High Holiday Helpline For Rabbis Flooded With Millennial Calls
In the run-up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Rabbi Chase Foster was staring down three sermons, a war in Gaza approaching its second anniversary and a congregation split on how to talk about it.
“The world feels very heavy right now,” said the 39-year-old Reform rabbi. “On any given Friday night, I have people who would say they are anti-Zionist sitting next to people who would say, ‘Let’s carpet-bomb Gaza.’ And my role is to bring Torah to that conversation.”
When we spoke by phone Monday — his one day off each week — Foster was at his suburban Atlanta home sprawled on the couch in shorts and a T-shirt, his 21-pound miniature schnauzer, Griffey, asleep beside him. It was a reminder that rabbis who carry their congregants’ grief into the High Holiday season need a respite.
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That’s where the Elul Helpline comes in. Created by the Jewish nonprofit Atra, the service pairs rabbis with experienced mentors for short sessions over Zoom — part therapy, part troubleshooting, meant to get clergy through the season intact.
So far, 57 clergy have signed up this year, 21 of them using the service for the first time. That’s up more than 25% from previous years.
In the shadow of ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and deepening communal divides, the helpline has become a barometer of modern rabbinic life. That so many younger rabbis are calling in underscores a generational shift: Vulnerability itself has become part of the rabbinate’s survival toolkit.
A generational divide
Dr. Betsy Stone, a retired psychologist who coaches rabbis on the helpline, has noticed a pattern. “Younger rabbis are more likely to both ask for help and recognize how difficult the job is,” she said. Boomer-age rabbis, she explained, often relied on spouses for support and were less inclined to admit their own pain. “Older rabbis tend to tell themselves they’re immune from the pain of other people. Younger rabbis do not.”
Stone sees this as part of a broader cultural divide. Boomers, she noted, were generally raised with unsupervised neighborhood play — roaming freely, learning resilience on their own. Younger generations grew up with playdates scheduled by parents, more adult oversight, and fewer chances to stumble and recover.
“They’re less prepared to take on responsibility,” she said, “but they’re more willing to ask for help.”
For rabbis ordained in the past two decades, crisis isn’t the exception — it’s the norm. “I’ve had rabbis say to me: I’ve never had an easy year. I’ve never had a normal rabbinate,” Stone said.
Some date that back to 9/11, others to the 2016 election of Donald Trump, others to the pandemic.
Rabbi Jennifer Frenkel, senior rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, first learned about the helpline from a colleague’s Facebook post. Her synagogue, with about 700 families, can feel like its own small town — births, deaths, bar mitzvahs, and crises overlapping in a single week.
“We’re all carrying and holding so much this year, especially in preparing for the upcoming holidays,” she said. She realized she couldn’t keep running on fumes.
“You can’t pour from an empty cup,” said Frenkel, who is in her 40s. “For me, it was about carving out sacred time and sacred space, to nurture that spark within and take care of our own spiritual and emotional health.”
Rabbis, Stone said, “hold an enormous amount of human suffering.” The job rarely allows for real rest. “They work 24/7, most of them only have one day off a week,” she said. “That’s a really difficult thing to do.”
Foster described it as a kind of pastoral imposter syndrome. Walking into a hospital room, he knows he can’t cure disease. “I can’t give you physical medicine that’s going to help, but I can nourish your soul,” he said. “Not everyone understands that.”
This year, Stone has heard something new in her calls: a dimming of optimism about the state of the world. “There is less of a sense of hope right now, which is not to say that people are hopeless,” she said.
This year’s helpline calls mirror the pressures facing American Jewry — political polarization, exhaustion from antisemitism, and doubt about how to speak from the bimah about Israel and Gaza without further splintering a congregation.
More than a hotline
The helpline began in 2021 under the name “Troubleshooting the High Holidays.” It was conceived as a pandemic project, but demand quickly proved enduring. This year’s record signups show just how much the strain has persisted.
While the helpline runs only during the High Holiday season, Atra, which works to advance rabbinic leadership across North America, has considered expanding it year-round.
“Everybody asks for coaching,” said Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, the organization’s executive director. “The main barrier is financial. Most rabbis don’t have access to professional development funding. But the need is constant.”
For Stone, the helpline is a “critically important drop in the bucket.” But it also points to a larger question: how to sustain rabbis for the long haul. “If we want our institutions to be healthy, we have to invest a great deal more in the health of our professionals,” she said.
That means giving clergy not only spiritual training but also the support systems that therapists, doctors, and social workers often take for granted. “Clergy don’t have that,” Stone said. “It’s a very isolating job.”
Epstein hopes synagogues and federations will recognize that professional development for rabbis isn’t just a perk. “It helps the community, not just the rabbi,” she said.
In the end, rabbis, like the congregants they serve, are searching for resilience. As his congregation geared up for the High Holidays, Foster said his own preparation was “to make sure my battery is full so I can expend energy when it’s time.”
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
Benyamin Cohen is a senior writer at the Forward and host of our morning briefing, Forwarding the News. He is the author of two books, My Jesus Year and The Einstein Effect.