the values expressed in the CCAR Ethics Code. This code allows the CCAR, CCAR members, and our Jewish community to have a shared language and expectations around rabbinic behavior and to achieve safe, sacred communities. |
More than any other organization, the CCAR knows that being a rabbi is more than just a job. The CCAR is a lifeline that supports and strengthens Reform rabbis and helps them feel connected, resilient, ethically grounded, inspired, and empowered to flourish in every step, phase, and transition of their career.
| To discuss eligibility for CCAR membership, contact Rabbi Leora Kaye, CCAR Director of Rabbinic Career Services, at lkaye@ccarnet.org. |
