An Office the Destruction of the Temple Made Necessary

The rabbinate as a formal office grew out of the crisis of 70 CE, when the Roman destruction of the Second Temple ended the sacrificial cult the priesthood had existed to run, and the sages who reorganised Jewish life around study, prayer and the synagogue in the centuries that followed became the ancestors of the modern rabbi. Semikhah, rabbinic ordination, was originally understood as an unbroken chain of authority reaching back to Moses, a chain the classical sources describe as having lapsed in late antiquity, after which the ordination given by yeshivas and rabbinical schools has been a recognised but formally distinct successor to the original chain.

The office today varies sharply by movement. Orthodox ordination remains restricted to men, trained typically in a yeshiva under a recognised rabbinic authority; Conservative Judaism began ordaining women in the 1980s; and Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism ordain women and, in most of their institutions, openly LGBTQ rabbis as well, a set of differences that tracks the wider theological divide between the movements over the authority and interpretation of Jewish law. Israel and a number of diaspora communities also maintain the separate institution of a chief rabbinate, a state-recognised or communally recognised office with authority over matters such as marriage and conversion that goes beyond what any single congregation's rabbi holds.