Bathing in the Waters of Possibility: Mystical Tools for Healing and Renewal

Part of the TNS-Sonoma Series

Elliot Ginsburg and Host Irwin Keller

Jewish mystical traditions offer the adept a rich array of practices and paradigms supporting personal and communal healing and renewal. These include text, sacred time, sensory experience, meditation, imagination, play, and teshuvah—an annual and ongoing process of realigning the self with the cosmos. Join New School host Irwin Keller in conversation with scholar and mystic Rabbi Elliot Ginsburg as they discuss Judaism’s esoteric side and what it might offer all of us in broken times.

Listen (audio only)

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Rabbi Elliot Ginsburg, PhD

Reb Elliott is Associate Professor of Jewish Thought and Mysticism at the University of Michigan, and rabbi of the Pardes Hannah minyan in Ann Arbor. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and taught at Oberlin College, before coming to Michigan. He has received an NEH Fellowship and a Kellogg Foundation grant supporting his scholarship. Reb Elliot has written two books on the kabbalistic celebration of Shabbat and is currently working on a scholarly study of Jewish mystical prayer and meditation, and a multi-tiered study of Judaism as spiritual practice. Reb Elliot received his rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi in 1998, and is senior faculty in the rabbinic ordination program of the Aleph Alliance for Jewish Renewal.

Rabbi Irwin Keller

Host

Irwin has served as spiritual leader of Congregation Ner Shalom in Sonoma County since 2008, a post he took while still writing and performing with the San Francisco-based Kinsey Sicks, known as America’s Favorite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet. His legal advocacy work included authoring the City of Chicago’s first comprehensive human rights law, in effect since 1989, and serving as the Executive Director of the AIDS Legal Referral Panel of the San Francisco Bay Area. Photo: Adam Shemper.