Rabbi Elliot Ginsburg

In conversation with host, Irwin Keller
A Commonweal New School conversation.

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 TNS 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. 

Rabbi Elliot Ginsburg 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.