Areas of Expertise
Community-Building
Whether in worship & synagogue-service, education, activism, or life: community is always at the center There's no other way...
Teaching
After many decades in the pulpit and as an eco-Jewish educator-organizer-activist, I've honed these skills: how to read the room, so the teaching never comes out quite the same twice. How to introduce concepts pithily, then facilitate rich conversation around them. How to teach text, interspersed with music and humor and poetry and images (and often outdoor explorations and activities). How to address people with different levels of Hebrew/Judaic knowledge simultaneously, making classical texts and traditional ideas into our common language. How to keep the texts relevant to today, by offering bits of history and science as background, and pointing to contemporary political-social applications. How to balance the intellectual with the spiritual, ensuring affective/emotional connections as well as deeper understanding -- and to balance the universal with the particular, and the traditional with the modern-feminist-edgy-progressive (always titrated to the setting and the crowd). How to bring upbeat energy, to reconnect participants to a childlike wonder they never fully left behind, while forthrightly addressing the issues and challenges of our time -- and leaving learners hopeful. How to equip participants with knowledge, resources, tips, and confidence in going forth, and making a difference, by bringing this Torah to life.
Officiating
With humor, humility, and Hebraicism, I set a tone and hold the space in which you, and your life transition, are at the center. With song, sensitivity, skill, and spirit, the ceremony will feel as celebratory as the party. There should be no cookie-cutters in planning your big day; rather, you're empowered at every step of the way. I'm here to help you craft a set of key moments that will feel both super-spiritual and profoundly personal.
Advocating
"Study is the main thing" -- why?! -- "because it leads to action." I prefer rendering this great bit of Torah as "WHEN [and only when] it leads to action." Ever since taking a year off from college back in 1990 to join an environmental walk across the US, my focus has been on both goading and guiding sustained action in defense of vulnerable populations, our own future progeny, and the holy yet increasingly fragile web of Creation. Through the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, Interfaith Power and Light, the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, and other great groups (such as Adamah and Dayenu and JEA, as well as T'ruah and Jews United for Justice), I strive to make climate justice a reality
My Approach
Keep it real.
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Make it fun.
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Make it meaningful.
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Let it be profoundly, but not only, Jewish.
Or, let it be Jewishly-inflected, while wholly worldly.
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Let the universal be expressed and affirmed, amid the particular.
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Lead with values, and with relationship.
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Make it yours.
