Guest Contributor: Rabbi Yosef Romano wrote an impactful piece on the evolution of Shlichus. My dear brother-in-law Zvi Drizin wrote a thoughtful and impactful response to this article. Please enjoy.
Yosef's essays are thoughtful, perceptive, and in many ways clarifying. He has named something real: many established mosdos are experiencing friction around hiring, delegation, planning, fundraising, and leadership. He is also correct that these are not isolated operational problems, but expressions of something deeper. On that, I think he is absolutely right.
Where I want to push the conversation further is at the level of first assumptions.
The essays frame the history of modern Shlichus as a movement through three leadership eras: pioneer, operator, and now institutional leader. There is much explanatory power in that model. But I think it risks misdescribing the original "pioneer" condition, and therefore also risks misunderstanding what the next transition actually requires.
The first generation of shlichus did not experience itself, at its core, as institution-building. To describe those shluchim primarily as pioneers who built organizations, communities, schools, or centers is true on the surface, but not yet true enough. They certainly built all those things, often from nothing and with superhuman mesiras nefesh. But that is not what shlichus meant to them.
For them, shlichus was not first a leadership model, and not even first a communal strategy. It was a life of avodah. It was a way of being. It was hiskashrus embodied in a life-task. It was bittul to the Rebbe's ratzon as the organizing principle of one's existence. The mosad was not the essence of the work; it was the form the work took in the world.
That distinction matters.
If one mistakes the external form for the inner engine, then the current bottleneck will naturally appear as a leadership development problem: the founder must now evolve from pioneer to institutional leader. But if the inner engine of the first generation was something else entirely - a lived identity of shlichus, mesiras nefesh, and avodah - then the challenge before us is not simply to add a new leadership layer. It is to translate that inner world into a new vessel.
In that sense, I think the essays correctly identify the insufficiency of operator-era language, but they may grant too much to leadership and institutional language on its own. The second generation of operators did indeed acquire a modern vocabulary: systems, strategy, scaling, metrics, delegation, development. But for many, that language remained just that - a language layered onto the same underlying inner mission. It described the work, organized the work, and in some cases improved the work. But it did not redefine what the work was.
And therefore, I am not convinced that institutional leadership will become real merely by persuading a Shliach to sit in the "executive director's seat," or by teaching him to trust a team, shape a role before hiring, or build an organization that can function without his constant touch. All of that may be true and necessary. But for many shluchim, it will remain foreign, or at least emotionally unconvinced, so long as it is heard as a departure from the original inner grammar of shlichus.
The real question, then, is not only: how does a Shliach become an institutional leader?
It is: how does institution-building itself become understood as avodas hashlichus?
How does building an empowered institution become read not as "moving away" from mesiras nefesh, but as a higher form of it? How does delegation become an act of bittul rather than a weakening of control? How does creating empowered stakeholders become part of the very avodah of a Shliach?
In truth, the Rebbe's own model points in this direction. The Rebbe did not merely create followers who executed instructions. He created shluchim. He empowered them, entrusted them, and built a movement whose force came precisely through distributed ownership of a mission. If so, then the work of building institutions, teams, and empowered partners cannot be seen as a concession to modern organizational reality alone. It must be framed as an expression of the very same truth that animated the first generation: the expansion of the mission through people who are trusted, elevated, and made into carriers of it.
That is why I think the next era cannot be described only in managerial or even leadership terms. It is not simply a transition from carrying the mosad to leading it. It is a deeper and more difficult synthesis: carrying forward the original life-work of shlichus into a form that includes institution-building, empowerment, and shared stewardship as part of the avodah itself.
Until that synthesis is made, many shluchim will continue to experience the language of leadership development as external, useful perhaps, but not yet native to the soul of the work.
The essays are valuable because they have named the crisis honestly. But the solution, I believe, will require going one layer deeper still. Not only beneath the systems, but beneath the very category of leadership, to recover the inner world that made shlichus possible in the first place - and then to ask how that world can generate not only sacrifice and endurance, but also institutions, teams, and empowered communities worthy of the mission they are meant to serve.