Uri L'Tzedek: Orthodox Social Justice

Rabbi Aaron Leibowitz is a Jerusalem-based rabbi, activist, and institutional change-maker whose work has reshaped the landscape of religious life in Israel. He currently serves as CEO of Chuppot, the pioneering Orthodox wedding organization he founded in 2018 to provide halachically rigorous marriages independent of the Chief Rabbinate - an initiative that has now served over 2,000 couples. He is also a member of the leadership team of Rabanut Yisraelit, the groundbreaking pluralistic rabbinic training and network program at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, where he teaches weekly.

Rabbi Leibowitz has spent his career building alternatives to institutional monopolies in Israeli religious life. In 2012, he founded Hashgacha Pratit, Israel's first independent kashrut organization and the first to employ women as supervisors - a project that broke the Chief Rabbinate's exclusive hold on kosher supervision and was later transferred to Tzohar. In 2018, he launched Chuppot on the same premise: that Israeli couples deserve a dignified, high-quality religious marriage outside the Rabbinate's jurisdiction.

Ordained by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and Rabbi Chaim Brovender in 1996, he serves as the Rabbi of the Va'ani Tefillah community in Nachlaot, Jerusalem. From 2015 to 2018, he served on the Jerusalem City Council, representing the pluralistic Yerushalmim party and holding the education portfolio.

Martin Luther King III in conversation today with Rabbi Shmuly about the upcoming elections, disagreeing with civility, an ethic of non-violence, and the value of Democracy! 

Mr. King is a distinguished global humanitarian carrying forward the human rights advocacy of his parents Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. & Coretta Scott King! 

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Rabbi Dr. Aharon Ariel Lavi is the Managing Director of the Jerusalem Interfaith Center, working to make religion part of the solution to global challenges. He also co-founded the MAKOM and Hakhel networks of intentional communities (both won the Jerusalem Unity Prize, awarded by the President of Israel). His PhD explored the migration between the U.S. and Israel, and his postdoc fellowships at the Harvard Divinity School and Bar-Ilan University’s Ma’ayan Institute focused on Jewishly-informed community building. He lives with his wife and five children in Moshav Shuva on the Gaza border and is a mountain biking enthusiast.
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American democracy was argued into existence with the Hebrew Bible: when Thomas Paine made the case against monarchy in Common Sense, he built it on Gideon's refusal to rule and Samuel's warning about kings, concluding that in a free country the law must be king. We will study Paine alongside the Jewish sources behind him, from the Torah's laws of the king to Ezekiel's mockery of rulers who declare themselves gods to the rabbinic teaching that the crown of Torah is open to all. At a moment when the principle that no ruler stands above the law is under real strain in America, these sources ask what is demanded of us to safeguard a country where only the law is king.

About the speaker:
Rabbi Zachary Truboff is the author of Zionism In Crisis: Jewish Power and Moral Responsibility After October 7. He serves as the Director of the International Beit Din Institute for Agunah Research and Education. His first book was Torah Goes Forth From Zion: Essays on the Thought of Rav Kook and Rav Shagar. Before making aliyah, he served as a synagogue rabbi in Cleveland, Ohio for nearly a decade. He lives with his wife, Jen, and four children in Jerusalem
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Rabbi Aaron Leibowitz is a Jerusalem-based rabbi, activist, and institutional change-maker whose work has reshaped the landscape of religious life in Israel. He currently serves as CEO of Chuppot, the pioneering Orthodox wedding organization he founded in 2018 to provide halachically rigorous marriages independent of the Chief Rabbinate - an initiative that has now served over 2,000 couples. He is also a member of the leadership team of Rabanut Yisraelit, the groundbreaking pluralistic rabbinic training and network program at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, where he teaches weekly.

Rabbi Leibowitz has spent his career building alternatives to institutional monopolies in Israeli religious life. In 2012, he founded Hashgacha Pratit, Israel's first independent kashrut organization and the first to employ women as supervisors - a project that broke the Chief Rabbinate's exclusive hold on kosher supervision and was later transferred to Tzohar. In 2018, he launched Chuppot on the same premise: that Israeli couples deserve a dignified, high-quality religious marriage outside the Rabbinate's jurisdiction.

Ordained by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and Rabbi Chaim Brovender in 1996, he serves as the Rabbi of the Va'ani Tefillah community in Nachlaot, Jerusalem. From 2015 to 2018, he served on the Jerusalem City Council, representing the pluralistic Yerushalmim party and holding the education portfolio.

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Life Against Death - a new two-volume collection of essays from Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg 
Save 40% on book orders with discount code 6AS26 exclusively at jps.org/books/life-against-death/ (https://jps.org/books/life-against-death/)

About the speaker:
Rabbi Irving Greenberg is a preeminent Jewish thinker, theologian, activist, president of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life, and senior scholar-in-residence at Hadar. He served as a founding president of CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, founding president of the Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation, activist/founder of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and rabbi of the Riverdale Jewish Center. He is the author of multiple volumes, including The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism (JPS, 2024) and For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity (JPS, 2004). Greenberg won the Jewish Book Council’s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award.

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We say this sentence every week but we often feel that following the path of halakhah requires effort, sometimes sacrifice and can occasionally — think of agunot —, cause suffering. Do we misunderstand Jewish law? This talk explores talmudic reflections on how halakhah is supposed to make our life better and NOT more difficult, and looks at cases where the principle of Derakheha darkhei noam is employed even against a deorayta law in order to make life "pleasant".

Speaker bio:

Rabbanit Dr. Ágnes (Ági) Vető, a Visiting Assistant Professor of the Jewish Studies Program at Vassar College, grew up in Budapest, Hungary. She received an MA in Oriental Studies from the London University School of Oriental and African Studies and an additional M.A. in Jewish Studies at the Rothberg Graduate School of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After studying at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem she enrolled in a doctoral program at New York University and has earned her PhD in Talmud and Rabbinic Literature in 2015. As of 2020 she is a musmekhet of Yeshivat Maharat, where she also completed the Halakhah in Action Fellowship in 2023. Her current book project investigates how to reutilize dormant halakhic  institutions in order to secure agency for Jewish women seeking divorce.

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When people have strong opinions, especially on emotional and important subjects such as religion, there is always a danger that public discussion of these matters will become angry and heated - we currently see this a great deal. Things weren't so different in talmudic times, so what do the sages have to say about public dispute, and how it should be conducted? We'll look at some rabbinic texts and see whether their ideas could be relevant to us today.

Rabba Dr Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz received semichah from Yeshivat Maharat in 2021. She is currently a Teaching Associate at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University, and has also taught at the universities of Oxford, the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (London), King's College London, and Vassar College in the USA. In 2021 she published her first book, Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization), and she is currently working on a book on Limmud.

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The unpredictability of life—and the violence that Jewish communities in Israel and around the world have experienced again in recent years—reopens the question of human agency and responsibility when nothing feels within our control. An ethical revisiting of the mystical concept of Tikkun Olam.

Rabbi Dr. Mira Neshama Niculescu has been teaching Jewish texts and contemplative practices for over a decade across the United States, Europe, and Israel. Originally from Paris, she holds a Ph.D. in the socio-anthropology of religion (EHESS, 2018) and modern Orthodox rabbinic semikha from Rav Prof. Daniel Sperber at Yeshivat Har El in Jerusalem. Mira teaches Parshanut (biblical exegesis), Mussar (Jewish ethics), and Hasidut. She is a regular contributor to Akadem, TaShma, Shofar, and Tenoua in France, and adjunct faculty IJS in the United States. Based in Jerusalem, she teaches online and in person in English, French, and Hebrew.

Her goal is to help talmidim joyfully reconnect to the beauty and meaning of Jewish wisdom, refine their middot (character traits), and, through their everyday actions, make the world a better place.

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Rabbi Leah Shakdiel was born in Jerusalem in 1951 to a family of Modern Orthodox pioneers. She moved to Yeruham, a small development town in the Negev Desert, in 1978, with a group committed to Halacha, social responsibility, peace, and ecology.  Mother of Rachel (42), Tzvi (40), and Pinchas (38), and grandmother of Toviya (19), Channah (17), Miriam (15), and Batya (11), she holds a BA from Bar Ilan University in English and French Literatures. Her other studies include Bible and Oral Law, Jewish Thought, Jewish History, and Education. She taught Hebrew and Jewish studies, developed teaching materials, trained teachers, coordinated and directed projects and institutions in the areas of education and community. She also taught courses on Jewish feminism, state and religion, and Israeli society, in the Schechter Institute and in Sapir college, and in post-high school pre-military programs. Rabbi Shakdiel is socially and politically active on behalf of peace, empowering the disadvantaged, civil and human rights, and feminism, having published academic and popular articles in all these areas. She served as the first Yeruham towncouncil female member ever (1983-8), and in 1988 became Israel’s first female member of a local Religious Council, following a successful struggle that ended with a landmark Supreme Court decision. As a School for Educational Leadership Fellow (1994-6) she developed a model for feminist pedagogy for Israel. She is the recipient of the Yig'al Alon Prize for Lifework as Pioneer (2009), the Israeli Parliament Distinction for Women Leading Change (twice, 1999, 2015), and the New Israel Fund (England) prize for human rights (2014). She studied towards Orthodox rabbinical ordination in Beit Midrash Har'el, Jerusalem, and was ordained in 2O19.

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