Photograph by Kevin Roberts
The Jewish Federation of St. Louis sets the agenda—and raises the money—for the community’s powerful outreach. But after 19 years without a change in leadership, the federation had grown a little stuffy and insular. So it searched nationwide for 18 months, unearthed 27 serious candidates to be president and CEO—and chose Andrew Rehfeld, associate professor of political science and professor of law at Washington University. He hasn’t a whit of experience managing a nonprofit, let alone fundraising. He just thinks a lot.
You were a pretty committed professor: You left your big house in University City for two years to live in the dorm with your wife and kids… It was my idea. I’m a frustrated camp counselor.
And you read Dr. Seuss books to the students in the evenings? They’re political treatises. Take Bartholomew and the Oobleck. The king is getting bored by the seasons. So he instructs the wizards—I call them the policy wonks—to come up with something else, and they come up with oobleck, which mucks everything up. This is Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in 30 pages with illustrations. The things you have that work have passed the test of time, and you should be settled with them and not keep looking for the next new thing.
Like a new job? What was your very first career decision? Not to become a rabbi. I came back from doing Jewish community service, living in Israel, and decided I did not have the kind of theological commitment I needed. The idea of God I thought you needed to subscribe to—and the traditional view of God’s role in history and in human affairs—didn’t resonate with me.
What idea was it? “Old man in the sky”? Yes. And I didn’t understand how you could be a religious leader if you didn’t buy into that particular view of God. But at the same time, I was very committed to, and very engaged in, the themes that lead people to God: questions about infinity, struggles with ethics. I just didn’t find the theological explanation very compelling. I was no less committed to Jewish people and history and culture, but I didn’t want to live my life according to that constrained view.
So you live as a philosophical agnostic. And this flies, for the head of a major Jewish organization? I think many other Jews live like that, too. They just don’t have the time or interest to reflect so much on it.
After college and after working in India and Israel, you took a series of jobs in synagogues back East, playing liturgical music. By genre, it was folk music. Peter, Paul and Mary. I was the kind of person John Belushi smashed the guitar on.
Then you went from being not-a-rabbi to getting a master’s degree in public policy and a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Chicago. I found I could ask the questions I wanted about community, about ethics, about the meaning of a well-lived life, in that context. “What is the good that animates community? And how do we all figure out what that good is when we have such various views of what community ought to be?”
You were a trustee of the Federation. When did you first think about taking the CEO job? Back in January 2012. I was talking with someone who’s known me for 20 years, and I asked, “What kind of person are you looking for?” and his face changed, and he said, “Well, actually, we’re looking for someone like you. [Pause.] But with management and fundraising experience.”
Bossing students around doesn’t count, I guess. How much fundraising are we talking about? We raise $10 million a year in our annual campaign, and that’s not including what we raise for endowment. So I wasn’t considering it. But six weeks later, I’m in another meeting, and someone else says, “We need someone who has the kind of skills you have.” Afterward, I said, “Can we just have a crazy conversation?” and he almost fell off his chair: “Oh my God, that would be wonderful!” Of course, he didn’t have to worry; he wasn’t on the search committee. But over the next six months, I realized that the skills I’d been cultivating at Wash. U.—shepherding cats among faculty, building relationships—were the kind of skills you need for fundraising.
What appealed to you: the scale of it, the larger audience, or the chance to do something more practical? Yes. All of that—the scale, the audience, the practicality. I gave a talk at Penn State in February. It was terrible weather, and the plane was rocking, and we were circling for a long time. People were getting sick. People were praying—that was not an option for me, for reasons I told you before. I thought, if I go down on this plane, I will have left a very respectable legacy. But if I go down 20 years from now, I could have the legacy of helping people live meaningful, engaged lives—engaged not only with the Jewish community, but also with St. Louis…
“Community building” is a phrase used so often, I’m not sure what it means anymore. How do you go about it? Where I really want to start is with Aristotle: the idea that man is by nature a political animal. Aristotle didn’t mean we were backbiting or power-mad. He meant we need to be part of a polis, engaged in meaningful community.
And for you right now, that’s religious community. A community that’s animated by justice, by goodness, by a struggle to understand the infinite. There are many ways to do it. I’m not partial. Judaism resonates with me for psychological, historical reasons. It’s not just a religion; it’s a people, a culture, a history. It allows all the benefits of those very broad secular humanist values without having to buy into one idea of God.
But there are priorities, right? Historically, it’s been God, Torah, Israel; I frame it as the ideas of goodness, rightness, justice, and eternality.
If an Orthodox Jew were sitting here, would he quarrel with that? I think he would push me and say, “You can try to marginalize God, but God is the center, in a way you don’t recognize.” Still, there’s a very important teaching I’ve heard many times from the Orthodox Jews: The point is not to believe first and then do; the point is that you do first, and then you will believe. I like to call myself an observant nonreligious Jew. We celebrate Shabbat every Friday; we celebrate the holidays. I do it because of my understanding of law and communalness—it’s a shared set of practices, a shared outlook.
Does that shared set of practices preclude bacon? Yeah, I don’t eat pork. Not because God told me, “Don’t eat pork,” but because it’s such a robust practice that helps define what it means to be Jewish, both for me and to connect with the community. Now, somebody else might not eat pork because they’re following a commandment. But the overarching consensus of our community comes in the form of shared practices, all around a core of justice, of righteousness, of tikkun olam—making the world a better place.
It sounds like the difference is only in how you literally understand the teachings. I wasn’t going to read my kids the Torah, and I found myself reading them Greek myths. So I opened the Bible and read, “In the beginning, God created the world.” My son, who was 4, said, “Dad, did that really happen?” I said, “No.” We had a 10-minute conversation about the creation of the universe, about evolution, about the existence of God. And finally my son said, “Dad, would you just read the story?” We have the ability to understand text literally, but also to understand it as a kind of lived poetry that reinforces those values of tikkun olam.
I always get the impression that fewer Jews struggle with addiction, vice, poverty, social ills. Myth? I don’t have the demographics—I’m not evading the question, that’s just the academic in me—but my understanding is that alcoholism rates are much lower. Those kinds of social ills are lower. However—and this, I think, is very important to understand—whether the frequency’s the same or lower, any of those problems cause real suffering. And secondly, when you have a story like that, even if it’s true, it makes it much harder for those who need help to get it. It’s a much bigger deal to say you’re a Jew and you need help.
What characteristics best describe the Jewish community?
First of all, we are people of the book. Every week, we study, and ideas play out in a very real and lively way. It’s not enough just to do. Maybe you don’t have to believe, but you certainly have to think about what you are doing. And this leads to a certain neuroticism!
Why have being Jewish and being neurotic gotten so linked in the popular imagination? Surely it’s not just Woody Allen…
I don’t know. I’m going to put a positive spin on it: We are an aspirational people, and aspirational people do not settle. Karl Popper said the neurotic lacks the ability to rethink their self-concept, even in the face of contrary evidence. They do something well 20 times and fail on the 21st, and that’s all they remember; the good stuff doesn’t stick. It’s extremely unhealthy—but it does lead to ambition. We’re about 2 percent of the U.S. population, and look at the achievements we’ve had.
What about you? What are you most eager to do in your new position? In order to build community, you have to know what your component parts are. We have not done a demographic survey in about 20 years. A lot has changed about our community and about St. Louis, and the changes aren’t all great—loss of Fortune 500 companies, economic decline. Anecdotally, we hear stories of people whose kids are no longer in the region. My concern is that our community is planning based on an assumption about who we are that is no longer true. Next, I’d like to see a permanent exhibit about our community’s history in St. Louis. We’re losing a generation—we need to begin with oral histories. We also need to figure out ways to get young Jews to see the possibilities of St. Louis as a community in which to invest the rest of their lives. That, frankly, is not immediately to connect them with their Jewish roots, but to figure out how they can make professional lives here. Because if St. Louis declines, the Jewish community declines—and vice versa.
Speaking of demographics, Jews are heading east. Jews in St. Louis have traditionally moved west of Interstate 170. Now we’re seeing a return of young singles and people with empty nests. We’re not ghettoized anymore. I’d like to see more points of access east of I-170; I’d like to see a Jewish folk arts festival held in Forest Park or University City.
This job’s a big change for you. Where do you feel wobbly? Oh, I know what they’re going to say. They’re going to say, “Look, ultimately, he really is an intellectual.” I care deeply about learning and about ideas—that’s my core. If I were a religious man, I would say that ideas are the realm of the divine. So I approach this as so many
idea problems.
That’s a bad thing? I think it has costs. Idea people tend to deliberate a little too long, to not know when it’s not a good time to entertain an idea.
You don’t strike me as navel-gazing. I’m not navel-gazing. But I do miss it.
Your wife, Dr. Miggie Greenberg, is a shrink: vice chief of neurology and psychiatry at Saint Louis University. What does she think of the shift? She said she’s never seen me happier.
