The program enables new rabbis to learn about the nature of synagogues as complex organizations and how to manage them effectively while ensuring their own spiritual development.

• Leading Congregations
• Synagogues as Organization
• Spiritual development

Leading Congregations and Organizations

New rabbis who quickly learn to be effective in their roles understand and enact principles of leadership. Acquiring such knowledge and the ability to apply it requires new rabbis to develop ways of learning about their roles and about themselves in those roles. This is partly a process of learning to think as congregational leaders. And it is partly a process of individual development. personal growth in awareness and insight, skills, and the ability to reflect on oneself and one. s practice. The Senior Boot Camp program emphasizes both such areas in addressing the following:

• The role of the rabbi as spiritual and organizational leader and the tensions inherent in that role.
  
• The nature of the working relationship between senior and assistant rabbis.
  
• Awareness of personal pre-dispositions and tendencies in relation to authority.
  
• Creating personal identities as rabbis while dealing with others. projections, needs, and wishes.
  
• Articulation of personal values and mission.
  
• Personal career development.
  
• Work-family balance.
  
• Understanding the dynamics of authority, power, transference, and counter-transference.
  

Synagogues as Organizations

Effective new rabbis also understand how synagogues are complex organizations, and as such, require organizational leadership. Rabbis, in conjunction with lay leaders, must provide that leadership. They are able to do so to the extent that they learn a set of insights and skills by which leaders mobilize individuals, groups, and organizations toward productive action. The Boot Camp program emphasizes the following areas that pertain to the organizational nature of synagogues:

• Developing collaborative relationships with lay leaders and boards.
  
• Managing working relationships with senior, emeritus, and associate rabbis and other clergy.
  
• Clarifying staff roles, responsibilities, boundaries and inter-relationships.
  
• Clarifying appropriate organizational structures and processes.
  
• Creating positive organizational cultures marked by innovation, accountability, collaboration and support.
  
• Creating networks of formal and informal relationships to create change.
  
• Skill-building in the practical areas of organizational change and development (e.g., strategic visioning, analyzing organizational problems, managing and mentoring others, achieving consensus, negotiating, managing conflict, building coalitions).
  

Spiritual Development

Effective new rabbis, assuming roles as spiritual leaders of religious institutions and communities, also need to continue to develop their own spirituality. Rabbis must develop practices that enable them to remain connected to that which initially brought them to the rabbinate, even as they are driven to respond to the pressures of institutional leadership. Such practices enable rabbis to stay alive spiritually in the midst of other pressing demands and roles. The Boot Camp program focuses on practices that include the following:

• Understanding and preventing burnout.
  
• Developing individual daily spiritual praxis models that work.
  
• Envisioning the work and enacting those visions.
  
• Finding spiritual partners.
  
• Models of spirituality that do not sacrifice rationality.
  
• The Holiness-Wholeness continuum.
  
• Spiritual self-assessment tool.