The biographical essays that follow can were stimulated by questions designed by Rabbi Rami Shapiro.

1. Without going into a lengthy autobiography, what brought you to making Judaism so central to your life?

A number of unique and interesting circumstances appear in the tapestry of my life which have led me to desire to wrestle a blessing out of having been born Jewish. To my delight I have found a treasure chest of blessings. A brief relevant list of meaningful moments follows:

1. Growing up in a stunningly anti-Semitic suburban neighborhood. The most egregious incident was when as a kindergartener I wandered into the back yard and taught a little song from Hebrew school with cute hand motions to the other children. The next day a delegation of mothers came to tell my mother they wouldn't have me trying to "convert" their children. They placed me off limits to their children as a play mate. A year and many lonely months later, I noticed with delight the local children were playing in a tree in our yard. Joyfully running out to enjoy my reprieve, instead they greeted me with "there's the Jew, she killed Christ, let's kill her." They chased me with bits of scrap wood that they had gathered to build a tree house.........I escaped into the shelter of the family playroom.

2. Getting a wonderful education in a Friends School while often feeling called to explain and understand my Jewishness, as I was one of the few Jews attending that school. Teachers recall me getting up in meeting for worship to create awareness of the Jewish holidays.

3. Adoring my Yiddish-speaking maternal grandfather who was a shochet (kosher butcher), as well as a Talmud scholar. During his rare visits to our home, he would pray in the dining room each morning. My mom says when I was a toddler I would stand next to him, a ribbon wrapped around my arm to emulate tefillin (prayer boxes that are a meditative tool) and a towel for a tallit (prayer shawl) around my neck.

4. Feeling bored and saddened by the dry, desiccated, repetitive Shabbat services offered at the only synagogue in our neighborhood, yet excelling at Hebrew school. It was as though I had known the material before birth.

5. Receiving lots of support and attention from the procession of rabbis at our Conservative synagogue. Feeling so sad for the mean things I heard board members say about and to the rabbis. Watching them one by one become disheartened and beaten down.

6. Feeling betrayed and spiritually wounded when, because of being a female, I was not allowed to read from the Torah at my bat mitzvah, though I led the entire service.

7. Having the Jewish youth group United Synagogue Youth become a central focus of my teenage years. Discovering there could also be joy associated with being Jewish. Constantly attracting Jewish leadership roles without seeking them.

8. Confusion at my parents' relative lack of depth of religious observance, given their orthodox upbringing. Surprise at my mother's rage when I began to keep kosher as a teen and my father's soft, encouraging approval and support. Later, understanding that my parents' resistance to Jewish spirituality and practice had to do with anger at observant family members' behavior and at God over the Holocaust.

9. Occasional mystical experiences of feeling called, connected, spoken to, fascinated by and important to - for want of a better term - the Consciousness of the Cosmos.

2. What is your denominational history? How were you raised? What denominational affiliation do you currently hold? How important is denominationalism to you personally and to Judaism as a whole?

Today am I Reconservadox? Reconstructionist? Jewish Renewal? Post- Halachic? Inter-halachic? Post Denominational? I love the vast spectrum of Jewish possibility, though some of it I can only visit with respectful interest. I believe that there is no right or wrong denomination. Every neshama (soul) needs a Jewish "custom blend" with the recipe changing over time. For example, I grew up attending a Conservative synagogue. I am a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and a member of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association. I have recently received the privilege of smichah from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. I teach at Elat Chayyim and serve as an innovator in the phenomenon Reb Zalman helps to mentor, known as Jewish Renewal. I have completed seven years on faculty and as a Dean at the only multi-denominational seminary in the Jewish world, The Academy for Jewish Religion. There, my  fascinating duties included teaching, spiritual mentoring, advising and my favorite team teaching with an Orthodox colleague a course for rabbinical and cantorial students on leading life cycle rituals including a special half semester course on conversion. Recently I covered the Reform congregation of a colleague on sabbatical and I served as senior visiting rabbi to Reform congregation Eitz Chayim in Chicago. Of course, my travels as a teacher bring me to communities of every kind, for example Budapest where I recently led a training week for bar/bat mitzvah teachers from Orthodox and Reform congregations in Central Europe and South Africa, where my work was welcomed at the Orthodox day school and Marais Road Synagogue as well as in the three sites of the Reform community in Cape Town.

3. Judaism rests on three things: God, Torah and Israel. How do you currently understand each of these?

God

For me God expresses the oneness of the evolving Cosmos. God is that to which I cry out when I am in pain. God is a direction for my praise of the stunning creation of which we are a part. God is that which you and I resemble..........in both our creative and destructive nature.

God is everything unfolding, seeking all possibilities, becoming what it is becoming. God is the encoded consciousness of the cosmos which is aware of Its needs and deploys every one of us as an important part of the present and future.

God is the cosmos's ability to interact with us...........our choices shifting its realities, its unfolding realities impacting upon our choices. God is as vast and inconceivable as infinity and as intimate and familiar as love and death.

God is our sensation of the deep structure of matter through which evolving Jewish rituals encode ways of achieving healing, connection, loving-kindness and peace.

There are at least 360 degrees in all dimensions of possible God experience. Some are diametric opposites, such as feeling abandoned or betrayed by God or feeling loved. Humans are complex beings and we can contain opposing experiences as meaningful without requiring any specific on to be proven or true by the methods of linear thinking. I have heard both Rabbis Marcia Prager and Jane Litman individually articulate a very important version of this idea as follows: "When people ask me if I believe in God, I answer 'no.' And then they continue by saying, 'I experience God.'"

Torah

Torah is our people's recording of our people's mythologized memories as well as our foundational holistic tract for living one's life. Torah serves numerous valuable functions in the life of Jews: The characters and stories are sacred archetypes that we hold as national treasures. Each week, as we let our individual souls become a prism for the reading of the text, we expand the Torah of our lives by what comes into our awareness about ourselves and others. This is what I call "revelation."

The cycle of reading Torah helps us with our personal and collective growth. Torah helps us realize that when we make a difficult decision, like leaving our personal Egypt to give up a form of enslavement in our lives, that we don't arrive straight into the promised land of our hopes. Suddenly, like the Israelites, we find ourselves untrained to live in the bewildering wilderness-like place that our decision places us. Like the Israelites we must reformat so that we can grow into our hopes and dreams. Even Moses, one of the all-time great CEO's, becomes frustrated and challenged by trying to manage people in the midst of radical change. Like him, we too find times in our lives when we feel like we are climbing mountains. How comforting to have Torah stories which teach us to anticipate this reality and feel supported while we are moving through it.

Christians often mistake the Torah for being all there is to the Torah of Judaism. They are unaware that it is our sacred starting point, from which we have evolved for several thousand years. We have developed profound tools for interpreting and modifying the impact of those verses which reflect the values we have outgrown. Without an awareness of Talmud, Midrash, the Responsa literature and other more contemporary Jewish religious texts, it is possible to greatly misunderstand Judaism and the Jewish people.

There are also troubling passages in our sacred texts. It became an essential revelation for me to notice that Judaism holds midrash as an important source of sacred learning. Midrash occurs when we notice lacunae - gaps or other strange moments in the text that give us opportunities to fill in the text or ask it our own questions. Our religious imagination in every generation has interacted with the text raising questions and ideals appropriate to the times. Sometimes I teach that the story of Abraham's experience of God asking him to sacrifice his son strikes me as being a tale about misguided faith which, when applied, led to severe, traumatic child abuse. Previous generations usually found a very different message in this text, that of the importance of acting on faith. I experience the story of Sarah instigating Abraham to throw Hagar out into the wilderness as an example of unacceptable behavior in a family, many see this as an essential act of creating the family of inheritance for the Jewish future. Today Jewish women search for the voice and names of Lot's wife, Noah's wife, Rachel and Leah's mother (or mothers), Abraham's mother.........earlier generations only rarely noticed the absence of such details.

I am passionately interested in perpetuating the sacred dialogue among the generations of our people, so that while we might respectfully disagree we can remain on the same page. New commentaries are emerging which include the voices of Rashi, Rambam and other great luminaries of prior generations along with those of contemporary commentators, including among others, women and Jews of all denominations. This is true Jewish continuity, putting the Torah of all our lives into the tradition. Consider putting your own voice into the dialogue and onto the page!

Israel

To me Israel first means the Jewish people. We are one of the longest continuously existing forms of human organization on the planet. I consider it absurd for us to believe that anything other than the needs of Cosmos could lead to our extinction. Not intermarriage under the Greeks, the Babylonian Exile, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, or even the Holocaust have succeeded in eradicating us. Creation clearly has an intention to maintain our presence for the time being and at different points in history we seem to be needed in differing numbers across the face of the planet (and no doubt, throughout the accessible Cosmos, when human colonies come to exist in space.) Numbers are not the criterion for survival or significance, look how important a little bit of baking soda is to the success of a cake!

Like most organisms in creation we are diverse, we Jews, this is a well-documented survival mechanism for species which tend to evolve adaptively in response to the niches in which they are found. Let us regard our diversity with awe and respect - as we would any other aspect of creation. It is likely we are important to creation's unfolding, given that against all rationally apparent odds we continue to exist. May we continue to practice, treasure and fine tune our diverse, yet Jewish ways of being, which it seems, are part of our covenantal contribution to the Great Unfolding.

Then there is the land of Israel. Our relationship to this land, its stories and governance is one of the many organizing structures of a Jewish person's sense of meaning and identity. It may be like the nucleus of a cell, or some other structure - important to the organism (the Jewish people) of which it is a part, yet not comprising the entire organism. For me it is a positive place of wonder, history, spirit and exploration, while the shadow side behaviors of Jews inside and outside of the land challenge me to grow and help with forging new models for the moral, compassionate co-existence of peoples and perspectives.

4. What do you believe to be the central challenge facing contemporary Judaism? How are you addressing that challenge?

With the Hubble telescope issuing awesome views of an expanding universe including potentially devastating asteroids; and a CNN view of our planet that reveals growing mega-corporations wiping out the power of individuals; and with the incredible persistence of human inhumanity to humans and nature, it is challenging to sustain one's spirit and not succumb to stress and existential terror.

Contemporary Judaism's greatest challenge is to reconnect with the healing, centering, peace-filled potential of our legacy. To maintain and delight in our particular path, function and value as Jews loving Judaism, while lovingly joining the everlasting task of fine-tuning our tradition to help us better serve the ever changing needs and realities of all human existence.

What I am doing about it is making my life available as one of the vehicles for midwifing contemporary Judaism. A firm pluralist, I would give my life for the right of the full spectrum of Judaism to flourish. At the same time, the approach to Judaism which I am committed to developing is that which I was first exposed to through the teachings of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. This Judaism is inclusive, non-hierarchical, non-triumphalist, healing, politically pro-active, environmentally sensitive, deeply spiritual, and respectfully grounded in tradition.

6. Given that this interview is being used as an introduction to you and your work, what three things do you want people to know about you.

A. I passionately love people, stories, meaningful connections, travel and community. A great joy has been making the time to travel to a limited number of communities each year to teach, consult or lead retreats. The Jewish soul is rebirthing in diverse and beautiful ways, this is such a blessed, wonderful time to be a Jew!

B. The treasure chest of Jewish tradition is so vast and rich it offers more than anyone can fully take in over one lifetime. Question my assumptions and knowledge and reasoning always. I am only a seeker like yourself. I encourage you to read the works of and study with the rabbis and colleagues who have so particularly affected me through their deep teachings and role-modeling during my education and professional growth so far: Rabbis David Cooper, Art Green, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, David Teutsch, Arthur Waskow, Adin Steinsaltz, Lynn Gottlieb, Shohama Wiener, Jacob Staub, Marcia Prager, Samuel Barth, Michael Lerner, Shefa Gold, Linda Holtzman, Leah Novick, Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, Isaac Mann, Rami Shapiro, Rob Scheinberg, Seth Brody z"l, David Wolfe-Blank z"l,  and Drs. Tikveh Frymer-Kensky, Peter Pitzele, Norman Linzer, Louis Levitt, Aviva Zornberg, Judith Plaskow, Noam Zohar, Shlomo Bardin and Charles Miller z"l.

7. It is often true that teachers have an essential message they wish to impart. Is that true of you? And, if it is, what is your core teaching?

That Judaism is a beautiful, deep, profound, effective spiritual path.

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