The Counseling and Pastoral Role of the Rabbi in the American Jewish Community

In the Amer Jewish Community the rabbi has 2 roles: (1) he must encourage his people to live as positive & creative Jews; & (2) he must help them develop wholesome & integrated personalities. A survey of the att's of rabbis toward the counseling role, undertaken in 1950 via mail questionaire was replicated in 1966. 839 useable responses were obtained & compared with the 1950 data. The purpose of the study was to assess what changes, if any, have occurred during the past 16 yrs in the attitude of the US rabbi toward counseling & his role as a counselor. Responses include 394 from rabbis belonging to the Central Conference of Amer Rabbis, 316 from the Rabbinical Assembly of America, & 182 from the Rabbinical Council of America. The following findings emerge: (a) The N of rabbis who now engage in counseling has increased. (b) More rabbis now make it a rule to have a pre-marital conference before performing a marriage ceremony, read on the subject of counseling & have had special training to prepare themselves as counselors. (c) In the original study, the majority of rabbis opposed special training for the counseling role. They maintained that 'common sense, ' 'maturity,' & 'experience' were the only requirements. They considered their seminary training adequate for their role. Now they are more aware of the importance of counseling, realize the need for specialized training, & are more likely to make a referral to a more competent authority, if they feel that their training is not adequate enough to handle the problem. They have come to realize that adequate training is needed to perform the counseling role. (d) When comparing the 3 rabbinical org's to each other, the following conclusions were found warranted: (i) The reform rabbis do more counseling & place more emphasis on this role & on pastoral visiting; (ii) more reform rabbis consider counseling to be 'as important as preaching' & indicate that their congregations expect them to provide counseling as part of their responsibilities as a clergyman; (iii) more reform rabbis have had special training to prepare themselves as counselors. In general, the average reform rabbi is more interested in counseling & spends more of his total time as a clergyman in a counseling role with his congregation than the other rabbis. However, the diff between the reform & the conservative rabbi on most questions was not as signif as the diff's between the reform & the orthodox rabbi or the conservative & orthodox rabbi. M.