From seminary to secretary: How Uri Monson balances Pennsylvania's budget and keeps Shabbat

Yahoo

18-04-2025

Only in a family where nearly everyone is a rabbi does becoming a Cabinet secretary in one of the largest states in the nation make you a black sheep. That's the joke that Uri Monson, Pennsylvania's budget secretary, likes to make when describing his career as a public servant in the context of his family — a brother, father, grandfather and great-grandfather who were rabbis; a stepmother who was a lifelong Jewish nonprofit professional; and a mother who was a renowned Jewish academic and university administrator. But coming out of that kind of lineage (his great-grandfather was the first person to certify Coca-Cola as kosher!), choosing a career in public service was Monson's act of 'pseudo-rebellion,' he said in an interview with Jewish Insider earlier this month. He didn't stray that far from his Jewish values, though —during his first internship, at city hall in Philadelphia, he helped draft the mayor's speech for Israeli Independence Day. 'I grew up a mile from Independence Hall. Ive always been an American government junkie, and fascinated by and love[d] government and its ability to really help,' said Monson, 56. 'I felt, even at 18, that I could make it better, that it had to be able to be done better, and that started me on that path to public service.' Even if Monson didn't follow his family members into the Jewish professional world, growing up immersed in deep conversations about the weekly Torah portion over Shabbat lunch and spending his summers at Camp Ramah in the Poconos shaped his approach to public service just as much as his wonky fascination with fiscal policy and his master's degree in public administration. 'What weve seen all along is that that Jewish perspective has shaped his commitment to what government can do and the way that society should work,' said Rabbi Chaim Galfand, the head rabbi at Perelman Jewish Day School in Philadelphia and a close friend of Monson's. Monson attended the joint program at List College at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he earned a bachelor's degree from Columbia University and another, in midrash, from JTS. The intellectual curiosity and creativity that comes from his expertise in interpreting the Torah — Monson calls himself a 'midrash parsha junkie' — colors the way he approaches everything from budgetary policy to his weekly Settlers of Catan board games with Galfand each Shabbat. The biblical stories about Joseph are his favorite; Joseph's 'rise in the political world,' from slave to advisor to the Egyptian pharaoh, is particularly resonant for Monson. But he doesn't think there is only one way to engage with these stories, and that's a lesson that guides his approach to public policy, too. 'When you make that jump to learning that the Talmud is not a book of law, but that it's a book of how to think about law, it's a major change. It's a major jump in thought,' Monson said. 'To realize that you had people disagreeing over really complex issues of Jewish law —thats how they lived their lives, and what they actually record [in the Talmud] is the discussion and the back-and-forth and the debate. They were able to do it while living civilly together.' Monson started his career in Washington as a policy advisor at the Department of Education during the Clinton administration. He has friends from that era who have lost their jobs as the Trump administration slashes the federal workforce. Monson does not reflexively believe all public employees have a right to keep their jobs; his former boss, President Bill Clinton, also stressed efficiency and shrunk the federal workforce by hundreds of thousands of people. But he does think those workers should be respected. 'There are few of us who have a mantra, and I share this with the governor, that [we] cannot stand the phrase, 'Thats the way weve always done it.' There are always opportunities for change,' he said, referring to Gov. Josh Shapiro. 'The biggest difference for me between what I was a part of and what the current administration is doing is that that change was all about employee empowerment.' Shapiro has made a play for laid-off federal workers, encouraging them to apply to fill vacancies in Pennsylvania. Monson's time in Washington got him started on his path to Harrisburg — both because it was his first full-time gig in the government, and also because it was in this era that he reconnected with Shapiro, who was working on Capitol Hill at the time. 'Like most expatriate Eagles fans, we would find each other to watch games, that kind of thing,' said Monson. But their relationship goes back decades: Shapiro and Monson's younger brother, Ami, were in the same grade at Akiba Hebrew Academy, a pluralistic Jewish day school in the Philadelphia suburbs. (CNN anchor Jake Tapper was another classmate.) Shapiro's parents and Monson's were active in the Soviet Jewry movement of the 1970s and 1980s. 'Uri and I both lean on our family and our faith as motivation to serve the good people of Pennsylvania,' Shapiro told JI in a statement last week. 'We are both driven by the same Jewish principle of tikkun olam, and from the passage from the Talmud that teaches us that no one is required to complete the task, but neither are we free to refrain from it.' Shapiro's first video ad in his 2022 gubernatorial campaign showed him, his wife and their children celebrating Shabbat. Monson, who observes Shabbat and does not work or travel from sundown Friday until Saturday night, receives weekly 'Shabbat shalom' emails from Shapiro. 'When he offered me the job, I said, 'Im not going to be in Harrisburg on Fridays in the winter'' —when Shabbat begins in the late afternoon — 'and he said he understood,' Monson recalled. Over the years, his colleagues have gotten used to Monson's Shabbat observance, sending emails on Saturdays with the subject line 'read me first' to try to capture his attention after Shabbat ends. 'Once in a while they're like, 'Maybe I want to be Jewish too,' because they need a break,' Monson said, laughing.
Uri Monson wears a kippah with the commonwealths outline and crest on it Monson returned to Philadelphia in the late 1990s for the first in a series of increasingly powerful jobs dealing with municipal and school district budgets. In 2012, when Shapiro was chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners, he tapped Monson to serve as chief financial officer of the commonwealth's third most populous county. Monson then spent seven years as chief financial officer of the School District of Philadelphia, which has a budget of $4.6 billion, helping shepherd the district through the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic. He joined Shapiro in Harrisburg in early 2023. 'Uri had a very calming presence of being able to lead with certainty in very uncertain times,' said Larisa Shambaugh, the former chief talent officer in the Philadelphia school district, where she worked closely with Monson. She saw him take a forward-looking approach to budgeting, thinking not just about cost but about how to advance the interests of the school district. 'What was truly a joy about working with Uri is that he wasnt a CFO that was focused only on finances and only on the bottom line,' Shambaugh explained. 'When we would be thinking about proposing a new initiative or a new policy or a new staffing structure, the first question wasnt, How much would this cost and can we afford it? It was, Why is this best for students?' Shambaugh also benefitted from another skill Monson brought with him to his next job: his baking skills. He baked lemon squares for a meeting with new school board members. When he found out Shambaugh loved challah, he baked her one. In his new job, he's baked cranberry walnut muffins twice — once to relax before a budget hearing and once to get rid of flour before Passover — and brought hamantaschen to the capital during Purim. ('We've all been on the receiving end of his largesse,' said Galfand.) Monson has spent the spring testifying at Statehouse hearings about Shapiro's $51.5 billion budget proposal. This is the forum where he allows his Torah discussion skills to shine: keeping his cool under sometimes hostile questions from Republicans, and disarming them by actually being willing to engage. (When he sat down at this year's budget hearings, he wore a custom kippah showing the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, made by an artist his wife found on Etsy.) 'I will never claim to have a monopoly on good ideas, and I think thats something I certainly learned from around the table and from growing up among the rabbis,' said Monson. 'I want to learn from everybody, because you can learn from everybody, and be open to the discussion.'