Rabbi Rachel Barenblat was named in 2016 by the Forward as one of America’s Most Inspiring Rabbis. Since 2011 Rachel has served as spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires. She is a founding builder at Bayit: Building Jewish, a pluralist spiritual innovation incubator, where she leads the Publishing and Liturgical Arts Working Group build teams. From 2015 to 2017 she served as co-chair, with Rabbi David Markus, of ALEPH, and in 2017 she served as interim Jewish chaplain to Williams College.
Rachel has blogged as The Velveteen Rabbi since 2003, and in 2008, TIME named her blog one of the top 25 sites on the internet. She is author of six book-length collections of poetry: 70 faces: Torah poems (Phoenicia Publishing, 2011), Waiting to Unfold (Phoenicia, 2013), Toward Sinai: Omer poems (Velveteen Rabbi, 2016), Open My Lips (Ben Yehuda Press, 2016), Texts to the Holy (Ben Yehuda, 2018), and Crossing the Sea (Phoenicia, 2020.) Her work has appeared in Lilith, The Texas Observer, The Jewish Daily Forward, and a wide range of anthologies. Her downloadable Velveteen Rabbi’s Haggadah for Pesach has been used around the world.
She has taught courses arising from the intersection of the literary and spiritual life at the Academy for Jewish Religion (NY), the (Methodist) Academy for Spiritual Formation, the National Havurah Institute, (where she was digital Liturgist In Residence in 2020), the ALEPH Kallah, many congregations around New York and New England, and Beyond Walls, a writing program for clergy of many faiths at the Kenyon Institute.