Ballard Announces New Clergy Training Model

Atlantan Debbi Ballard has spent more than 25 years as an ordained cantor, rabbi, and interfaith minister, serving unaffiliated and interfaith Jewish families across South Florida and beyond. (This writer attended bar mitzvah in January in Del Ray Beach, Fla., when up popped Cantor Ballard at the boutique hotel’s tent service.)

Ballard has announced the formation of AISLE, the Academy of Independent Spiritual Leaders and Educators, to train clergy who can multiply her mission of rabbis and cantors trained not just with liturgy and text, but also with the flexibility, business skills, and lived understanding to meet families exactly where they are, “without asking them to first prove that they belong,” Ballard added.

The seed of her work was planted at age 13. Ballard grew up in a family where her only Jewish role models were parents and grandparents. At her Conservative synagogue, she found that girls were relegated to Friday night bat mitzvah ceremonies, while boys got Saturday mornings. She became the first female in her congregation to break that pattern and claim a Saturday morning bat mitzvah with the help of her rabbi. She calls that as her first act of “holy disruption.” It would not be her last.

Another turning point came in 1987, when she married a man who wasn’t Jewish. She labels the experience as “painful” as the rabbi who married them, according to her, “cared more about his fee than how we would live our lives. My parents refused to attend my wedding, and we were forced to figure out life as an interfaith couple completely on our own. We did the best we could, and our children were raised as Jews. I learned so much from that experience that nobody else teaches. I vowed to teach others the same.”

Through those life experiences, Ballard observed some of the basic reasons so many Jews are unaffiliated. “A congregation of many must have rules for the many.  But families wanted something more – personalization, and a congregation is not prepared to offer that. As a board member and lay leader in my own Reform synagogue in Weston, Fla., I watched nearly 80 percent of the Jewish families around me live exactly that story.”

Nationally, Pew Research found only about one-third of Jewish adults are synagogue members or live with one, and roughly two-thirds have no formal congregational home. She continued, “That’s not fringe. That’s the majority of American Jewish life, priced and structured out of the institutions built to serve it.”

Her new AISLE Zoom program runs 18 months with a weekly rhythm of content, live cohort sessions, and assignments. Six students participated in the first cohort. Every student works with Ballard directly as a primary mentor, paired with a second mentor chosen for their specific track (rabbinical or cantorial). Tuition is $1,800. AISLE ordination isn’t a state-accredited license, no independent clergy program’s is, but it carries the same weight within the independent clergy community that has let Ballard serve for more than two decades. Ballard was ordained in 2004 by the Rabbinic Seminary International, a private Beit Din of rabbis and cantors.

An example of support cohorts learn is how to deal with grief. “Knowing not just how to hold space for loss, but how to hold it in a Jewish framework is something AISLE trains directly and that one cannot learn from a search engine.”

Her own practice stays busy, over 100 events a year: roughly 50 b’not mitzvahs, 30 weddings (local and destination), and 20-plus babynamings and funerals. That volume is exactly why she built this format.

“AISLE isn’t theoretical. Everything I teach comes from a calendar as full as the one my students hope to build for themselves,” she explained.

When she’s not officiating or teaching, Ballard can be found on her e-bike or hiking through the Georgia mountains.