Rabbi Rachel Barenblat was ordained as a rabbi and mashpi’ah (spiritual director) by ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. Author of several collections of poetry (among them 70 faces: Torah poems), she has blogged since 2003 as the Velveteen Rabbi.
Rachel Barenblat
By Rachel Barenblat
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Community Our Neighbors Graffitied Our Synagogue — With Love
“Is there anything inappropriate about chalk drawings outside a synagogue?” The query came to me via text from one of my congregants. I wrote back, somewhat puzzled, to ask for context. In response, she told me that one of her non-Jewish friends wanted to organize a graffiti love-in for our small-town synagogue. “It’s supposed to…
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Community Is Ranting Against Globalism Anti Semitic?
The president has railed against “globalists” in recent rallies. (This is not new rhetoric; earlier this year the president told the United Nations that he rejects globalism altogether.) “Globalist” is a term with an anti-Semitic history, and it’s often understood as code for “Jews,” so this language is activating and traumatizing for a lot of…
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Community Squaring The Freedom Of Passover With The Struggles Of Life
We talk a lot about freedom at this time of year. Freedom from bondage. Freedom from our narrow places. Freedom from constriction. But what do we do with this talk of freedom if we ourselves feel stuck, if liberation seems impossible? What are the psycho-spiritual implications of that narrow place, the one that feels existential…
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Community In Defense Of Dressing Up On Purim
The Forward recently ran an article by Elon Gilad that argues that dressing up for Purim is a relatively new tradition, dating back to a particular banquet in Vienna in 1900. The article is interesting, but it has one of the worst headlines I’ve seen in recent memory: Wearing Costumes On Purim Is Not A…
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Community This Hebrew Month, Challenge Yourself To Look Inward
None of us actually knows when the middle of our lives will be. A midpoint can be measured after a life ends, but while one is still living, there’s no knowing. I had two strokes in my early thirties. I didn’t think I was going to die imminently — but I could have. And that…
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Community Four Propositions of Megatrends and What They Mean For Us
In his book “Megatrends,” and essay on this blog, Sid Schwarz makes some strong propositions. Here I respond to four of them. Proposition 1: In an age of globalization, Jewish institutions need to offer multiple avenues to explore chochmah, the wisdom of our sacred texts put into the context of the world’s religions and in…
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Culture Hasidic Tales and Prayer-Poems
A Hidden Light: Stories and Teachings of Early HaBaD and Bratzlav Hasidism By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi with Netanel Miles-Yepez Gaon Books, 490 pages, $31.95 All Breathing Life Adores Your Name: At the Interface Between Poetry and Prayer By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi Gaon Books, 212, pages, $18.95 In her introduction to “A Hidden Light,” Susannah Heschel notes that…
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News Birch Magazine
A typo transforms my cover letter into one aimed at an editor at Birch and I find myself wondering what kind of articles they publish there. Rebuttals of that famous Frost poem, perhaps, from the point of view of the trees getting swung upon. Praise-songs penned on curled bark and sent, ironed flat, via post….
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