Sarah Maslin Nir writes in the New York Times on Sep. 14, 2023:
Michele Lowe, a former advertising executive, coaches religious leaders on how to write sermons with a little “zetz.” This is her peak season.
Football players have the Super Bowl. Actors have the Oscars. For rabbis, it’s Rosh Hashana.
The Jewish New Year is a time of reflection and celebration. But for clergy, who preach to pews swelled with once-a-year attendees, it is a high-pressure moment: All eyes are on them to come up with the pitch-perfect sermon that will keep congregants inspired, engaged — and awake.
That is why rabbis from New York, Texas and beyond have been known to place a call for an unlikely source of backup: a former advertising executive from the Bronx.
Call her the Rabbi Whisperer. Over the past eight years, Michele Lowe has emerged as a resource for dozens of rabbis, becoming — to her surprise — something like a college-essay coach for the rabbinate. Via word of mouth, her contact information has been passed shul to shul each year by clergymen and women struggling with fine-tuning a phrase, delivering a punchline or solving a bad case of rabbis’ block.
“I call myself the ‘Jew in the pew,’” Ms. Lowe said in a recent interview during a break between clients. “I come and say, ‘I am here, and what do you want me to be thinking about for the next 12 months?’”
This year is one of her busiest: She is editing 33 sermons intended for Rosh Hashana, which begins Friday at sundown, and Yom Kippur, she said. “My job is to help these rabbis find their voice.”
In this New York Times profile, Michele Lowe emerges as an improbable but increasingly indispensable figure in contemporary Jewish clergy life. A former advertising executive who once sold Miracle Whip and cat litter with memorable flair before leaving Madison Avenue for Broadway, Lowe now coaches rabbis on crafting High Holiday sermons, the marquee performances of the Jewish calendar. What looks on the surface like a quirky side hustle in sermon polishing is, on closer examination, a textbook case of quiet professional evolution. Without fanfare or formal decree, rabbinic authority is being upgraded. Traditional expectations of textual mastery and halakhic fidelity are being layered with competencies borrowed from advertising and theater: narrative drama, emotional pacing, audience capture, and stage presence. The language that makes this shift palatable, finding their voice, a little zetz, making it personal, does the legitimating work so softly that the transformation itself remains unnamed.
Lowe’s trajectory supplies the perfect metaphor for what she is doing to the profession. The same critical eye trained on consumer attention and theatrical timing now turns to the pulpit. Rabbis contact her via word of mouth, shul to shul, because the High Holidays demand something the seminary curriculum rarely supplies: sermons that can hold a thousand once-a-year attendees who will dissect the message over brisket for the next twelve months. Rosh Hashanah is the rabbinate’s Super Bowl. Failure is not theological but reputational. Attendance outside the holidays can dwindle. Peers notice. Congregants talk.
The coaching itself is imported wholesale from commercial craft. Lowe instructs clients to write three different openings in three different tones, then choose the strongest. She pushes them to insert personal anecdote where scripture once stood alone. She tells a nervous young rabbi to wear a ponytail and plant her feet. She advises another to tape his yarmulke with fashion tape so he stops fidgeting during the service. For Rabbi Mara Nathan of Temple Beth-El in San Antonio, Lowe helped fuse the 2023 blockbuster Barbie with the teachings of Hillel the Elder into a sermon on embracing imperfection. The result is a hybrid product: part ancient theology, part pop-culture artifact designed for a culturally literate audience whose attention is competed for by every screen and algorithm they carry in their pockets.
None of this is framed as a challenge to tradition. That is precisely why it works. The moral vocabulary is gentle, almost therapeutic. Rabbis are not being retooled. They are finding their voice. They are not learning marketing. They are adding sparkle. They are not optimizing for retention. They are delivering a little zetz. These phrases do not threaten the core identity of the rabbi as transmitter of Torah. They reframe expanded skill sets as deeper authenticity. Authority is no longer indexed solely by fidelity to text or halacha. It now includes performance competence and emotional resonance. The rabbi remains the rabbi, but the job description has quietly lengthened, and the new requirements arrived without anyone voting on them.
Institutional enforcement requires no central mandate. Diffusion is informal and relentless. High-stakes moments create urgency. Audience feedback loops, sermons hotly discussed at holiday tables all year, turn every service into a referendum on the rabbi’s effectiveness. Status anxiety does the rest. Rabbis fear being labeled boring, out of touch, or failing to connect. Some of Lowe’s clients ask her to remain confidential, worried that needing a coach signals weakness. Yet once a few respected figures adopt the practice, it becomes an expected competence. Rabbi Dara Frimmer of Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles initially hesitated to credit Lowe publicly. She eventually wrote at the bottom of her sermon: Thank you to Michele Lowe. The act of acknowledgment itself was, she realized, profoundly Jewish, turning to community in a time of need. The rationalization completed the legitimation.
What is being imported is not theology but technique. Narrative framing, emotional pacing, brand voice, audience capture: these are the tacit knowledges of the advertising and theater worlds migrating into a religious domain that previously drew its authority from an entirely different source. Lowe is not a theologian. She is a communications professional. No rabbinical assembly votes on sermon coaches. The practice spreads because it solves an immediate problem, holding attention in a media-saturated age, and then hardens into new expectation. The penalties for noncompliance are soft but brutal. Disengaged congregants. Stagnant attendance outside holidays. Peer judgment. The quiet label of uninspiring. No one is excommunicated. Influence simply erodes.
This migration of technique is not unique to the rabbinate. It reflects a broader shift underway in every profession where authority once rested on credentialed expertise rather than performed competence. Medical schools have integrated narrative medicine into required clinical curricula, asking students to write parallel charts reflecting on a patient’s hopes and fears alongside the clinical notes. Columbia and Geisinger Commonwealth have made this formal. The logic is that narrative competence, the ability to recognize and be moved by the stories of illness, improves both clinical judgment and patient compliance. Teachers’ colleges now embed social-emotional learning frameworks into preparation programs, training aspiring teachers not just in subject matter but in the management of classroom emotional climate, replacing the category of the good teacher with the learning facilitator who must demonstrate measurable empathy behaviors in simulation labs. Major rabbinical schools including the Ziegler School and Hebrew Union College have formalized homiletics and twenty-first-century media communication as core competencies alongside text study, requiring students to demonstrate the ability to translate Jewish sources in meaningful ways for contemporary life rather than simply to master them.
The pattern across all three fields is identical. What was once treated as an innate gift or a secondary craft has been codified into professional standards. Learning has moved from the classroom to the simulation lab. Skills once thought intuitive are now broken into measurable behaviors that can be taught, assessed, and graded. The gap between learned expertise and lay reception has become a professional problem requiring professional management.
Viewed through an alliance-theory lens, Lowe’s work upgrades the rabbinic coalition in a specific way. The old coalition rested on Torah authority, textual mastery, halakhic reasoning. The new layer adds emotional authenticity and cultural fluency. A rabbi who can weave Barbie and Hillel signals competence to both traditionalists and to culturally literate congregants navigating a secular world. The sermon becomes a hybrid product that expands the tent without appearing to tear it. At Washington Hebrew Congregation in Washington, where congressional staffers from both parties pray, Rabbi Eliana Fischel and Lowe steer deliberately away from partisan weeds, finding messages that resonate across the political divide. In San Antonio, Rabbi Nathan leans into politics through a Jewish lens, reproductive rights, Black Lives Matter, migrant welcome, using Lowe’s tools to sharpen delivery without losing the room. The coalition adapts. The role widens. The jurisdictional claim quietly expands.
The signal broadcast to the pews is authenticity. I am speaking from the heart. The cue to the careful observer is professionalization: a communications expert trained in consumer persuasion is optimizing message delivery for maximum impact. Theology has not disappeared. It has simply been joined by attention economics, and the joining was accomplished without any announcement, through small practical decisions that solved immediate problems and then became new norms.
In the end, Michele Lowe is not merely editing sermons. She is helping to edit the definition of rabbinic success for the twenty-first century. The Jew in the pew has become the unseen co-author of the rabbi’s public voice. And in that collaboration, authority is not diminished but quietly, durably updated for an age in which the greatest threat to any pulpit is not heresy but boredom. The zetz has been professionalized. The voice has been found. The profession, almost without noticing, has moved on.
