Rabbi Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi, Ph.D.

Rabbi Sabath is a well-known American-Israeli Rabbi, bold thought leader, and an experienced institutional executive. An inspiring public speaker, Rachel is also unique in the breadth and depth of her experience and strategic achievements in Jewish life both in North America and in Israel. She has held senior positions in international Jewish pluralist leadership institutions led by Orthodox rabbis, has held senior congregational rabbinic positions in both Conservative and Reform synagogues, and is deeply connected to Reconstructing Judaism because of her scholarship and work with the Mordecai M. Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood.

Rabbi Sabath taught liturgy and Jewish thought for seventeen years at HUC and served as President’s Scholar and the National Director of Admissions. At the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, Rabbi Sabath directed Lay Leadership, Rabbinic Leadership, and Christian Leadership programs becoming Vice President in 2010.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rachel also studied as an undergrad and graduate student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at New York University. She is an active Wexner Foundation Fellowship alumna and previously taught in the Wexner Foundation Heritage program. Currently she serves as the Inaugural Senior Rabbi of Har Sinai-Oheb Shalom Congregation in Baltimore and teaches for the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and serves on the Response Committee of the CCAR.

She has held senior executive leadership positions while also serving as faculty at the Hebrew Union College and as Vice President of the Shalom Hartman Institute. In addition, she has served as a senior rabbi in Reform, Conservative, and Nondenominational synagogues. 

Currently Rabbi Sabath serves as the Inaugural Senior Rabbi of Har Sinai-Oheb Shalom Congregation in Baltimore where she has led the successful merger of two historic congregations and established its reputation in the community as a joyful, warm, inclusive, and inspiring congregation. On a daily basis, Rabbi Sabath teaches and models how we can live our Jewish values in the complex context of our ever-changing world. Together with committed lay leadership, Rabbi Sabath leads the congregation in prayer, study, regular engagement with Israel and the global Jewish community, while also fulfilling our commitment to social justice in our state and country and always striving to repair our beautiful but broken world (Tikkun Olam).

Published Articles, Torah Commentaries, Presentations, and More:

Below are quick links to her published articles on Jewish Peoplehood, pluralism, ethics, democracy, Israel, gender, prayer, theology, the life and work of modern Jewish thinkers, Jewish holidays and more!

• Among Rabbi Sabath’s writing and teaching on Mordecai M. Kaplan include a program in conversation with Dan Cedarbaum z”l entitled “A New Haggadah for a Time of Crisis? The Radical 1941 Haggadah of Mordecai M. Kaplan”
• Rabbi Sabath’s writings and teachings can be found on the Hartman Institute Website: https://www.hartman.org.il/person/rachel-sabath-beit-halachmi/
• On the URJ Website primarily about Covenant Theology and the themes of ethics, leadership, and hope in the Book of Deuteronomy which she wrote while teaching at HUC.
• On the Har Sinai-Oheb Shalom website, you can find her Weekly Torah Commentaries/Divrei Torah and other writings as Senior Rabbi at the https://www.hsosc-baltimore.org/rabbi-sabath-on-the-sabbath.html
• Rabbi Sabath’s published pieces in her monthly column in The Jerusalem Post, “Rethinking Judaism,” can be found here:
• Rabbi Sabath’s published articles in The Times of Israel

Curious About the Whole Story?

I was born in Boston and spent the second half of my childhood in Minneapolis. My father was a professor of medicine and my mother was both an activist and a corporate lawyer. I attended St. Paul Academy as one of the few Jewish students and graduated in 1986. In addition to playing soccer and basketball, I was also very active at our synagogue, Temple Israel and in the national Reform youth movement, NFTY. At an early age I fell in love with world history, with poetry, with the study of faith and ethics, and with the values and debates of the Jewish People. At the same time, I never lost sight of what my parents taught me: as a human being I must always be a loyal citizen of the world and aware of my ultimate connection to and responsibility for all people — especially the most vulnerable — for the animal kingdom, and for our sacred environment. (My eulogy for my mother, Suzanne Wells Sabath z”l, can be found here.)

Elected NFTY national Vice President for Social Action in 1985, I joined youth leaders from every denomination and ideology from around the world on a Mission to Poland with Holocaust survivors. The mission was a formative experience for me in many ways — it’s where and when I first experienced the profound power of global Jewish Peoplehood, the many different and conflicting types of Zionism and Jewish practice, and when I came to understand the absolute necessity of Jewish pluralism.

Throughout my life I have been immersed spiritually and intellectually in the diversity and complexity of Judaism, Jewish peoplehood, and religious pluralism. After living in Israel during college I came to love the many forms of the Hebrew language, the breadth and depth of Hebrew literature and Jewish faith, and the many different populations dwelling in the land of Israel.

Upon graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1989) I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated a year early eager to figure out how I wanted to serve humanity and serve our people. I spent a year working for Hillel in San Francisco trying to discern if I should become a rabbi or an academic and learned that I wanted and needed to be both.

Selected to be a Wexner Foundation Graduate Fellow in 1990, I began my rabbinic studies at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem and then spent another year studying Talmud and Bible at the graduate level — all in Hebrew — at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I then returned to New York in 1992 to complete my rabbinic studies for ordination at HUC where I wrote my rabbinic thesis on the role of the body in prayer in Hasidic thought. (I initially began my doctoral studies at New York University focusing on the same questions.)