A Torah that Lives in the Body and the Mind
My love for Torah began early — in the day school classrooms and Shabbat morning Torah study sessions of my childhood synagogue in Tampa, where I discovered that serious engagement with Jewish texts could open an intergenerational conversation that included me. It was at NFTY and Kutz camp that I discovered a second vocation alongside learning: facilitating that encounter for others, helping peers find their own entry points into Torah and Jewish life.
At Florida State University, where I studied Religion and Middle Eastern Studies, I encountered the full breadth of human religious experience — and discovered that serious academic engagement with other traditions deepened rather than diluted my Jewish commitments. I facilitated interfaith dialogue and Jewish campus life, learning that the question of how religion shapes meaning and community is one I wanted to spend my life exploring — from the inside of my own tradition.
From there, a winding path led through Jerusalem, Pardes, Hadar, Drisha, and finally to Hebrew College in Newton, MA, where I found the beit midrash home I had been looking for. My rabbinical capstone — Beautiful Jews: Selected Translations and Interpretations of the Sermons of Rabbi Yisroel Shalom Yosef of Bohush — reflects the work that animates everything I do: close, empathetic reading of a Hasidic teacher in his particular historical moment, opening his wisdom to a new generation. Contributing to the research and editing of a published intellectual biography of Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev gave me a model of scholarship I aspire to: rigorous, historically grounded, and deeply attuned to the inner world of the teacher being studied.
Since ordination I have served as rabbi of Temple Israel of Vestal, leading a Conservative congregation through a period of real growth. In my first months there I designed and taught a six-session course on the origins and architecture of the Siddur — one of the most rewarding teaching experiences of my rabbinate — alongside courses on the High Holiday Mahzor, Talmudic narratives, Jewish mourning customs, and the Book of Esther.
My religious outlook is grounded in a halakhic-egalitarian approach that takes Jewish legal discourse seriously and seeks to open it up to all who want to learn — newcomer and expert alike.
Beyond teaching and scholarship, I consider it an honor and a privilege to accompany people and families through times of illness, loss, and life transition. Pastoral care — the quiet, unhurried work of being present with someone in difficulty — is among the most sacred dimensions of the rabbinate, and one I bring the same attentiveness and preparation to that I bring to the bimah and the beit midrash.
