Rabbi Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi, Ph.D.

• Rabbi Sabath’s writing and teaching on Mordecai M. Kaplan include:
  • “The Evolution of Mordecai M. Kaplan’s Religious Thought”, American Jewish Archives Journal, 2020;
  • “Democracy, Disillusionment and Salvation Rethinking Jewish Life” originally published in the Jerusalem Post.
  • In conversation with Dan Cedarbaum z”l program entitled: “A New Haggadah for a Time of Crisis? The Radical 1941 Haggadah of Mordecai M. Kaplan”
• Many of Rabbi Sabath’s published writings and teachings on Jewish ethics, Torah, Israel, and Zionism can be found through this link on the Hartman Institute Website
• On the Har Sinai-Oheb Shalom website, you can find Rabbi Sabath’s Weekly Torah Commentaries/Divrei Torah
• 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.
• Rabbi Sabath also published a monthly column in The Jerusalem Post for several years entitled “Rethinking Judaism.”
• Rabbi Sabath also published pieces in a blog in The Times of Israel
  • SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• “Halakhah in Reform Theology from Leo Baeck to Eugene Borowitz”, CCAR Journal, 2020.
• “The Theological and Political Radicalism of Hartman’s ‘Auschwitz or Sinai?’” in The New Jewish Canon, Suffrin and Kurtzer, Eds., 2020.
• “The Oneness of God and the Diversity of Religions: A Jewish Perspective,” Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning at College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University.  https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/phillips_lectures/17/
• “The God Who Loves Pluralism”, in More Than Managing: The Relentless Pursuit of Effective Jewish Leadership, Lawrence Hoffman, Ed., Jewish Lights, 2016
• “Getting God’s Attention and Giving God Ours” originally published in the Jerusalem Post.
• “Ethical Leadership: What We Need Now,” LA Jewish Journal.
• “A Decisive Hour for Jewish-Christian Hope,” originally published in the Jerusalem Post.
• “Public Criticism and Responsible Love: Are Jews permitted or obliged to reprove Israel and its leaders? If so, how may this be done? A liberal reading of rabbinic sources offers principles and guidelines,” Shalom Hartman Havruta Journal, Winter, 2012.
• “Toward a New Understanding of Jewish Peoplehood: Undoing the False Tension of Particularism and Universalism or Between ‘Aniyei Ircha Kodmim’ and ‘Tikkun Olam,’ originally published in “Peoplehood – Between “Charity Begins at Home” and “Repair the World,” The Peoplehood Papers (Vol. 6, November 2010)
• “Radically Free and Radically Claimed”, in Jewish Theology in Our Time, Elliot Cosgrove, Ed. Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010.

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 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, poetry, the study of faith and ethics, and 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 a year early from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1989) I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. But why graduate a year early? I was eager to figure out how I wanted to serve humanity and serve our people and knew I needed a year before applying to graduate school. So I spent a year working for Hillel in San Francisco, interviewing rabbis and academics throughout the Bay Area trying to discern if I should become a rabbi or an academic and learned that I wanted and needed to be both.

Being selected to be a Wexner Foundation Graduate Fellow in 1990, it helped me make the decision to go to rabbinic school first because they didn’t — at the time — fund doctoral programs. With utter fear and excitement, I began my rabbinic studies at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem and having fallen completely in love with the language, the land, and the people of Israel, I decided to stay and spend another year studying Talmud and Bible at the graduate level — all in Hebrew — at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. But then I had to return reluctantly to New York in 1992 to complete my rabbinic studies for ordination at HUC. I wrote my rabbinic thesis on the role of the body in prayer in Hasidic thought under the guidance of Larry Hoffman and Elliot Wolfson at New York University (NYU). I initially began my doctoral studies at NYU focusing on the same questions but eventually decided I wanted to work on bigger and more urgent questions relevant to the broader Jewish and non-Jewish world.

Following ordination in 1995, I began studying with and working for Rabbi Yitz Greenberg at CLAL, the pluralist Jewish think tank and North American leadership teaching institution he founded with Elie Wiesel. During that period, I also taught for the Wexner Foundation and at HUC in NY. Wanting to focus on bigger and broader questions facing world Jewry, I continued my doctoral studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary studying Jewish philosophy, Talmud, theology, Jewish ethics and faith after the Holocaust. In 2001, I completed my coursework and met and instantaneously fell in love with the man who would become my husband, (not yet Rabbi) Ofer Sabath Beit-Halachmi. He was based in northern Israel and I wan ensconced in New York City. After we squandered most of our money on long distance phone calls and plane tickets, we decided we needed to be together permanently.

With great delight I fulfilled another life-long dream, to make Aliyah and make a life in Israel. We got married on the 4th of July 2002 in the midst of the second Intifada. I began studying at the feet of — and working for –Rabbi Prof. David Hartman z”l at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. In addition to ongoing post-graduate study, I directed lay leadership, rabbinic leadership, and Christian leadership programs, and was a member of the faculty for nearly 15 years. During those years, Ofer and I became the parents of three Israeli-born children. Thanks to Ofer’s endless support and encouragement and the support of parents z”l, and my boss, Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman, I finally finished my doctorate and became Vice President of the Hartman Institute.

While working and studying at the Hartman Institute, I taught the first year Rabbinic, Cantorial and Education students at the Jerusalem campus of the Hebrew Union College — the Reform seminary — and regularly served as a scholar in residence throughout North America.