The Jewish people has pulled off some pretty fancy tricks over the millennia; still being here today, with a reborn homeland, high among them. But purging sin, greed and general bad behavior from every single adherent seems a tall order, even for such a talented and determined group as ours.

So our dream of being only the people of Einsteins and Wiesels, Heschels and Koufaxes is sometimes thwarted by Rosenbergs and Pollards, Milkens and Boeskys, Amirs and Madoffs.

It’s early in the scandal of five rabbis accused of being part of a web of money laundering and other corruption in New Jersey, coming so quickly on the heels of the Madoff scandal. More key details will emerge in the coming months. While everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence, we must accept that high-profile cases like these, reportedly built on secret recordings, are rarely pressed by prosecutors without airtight evidence, and as such often result in pleas, with or without deals, rather than a trial verdict.

It’s easy to scratch our heads and wonder where Judaism in America, and Orthodoxy in particular, went wrong. But it’s important to keep perspective. These are five out of tens of thousands of rabbis. Since non-profit institutions, including yeshivot, are implicated in the alleged profit-making scheme, it may well turn out that they operated as part of a system of corruption enabled and supported by segments of their communities. Or it may turn out that their alleged activities took place in a vaccum. We’ll know the answer if more arrests follow.

Our temptation to say that there is a trend at work here, a betrayal of values that grows like a cancer. But the fact is that organized Jewish life in America, secular and religious, is intrinsically and overwhelmingly ethical and altruistic, something in which we should never lose pride.

This is not to suggest we should accept a percentage of misbehavior unchallenged, in the way banks and other companies figure a degree of fraud as the cost of doing business. We should always embrace, to use an increasingly popular phrase, a teachable moment. Even a single example of religious hypocrisy or corruption is one too many.

But it would be challenging to find any group — religious, political, social or professional — without its disgraces. In recent years we have seen the downfall or tainting of presidents, governors and senators, military leaders, CEOs and police officers, judges, teachers, priests and chaplains — all people from whom we had a right to expect better.

It’s flattering if the public expects 100 percent of rabbis to be, by definition, immune to the same temptations as those in other professions; and while we would like it to be true, the law of averages and the weakness of the human spirit suggest otherwise.

The lack of sustainability of what is now a $2 billion educational system that caters primarily to middle-class and lower-class students should have been anticipated long ago, when the number of kids in private Jewish schools began to skyrocket, as far back as the 1950s.

But a new report by Yeshiva University’s Institute of University-School Partnership suggests that even today, “lackadaisical lay leadership and weak boards of directors at the schools seem content with making half-hearted attempts at creating economically viable institutions.”

The  Survey of the Governance Practices of Jewish Day Schools is based on the assessment of lay leaders themselves via questionnaires submitted to board members at major Jewish schools in North America. Only about one third of schools who received the surveys, or about 71 institutions responded. But those who did were refreshingly candid.

From YU’s press release:

• Only about one-third of presidents strongly agree that board members give their schools their top personal philanthropic gifts or that they generate financial support for school events.

• Only about one-quarter of presidents feel that board members are actively engaged in identifying and cultivating potential major donors for their institutions.

• Only about 24 percent of presidents strongly agree that their schools have a comprehensive long-range financial plan.

“Boards spend half their time schmoozing,” Harry Bloom, the report’s primary author told JTA’s Jacob Berkman. “If they are spending their time schmoozing, then they are not spending their time on planning.”

The Jewish Week’s Carolyn Slutsky reports further on this tomorrow. There is more about the report, including a video of Bloom discussing it, on YU’s Web site.