Deepening our connections with Williams

Dear Congregation Beth Israel members and friends,

I’m writing to share with you some happy news: this spring, in addition to serving CBI as your rabbi, I will also be serving the Williams College community as interim Jewish chaplain to the College.

The position at the College (which officially begins in February) is halftime, as is my position at CBI. I know that there will be challenges in dovetailing these two positions, but I am confident that it can be done — and I hope that CBI will reap benefits from this opportunity to more closely connect our shul with the Jewish community and the multi-faith community at the College.

The students have already expressed to me an interest in figuring out how to be more connected with CBI. I’m hoping we can sponsor at least one celebration or program together during the spring semester, so stay tuned for more on that.

I will still be at CBI two days a week. I will still lead davenen (prayer) at CBI two Shabbatot a month. I will still teach my five b’nei mitzvah students. I will still teach the Introduction to Judaism class at CBI. I will still lead our meditation minyan on Friday mornings. I will still provide pastoral care and counseling. And I will still preside over lifecycle events at CBI from babynamings to funerals and everything in between.

I anticipate that there will be times when I have to say “no” to an obligation at the College because I am already committed to something at CBI, and times when I will have to say “no” to something at CBI because I am needed at the College. I know that won’t be easy for anyone (least of all for me!) and I ask all of you to please bear with me as I figure out how to walk this path.

I recognize that this news may evoke anxiety for some of you. You may be wondering whether I will still be able to provide sufficient service and care to the CBI community. I am happy to sit down with anyone who wants to talk about this and what it brings up for you. I promise you that I will do everything within my power to continue to serve CBI with whole heart, even as I also move into serving in this other way to which I am called.

With loving blessings,

Rabbi Rachel

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Rabbi Rachel named one of America’s Most Inspiring Rabbis

Each year, the Forward solicits nominations from the public for their Most Inspiring Rabbis list. This year they received 350 nominations, and chose 32 rabbis for this national honor. Our own Rabbi Rachel was one of those 32! Congratulations to Rabbi Rachel.

Read all about it: America’s Most Inspiring Rabbis 2016.

On serving CBI, and my new ALEPH role

Dear Congregation Beth Israel members and friends,

Some happy news became public this week: along with my friend and colleague Rabbi David Markus, I’ve been tapped to serve as co-chair of ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal. (See ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal names new leadership.) Rabbi David and I are humbled and honored to be asked to serve in this way — to have the incredible opportunity of carrying ALEPH and Jewish Renewal forward for new generations.

As the news has been percolating around Facebook, a few of you have reached out to ask me: will I still be your rabbi? What does this news mean for CBI? I’m writing today to offer instant reassurance: I will still be your rabbi for as long as y’all want to have me. I am honored and delighted to serve as CBI’s spiritual leader. That won’t change.

I believe, and I know Rabbi David agrees, that it’s important for ALEPH’s leadership to be pulpit clergy. ALEPH isn’t only an academic venture: we can’t lead ALEPH from a walled-off place detached from real life. Our Judaism needs to be lived: innovation needs to be effective in touching the lives of individuals and communities, or else it’s not particularly useful to anyone.

I think of CBI, and of Rabbi David’s little shul on City Island, and the growing network of other communities led by ALEPH-ordained clergy and aligned with ALEPH’s mission and vision, as living laboratories for the renewal of Judaism. What works at CBI, we can try to bring elsewhere. In that sense, the work I do at CBI is a key part of my ALEPH role.

I am always honored and blessed to serve the CBI community. And, I think and hope that the bigger-picture work I’m doing in the Jewish world will bring some prominence to CBI… and my experience at CBI will help me bring more wisdom to my ALEPH work. Perhaps my new role will bring some visibility to our little community in North Adams, and — who knows! — maybe even entice some new members to join us.

I hope that I will continue to bring creative and meaningful teachings, interpretations, and practices to our community, as I have done from the very beginning. And when what we do at CBI seems translate-able to a different setting, I will share some of our community’s practices and our community’s wisdom with the broader Jewish Renewal world.

For my part, I’ll be spending more of my non-CBI time working with Rabbi David, and my ALEPH colleagues, on striving to bring the spiritual resources of Jewish Renewal to a broader audience. My ALEPH work, like my poetry work, will happen during the “other” half of my time.

As I wrote in a blog post recently on my own blog, Velveteen Rabbi, Jewish Renewal has given me incalculable gifts. I look forward to helping to share those gifts with more people — including all of y’all at CBI — in years to come. And I hope that over time I can strengthen the connections between our little community which I love, and the broader Jewish Renewal community where I have found a home.

If you have questions or concerns about this, or about anything, please don’t hesitate to reach out — my door is always open.

Wishing y’all many blessings, as always,

Rabbi Rachel

What is the Rabbi Reading?

One way to know someone more deeply is to find out what they’re reading. Board member Pattie Lipman asked our shlichei tzibbur (prayer leaders) what they are reading, and here’s what they said in response!

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat is reading:

• Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo, a wonderful novel about an ordinary guy who winds up on a road trip with his sister’s guru. I read this while on vacation earlier this summer, and am hoping soon to begin the sequel, Lunch with Buddha;
• Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Torah Min HaShamayim b’Aspeklaria HaDorot / Heavenly Torah As Refracted Through the Generations (translation and commentary by Gordon Tucker) — this is what the Wednesday morning clergy Torah study group reads at Tunnel City each week, and it’s incredibly rich and dense and beautiful;
• Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, about the ways in which America’s prison system enshrines a kind of invisible racism — depressing but powerful;
• and, as I do every year at this season, I’m re-reading Rabbi Alan Lew’s This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: the Days of Awe as a Journey of Spiritual Transformation. This is one of my very favorite books to read as we approach the Days of Awe. The spiritual teachings are just tremendous, and every year they speak to me anew.

Rabbi Pam Wax is reading

• Colum McCann’s new book TransAtlantic;
• Eitan Fishbane’s memoir about his wife’s tragic death (at age 32!) Shadows in Winter: A Memoir of Love and Loss. I teach in Eitan’s “Practical Hasidism” class at JTS every year, and he gave me the memoir as a gift because of all the bereavement groups I lead.
• My Mussar hevruta partner and I are slogging through Avraham ben haRamban’s (Maimonides’ son) Mussar tome The Guide to Serving God, from the year 1230.
• And I am re-reading (for the 3rd or 4th time) the most seminal Mussar classic, Mesillat Yesharim/The Path of the Just (early 1700’s) to try to keep at least a half step ahead of the rabbi/cantor Mussar group I lead.

She adds: “There are a lot of books I dabble in regularly but don’t read cover-to-cover — Naomi Levy’s amazing book of personal prayers, Talking to God is a mainstay, as are the poetry books of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.”

Rabbi Howard Cohen is reading

• Burnt Books:  Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka, by Rodger Kamenetz;
• Building Singing Communities:  A Practical Guide to Unlocking the power of Music in Jewish Prayer, Joey Weisenberg; and
• Mending the Heart, Tending the Soul:  Directions to the Garden Within, by Gail Albert.

And Rabbi Dennis Ross, who will lead services here on Shabbat Shuvah (between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur), is reading

• The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture by Yoram Hazony;
•  My Friendship with Martin Buber by Maurice Friedman; and
• Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan.

Stay tuned for the next installment in this periodic series of glimpses into the bookshelves of our shlichei tzibbur!

Announcing a new book by Reb Rachel

Dear CBI members and friends,

I’m delighted to be writing today to announce the publication of Waiting to Unfold, my new collection of poems about motherhood.

About the collection, poet Merle Feld — who visited CBI last year — writes,

In these remarkable poems Rachel Barenblat traverses the world of first-time parenthood with insight, generosity, rare courage. She shares first innocent awe, then unexpected darkness as a winter of the soul claims squatter’s rights in the nursery, and finally, aching, yearning, growing toward hope, a relearning of holy presence in small things. New parents will be astonished that someone has found words for their deepest secrets, parents long past these early months will gratefully nod: yes, I remember, this is true.

And poet Rodger Kamenetz writes:

The intense observation of the poet and the intense observation of the mother unite in a celebration of what is new and newborn, what is intensely felt and cherished and what is lost and mourned. Rachel Barenblat’s poems are easy to enter into, and they carry both the uniqueness of her persona as poet and serious Jew and the universality of love that has made us all. There’s a subversive wit here too,—a changing table that’s also a throne of glory, or the baby chewing on his mother’s tefillin—that speaks to a newly emerging sensibility about what is reverent and what is holy. It’s in the everyday as our best American poets have taught us, and as Rachel Barenblat teaches us in a new way too.

You can learn more about the collection at the publisher’s website; if you’re so inclined, you can purchase a copy there, or on Amazon.

I’ll be giving a reading from the new collection at 4pm on Sunday June 9 at CBI, and books will be available for purchase then too. Stay tuned for more information about that.

Thank you for joining me in celebrating this milestone!

Blessings to all,

Reb Rachel

Reaching Reb Rachel

EDITED TO ADD: As of 1pm, Len has fixed the problem; you can return to using rebrachel@cbiweb.org, and those messages should once again reach me! If you sent something in the last few weeks and I didn’t respond, please re-send. Thank you kindly.

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Dear Congregation Beth Israel community,

I hope this note finds y’all well as we move into the third week of the Counting the Omer, the week of Tiferet, harmony and balance.

I am writing because I have just learned that there is something awry with my congregational email account. It appears that I have not received any emails sent to my congregational account since March 23.

This is, of course, a matter of great concern both to me and to Len Radin, our webmaster! Len is in touch with the web hosting service to find out what’s gone wrong, and I’m exploring the possibility of setting up a different congregational email account if that’s what’s needed.

Meanwhile: please know that if you have written to me and I have not responded, I’m not ignoring you — I promise! We’re working on fixing the problem as soon as possible. Meanwhile, if you need me, for the moment, please email me at my personal account or call my cellphone.

An email containing my personal email address and my cell number just went out to everyone on the CBI email list. If you aren’t on our mailing list / didn’t receive that email, but you still want to reach me at this time, you can ping office@cbiweb.org or call the synagogue at 413-663-5830.

(As soon as we’ve resolved these email issues, I’ll go back to using the personal account for personal matters and the synagogue account for synagogue matters. But for now, it’s most important to me that I be reachable, so — if you want to reach me, please call me or write to my home account, and I will check that one faithfully.)

Blessings to all,

Reb Rachel

Nice publicity in the Transcript for CBI

Many thanks to Seth Brown and to the religion editor at the North Adams Transcript who decided to run an article about my Velveteen Rabbi blog! You can read it this morning at the Transcript: Local rabbi’s blog keeps conversation moving.

(The article is also reprinted below.)

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Local rabbi’s blog keeps conversation moving

By Seth Brown

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat of Congregation Beth Israel in North Adams is also known as the Velveteen Rabbi. (Courtesy photo)

Saturday November 10, 2012

Special to the Transcript

NORTH ADAMS — Rachel Barenblat serves as the rabbi for Congregation Beth Israel in North Adams, where she is known by her congregation as “Rabbi Barenblat.” But to a larger readership across the country, she is known as “The Velveteen Rabbi,” the name of her nearly decade-old blog on which she blogs about various aspects of Judaism.