5. Remember Professional Ethics
When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.
-Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
Reminding One Another to Whom We Are Accountable
“If members of professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment … they can find themselves doing and saying things they might previously thought unimaginable.”
As the CEO of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association for nearly a decade, one of my roles was facilitating and managing the work of the RRA’s Ethics Committee. Although not a committee member, I had a front-row seat to the challenging, time-consuming and emotionally draining work of colleagues investigating and passing judgment on the actions of their peers.
The majority of the cases brought before the Ethics Committee did not involve serial abusers or evil people intent on harm. To be sure, the Reconstructionist rabbinate has had examples of individuals using the power and prestige of their title for nefarious and truly horrific purposes. Thank goodness, these cases have been few and far between.
Instead, we mostly saw examples of individual rabbis getting caught up in their own emotions, relatively isolated from peers, and exhibiting poor judgment — often with disastrous consequences for those they serve and their loved ones.
This is a failure by the individual rabbi, in addition to the system of peer networks and professional support that a clergy association purports to provide.
If used correctly, a professional Code of Ethics is not a static document but an ongoing conversation that enables those beholden to it to continually remind themselves (and each other) that they are servants to something much more significant than individual success and glory. This is the essence of our spiritual leadership, inspiring us to commit to the highest standards of professional ethics.
As Snyder notes, this is true for lawyers who must abide by the codes of their bar associations and doctors who must abide by the code of medical ethics overseen by the American Medical Association. Clerks, carpenters, teachers, secretaries and Supreme Court justices can — and in some places do — hold each other accountable through membership in professional associations, unions or trade groups.
None of these associations can guarantee harm prevention, but they can create communities of practice where accountability and ethical conversation are norms of everyday life. As Snyder says, “Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government.”
For clergy associations, we are more concerned about the weaknesses and frailties of individual egos than the indifference of a distant government. But the prescription still holds. Ethical conversations — learning together what it means to be rabbis who often hold people’s spiritual, emotional and sometimes physical well-being in our hands — are necessary counterweights to the isolating work of spiritual leadership. Through ethical conversation — by which I mean ongoing engagement with peers and colleagues about our day-to-day work and the decisions we make almost instinctively — we can gain broader perspectives, reality checks, practical suggestions and gentle redirection (what Jewish tradition calls tokhekhah). This equips us to prevent ethical lapses and stay true to our professional standards rather than becoming confused, as Snyder says, “with the emotions of the moment.”
The instances in which I was most proud of the work our association did together were when a colleague would call and say that an issue had come up in their community or with an individual they served, and before going any further or making any decision, they wanted to talk it through and seek some advice. That we had created, at least for this colleague, a safe environment in which questions could be asked, vulnerability expressed and advice sought is an example of the potential power of professions that Snyder is discussing — the power to hold each other accountable so as not to succumb to the tyranny of our own frail egos.
