I know what it is to carry the whole weight of a congregation.

For Your Congregation

Scholar in Residence

I come for Shabbat, or whatever shape your community keeps. We build it together beforehand, around what your people are carrying this year.

Topics communities ask for most:

LGBTQ Pride. A Pride weekend, or any weekend a community is ready to do this. I was the first openly LGBTQ president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. I edited Mishkan Ga’avah: Where Pride Dwells, and I officiated the first legal LGBT wedding in California in 2008. This is a subject I lived, not one I studied.

Gender and sexuality: understanding the difference. What the terms actually mean, where they came from, and what our tradition gives us to work with.

Jewish creative liturgy. Drawn from Mishkan Ga’avah, a book of creative LGBTQ liturgy, for the moments your community will actually be asked to mark.

Courage and resilience. Drawn from 7 Principles for Living Bravely, which I wrote with Rev. Neil Thomas out of two pandemics, HIV/AIDS and COVID.

Women in religious leadership. I was the first woman to lead the Southern California Board of Rabbis, I co-edited Gender and Religious Leadership, and I was named a trailblazer by the City of Los Angeles.

Moral courage and the public square. What our tradition asks of us when the world is loud. I have sat with presidents and prime ministers, and spent as many hours in city council chambers. I serve on Austin’s Public Safety Commission.

A congregation in transition. New leadership, a merger, a departure that is still tender. Some things are easier to hear from a visitor than from anyone who has to be there on Monday.

Two things happen on these weekends that aren’t on the schedule. Your lay leaders spend three days with someone who has run a congregation from the inside, and the best conversations happen at the oneg or in the car to the airport. And for one weekend, someone else carries the pulpit, so you get to sit in your own sanctuary and listen.

A single program

Not every invitation needs a whole weekend. A Shabbat evening, a Sunday morning, an adult education session, a program your sisterhood or brotherhood has been building toward. Any of the topics above can be a single program, and some communities bring me for one, so we do one thing properly.

New: Zionism, what it is and isn’t. Understanding Zionism in the face of antisemitism. A single class.

Congregational fees are set with congregational budgets in mind. Write and ask.

For Boards

Working with your board

Most boards were never taught their own job, through no fault of their own. Most are relieved when someone finally does it.

Board retreats and leadership weekends. An evening, a day, or a full weekend with your board on what governance actually asks of them, before anyone opens the agenda. A longer retreat can include alignment work with the EGER Framework: where your board’s expectations, authority, and results line up with your leadership’s, and where they don’t.

Time with your lay leaders. On a retreat or a Scholar weekend, I can meet privately with your president, officers, or committee chairs.

An outside voice in the room. Sometimes your rabbi and your president know what the board needs to hear and can’t be the ones to say it. I can.

Beginning a succession plan. Before anyone is leaving, I help your board start thinking through how a transition should work, so the plan exists before it’s needed.

Deeper work with your board. When a role needs rebuilding, the governance needs realigning, or a leader is getting ready to leave, the work runs over months, not a weekend. The Role Rebuild, Governance Realignment, and Succession Advisory are on the For Boards page →

For Clergy

Workshops for colleagues

A small group, three sessions, clergy only. These are the rooms I most enjoy, because nobody has to explain the job first.

Gender identity and sexual orientation. Most of us were trained before this vocabulary existed, and most of us have already had the conversation we weren’t ready for. This series covers what the terms mean, what our tradition gives us to work with, including the hard parts, and what to say when a frightened family is sitting across from you. The middle session uses Mishkan Ga’avah as a working text for the liturgical moments you’ll actually be asked for. You leave able to do things on Monday that you couldn’t do on Friday.

Artificial intelligence and clergy, in development. What these tools are good for, where they quietly flatten your own voice, and how to keep a tool from becoming a substitute for your thinking. I’m still working out its shape, and I’d rather say so than sell you something half-built.

Workshops fill by word of mouth. If you’d like to hear when the next one runs, write to me.

For You, Privately

And if what you actually need is the other thing

Some of the people who write to me from this page are not looking for programming. They are looking for one conversation with somebody who has held the seat.

Because the board has changed and you can’t read it anymore. Because you followed someone beloved and can feel every decision measured against a memory. Because you’re eight years in and something has gone quiet that used to be loud. Because you’re thinking about leaving and have not said it out loud to anyone, including yourself.

There is rarely anyone in the building you can safely tell. For nearly forty years I named crisis and vulnerability out loud from a pulpit, and almost never about myself. This is most of what I do now, and I do it privately.

That is most of what I do now, and I do it privately.

What you tell me stays with me. I have written out exactly what that means rather than asking you to take it on faith , How I hold confidentiality.

There’s nothing to prepare. Tell me where it’s heavy. If I’m not the right person for you, I’ll say so and help you find who is.