|
Well, first off, just to make sure we're clear on this: I'm not a rabbi...yet. In September 2005, I became a rabbinic student in the ALEPH rabbinic ordination program. I continue to be delighted and honored to be able to call myself an ALEPH rabbinic student. I hope to receive smicha (ordination) in January of 2011.
I can't take credit for my blog's clever title. As my first post notes, the name is borrowed from a cartoon by Jennifer Berman, which has hung over my desk for fifteen+ years. I've been blogging since October of 2003; in April of 2008, Time.com named Velveteen Rabbi one of their top 25 blogs in their first annual blog index. (They said very nice things. Thanks, Time.)
I'm a writer, in a variety of genres. My first love is poetry; I hold an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and have been writing poems for a long time now. And my other longstanding love, unsurprisingly, is Judaism. For a while I was working on a nonfiction manuscript about writing one's own Jewish rituals (currently back-burnered, though I may return to it someday). You can find my Judaism-related work in The Jewish Women's Literary Annual, Lilith, and The Women's Seder Sourcebook (Jewish Lights, 2002), among other places. In 2004 I wrote Blog Is My Copilot, an article about women in the godblogosphere published in Bitch magazine.
I'm co-founder, and former executive director, of a literary arts nonprofit called Inkberry. I'm a contributing editor at Zeek magazine. I'm author of four poetry chapbooks, most recently chaplainbook (laupe house press, 2006), a collection of poems arising out of hospital chaplaincy work, and Through (2009), a self-published collection of poems chronicling the experience of miscarriage and healing. I'm interested in the places where poetry and liturgy intersect, and my poems have appeared in a variety of siddurim and siddur/machzor supplements.
I was born and reared in Texas, and have lived in a small New England town since 1992. I'm married to a really wonderful man who also blogs. We're expecting our first child in December of 2009.
I write rituals for fun, and sometimes for profit. (Okay, not much profit, but it's one of the ways I make a living.) I create, and officiate at, custom-designed weddings and baby-namings, and have also been involved with creative b'nai mitzvah ceremonies. I'm also a semi-regular leader of prayer at my synagogue, which is a source of constant pleasure for me.
I'm a fan. For me, being a Jew and being a writer and being a fan are all intertwined. You can read more about that in the post called On Transformative Works.
You can learn more about me by visiting velveteenrabbi.com. Or, by reading an interview or two. Faithful Progressive interviewed me in spring of 2005, before I was a rabbinic student: The FP Interview: Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi. And here's one from 2007, a couple of years into my rab school adventure: Rachel Barenblat: When Can I Run And Play With The Real Rabbis? (by David Verzi, from the Berkshire Jewish Voice.) Of course, the best way to get to know me is to dive into the blog; there should be enough material there to keep anyone busy for a while. Enjoy!
